Blacklisted: Blacklist Operations Book #1 Read online

  “Where are we going?” She hadn’t asked him in days.

  “London,” he finally answered, looking down at her.

  “How far away are we now?”

  “Another week, if we stop. I could make it in three days, if we didn’t have to sleep.”

  “And if we flew?” Aidan realized that he’d overlooked that simple option. He trusted her now, enough that he could take her on a plane and not worry about exposure. Sophie had been free to walk out the door, but she always walked back in.

  He couldn’t help but wonder if she felt something for him, too.

  God, he wanted to kiss her. Her lips were soft pink and the bruises had faded from her face, leaving them clear of cuts. He wanted to cover her body with his, to taste her mouth and feel her moan against him.

  But he couldn’t ask her for what she shouldn’t give. Not to him. He’d already taken too much from her.

  Sophie felt him shift against her. Unsure if her weight was making him uncomfortable, she started to move away, then stopped when his arm moved up and circled her waist, drawing her back to him. He smelled like sandalwood, she thought, like sandalwood and fresh air.

  They’d only had one disagreement since he’d woken up and that had been when he was unable to find his phone in the car she’d left in an underground parking garage. Digging through the almost-empty car, he’d complained that she’d obviously overlooked it, even accusing her of hiding it at one point. She’d shifted her weight from one leg to the other and glared at him.

  “What cause could I possibly have to hide your phone?” After everything she’d done for him, he still didn’t trust her, she thought.

  He didn’t say anything, just frowned and reached his hand deeper under the seats. “I left it right here when I came to get you in Qom,” he insisted, pointing his other hand to the driver’s side of the car.

  “Well, obviously someone took it or it fell out when I was maneuvering your dumb ass into the backseat.” She huffed out a breath and started to walk away, stopped by his hand around her good arm.

  He’d pulled her back toward the car. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe you could try trusting me a little.”

  “Habit,” he’d growled, releasing her and locking down the car.

  She thought about that as they watched a sitcom. It was habit for Aidan to not trust her, for him to push her away and rely only on himself. Sophie supposed that she should feel honored that he’d deigned to offer her information about their city of arrival, but instead she was only irritated. They had, at most, a few more days together and he still wouldn’t talk about Synthesis.

  It haunted her, dogged her every step, even when she was searching through flowers in the marketplace. At night, when they settled in for bed—and how much of an old married couple could she really feel like with this guy—she’d almost asked. Twice. But he wouldn’t tell her. For the last two weeks she’d done nothing but be helpful, had never tried to run, had only called him a moderate amount of terrible names and, sure, she’d bit him really hard that one time but the marks her teeth had left were gone the next day. What did it take?

  Pushing it out of her head again, Sophie pulled away and stood up, went into the bathroom and got ready to go to sleep. When she came out in a blue tank top and white pajama pants, Aidan pulled back the blanket and she crawled in next to him, curling up and closing her eyes.

  He reached to turn out the light on her side of the bed and she felt the weight of his arm over her chest for one brief moment. It was delicious, masculine and strong. Once he’d reclined, face toward her and almost indistinguishable in the dark, she leaned forward, seeking his lips with her own.

  Electric, again. Better than the first time because she wasn’t scared, wasn’t shivering and sick to her stomach with terror for her friend. Better than the second because she wasn’t sour with anger at his actions. He didn’t move forward, though god she wanted him to, just pressed his mouth to hers and touched his tongue to her lips. Moving closer, wrapping one arm around to his back, she deepened the kiss. Then he covered her.

  She tasted sun-warmed mint and, oh, his body under her hands was taut and rippling with muscle. When she bit his lower lip and moaned, he slid his hand under her shirt, stroked the skin on her back, gentle, so gentle, aware of the pain that would still nest under her ribs from the beatings.

  Finally she pulled back, put one hand on his chest and eased him off of her. She pressed her swollen lips to his once more and then moved away slightly, rising up to press her forehead against his.

