NINE
M ay stretched languidly beneath the sheets, her silky skin brushing across Henner’s in all the ways that brought him instantly awake. He turned his head and brushed his lips over her shoulder, then trailed to the curve of her neck.
Though a shiver of pleasure ran through her, she heaved a dramatic sigh like she was put out by his laser focus on her and her alone.
In this bed, it was only them. But reality wasn’t easily ignored. The warmth between them couldn’t shield them from what waited for them outside these walls. They had roles to play and a mission to complete.
“We have to get up.” She made no attempt to move.
He hummed against her skin and anchored her to the bed with his arm across her middle. “Hmm. Do we?”
Turning into his arms, she ran her fingers over his chest while her gaze burned into his. “Unless you feel like skipping out on the mission, yes. But you’re going to be the one to tell Con.”
“I’m not afraid of my commanding officer.”
“And Commander Barrett.”
A rumble vibrated his chest. “Okay, you got me with that name drop.” It didn’t surprise him that she knew everything about Blackout from top rank to the lowest guy who serviced their systems.
Neither of them budged from the warmth of the bed and the feel of the other.
“You’re not moving.” She flicked her tongue over his chest dangerously close to his nipple. His cock grew harder than it already was.
“I guess we can’t let this op go sideways.” Finally, he rolled out of bed and stretched before reaching for his abandoned jeans.
Just touching the cloth resurrected the memory of May wrapping her fingers around his cock and leaning in with the intention to take him in her sweet, hot mouth.
Fuck. He was fully stiff now.
May sat up, eyes gleaming with barely veiled appreciation as she drank in the sight of him.
He pivoted, giving her a look at his backside, and took two steps toward the bathroom.
She suddenly popped to her feet, snatched up her top and held it over her naked torso as she darted to the bathroom before he could get there.
He caught her wrist as she passed, whirling her into his arms.
“Ohh.” She fell still for a moment. “We need to at least work on formulating a plan of action for the day before Con calls.”
At that moment, the phone in his abandoned clothing buzzed.
Henner fixed a look on her. “You manifested that.”
With a sexy chuckle, she drew away and padded into the bathroom. At the view of her backside, he fumbled his phone and almost dropped it. When he brought it to his ear, he was glad his CO couldn’t see his tongue hanging out of his mouth.
“Chickie.”
God, she really did have a fantastic body. He’d love to grip those hips while she rode his cock.
“Henner.”
He snapped back to attention at Con’s voice in his ear, the tone laced with an unasked question and the bark of a command.
“Con.”
His CO groaned. “You’re distracted.”
“Not really.”
May’s hips gave a little twitch before she closed the door.
“I fucking knew it.”
Henner’s focus shifted back to the call. “What do you know?”
“That you’re attracted to May.”
He couldn’t deny it, not even to save his ass with his leader. He scrubbed a hand over his face and willed his erection to go down.
“You slept with her, didn’t you?”
Pushing air through his nostrils, he weighed his options. One: confess. Two: pretend like he didn’t hear the question.
“Shit, you did.”
He raked his fingers through his hair. “Are you going to lecture me?”
“I’m in no position to lecture. Remember Turkey?”
“It wasn’t that long ago. Of course I do.” He remembered vividly how Con had boarded that jet with Sophie as a hard, unyielding leader and returned as a love-smitten man who’d bend over backward for the woman who’d won his heart.
But that wasn’t where Henner’s brief interlude with May was going.
He mumbled something that came out unintelligible because there wasn’t anything to say. Besides, he didn’t kiss and tell. He was a fucking Navy SEAL—he had so many secrets to keep inside that he didn’t even have the key to unlock the vault anymore.
“Where’s May? I need to speak to both of you. What I have to say involves her.”
Henner darted a look at the closed bathroom door. “She’s about to step into the shower. Give me a minute.”
He muted the phone and crossed the hotel room to knock on the bathroom door.
She called out a flirty, “Yes?”
Good thing Con couldn’t hear the come-get-me way she said that.
“Con’s on the line. He needs to speak with both of us.”
The door whipped open, and May filled the doorway, her expression all business though she was wrapped in a towel.
He unmuted the line. “Con? We’re listening.”
“Hi, May. I have a way to get you on base. Training exercises from an explosives expert.”
Henner’s head snapped in her direction. Her expression didn’t give anything away. Gone were the soft looks she’d given him just moments ago.
“That’s perfect,” she said.
He shook his head. “That gets May onto base. What about me? I can’t just walk in there as a dead man. And no way are you going alone.”
