Page 19 of Smith

This was a whole new side of Smith.

And he kind of scared me.

CHAPTER FIVE

I was doing a piss poor job of hiding my irrational jealousy. Aria wasn’t mine, she’d never be mine, but for some insane reason I didn’t like the way Delivery Guy Philip demanded Aria call him if she was working late. Not only was my reaction absurd, it was asinine. The more eyes on Aria the better. But I still couldn’t stop the emotion from sitting on my chest like a lead weight.

“Smith?” Aria’s uneasy voice hit me and that weight amplified.

“Sat down with Zane this morning,” I launched in. “Kira Cain is my team’s lead tech specialist. She’s already working on getting the plate information from the toll plaza. Once she has a tag number she’ll run it through some fancy software she developed and confirm it was the same red Tesla you saw in Philly. Once we have confirmation, we’ll run that lead down.”

“Okay,” she mumbled.

“Kira’s husband was a cop in California before he joined Z Corps. He’s not on my team, but we read him in. I want his opinion on the break-in and the letters. He’ll also have better insight into stalking.”

Aria’s brows pinched together.

“All right.”

“Zane also called one of my teammates, Jonas, back to Maryland to help. He’ll be back tonight then he’ll take over looking into the old owner and his children.”

“That seems like a lot,” she noted.

“Does it?” I asked. “You’ve got someone mailing strange letters to the house. Someone broke in—not to have a party, not to pull some jacked-up shit and vandalize for no other reason than to be a punk, and you were followed home from Philly. Which means, you were followed there. And all you got is me, Kira, Cooper, and Jonas when he arrives. That’s not a lot, Aria, that’s a skeleton crew with three of my teammates on assignment.”

Aria added a nose scrunch to the brow thing she was doing, and asked, “Is that why you’re in a mood? Your team’s on assignment and you’re stuck here babysitting me?”

The smart thing would’ve been to lie and allow her to believe me being in Maryland while my team was chasing down an informant in Virginia made me feel slighted.

The informant had some potential intel on an outline for a terrorist attack a former CIA officer sold to the Chinese. The ‘former’ in former CIA was only due to the fact the man was dead. He’d still worked for the Agency when he sold his plan. Nebraska Michaels, the newest member of Silver, didn’t know exactly what that plan entailed. But Maddon had been with the CIA for a long time—who better to plan an attack? The man knew our country’s weaknesses. He knew the perfect order in which to hit the US for maximum chaos and confusion, making us vulnerable for an invasion. We needed to find the outline or as much of it as we could. It was important work. My team was all-in to find the plan. I was all-in.

Yet, I didn’t feel slighted that I’d stayed back to help Aria. If I was being honest, and I wasn’t, I was actively ignoring how I felt when I was around Aria in an effort not to contemplatewhy I felt anything at all beyond physical attraction. Then I’d have to admit I’d rather be here, with her, than with my team. Something I also wasn’t considering—why that was.

“I’m not in a mood,” I said, evading the truth.

She gave that a moment to settle before she called me out.

“You’re not?”

Fucking hell.

“If you have time now I can help you with the lights.”

Aria’s gaze went to the front door. Then when it traveled back to me she had a smug grin. No, I wasn’t hiding my jealousy and she’d clearly picked up on it.

“Philip’s just being cool,” she reported.

I said nothing. Mainly because she was probably right, but mostly because I had no call to be jealous.

With a sigh, Aria went on. “If you have something else to do I don’t need help installing the light. But just to say, it won’t be functional until I run electric to it.”

I had about a hundred other things I was supposed to be doing, however none of them constituted as ‘better.’

“I’ll handle the cameras for the back of the house,” I reluctantly told her.

The reluctance in that was I much preferred holding the ladder for her, getting an up-close view of her fine ass. Which was precisely why I wasn’t going to hold the ladder. I needed to stop this back and forth. She was a client. My boss had warned me to keep my hands off her. His message this morning after the briefing was more specific. Zane Lewis had a way with words—they might be coarse, but they’d been clear when he outlined exactly what I was not to do with my hands or my dick, and for good measure just because he was thorough, he’d included my mouth and tongue. If he hadn’t been talking about Aria or he’d laid out his commands to one of my teammates I would’ve laughed my ass off. Yet I wasn’t laughing when I left the office.I also hadn’t planned on listening to him. But now, feeling what I was feeling on top of what I’d felt the other times I’d been around Aria, I unequivocally knew I was in over my head and it was time to back off.

So I wouldn’t be holding the ladder to get a glimpse of her ass. I wouldn’t be going out to dinner with her again. I wouldn’t be teasing or flirting with her no matter how much I got off on it. I was man enough to know when to retreat and pivot.

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