  “I didn’t thank you yet for protecting me. For trying to get me out of there.”

  “Is that what that was?” he asked, jaw clenching. “You shouldn’t give yourself away so cheaply.”

  Furious, she pulled back. “That wasn’t thanks,” she snapped, turning around and moving as far away from him as she could. “That was something I thought maybe I’d like. I didn’t.” She felt petulant and childlike, but couldn’t stop the words from escaping.

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “No.” She pulled the blanket up with a jerk and wrapped it around herself.

  “That must have been a moan of disgust then. You know, when I had my hand up your shirt.”

  Such a fucking man, she thought. “Well, I won’t make that mistake again.”

  She could see his desire to prove her wrong then, to lean over and take her lips until she was mewling into his mouth, to drive himself into her and finally ease the ache that had started in earnest after their second kiss. She watched it rise and then die.

  “Good luck,” he finally said and settled down. Unable to dampen the impulse, he reached one arm out and locked it around Sophie’s waist, pulled her back to him. She fell asleep quickly and he let himself follow.

  She woke up the next morning with a sick, sour feeling in her throat. Like a child who’d never kissed a man before—and what a load of crap that was—she’d followed their embrace with careless, thrown out words. Then, when he took offense, she’d erupted on him, denying what she’d felt in his arms.

  She’d have to apologize, she thought. Aidan had already left the room with her bags slamming against his hip. Maybe later, in the car, she’d get a chance to say the right thing, for once.

  Since she’d met the man, nothing had gone right. Made sense, of course, given the circumstances. She smoothed the covers over the bed, a habit of many years, before closing the blinds tightly and looking out at the street below.

  He’d insisted that they leave early, shaking her gently when the room was still too dark for even shadows. Now it was a pale blue and yellow that reminded her of getting up early for family vacations as a child. Then she’d forced down a bowl of cereal and milk, wandered sleepily to the chilly car on the driveway and dozed the entire way to some beach or mountain.

  Now she longed for the cereal, but most of all for her mother. Always hungry, she didn’t think that Aidan would want to stop for doughnuts or eggs. If she was honest with herself, she wasn’t sure she wanted to make him; the last time they’d stopped, after all, they’d been captured. Her stomach flipped at the thought. She’d never forget the sight of Milad bearing down on Aidan with a gun and her soaked with the dead man’s blood, unable to move in time to stop him.

  Shaking her head to clear the unwanted thoughts, she looked around the room for the last time. Ready, finally, Sophie stepped into the hallway and walked down the faux-Persian rug to the front desk, left the keys in the middle of the dark, polished wood. Then Aidan walked back through the doors and gestured to the car he’d parallel parked on the street.

  “Ready?”

  “Yeah, let’s go.” She walked to him, cheered when he took her hand. He pulled it behind her and slipped something cool and damp into her palm.

  “You’re always hungry, Sophie,” Aidan explained. He’d given her a cardboard carton of orange juice and, when she looked ahead, she saw puffed rice and chunks of fruit on her seat, neatly arr
anged in a wide, shallow plastic dish.

  “Thank you,” she said with a smile.

  Chapter Thirteen

  England

  “Aidan,” she whispered, drawing him out of sleep while they flew over the sea. “I need to tell you something. I’m sorry for what I said last night.”

  “Don’t apologize,” he whispered back, his lips brushing her ear. “I shouldn’t have touched you.”

  “No, damn it.” She sighed, frustrated. “I just want you to know, I wasn’t thinking about gratitude when you kissed me. When you kiss me, I can’t think at all.”

  He smiled at the admission and felt the warmth spread through his body. It was a damned inconvenient time to get an erection, but Sophie had that effect on him. Hearing her admit that she’d liked the pleasure she’d found in his arms was a heady experience.

  She was going to wreck him.

  “I just don’t want gratitude to be between us if we…” She trailed off, blushing.

