Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
There were several ways that she could play this scene. Unfortunately, none of those ways seemed promising. Esme swore she could feel her head spinning, and the last thing she wanted to do was pass out while Tyler glared at her. “You should smile more,” she blurted as her mind kept right on whirling. “Makes you look so much less scary.”
His glare intensified. So much for following her stellar advice.
Her gaze zipped down to the USB drive in his hand. “Where did you get that?”
“It was tucked inside one of your bras.”
Dammit. That had been her hiding spot. A man was not supposed to go plundering in a woman’s personal space. “Why on earth would you be searching inside one of my bras?”
“Because I knew you’d taken something other than those diamonds from Jorlan. My job is to figure out your secrets, remember?”
As if she could forget. “Yes, I remember. You must uncover all of my deep, dark secrets, even if you have to fuck them out of me.” Horror filled her. “ Mon Dieu. That’s what you did, isn’t it? After we…last night…when I fell asleep with you— you searched then, didn’t you?” The betrayal she felt was staggering. Betrayal, followed swiftly by rage.
He didn’t speak.
She shoved against his chest, and he took a step back. “Asshole!” A very loud yell.
He didn’t flinch.
“You used me. I thought that what we did meant something, but you were just trying to fuck me into oblivion so you could search my stuff!”
“What’s on the drive, Esme?”
Rage and pain and fear swirled within her. All of her careful plans were in ashes. “Heroes aren’t supposed to do things like that.” She swiped at her cheek. “Such an utter disappointment.”
“ Are you crying?”
“Yes, dammit!” Another disappointment. “And I can’t march to the bathroom and cry in peace because some jackass locked the door and I’m trapped in here with him!” Another swipe at her cheek. “Can’t believe you did this to me. I trusted you! Heroes don’t do this. Heroes don’t?—”
“Sweetheart, heroes will do anything to get the job done.” He spun away from her. Stalked toward the desk. He pushed aside the plate of croissants that she’d carefully prepared and grabbed a black laptop. “I didn’t have one at our safe house. Was gonna have a secure computer brought in tomorrow, but I can use Kane’s right now. He always has the best tech, and I know his password.” He tapped on the keyboard. Plugged the USB drive in place.
Esme knew she had to stop him. But how? Inspiration came in only one way. “It’s a sex tape!” She lunged forward. “Do you really want to watch Jorlan fuck me?”
Wrong words. Oh, so wrong. But they’d been desperate words.
His head lifted. His blue eyes blazed. And his face could only be described as savage. “No, I don’t.” Cold and deadly. “And that’s not what I’m going to see, is it?”
“He wouldn’t give it back.” She inched closer. Once you start a lie, carry it through until the end. “I asked him to give it back, but he was blackmailing me. So I had to get the video on my own. He didn’t upload it to the cloud or anything like that. He just kept that single copy in his safe. The robbery at his house provided the perfect distraction that I needed in order to retrieve the drive.”
“Did you send those thieves to his place? Did you stage the entire scene?”
Not the entire scene, no.
“You must have, right? And that’s how you knew the guns they carried weren’t loaded?”
Her heart squeezed. “You figured that part out?”
“I’m figuring you out. You were way too cool about having a gun shoved at you. You either have a serious death wish or you knew the weapons weren’t loaded.”
She didn’t have a death wish. She did have a good ability to know her prey. “I didn’t send the thieves there. I just knew what types of hits they liked. I simply made sure I was in the right place at the wrong time.” She inched forward a bit more. Esme stretched out her hand. “Believe me when I say that you don’t want to see what’s on the drive.” At the very least, she needed to see it first. Without Tyler breathing down her neck.
And… so I can protect him.
“Jorlan is a dead man. ”
She flinched.
“If he’s fucking you on the video, he’s dead.”
Do not cry. “Again, you are so not heroic. My image of you grows more tarnished by the second.”
