Page 51 of Covert Temptation

She squinted, eyes narrowing. “That guy—I’ve seen him before. The hair… It stands out.”

“How so?”

“It’s obviously a home dye job.”

“How do you know?”

She shrugged. “Look at how yellow it is. He isn’t a natural blond.”

Where had she seen this guy? That hair…

The blond was too brassy, like he’d over-processed it without a clue what toner was. Most guys who dyed their hair either wanted it to look good or embraced the messy, grunge vibe. This wasn’t either. It was wrong in a way that made her look twice.

And that was why he stood out so much.

“Oh my god.” Her face felt wooden. “I saw him before! In Amsterdam!”

Dante’s head snapped to her. “Tell me everything you remember, Kennedy. This is very important.”

“H-he was in a-a photo taken of me and Alyssa!” Her words tripped over each other in her haste to get them out. “We were attending a conference on environmental protection.” She latched on to his arm. “I need my phone, Dante. I need to access my photo albums!”

Leaning over the keyboard, he opened a window, typed in a passcode…

And there it was. All of her photos that synced to the cloud on her phone.

A noise broke from her. “You already had my photos? You haveeverythingon me.”

“It has to be this way. For now,” he added, as if trying to soften the blow of her still being under suspicion. Maybe because he was no longer on the side that suspected her.

She stared at the tiny thumbnails of photos. “Let me at the keyboard.”

Wordlessly, he angled the laptop toward her, and she hunched her shoulders as she scrolled fast, fingers trembling slightly. The photo came to mind before she even saw it—her and Alyssa, grinning under the warm Amsterdam sun, both of them exhausted, grubby after a day of traipsing through tulip fields and across farmland, and somehow still smiling outside a UN peacekeeping station.

“There.” Her whisper quivered as she enlarged the photo. “Look in the background. Over Alyssa’s shoulder.”

Dante leaned in. The figure was small, blurred, but unmistakably the same man. Cheap dye job. Watchful eyes.Standing just close enough to notice—but far enough to be ignored.

“Jesus,” he muttered. “We just ID’d a ghost that even the FBI missed.”

For a beat, anger flared in Kennedy. At the breach of her own world. At the fact that Dante had combed through nearly every part of her life, driven by doubt.

Well, almost all of her life.

One truth still lay buried, locked so deep it would never see the light of day.

She nodded and looked back at the screen. “Do you have access to facial recognition?”

He tapped in a few commands.

The system began processing, a scan sweeping over images in a database.

Within seconds, a match popped up. They stared at the three photos side by side by side—the blurry footage, the photo from Amsterdam…and an older photo of a young man who looked like he once had hope for a bright future.

MATCH: 92% probability.

Dante cut a hand through the air. “Even if he’s altered his face—hair, beard, whatever—bone structuredoesn’tlie.”

“Exactly,” Kennedy murmured, almost struck speechless. “Look at his ears. See the outward flare at the top? It’s a specific angle in both photos. Same with the jawline. He’s just grown out the stubble to soften it.”

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