  “If we what?” He knew that teasing her wasn’t strictly kind, but he loved the way she pressed her lips together.

  “If we had sex.”

  “If I fucked you?” Aidan saw the blush deepen, pressed his advantage. “If I put my hands on your sexy curves and buried my mouth between your thighs? If I kissed you there until you were wet and screaming and begging me to push my cock deep inside you.” Maybe he’d gone too far, he told himself, but Sophie took a deep breath and relaxed against him.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “That exactly.”

  His whole world changed in the space of her quiet admission, there above the choppy ocean on his way back to London. What had been affection and desire, coupled with the need to protect her, suddenly became more. Not love, he told himself. Not for a woman like her, someone fragile and sweet. But the feeling was a hot mass in his chest.

  “I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life,” he said, wanting to give her the same honesty. “But I have a duty. To you as well as to the people I keep safe. I can’t touch you again.”

  “Don’t make excuses,” she said, putting a warm hand on his leg. “Do you want me?”

  “I want you, but I need to keep you safe.”

  “Taking me to bed won’t put me in danger.”

  “Sophie…”

  “I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anyone, Aidan.” Hearing his name on her lips made his cock tighten. “If you can’t be with me, then I’ll respect that. But really think about it. Maybe after everything is fixed…”

  “After, then.” She took her hand from his leg and twined it with her own, settling them in her lap. She stared out the window and didn’t look at him even when he reached over and covered her hands with one of his.

  I’ve gone completely insane. It was the only explanation Sophie could come up with to explain her behavior since they’d gotten off the plane at Heathrow. Since they’d admitted that they wanted each other, Aidan had relaxed and spent more time actually talking to her instead of sitting, silent and grim.

  He checked them into a single room at the downtown Marriot, then told her to take whatever she wanted from the minibar. As if she wouldn’t have anyway. Then he took the phone from the cradle and dragged it into the bathroom.

  Sophie worked on putting their clothes into the drawers, the repetitive motions soothing her ruffled nerves. Leaving them packed may have been the more logical option, but Aidan wasn’t saying how long they’d be there. She didn’t know when she’d be able to see his boss. To finally meet Oliver. Just thinking about it made her palms sweat.

  Everything action she’d taken in the last two weeks had been a mistake, Sophie thought as she stared at her reflection in the window. Two weeks had gone by and though she knew her chances of actually making it to Rome in time to teach were slim, she couldn’t help but worry over the syllabus. It seemed so ridiculous to care about something like that, though.

  When she’d called Adele from Teheran, she’d told her to go ahead and plan to spend the semester solo, after all.

  It was harder to stay with Aidan when she was so close to the flat she kept in Paris. Other than her parent’s rambling country home in California and Lyle’s townhouse in DC, it was the only place that felt like hers. Decorated in shades of blue and cream, it was simple and elegant. A place where she could go to relax and be alone. She slept well there. Adele kept an apartment only blocks away. Two stories. Two bedrooms. Two windows that faced a small, sunny street.

  She remembered closing on it, how she spent the first night in a sleeping bag on the hardwood floors. She woke with bright yellow light streaming through the glass windowpanes. Faced with the arduous task of putting up curtains, she’d decided to skip the whole thing and took her dog, Daisy, out into the small front yard, caged with wrought-iron fencing.

  Daisy had rolled around in the grass, getting to know the lay of the land. By the time all the furniture had arrived and been installed, she’d trotted across the wood floors like she, rather than Sophie, owned the building.

  She’d get back to that flat, she promised herself. Return to take Daisy from the kennel and fill her with steak and tummy rubs until she was less angry at being left. It was just London that made Sophie have doubts. London and Oliver.

  Her hands felt cold even in the heat of the room, so she pulled down the arms of her sweatshirt and tucked them over her hands. It was so hard to make herself stay, to not walk out the front door and disappear in the crowd, to abandon the whole crazy scheme when the doubts snuck in. Maybe it was Aidan, she told herself. The way he used his body to shield hers in Iran. How she loved waking to find his arm around her.

