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“More?” he asked.
She nodded. She couldn’t talk. He turned her onto her side, then arranged himself behind her and draped her leg over his hip. He slipped into her, pushing in easily. “I want to see you come again,” he murmured. “I want to feel it.”
He put his hands on her, touching the spot where they joined. He urged her, nudged into her, pressed deeper.
She gave up—gave up control, gave up everything. She let Gage take her apart again, and this time she felt him come.
Panting, she lay spent, the sweat drying on her skin while he ducked into the bathroom to clean up. She couldn’t move—not for anything. Gage returned to the bed, pulled the covers up over them, and put an arm around her. “Sleep,” he whispered, stroking her hair. “I’m so glad you’re safe.”
But even cradled in his warmth, Anna wondered whether safe had ever been a reality—or just an illusion she had constructed.
16
Gage held Anna until her breathing evened and deepened. When he was sure she’d fallen asleep, he got up. He pulled on jeans and a black T-shirt and headed into the sitting room, where he’d left the lights on. Romeo gave him a dirty look for disturbing his rest and closed his eyes again. So much for cats being night hunters. Gage was going to guess that Romeo had never gotten that memo.
Hunting up his spare burner phone, Gage punched in a number. He kept his voice low.
“Kyle, it’s me.”
“How’s Anna?”
Gage slumped into a chair and squeezed the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “Good. Or at least, as good as can be expected. She ate some. She…it’ll probably hit her later. But she’s sleeping. I want to stay close in case she wakes.”
“Yeah, she’ll probably have nightmares. We’re still working on the file, the one Anna confirmed is the one Becks wanted. There’s got to be some kind of code hidden in the manuscript pages—we just need to figure out what it is. Scotty dug up a friend who’s been known to break a few ciphers.”
Gage smiled. “Let me guess—female and good-looking?”
“You got it. On a first take, she thinks we’re looking at Agency stuff.”
“What—CIA? How the hell can she tell?”
“Scotty’s friend is NSA, and she recognizes some of the names used for the story’s characters. She's saying whoever has this list could wreak some serious havoc. Scotty got her to agree to keep quiet for now, but she’s not happy about it. And what the hell is Coran Williams doing with a list of spooks?”
Gage let out a breath. “You think he’s a handler? Double agent? He made his money in the defense industry, right?”
“Honestly, Gage, I don’t know what to think, or what a guy like Becks has in mind for something like this.”
“And then the million-dollar question—how does any of this connect to Nick’s death?”
“That’s another thing we don’t know,” Kyle admitted. “Look, you stay put. We all need some rest. Scotty’s staying with his code-breaker friend—seems she comes with benefits. Spencer is hanging with me. Get some sleep, and we’ll talk in the morning.”
Gage disconnected and sat there staring at his phone. What had Anna been pulled into? Gage knew he should rest, but he was too wired. Actions hit him like this, left him wired and needing to do something. Opening his browser, he headed online. He could at least find out a little bit about what had happened that might explain Becks’s role in all this.
There was nothing in the news about that mission in Borneo. There wouldn’t be. SEAL ops were hush-hush to begin with, and more so when they ended with the deaths of multiple servicemen. Those wound up in classified files that the government buried as deep as possible. But Gage knew something would be out there.
He headed over into the dark web, the world of drug deals, snuff photos, and worse. It was also a place where conspiracy theorists posted anything they could get their hands on. He finally found photos there—not good ones.
To him, it looked an ambush. The surrounding area had clearly been the site of a vicious attack, with bodies of men, women, and children scattered on the ground. Some of the bodies had been burned—a whole village destroyed. Gage wondered if the perpetrators had been covering their trail.
If that had happened to his team, he’d be driven to make someone pay, too. But if Becks wanted revenge, why was Nick dead—and what did Nick’s wife have to do with it? What connection did either of them have to an ambush in Borneo? And how did it tie back to Williams? Were he and Natalie working together in some way? Or were they on opposite sides?
He kept digging but didn’t find much more.
Natalie’s online presence didn’t show much of anything, other than that she hadn’t been posting on her Facebook page for some time. She looked like a normal kind of person. When he resigned himself to the fact that he wasn’t going to find anything more that night, he decided it was time to get some sleep.
Gage checked the room again, double-checking that the windows were locked and the door bolted. He got another snotty look from the cat, which he returned before heading into the bedroom. He slide between the sheets, and Anna turned and cuddled into him.
Thanks to Coran, she’d been pulled into the middle of a situation that had nothing to do with her. But now that Becks had the tablet, maybe her role in it could end. There was nothing else Becks wanted from her, no further reason why she would be targeted…unless she stayed close to Gage. Since all of this seemed to tie back to Nick—and since there wasn’t a chance in hell of Gage letting it drop until he’d gotten the answers he sought—he was going to remain in the path of the storm for a good while longer.
