Page 6 of Undercover Shadow
“Let me rephrase. I probably know some.”
As I followed her up the grand staircase, I tried to look anywhere other than at the way her arse swayed with every stepshe took. The woman was solid muscle, yet no amount of fitness could ever hide her femininity. As I did every time I was with her, I longed to pull her into my arms, not in a brotherly hug, but as a man who desired her more than I had any other woman.
“It’s freezing up here,” Leila said as we reached the top of the staircase. She opened the first door we came to, which led to a large bedroom that had a massive rock fireplace already laid with wood.
“Wait here,” I said, moving past her to check the room. It was the master suite, by the look of it, with heavy furniture built to last centuries, thick draperies on the windows, tapestries hung on the walls, and a sofa positioned near doors that led to a balcony. The bed, which sat farther from the hearth, was massive, with carved posts reaching nearly to the ceiling.
The lights flickered, died, then came on at half strength as I knelt to put a match to the kindling.
“I’ll sort the generator in the morning. Tonight, we’ll stay here, where there’s heat.” I stood, brushing my hands clean. “I’ll take the sofa. Get some rest.”
She was already moving toward the bed, exhaustion winning over any argument. She climbed in fully clothed and pulled the heavy blankets up to her chin. The archaic heating system groaned somewhere in the walls, then went noiseless.
Twenty minutes later, the room remained so cold I could see my breath, and the sofa might as well have been carved from ice.
“Tag?” Her voice sounded small from across the room.
“Yeah?”
“You’re going to freeze over there.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. I can hear your teeth chattering.” A pause. “Please get in the bed. We’ll freeze separately or survive together.”
She was right. Hypothermia wouldn’t help anyone. I stood and moved to the opposite side from where she lay, then crawled between the layers of blankets rather than under them.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
The wind howled. The wood crackled. And I lay there, acutely aware of every breath she took, trying not to think about how many days we’d be trapped here and how absolutely fucked I likely was.
3
NIGHTINGALE
My consciousness returned in layers—warmth first, then weight, then the shocking realization that I was wrapped in Tag’s arms.
Though we were still in yesterday’s wrinkled, musty clothes, our bodies had gravitated toward each other’s in the night despite the layers of blankets between us. His arm was draped across me, and my cheek rested against his chest, above his heart. His breath stirred my hair, surrounding me with his unique and intoxicating scent.
For three years, I’d wanted exactly this, and now, I had it—except I didn’t, not really, because this was nothing more than survival, just two operatives sharing heat to avoid hypothermia.
His breathing shifted from the deep cadence of sleep, telling me he’d woken. I kept my own breathing steady, feigning unconsciousness, even as his body went rigid and the arm draped across me turned to granite.
The silence stretched between us—both of us awake, though I continued pretending otherwise—while his heartbeat raced faster than it should for someone just waking. Then he moved, extracting himself from me and the bed with the kind of cautionusually reserved for disarming explosives, the mattress shifting as his weight left it and cold air rushing in where his warmth had been.
I listened as he crossed to the hearth and heard the scrape of the poker against stone. When the flames caught and grew, I sat up and brushed my tangled hair from my face.
“Morning,” he muttered without turning to look at me.
“Morning,” I responded in an equally cold tone.
I swung my legs out of bed, and my feet hit the floor, frigid even with my socks on, making me regret leaving the blankets. I tried to smooth my pants that were creased beyond salvation and untwist my black shirt from around my torso, but both were a lost cause.
“Bathroom’s through there,” he said. “You can go first.”
I escaped through the door into a massive space that held a claw-foot tub that belonged in a museum and pipes that groaned when I turned the tap. The mirror above the sink showed me how rough I looked. There were dark circles beneath my eyes, and my hair was a nightmare of tangles. The water that sputtered from the tap smelled faintly of iron, but I splashed it on my face anyway, then finger-combed my hair into submission while trying not to think about how Tag had pulled away from me like I carried something contagious.
When I emerged, he took his turn without meeting my eyes. I used the time to fold the blankets and arrange them on the bed with their edges aligned—anything to occupy my hands, to avoid thinking about how different this morning was from what I’d conjured during the long nights when I allowed myself to imagine being in Tag’s arms. Rather than sleeping, I dreamed of his naked body against mine, him inside me in a way no man had ever been before.
