Page 4 of Undercover Shadow
“We need to move. Now,” I said, reading the brief message that had appeared from Typhon.Do not board. Transport arranged. Make contact ASAP.Unlike Leila, I’d allowed him to track me.
I nodded once, knowing he’d pick it up through whichever camera he was currently monitoring.
She studied me while I speed-dialed.
“Obsidian,” Typhon said, answering on the second ring. “I’ve arranged for immediate extraction. Renegade’s family has a place in the Highlands on the North Sea. Dunravin Castle is both isolated and defensible. Transport is on the way.”
“Copy that.”
“Tag.” He paused. “Keep her safe.”
“Always.”
“Where are we going?” she asked when I ended the call and led her out of the station.
“Dunravin.”
My mobile buzzed with a message from Renegade.City Airport. Hangar 7. Weather system moving in fast. Window closing.
“Transport’s waiting,” I said.
She nodded as if in surrender, but I knew better. Leila would never. She’d withdraw. Strategically.
As promised,the helicopter waited at London City Airport’s private terminal with its rotors already warming. The pilot gave a brief signal as we climbed aboard. Leila sat across from me in the dim cabin, analyzing everything, including the flight path on the pilot’s screen and the atmospheric chaos apparent on radar.
“We’ll be trapped there if that front hits.” She raised her voice to speak over the rotor noise.
“So be it.”
“We should abort. Find another location.”
“Not an option,” I countered
The advancing storm was unusually massive for February. We’d have maybe eighteen hours before it hit the area where wewere headed, if that’s where it made landfall. If it did, there’d be no extraction for days. There’d also be no way for whoever was following her to get to us. That was the most important part of the equation.
Neither of us left the chopper when we landed in Edinburgh two and a half hours later and the ground crew refueled it.
“Remember Buda?” she said so quietly I could barely hear her. “Where I had to wear that ridiculous dress.”
“Of course I do.” We’d been undercover in Hungary, attending an event at the castle where a member of the former royal family was targeted for assassination. It felt like a lifetime ago, but no matter how long I lived, I’d never forget how Leila looked in the dress she’d called ridiculous but I thought was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.
“Change of plans,” the pilot announced through the comms, interrupting a recollection that should’ve been forbidden. He motioned to a jet that approached from our right.
We quickly exited one aircraft and boarded the other.
“Wind gusts are building fast. I’ll be able to land at Dornoch Airfield,” said the pilot, who I recognized as being former RAF. “But once there, I’ll have a tight window to get in and out.”
“Copy that,” I responded, knowing that, when we touched down, Typhon would have a vehicle waiting on the tarmac.
I followed Leila into the main cabin and waited until she chose a seat, then took the one across the aisle and studied the woman who had been under my skin since her first day of intensive training at Unit 23’s facility near Cape Wrath in the Durness parish—less than two hours north of the castle where we were headed.
Then and now, I had to remain steadfast in not succumbing to the overwhelming attraction I had for her. She was Idris’ sister, I reminded myself again and again. That meant hands-off,regardless of how impossible it was to keep my thoughts from drifting to her.
I couldn’t ignore the way her body naturally turned toward mine in the jet’s cabin that felt too small, too intimate. Every movement as she adjusted herself in her seat made the black athletic shirt she wore shift across her body, drawing my attention despite my attempts to look anywhere else. The fabric pulled tighter when she reached for her seat belt, outlining the curves of her ample breasts and the dip of her waist. The way her long hair was pulled into a tight bun exposed the elegant line of her neck, and the cargo pants that had seemed practical in the underground station now felt designed to torture me.
She glanced over and caught me staring at the spot where her pulse flickered beneath her bronze skin. Every time I was near her, I fought to remain detached, but with her close enough to touch, my resolve threatened to unravel. To fall away in the same way her clothes would as I peeled them from her body.
“Tag?” she said as my eyes swept her breasts once more, unable to resist one last glimpse but nearly biting my tongue when her hardened nipples kept my gaze lingering overly long.
