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CHAPTER1
They’d perfected acting normal.
They’d convinced those around them, and at times, even themselves, that they were stable, sane, and non-threatening, all because it had been a few months since their last assignment. Yet, the silence came with its share of uneasiness, and being still was a skill they were beginning to realize they might never hone.
Central, they could leave behind.
Black Ops, not so much.
However, like stable, sane, and non-threatening people, they made innocuous plans for holidays, birthdays, and vacations. Currently, they were in Fiji to get a break from the frigid weather in Sweden.
Joel looked around the villa and understood why Julien had picked up on communications that suggested they’d gotten too powerful. To them, they were friends who’d grown as close as family. On the outside looking in, they were forming a syndicate.
Gage joined him in the kitchen, holding a glass bottle of a non-alcoholic drink ironically named ginger beer. “Mate, you’re scaring the kids,” he said. “Is there a reason you’re staring and not speaking?”
The crystal clear waters through the open doors behind Ayesha’s head returned. Children’s screams, along with splashing noises in the pool, rose from unknown depths. Breezes blew, tossing about the fronds on the palms surrounding the property.
She was so damn beautiful.
It was hard to notice anything other than her sun-kissed brown skin, glossed lips, eyes like the horizon at dawn, and the braided strands that fell about her shoulders. The tropics had welcomed her with open arms from the top of her head down to the decorated blue polish on her toes.
“Lattimore.”
“Uh,” Joel cleared his throat, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“We’re back to doing this again?”
“And what’s ‘this’?”
“Pretending that you’re not in love with Ayesha. Come on, Lattimore. The only person who’s spent more time with Eesh is Curtis.”
Joel leaned back against the kitchen cabinets and folded his arms. Ayesha glanced at him for all of two seconds, and a sensation sparked in his chest he was pretty certainwas a small heart attack.
“I’m working on it. I have a strategy.”
“At my wedding, you were ready to kill Tayler’s cousin fordancingwith her,” Gage added. “I know you’re worried about the future, but we all could die, and not from the job. We could go out there, get in a wreck, and never come home. Would it have been worth it, then? Spending all your time looking at her from across the room rather than waking up next to her in the morning?”
He slid a glance in Gage’s direction. “Could you write me one of those? I need a sonnet to recite to her outside her bedroom window on a dreary Sunday morning.”
Gage, chuckling, tipped back his drink.
Ayesha glanced up again.
Their gazes held until Theo and Thandie burst into the main room from the pool, Thandie crying and Theo sputtering through his defense opening statement. To Joel’s surprise, Thandie ran to him instead of Ayesha.
“Uncle Joel,” Thandie wrapped her arms around him, “Theo’s being mean.”
Theo flicked away the accusation. “Nuh-uh. I do not have a mean bone in my body.”
Joel ran a hand over her damp, curly hair. “What’d he do?”
“He—”
“It was an accident!”
An interruption meant Theo was guilty. If Theo was culpable of a crime, he objected whenever the prosecution tried to present their side of the argument.
Thandie tilted her head. “He didthis.”
