FOUR
Sophie prided herself on being a levelheaded human being. Over her years at the university, she’d learned how to go with the flow, to change and adapt as her students needed.
But boarding a jet bound for a foreign country while posing as somebody’s wife was not a thing she wanted to adapt to.
She wrapped her arms around herself and let her head fall back against the airplane seat. Seats flanked a wide aisle in pairs. She’d taken a window seat, expecting Con to sit anywhere but beside her.
She was wrong.
The big man crowded the space with his long legs stretched out so his boots disappeared under the seat in front of them. And did his muscled forearm need every inch of the armrest?
She sighed. This was going to be a long flight. Sleeping was probably off the table too. One thing Sophie needed for good rest was her routine, and she wasn’t getting that here.
Con shifted in the seat. His elbow bumped hers.
She whipped her head to glare at him. “Do you need the entire armrest?”
He looked down at his thick forearm that took up the whole thing. He twitched it minutely, presenting her with a sliver of tan vinyl. “Is that better?”
“Sure, if my arm were the size of a noodle, but it isn’t!” She held up her arm, turning it side to side so he got a good look at the limb.
“I’m big. I take up more room.”
“Does that mean you deserve more room? No,” she answered her own question. “It does not.”
“What would you suggest, Sophie?”
She shoved a sigh through her nostrils. “You can sit somewhere else. Or let me find a different seat.”
“We need to talk.”
She stared at him. “Now? About what?”
“About how we’re going to pull off this act.”
He didn’t need to elaborate on what act he referred to. The wedding ring was a hot brand on her skin every second she’d been wearing it.
She dropped her face into her hands and then raked her fingers through her hair in an attempt to gather her emotions. “Look, this is all moving too fast.”
“We don’t have time to wait. You need to be decoding that cryptogram. In fact, as soon as the plane hits cruising altitude, I’ll give you a computer to get to work.”
She gave a little shake of her head to clear out the emotional clutter. “I take it I don’t need to worry about security leaks over an insecure network?”
“No. We’re the government.”
“So you’ve said.”
“I know you hold a doctorate in computer science and a doctorate in mathematics. We understand that you know what you’re doing, and we’re going to accommodate you.”
“I appreciate being able to do my job without worrying about some hackers tapping into what I’m doing. That still doesn’t give me an armrest of my own.”
He stared at her for a heartbeat that stretched on and on.
Maybe she’d gone too far. In the name of self-preservation, she sometimes ended up being too blunt. A lot of guys didn’t appreciate that behavior from a woman, but she wasn’t just any woman.
Still, she tried to smooth things over. “I realize this is important.”
“I don’t doubt that. I don’t claim to know what you do—so don’t try to guess what I do. I’m in the trenches, Sophie. I’ve seen things. Done things.” Those deep eyes shuttered, closing her out of whatever he was thinking. Or feeling.
“Right now, you are seeing things through one lens. The one you know.”
She tipped her head, studying his face to gauge how far she could push her boundaries before Con would snap. She knew from the boys’ club that was academia that arguments with know-it-all males created hard feelings. That, in turn, made for tough working conditions.
She stole a look at Con’s hand. Seeing the gold band on his left ring finger unnerved her. Seeing the matching one on her own finger left her feeling like a trapped bird, even if it was just pretend.
“We don’t have time for this now.” She twisted forward in an attempt to ignore him.
“Yes. We do.”
“We’re going to Turkey. How many hours is that?” She looked around. “Does the government give you a supersonic jet, because if not, we’re stuck together for about nine more hours.”
His brows drew into a V over his eyes. “How do you know this? Do you study flight times for every destination in the world?”
“No. But I read. A lot.” She closed her eyes, counted to ten, then opened them again, a fraction calmer. “If you want me to pretend we’re newlyweds, you’re going to have to give me something to work with. I have to look like I like you. Right now, I don’t like you.”
She darted a glance at his ring and created a fist around her own.
The main reason for her dislike was Con’s natural bossiness, which probably came from being in the military.
The other issue…was all on her. She was so against marriage, she didn’t even want to be involved in a fake one, and that was making her act bitchier than she typically was.
“What’s not to like?”
She blinked rapidly at his question. “That right there. The cockiness. The way you deflect my questions and act like I don’t know anything because I only ‘see it through my own lens.’ Heads-up—if you want me to know something, you need to tell me. For instance, say…the cryptogram possibly pointing to a potential bombing.”
“I have a level of clearances you do not, Sophie. I cannot share everything I know with you.”
