Page 18 of Exposing Adonis

“Absolutely.” I cringed. “She’s like a sister to me. I’ve known her since before she had braces.”

“She had braces?”

“Hideous ones. Rainbow colored ones. With her coke bottle glasses. The girl is as blind as a bat.” I laughed at the memory. She was a combination of Hermione Granger and Harry Potter, the book version, not the exceedingly sanitized movie version.

“I think she’s beautiful,” he admitted.

I took that in. Chloe was a good kid. She deserved happiness. And the Bonifacio twins were good people, too. I was probably exceedingly biased at this point, but our circle of St. Michael’s Boarding School alumni, known collectively aschocolatiers, could use some new blood. The intertwining of marriages, and families that grew more like vines than trees wasn’t good for anyone. And Chloe had never found a partner among us. So why not this assassin posing as a nurse?

Itsoundedstrange, but I had worked in the shadows for decades. He wasn’t a bad person.

Hugo and Alastair were the dark-horse side of Caledonia, their missions - ahem,assassinations- were sanctioned, covered, and approved by my former colleagues at the circus. We sometimes even worked with the company. What made the twins such bad people?

Could I retroactively get their assassinations approved, and have them vindicated, the way ours had been? Would it even matter, when theirs had already been swept under the rug and blamed on Dieter Müller?

Thoughts whirled in my head, spinning and spinning. It moved so fast that I almost missed the whirling dervish that was below our feet.

“Hold on.” I said, releasing the brakes on my parachute, and steering us straight into a small clearing.

“What?” He asked.

The air grabbed at us, twisting us into a little tornado, tossing us like sand before sucking us down into its vortex.

A whirling dervish is a skydiver’s worst friend. They happen close to the ground, when we’re arguably the most vulnerable, trying to softly land on the ground. The vacuum of wind tossed everything to the dirt. In the fight between human and earth, the earth always wins.

We slammed into the ground. Thankfully, I was taller than Leo and my feet touched ground first.

The balls of my feet hit the dirt, and my knees bent so we rolled onto the side of my calf, thigh and onto my buttocks. When the ground finally hit the side of my back, I relaxed. The man landing on top of me, mostly between my legs, smacked my body with a smack. Then he let out a deep sigh of relief. The man wasn’t tall, or even large by any measure. But fuck, he was heavy. His muscles were made of fucking steel. A man of only 5’8” had absolutely no business weighing as much as he did.

I collapsed the parachute by pulling on one brake and it fell like a blanket falling from a wash line.

“Fuuuuuuuuck,” Leo whined as the wind died down. I rummaged in the space between us and unhooked his straps from mine so he could get his heavy arse off of me.

He sat up, then continued to roll until he was on his hands and knees, pulling off his helmet and letting it roll on the dirt. He looked like he was about to kiss the ground.

He looked very different from his sister, now that his hair was dyed to his natural color. It was a temporary dye, and he’d go blonde again, as the bleached hair underneath would come through. But he looked more masculine with the black hair.

I got up, unhooked the canopy container from my arms and kicked off the leg straps. The task of trying to pack my parachute in the dark was going to be hell. We had landed near some shallow caves so I could easily stash the equipment away. I may come back for it later, when the area was safe. Or I could just leave it here to rot and consider it a field loss.

I wasn’t quite sure which way I wanted to go with that yet.

I rolled around on top of the silk parachute,, using my body to push any air from between the folds when I realized that Leo was hovering. His eyes were looking down at me with a slight condemnation.

“What are your intentions with my sister?” He said, quietly.

“Good lord, we’re having this conversationnow?”I looked at him, baffled.

Really? A man-to-man in the middle of the night, in a hostile desert that was likely to eat us both alive? Two peas in a pod. Brother and sister had zero clue about timing.

Chapter 8

Lea

Istanbul, Turkey

“We’vedumpedthebaggage.”I could hear Alastair smiling, even through the radio.

“Lovely,” Geordie responded dryly, before hanging up the handset and leaning back in his chair.

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