She sighed. “I know the man who runs the place, AJ. I’ll be fine.”
His brows shot up. “And you’re just now telling me this?”
She shrugged. “You already know him.”
His eyes bugged. “Who the hell is he?”
She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Major General Shaw Simpson.”
If he weren’t a fucking SEAL, he’d find the nearest chair and sit down. “You’re joking. Simpson is at Fort Leonard Wood?”
She blinked at him. “I thought you knew.”
“Why the hell would I know what base he’s in charge of? Some of those places change command like the leaders change the women they bed.”
Her eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly, but he was watching her closely so he noted the change.
“You didn’t think it was important to tell me until now?” he pressed her.
“Honestly, I don’t see the problem, AJ. Don’t you see that this makes it easier for me to get on base? He already knows my family and what I do. I have the credentials to do the training.”
He gripped the phone harder, but all of his attention was on May, and Con was a faraway thought in his mind. “You’re the smartest person in the room, May, but I would still hold your hand crossing the street.”
She squared up to him, her jaw tipped in a challenging manner. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means you’re missing the commonsense component.”
“Name one instance.”
“The dress.”
She scowled. “Okay, well, name two.”
“Not telling me about the major general.”
“Ugh.”
Con chuckled, snapping Henner’s attention to the fact that his CO heard every word of their push and pull. “Look, I love the banter, but can we move this along? You need to figure this out. I unlocked the door for you. Get on that base and do what you’re there to do.”
The line went dead, and Henner tossed the device onto the mattress a few feet away. He yanked on his boxer briefs over his unrelentingly stiff cock. He wanted to both throttle the woman in front of him and simultaneously rip off her towel and bend her over the bed so he could sink his cock inside her.
“Get dressed.”
“I’m not going to the base smelling like…”
He tossed her a look. “Like sex? Like me?”
“Um.” Her cheeks heated pink.
He curled his fingers into the cloth in his grip and battled his urges. “Get your shower, May. Make it quick.”
He didn’t glance up as May rushed into the bathroom. His mind was already working, flipping over every stone to find a way to get on to that base with her. If he pulled this off, he’d be a ghost walking among the living at Fort Leonard Wood.
Because there was no way he was letting May out of his sight.
* * * * *
AJ leaned against the steering wheel. His long fingers pressed into the twin lines of concentration between his brows that grew deeper as the day wore on.
“What’s taking so long? The training is supposed to start in an hour.”
In the passenger seat, May was just as on edge, but not because she was worried about the training. AJ’s irritation and anxiety were starting to rub off on her.
“You said Kit’s on maternity leave. Maybe something came up and she’s taking longer to alter the file.”
Since ending the call with Con that morning, she and AJ had volleyed ideas for the plan back and forth. The only thing they could agree on was that since AJ flat-out refused to let her go to Fort Leonard Wood alone, he had no choice but to take the risk of being recognized.
Due to Blackout needing to walk among the living at times, they had many fake credentials just for this, but the risk of being recognized was always there.
So far, the phone hadn’t gone off once with a text or a phone call. The car began to feel claustrophobic, the sun too hot on the side of May’s face. She lowered the window to catch the cool Missouri breeze.
“Dammit. Why don’t we have more support personnel in Blackout? Charlie needs our own people in place.”
“Blackout hasn’t worked out all the bugs yet.”
He gave her a dry look. “You would think that after what happened to Echo that they would have figured it all out quick.”
She didn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about. After all, she had been working in this business for a long time.
“What happened to Echo was a tragedy—”
When the phone buzzed, her spine snapped straight, and AJ grabbed the phone from his lap. He skimmed the text and his shoulders visibly relaxed even as they carried the weight of what they were about to do—infiltrate the military base in order to locate a terrorist’s bomb.
“It’s done. We’re clear to go in,” he told her.
She nodded.
He put the car in gear and entered the roadway from the department store they’d stopped at to pick up a laptop, then just sat parked in front of for the past two hours. Neither of them spoke as they drove the few miles to the base.
At the approach to the gates, her nerves kicked in. She knew enough from working with SEALs that anxiety was really just a body response, and therefore could be controlled.
She measured her breaths until her pulse finally slowed to a more normal rhythm.
Getting inside was easy—Kit added their names to the list of visitors too.
“That woman is a gem,” AJ muttered after they rolled past the guards.
“Yes, she is.”