“Aren’t we going to locate this man so I can find out more about him and decode the cryptogram faster?”
“That’s one hundred percent correct—for your part of the op. The orders I received are to bring him in no matter what it takes.”
She swallowed hard, realizing how shrill her voice had become. She shook her head. “You read my file. I’d like to read yours too.”
His brow flicked up with a devil-may-care attitude that made her stomach do a nosedive. “It’s classified.”
“Are you telling me that I don’t have the right security clearances as your pretend wife? Hand it over.”
His mouth twisted—he knew she was using the link she had bucked so hard to her own ends.
“What do you think you’re going to see?” he asked.
“Oh, how about the fact that you operate almost entirely off memorization?”
The narrowing of his eyes was almost undetectable, but she caught it. She would bet her whole book collection—besides the signed copies, of course—that Con’s mind worked like an advanced computer.
“I’ve been teaching for a long time. I know how to figure out the way people learn. I’d say that you can memorize a detail or fact just by seeing or hearing it.”
He didn’t respond.
“I think you masked some learning problems when you were in school.”
He shoved to his feet and strode toward the back of the plane.
She leaped up and followed. When he plopped heavily into a seat, she dropped into the one beside him.
“Haven’t you said enough?” His low voice sounded calm but had an edge as sharp as a blade.
“You didn’t let me finish.”
They stared at each other. They seemed to do that a lot.
“You must have a very high IQ to even be in special ops. I’d say if I’m right, your way of adapting by memorization has served you well, Con.”
He let out a snort as if he didn’t buy into what she told him.
“Not to mention special ops training is the most difficult in the military. Only twenty to twenty-five percent ever complete it.”
He gave a small shake of his head. “And you say I’m the one with memorization skills.”
“I told you, I read a lot.”
“Now you want to read my file.”
“Fine, I’ll compromise—let me see my file.”
Though they were sitting down, she got the feeling they were standing toe-to-toe. On even playing ground. Maybe her little outburst had leveled things up. She hoped so because she deserved more than commands to do this, go here, follow him, get in the vehicle.
He waved a hand in dismissal. “You want to see it now? Like you said, we have hours before we land.”
“If you want me in—and I mean all in—I want to see my file.”
He shifted his jaw in contemplation, creating a small bulge in the crease.
She squeezed her fingers into a fist to keep from reaching over and smoothing it.
He tipped his jaw toward the aisle. “Let me out and I’ll grab my tablet so you can see your file.”
When she slipped out to let him pass, his big arm brushed against hers. He was hard. And warm.
The skin on her arm hatched into gooseflesh under her cotton sweater.
She’d barely recovered from her body’s reaction or the view of his hard backside moving up the aisle before he was back, computer tablet in hand.
He passed it to her and took a seat across the aisle.
“Thank you.” She lowered herself to the chair and settled in to read the file on herself.
A doctorate in mathematics and computer science. There were details about her lesson plans and how she lectured on how technology changed society.
That was all to be expected. What she read next had her throat tightening.
Her ex-husband, Benjamin Maloy, was also a professor at Princeton, and taught in the same field as her.
Yes, and that caused a lot of problems.
She took the Cipher Award—five years running—and professional jealousy reared its ugly head in Benjamin. He couldn’t handle having fewer accolades than Sophie, and to make up for his shortcomings, he cheated on her. With his assistant, who was a grad student at the time. A grad student with cute bangs that she flipped all the time.
Sophie skimmed over the rest of the information about her upbringing and where she went to school. It even had her height and weight, which she blushed at.
When she swiped a finger over the screen to close out the file, she didn’t meet Con’s stare that she felt lasering into the side of her face.
She held out the device for him to take. Did he read all this? Did he know about her relationship with Benjamin?
“This is just data. It doesn’t show who a person is. It has my resume, addresses I’ve lived at, awards and accolades. But you can’t quantify a person on paper. This isn’t the whole story.”
Suddenly, she felt all the energy go out of her like air from a balloon. This had been the longest day. After getting up so damn early and teaching several classes on top of all that happened since then, she needed a little break from it all.
Only there was nowhere to go but to Turkey.
With Con.
* * * * *
Con was used to jet lag. He could land on foreign soil and hit the ground running on no sleep.
Sophie was made of softer stuff.
After she got the computer tablet back into her capable hands, she worked on the cryptogram for five long hours. He pulled the puzzle up on his phone screen too, trying to see if he could make any connections. He quickly gave up, while Sophie labored on until she finally declared her eyes were crossing and she was going to take a nap.
