Page 70 of Covert Temptation

Dante stood, adjusted his stiff cock with a grimace and stalked toward the door as Kennedy straightened her clothes, cheeks hot and her lips tingling.

By the time he returned, bags of food in hand and a sheepish grin on his face, she was seated primly on the sofa, trying not to squirm at the throb between her thighs.

Trying to pretend her heart wasn’t still galloping.

He set the bags down on the table and gave her a long, heated look.

“We’re not done,” he warned.

She smiled, slow and teasing, as she opened the lid. “Not even close.”

And with that, they sat down—back to work, back to the mission—pretending that every touch of hands and stolen glance wasn’t still burning between them.

THIRTEEN

Dante’s cock was still hard.

Even with the cold slap of reality that came in the form of a knock at the door and forty dollars of mid-rate Mexican food, his body hadn’t switched gears.

He could still feel Kennedy’s mouth on his, taste her lips, feel her thighs caging him in. Her perfume lingered on his shirt like a damn brand. Sweet, addictive…and entirely unhelpful.

But it was just as well that they were interrupted.

He had work to do. The hands on the clock were circling far too quickly. Time had started shrinking.

Everything was coming to a head faster than expected. The more they uncovered, the clearer it became that they weren’t chasing a lukewarm lead anymore. They were racing down a hot trail.

Dante sat at the desk, fingers flying across the keyboard of the CIA database accessed through the set of credentials he’d received. The deeper he dug, slipping past firewalls into the skeleton of the system—the more he realized just how wrong this setup was.

When he found it, he didn’t know what he was looking at upon first glance. Then he sat back in his seat, shock rippling up and down his spine like ice.

A back door. Into the CIA’s database.

One so buried in the software not even their top software architect ever found it.

Until now.

Dante keyed in a string of commands, and the interface shifted. The moment things snapped into place, his phone buzzed with another interruption, but this one more welcome than the one that took Kennedy out of his arms.

He stared at the name of his teammate, Hudson Steele, a beat longer than he should have. Earlier, before Kennedy had climbed into his lap and torched every coherent thought he had, Steele had called to warn him that fresh intel was incoming. Something that couldn’t be sent electronically. Something that needed context.

He answered. “Talk to me.”

His buddy’s voice was deep with a distinct drawl—Dante would pick out his unhurried manner of speaking anywhere.

“It’s about two guys from Echo.”

His rib cage felt like it flexed at the name of the team. A whole platoon of men wiped out in one horrific helicopter crash.

“What do you mean by two guys?” he asked Steele.

“Remember Chase told us that day that one of his teammates was on leave at the time of the chopper crash?”

“Yes.”

“There was another man on Echo who escaped.”

“Jesus Christ.”

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