He grabbed her. She didn’t even have time to cry out. In one fast move, he’d wrapped his hands around her waist and lifted her onto the desk. He held her there, with her legs dangling off the edge, with his body between her spread thighs, and with his powerful hands curled around her.
“Sweetheart,” he leaned in ever closer, “why do you persist in thinking heroes are always good?”
“I—”
He kissed her. A hot, angry, brutal kiss. Deep and driving. Possessive and commanding. His tongue took her mouth. He took her. The kiss branded and owned and demanded a response.
She should shove him away. She should bite his lip and tell the jerk to leave her alone. She should?—
He pulled away. “I can taste your tears.”
Dammit. No.
His fingers rose and with a tenderness that shattered something in her, he lightly brushed the teardrops away from her cheeks. “I don’t like it when you cry. Not the fake tears and especially not the real ones.” His lips thinned. “The real ones are the worst.”
She nodded. They were.
“Let’s try this again.” His mouth came back to hers. Not brutal with intensity this time. Soft. Caressing. Asking. Stirring.
Longing.
Her eyelids fell closed. Her hands rose to press to his shoulders even as her mouth opened wider because she yearned for him when she knew that she shouldn’t. But this could be the last chance she had to taste him.
A final kiss.
“There’s nothing final about us.”
Oh, no. She’d whispered those words against his mouth.
His hand closed around hers. Her right hand—she’d been sneaking it toward the USB drive and the laptop while they kissed. “Cute, sweetheart, but not happening.”
Her eyes opened.
His eyes gleamed down at her. “For the record, I’m not leaving you. Even if you are on a video fucking him. Though I will rip him apart. Count on it. I’ll make him bleed and beg, and I’ll enjoy every second of that time.”
Her breath choked out. “Aren’t you the bloodthirsty one?”
“Yes.”
Just that. A firm yes.
His fingers were still curled around her wrist. “Did you think you were going to distract me so you could swipe the drive?”
It had been worth a shot. “You were the one who put me on the desk and started kissing me. I was just using the proximity to my advantage.”
His thumb slid along her inner wrist. Right over the rushing pulse. “And what would you have done if you had gotten your silken hand on the drive?”
“Tried to destroy it before you could stop me.” In her mind—after securing the drive in her fast fingers—she’d envisioned herself rolling across the desk. Slamming the drive into an open drawer. Hopefully smashing it into lots of little pieces.
“You truly don’t want me to see what’s on the drive? ”
She truly didn’t. “If you see it, then there will be no saving you.” Us.
A line appeared between his brows. “Why would you want to save me?”
“Because you saved me once upon a time. And whether you believe me or not, I did think that you’d get out of this whole protection detail business with me in one piece. Then you could go about your life. But if you see that drive—if you see what I think is on it—then there will be no going back for you.” Absolute brutal honesty. She had nothing else to give him.
“You’re protecting me?”
“Feels weird, yes? To me, too.”
His fingers slid along her inner wrist once more. Her pulse skittered.
“Don’t look at what’s on the drive.” A plea from her. No, more than that. “I’m begging you. Some things in this world can’t be unseen.”
“Are you on the drive?”
“My world is on that drive.”
His gaze searched hers.
“There’s a reason Jorlan had the drive hidden in his personal safe. It was his protection. Without it, he’s vulnerable, and he knows it. That’s why he is going to try so hard to get it back. Jorlan doesn’t want me. He wants what’s on the drive.”
“He has a backup. Surely. If the contents are that important, there are other copies. There have to be.”
Mocking laughter escaped her. “You don’t put things like this on the cloud for any hacker to stumble upon. You put them in your safest space, and you make sure the drive doesn’t get stolen. But then, unfortunately for you, a master thief just walks herself across a narrow ledge and takes what her greedy heart wants.”
“Your heart isn’t greedy.” Certainty.
Not when it came to Tyler, it wasn’t. The man was her weakness, and she knew it. She’d tried to show him how she really felt in a thousand ways. But…some dreams just never came true. “Don’t watch what’s on the drive. Please.”