  Sophie walked closer to the window and stared down at the street. From so high up, she could just make out the people scrambling for taxis in the rain. The storm almost seemed like a bad omen warning her to head back. To rewind. She traced her fingers through the raindrops that beaded down the glass and tried to convince herself she hadn’t made a huge mistake. That it was all going to be okay. The rain didn’t slow down.

  Across the street she could see the blurry figure of two women having a conversation in their own hotel room. Chairs angled toward the window, they shared what looked like a bottle of wine in what she could only assume was their safe haven from the outside. She missed Adele. Aidan’s voice, almost inaudible behind the bathroom door, was a poor substitute.

  Crossing to the minibar, she opened a can of Sprite and took a long swallow. She wasn’t tired, but there wasn’t much else to do. The bed dominated the room, persuaded her to lie down and muss the coverlet. She set the drink down on the side table and curled into a ball, alone in the waning light.

  “I believe you, Aidan. Settle down.” Oliver’s deep tones weren’t making him rest any easier.

  “I need to know that you won’t hurt her.”

  “As long as she’s not Veronica, she’s safe. I’m not going to hurt an innocent girl because she’s Lyle’s daughter. What kind of man do you think I am?”

  “Sorry, boss.” Aidan stared at himself in the mirror, not missing the wildness of his eyes.

  “I agree that it’s unlikely she’s Veronica. The photographs you sent me look different than the woman I’ve met in the past. Besides, until Veronica’s knife turned up with Dima’s body, I was under the impression that she was dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “I heard she was killed in Japan.” Oliver sighed and Aidan let the subject drop. He could hear paper rustling through the phone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking at surveillance photographs of Lyle and Veronica meeting a few years ago. They’re clear enough to be a good comparison. The resemblance is damned near uncanny, but this woman looks haggard.”

  “Sophie isn’t.”

  “Well, we’ll see.” Aidan knew that Oliver hated Veronica almost as much as he did.

  “We will,” Oliver said. “Go rest, Aidan. I’ll see you Friday when I’m back in town.”

  “What about Synth
esis?”

  “We’ll discuss leads then. Rest.”

  Aidan hung up and placed the phone on the counter. Rest seemed impossible or, at least, very, very far away.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Oliver snuffed out his cigarette and stared at the silent phone. He couldn’t believe deep-down that Aidan had captured Veronica, though his heart had skipped a beat when the knife found with Dima’s body was revealed to him. The woman was dead. He knew it better than anyone, since he’d killed her.

  But still, he couldn’t be sure. He didn’t have a body.

  The photographs from the folder were spread across his desk. One showed Veronica beaten and bleeding in Tokyo. That night was one of the best of his life.

  After all, it was the cunt’s fault his daughter Isabella was dead.

  Six years after he’d first encountered her, fucking up his computer during an operation in South America, he’d managed to catch her. Devoid of a weapon, he’d taken her on in unarmed combat in the street and he’d thrown an elbow into her solar plexus, then jammed three fingers into the hollow of her throat.

  Still, she’d tried to crawl away from him. There had been rain that night too, he remembered, watching the rain slip down the windowpanes outside his Cornwall estate. The alley had been lit up by the neon signs for girly shows—harsh red light bounced off the still water and made the girl’s face glow.

  Veronica had choked when she’d gone down, wrapped her cold fingers around her throat—and he remembered, clearly, the feeling of those fingers in his hand later—gasping for breath. Oliver had hung back, perhaps farther than he should have, enjoying the sound of her gagging and retching on the dirty, wet ground.

  The alley smelled like garbage, the scent made worse by the water that ran through the dumpsters before pooling on the street. When he’d crossed the debris and water to handcuff her wrists behind her back, Oliver made the mistake of hunching over her. His collarbone was forfeit when she shattered it with the hands she’d templed together and snaked, fingers pointed, into him.