After wrapping a thick black shawl around herself, she promptly fell into a heavy sleep. She slept through the turbulence they hit somewhere over the Atlantic, but he checked on her several times. The plane only jostled her side to side, while she slumped into a more comfortable position and slept on.
Meanwhile, he’d battled his way through her file. And yeah, she totally had him pegged. He was dyslexic, and though he’d taught himself how to read—no thanks to his teachers throughout the years—he didn’t like doing it. He relied on his brain to remember everything he heard or was told.
Words were like cryptograms to him—a jumble of letters that were painstaking to figure out. But he read Sophie’s file from top to bottom just trying to read between the lines.
Everything seemed cut-and-dry. Facts, as she said. So what made her so on edge when she read it?
She’d been sleeping for about four hours now, slumped in a seat with her head twisted hard to the side, giving him a view of her usually animated features in repose.
Her small nose and pouty lips made her look like a doll. Long, dark lashes fanned over her pale cheeks. He’d traveled the world several times over and if he had to guess, she had European DNA, probably French.
Watching her sleep made him feel like an intruder, but they wouldn’t be in the air for much longer. The plane was beginning its descent. Before they landed and Sophie was asked to play the role of a new wife she hadn’t prepared for, he should wake her. Give her a chance to get her bearings.
He watched her face for any flickers of waking. When he saw none, he dropped his gaze to her chest, watching it rise and fall too rhythmically to be on the verge of getting up anytime soon.
If it were one of his guys, he’d ruthlessly shake them. He couldn’t bring himself to do that to Sophie.
He reached across the aisle and gently nudged her shoulder. She jolted, eyes snapping open. For a minute, they rolled wildly as she took in their surroundings.
Then she leaned forward and ran her palm over her face. “Where are we?” Her voice was a harsh rasp.
He handed her an unopened bottle of water, he had on the seat next to him. “We’re starting to descend. I thought you may want to freshen up before we land.”
She nodded, stretching her fingers through her brown hair. While she slept, he noticed how it wasn’t just boring brown but several shades of the color, from dark honey to deep chestnut.
The shawl had slipped down her body and pooled on her lap. She drew it off and set it aside before uncapping the water and taking a long drink.
“How long was I out?” Her voice sounded smoky from sleep.
“Four hours, give or take.”
She groaned. “I’m going to use the restroom.” She slipped into the aisle, her purse in hand.
While she was sleeping, he’d formed a loose plan of action, and he needed to catch her up on it. Even with the CIA working to locate the person of suspicion, he and Sophie had a lot of work ahead of them.
First thing was sitting her down with a laptop to work on that cryptogram some more. Second, they needed to find this guy and make him talk.
He was sifting through the steps when a scent hit his nose—something sweet and delicious.
Twisting, he looked toward the rear of the plane to see Sophie coming toward him, appearing much more bright-eyed. She had to be the source of that smell.
He watched her jaw to see if she had popped some gum into her mouth, but she wasn’t chewing.
A hard candy, then.
As she got within a foot of him, he drew a deep breath to pick up the scent. Sweet fruit and a natural freshness like a burst of summer air.
The smell wafted over him as she slipped into her seat. He glanced at her. She’d smoothed the flyaway strands of hair that he’d noticed got more unruly as she slept, even though she was completely still.
Why was he looking at her hair? He was a SEAL, not a fucking hairdresser.
“You need to prepare for what happens when we land.”
She grabbed the shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders once more. “What happens when we land?”
“You always respond with a lot of questions. You know that?”
“A trait of a lifelong learner. Shall I rephrase my thoughts?”
He sucked in another breath, then another. What was that smell she was wearing? It was driving him crazy.
“When we land, there’ll be a car waiting for us. We’ll go to the hotel and settle in, but we don’t have time for sightseeing or anything like that.”
“I’m not here to be a tourist, Con.” Her brows pinched. “I mean…Jeremy.”
The name on his ID had been his father’s name, and for that reason, was easy for him to remember.
“That’s right, Sydney. Good.”
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t require a pat on the back, but thanks. When can I get back to work on the cryptogram?”
“Once we land, I’ll set you up on another secure connection. Meanwhile, I’ll be doing my own footwork to find our guy.”
She flipped her hair over her shoulder, and he caught the scent again.
It was perfume. On her, it smelled friggin’ amazing.
If she smelled this good with an aisle between them, he couldn’t imagine how she would smell when he took her in his arms and enacted step two of his plan.
Acting like newlyweds in public.