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“That’s why you dyed your hair back to blonde?” Oliver asked, eyes on Mya. Her nod only seemed to make him more frustrated. “Of course, you’re painting yourself as a damn target.”
“Just bloody great,” Wyatt hissed, eyes on his blonde daughter.
“Anyway,” Gwen began, “we’re obviously working to get the names for the production crew, judges, and sponsors involved to narrow down our suspect list.”
Before we could continue bouncing ideas around, Carter shot Gwen a hard look, a warning embedded there. “Just so we’re clear, my face never ends up online.”
“Like I told you last night,” Gwen quickly replied, “I’ll never let the show see the light of day. Trust me, I’ll hack the hell out of it before that happens. But with any luck, if these people running it are bad guys, it won’t matter. They’ll be behind bars before then.”
“I love your confidence, really.” I sensed a “but” coming from Gray. “But like you said, Gwen, lots of question marks. Those of us not going undercover can do some more intel gathering from the outside. Sydney will remain Stateside, so she can be our point of contact here for anything we need. But once Jesse gets here, the two of us will fly down there. We’ll need to pull together a secondary crew. You may need an extraction or backup at some point.”
“My team is wheels up tomorrow for the Middle East. I can try and get out of it, but—”
“No, Dad,” Gwen interrupted Wyatt. “I’m sure Falcon has plenty of other trained operatives on standby who can have our six when or if needed. You need to relax.”
Wyatt snorted. “I swear if anything happens to you . . .”
Gwen lifted her wrist and shook her charm bracelet. “The tracker trident charm you cleverly planted is right here. And come on, they’ve got my back. Worst case, Carter can just fork a guy to death if we get in trouble.” Her lips teased into a slight smile.
And, yep, that happened—Carter really had killed a guy with a fork on the last op Gwen had taken part of—but Carter grumbled, clearly not amused by her comment.
“And Jack’s like an uncle by extension of Gray. He won’t let anything happen to me,” Gwen went on, still feeling the need to bulldoze her way through her obstacle of a father.
“I’m just curious why you sent me to a speed dating event tonight. It’s like y’all knew I’d need the practice for this undercover work.” At the very least, they could have given me the heads-up my night was going to grind to a halt right when I was hitting my stride.
“Wait, speed dating?” Gray grinned.
“That really is just a weird coincidence,” Mya said before Gwen could respond (or lie). I was having my doubts about these two right now. “And you’re awfully grumpy tonight.” Mya tossed a thumb Gray and Carter’s way. “They’re supposed to be the grumpy and broody ones.” Her gaze cut to Oliver. “He’s the frustrating one.” Oliver kissed the air to annoy her, and she rolled her eyes. “But, Jack, you’re the—”
“Unwanted one.” Damnit. What was with the verbal vomit tonight? I shook my head and slammed my hands to my hips.
“Not true.” Mya pouted, but then Gray motioned for me to follow him away from the others, and I hesitantly joined him on the other side of the jet.
Gray was the only one who knew about the woman I met post-op in South Africa last month. We’d wrapped up a quick job working with one of Carter’s old friends, Camila Hart. And since we weren’t leaving until the morning, Camila invited us to drinks at the hotel bar. She never made it to the bar because Carter beckoned her for something important—not that she ever spilled and told us what—which meant I wound up alone with Gray.
Not even ten minutes into the night, Gray’s wife had called, and I ordered him to go back to his room and talk to her like I knew he wanted to. And that was when I met her. The her. The woman I couldn’t seem to forget. The woman I so desperately still wanted.
“She didn’t give you a last name? Tell you where she was from?” Gray had asked when he’d caught me sulking on our ride back to the U.S. the day she’d ditched me.
“Not even a first full name. Just that everyone calls her Charley.”
Worried something had happened to her, I’d hacked the hotel’s surveillance camera using the bare-minimum skills I had in that department. Thankfully, no one had abducted her, but I’d also had to watch her willingly leave the hotel lobby on her own . . . like the night before meant nothing to her.
I’d taken screenshots of her image from the camera, tempted to run it through our facial recognition software to get a name and address, but even that felt a little too psychopath-stalkery for me.
So instead, I kept trying to convince myself that I only wanted her because I couldn’t have her. That it wasn’t because our time together had been great, hell, amazing even. That it was simply because she’d left me wanting more with no way of getting it. Like some weird mindfuck thing. Maybe I was reading too far into the situation. It was only one night . . .
“Dating might be a good idea,” Gray said, snapping me from my thoughts. “Maybe not speed dating, though. You need to get back on the horse. Or whatever that saying is.” He slapped a hand over my shoulder. “I’m worried about you, man. You can’t keep fantasizing about that woman. It just wasn’t meant to be.”
“And, what, you think I’ll meet the woman I’m meant to be with while undercover for a dating game?” I almost laughed at the absurdity of how that sounded.
“Hell, when it comes to us . . . you just never fucking know.”
CHAPTER THREE
JACK
IN THE AIR
