Page 61 of Stealthy Seduction
The phrase hit him with startling clarity.Come home to.Not just someone to sleep with or spend time with when he wasn’t deployed. Someone to build a life with. Someone whose happiness mattered as much as his own survival.
Someone worth planning movie nights for.
“You know what?” He stood up from the table. “Sinner’s right. I’ve got it bad.”
His teammates looked at him with varying degrees of amusement and understanding.
“But I don’t care,” he continued. “If having feelings means I get to see Izzy smile when she realizes we know she likes extra butter on her popcorn, or that we picked a movie she’s been wanting to watch, or that someone actually cares enough to notice what makes her comfortable, then I’ll take the feelings.”
He headed for the door, then paused to look back at the room full of elite operators who were, at least for tonight, teddy bears.
He chuckled. “This is going to be the best damn movie night in the history of covert operations.”
As he left the war room behind, Steele found himself thinking about the future in a way he never had before. Not just the next mission or the next deployment, but years ahead. Christmases and birthdays and lazy Sunday mornings. Coming home from dangerous places to someone who understood the cost of what he did and loved him anyway.
Maybe Sinner was right about the feelings being contagious. But if this was what infection looked like—a team of hardened warriors learning to care for the people who mattered to them—then Steele figured they could do a lot worse.
* * * * *
Izzy’s fingers flew over the keys of the laptop that Hudson brought her. Each word she wrote felt like part of a new kind of therapy, one she hadn’t yet discovered on her healing journey.
Oh, she’d written plenty over the years—journaled her thoughts, kept a diary of her self-care, even written letters to the editors of several newspapers with her own accounting as a hostage in a foreign land.
None of that felt as…freeing…as this piece on Cipher. Maybe laying out the pieces of the story in such a factual way was finally putting things into perspective.
A quiet knock on the door had her pausing with her fingers over the keys, and it took her a beat to pull her mind out of the world she was creating and return to reality.
She twisted to face the door when she called out, “Come in!”
Her heart picked up a beat in anticipation as she waited to see her lover’s head pop around the frame. Instead, a swish of blonde hair announced a different visitor.
Kennedy peeked in. “Is it okay to come in? I’m not interrupting your genius?”
Izzy laughed. “I don’t know about genius, but come in.”
Kennedy stepped in and glanced around. “Wow. You haven’t decorated yet, I see.”
Her brow shot up. “Decorated?”
“One of the first things I did was add some cozy touches to Dante’s room.” She wrinkled her nose. “The whole military-issue chic vibe wasn’t doing it for me.”
Izzy laughed again. “Well, he does have high thread-count sheets. I just…”
Kennedy came to lean against the desk. “You’re not sure you belong here.”
Biting down on her bottom lip, she nodded. “Nothing has been said. It’s too soon…” She trailed off with a shrug.
“I understand. And when you’re ready for something more than that concrete gray blanket, you know where to find me. I’m really good at planning. I have a whole mood board app.”
“You’ll be the first person I come to.”
When Kennedy smiled, her entire face lit up with the sort of beauty that could only come from pure happiness. “Good. But I didn’t come in here to pick on you about sleeping in a man cave.”
“What did you come here for?”
The woman’s eyes took on a faraway look, a tension riding in the depths that had Izzy’s palms sweating. “I’m getting all the girls together. Are you free now?”
She was so curious about what was causing such worry in Kennedy that she couldn’t write more on her project if she were forced to. She pushed to her feet. “I’m free. Just tell me what you need me to do.”
