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That was more or less all he knew, and trying to piece it all together into a coherent picture was giving him a headache.
Plus, he was trying to run through what he knew while a good chunk of his brain was taken up with this wild attraction. An attraction stronger than any he’d ever felt before, to a woman who wasn’t showing any signs of attraction back.
Which was … hard.
Pierce didn’t sleep around. He didn’t like impersonal sex. SEAL groupies in bars left him cold. Plus he’d been deployed under cover for a year and knew having sex with a woman would be painting a target on her back. However, in the past, when he was attracted, he’d been lucky because the woman in question was attracted right back.
So it all worked out okay. He didn’t hurt for sex, but it didn’t rule his life. He was in charge of his dick, not the other way around.
He was wildly attracted to Riley—had been since he first saw her picture back in Portland. But now he had a personality to add to the picture, and he liked it all. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, which was saying a lot because the IT department back in Portland was made up of Riley’s friends, who were all unusually good-looking.
Not as good-looking as Riley, but that would be hard.
She was also fascinating. Incredibly smart, brave and resourceful. And she could climb a building like Spiderman. There was that.
But Pierce tucked away his fascination, because right now the first priority was keeping this woman safe. She had real enemies and now had the police after her. The Sommers group had a lot of money, and cops earned very little. If Riley were ever arrested, he had no doubt she’d be whacked while in custody.
Not going to happen.
“Riley,” he said quietly. The soft sound of keyboard strokes continued. “Riley,” he said, a little less quietly.
Her head came up, eyes a little unfocused.
“We’re here.”
“Oh!” Her eyes widened and she looked around, orienting herself. Something warriors never had to do. They were always oriented because the price for losing yourself in your head could be death. And not usually a pleasant one.
But Riley, like her friends back in Portland, could get lost in her head, at the drop of a hat. They dealt in abstracts: algorithms, patterns, pixels. Pierce and his teammates dealt in blood and bone and steel.
They didn’t lose themselves in their head because that was a good way to get it chopped off. Two teammates had been beheaded in the ‘Stan.
“Sorry.” In an instant Riley stowed the laptop in the backpack and was ready.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Black rumbled.
Pierce was at her door, offering his hand. Which was insane. He’d just watched her do something that required lithe athleticism and superb balance. She could make it to the ground from a vehicle on her own just fine.
But it was habit and … well, he wanted to touch her. And she accepted his hand because the SUV was high off the ground. She put her hand in his and he held it as she descended like a ballerina, feet pointed to the ground.
He held her hand a second longer than necessary, and she left her hand in his. Their eyes met and he couldn’t have looked away if you had pointed a gun at his head.
Her eyes were like some cosmic black hole, only light blue instead of black. They absorbed all the light… the rest of the world became dark. You just fell into them, shiny, silver, with a rim of dark blue.
Whoa.
Black was looking at them over the top of the vehicle. His face was absolutely expressionless, betraying nothing. But an operator in the middle of a crisis losing himself in a protectee’s eyes … not good.
Pierce dropped her hand and followed her into the safe house.
They sat as they had before, Riley at one end of the small couch, Pierce beside her, Black in an armchair.
Riley opened up her laptop and Pierce nearly fell into that, too. She didn’t have the program Hope and Emma had, where you could see the screen only head-on, invisible to anyone to the side. Pierce could see just fine.
The screen had colors more vivid than any he’d ever seen, floating and morphing in an abstract pattern that was hypnotic. You couldn’t tear your eyes away from it. If he had that on his computer, he’d never get any work done.
Riley opened a program and her fingers floated over the keyboard, barely exerting pressure, blindingly fast. It must have been an intuitive keyboard and had to use some version of AI, it was that fast.
Riley looked at him, then at Black. “Okay, I am going to show you a program I wrote which is going to be more useful than I ever imagined. It peels back deepfakes fast. I wrote it on a dare.”