His mood shifted, and she felt more confident about what she was about to do. After all, it was just a training session, and she was an expert on explosives. She could talk about this stuff all day without missing a beat.
After they parked in the designated place, he cut the engine and turned to her. “Ready?”
Suddenly, she realized that AJ didn’t only reflect his good moods on people. He reflected his bad ones too. Now that he was feeling lighter, she was too.
“Yup.”
“Let’s roll.”
She was relieved that he had trust in her that she knew the plan and didn’t go over it again. Contrary to her initial thoughts on the matter, she was beginning to see that Con’s decision to partner her with AJ was actually a wise one.
At first, she didn’t see how their skills could ever mesh, but she was seeing how they didn’t need to mesh—only complement each other.
As they strode up to the entrance, she darted a glance at him from the corner of her eye. He caught her looking at him and gave her a bad-boy quirk of his lips.
Her breath caught. Was he just masking his worries or was he throwing her a smile to reassure her?
His long legs reached the doors first. Before the guard opened it for them, AJ placed his lips close to her ear. “I’m right here.”
A tingle hit her stomach. She didn’t have time to react before they were in.
Within minutes, they were led to the opposite end of the main building and through another set of doors that spilled onto a training field.
May kicked into professional mode. As she crossed where the training would take place, the breeze whispered over her skin and helped ground her. The afternoon sun slanted over the servicemen standing around waiting for her to begin, casting their long shadows on the pavement.
She had done a training or two in the past, but never one with so much at stake. While she conducted the training, AJ had to sneak off and search for the bomb.
Despite this, her voice didn’t waver as she launched into a brief talk about identifying various explosives and then got right to the part everyone liked—defusing them.
She called out instructions, her voice firm. “Every move matters. Every mistake is a potential weakness in the field.”
A tickle of awareness washed over her. She looked up…right into the eyes of the driver of the truck they’d followed all the way from Virginia. Moore.
Dammit. What bad luck. He was so green, she was surprised to see him in an advanced training.
She wished she could get word to AJ, but he was off on the base somewhere, following that tracker he planted. They could see the position of the bomb on the tracking app but not what surrounded it. It wasn’t planted in the middle of the barracks with hundreds of men, but if nobody knew what was inside…was it safe?
AJ was trying to find that out, which left her on her own to deal with the kid.
She took control and paced along the rear of the group until she stood next to Moore. “Hi there. Didn’t we meet before?”
He gave her a smile but something moved in the depths of his eyes. Something like suspicion.
“Yes, we did. At the gas station.”
“I thought so.” She offered him her most charming smile in hopes of disarming something besides the mock explosives they were running drills with.
She slapped the heel of her hand off her forehead. “I’m sorry. I forgot you were stationed here. When I got word I was doing the training, it never crossed my mind.”
“I get it. I didn’t know you were our expert.” He returned her smile.
May relaxed a little, and they stood chatting a bit about the training. Feeling better about the encounter, she continued down the line of men, giving them advice and discussing important points.
The weight of more scrutiny pressed into the back of her skull. She stilled, mind whirring. Then she slowly pivoted to see who was watching her.
Her stomach pitched into a nosedive as she found herself locked with Major General Simpson.
He saw me talking to the kid. He knows we followed the bomb.
That was ridiculous. Simpson couldn’t know.
He strode toward her in a measured pace, his unform crisp and his face unreadable. “Didn’t expect to see you so soon, May. Last I knew, you were halfway across the country.”
She offered him her friendliest smile, injecting what she hoped would be the perfect amount of warmth to disarm the man’s suspicions without appearing like she was trying too hard, but it felt brittle on her face. God, where was AJ? She needed to get out of here.
“It was a last-minute invitation,” she breezed out, taking advantage of the moment to exhale the breath she’d held for far too long. “My father called to say he was supposed to take the training, but he couldn’t make it.”
That was the story Kit gave them when she fabricated some correspondence between some higher-ups in the US military and her father.
“I know he’ll be sorry to miss seeing you.”
Hell, could this situation get any more unstable? She felt like she was standing on a fault line in the middle of an earthquake, juggling canisters of C-4.
Simpson looked hard at her. She reminded herself that just because he had rank didn’t mean he had the ability to weasel out her lie.
Luckily, one of the trainees let out a low exclamation that drew her attention. The perfect escape.
She waved to Simpson. “Looks like I’m needed. I’ll catch up with you later.”
Then something even worse happened—something not even the best hacker in the country could cover up.
AJ was coming her way, in plain view of Moore…and Major General Simpson.