He shook his head. “I have to watch, and then, you know I’ll have to turn over the drive to Gray and his people.”
Begging hadn’t helped before, either. It wouldn’t help now. “I haven’t seen the footage. I could be wrong about everything. Nothing at all could be on that drive.”
Doubt covered his face. “You want me to believe that you risked your life for nothing?”
“I was on the second story at Jorlan’s place. I know how to fall and how to get back up.” Breezy words. As if a body-shattering fall meant nothing. “Maybe I would have gotten some broken bones, but I wouldn’t have died.”
He let go of her wrist. With slow but determined steps, he moved behind the desk and sat down in the chair. Tyler tugged the laptop toward him.
The baseball hat had fallen off his head. She stared at the cap as it rested against the floor.
“Don’t you want to see what you stole, Esme?”
Her big goal. Getting that drive. But now she wasn’t moving toward it.
“What did you intend to do with the contents of this drive?” Tyler asked.
She pushed off the desk. For a minute, her knees wobbled. Odd. They’d never done that before. Not even when she walked across a slippery ledge as light rain dusted down on her at Jorlan’s party. Esme pulled in a breath, made sure her mask was in place, then she turned for Tyler. “I intended to get my vengeance, of course.”
A furrow appeared between his brows.
“Isn’t that the end game for all villains? To get vengeance? Wreak destruction? Those two items were at the top of my wicked to-do list.”
“Esme, why in the hell can’t you be honest with me?”
I have been. You just don’t know it. “You’re not honest with me. You steal things from me in the middle of the night. The sex is great, but everything else between us is just pretend.” Utter honesty from her.
She saw the hit in his eyes.
“Don’t watch,” she implored him again.
But his fingers were tapping across the keyboard. So much for her pleas. There was nothing else she could do. Esme’s steps were even slower than his had been. She moved to stand right behind him. One of her hands went to his shoulder. An instinctive movement.
“Three video files,” Tyler said.
That was one more file than her intel had indicated. She’d just thought two would be on the drive.
He opened the first file. A grainy image filled the screen. She sucked in a breath when she saw the old café in Paris. She’d gone there so often. It had been their meeting place. And, sure enough, there he was.
Louis Turner. Of course, that probably hadn’t been his real name. He’d been a CIA operative. She’d known that he was working undercover. Known that he was working her . Only fair, really, since her job had been to report back on him. To talk about the questions he asked her. To share any suspicions he might have.
Louis sat at a table with another man. Casually dressed, with silver at his temples, the man wore a pair of wire-framed glasses.
“That’s Thaddeus Caldwell,” Tyler muttered. “He’s Gray’s boss at the FBI. But he doesn’t wear glasses these days, and he’s got more silver in his hair.”
Her spine stiffened. Her hand remained on Tyler’s shoulder.
“Who the hell is he talking to?” He’d paused the footage to study the screen.
“It looks different, doesn’t it?” Esme mused. “When the walls are still up and the ceiling hasn’t collapsed and there isn’t ash and fire and hell everywhere, the café seems different? Such a beautiful place, once upon a time. I loved going there. I was the one who told him about it.”
Tyler tensed beneath her touch. His head swung so he could look back at her.
But she kept peering at the image. It wasn’t every day that a dead man stared back at you.
“I mentioned him to you before. He was the someone who I said could have caused a great deal of trouble in the international world.”
“Because he had proof of a weapons and drug trade. Proof that he wanted in the right hands.”
The proof had never made it to those hands.
“I knew him as Louis Turner.” Her voice softened as she spoke his name.
“Fuck. Were you in love with him?”
Had she been? “He was using me. I was using him.”
“That’s not a yes or no answer.”
“Sometimes there isn’t a yes or no answer.” Things could be more complicated. “You need more shades of gray in your world. ”
He started the video again. “Who the hell is recording this?”
“Probably the Feds. Or the CIA. Or?—”
Louis’s voice stopped her. “ I’m telling you, she doesn’t know .”
“Fucking clear feed,” Tyler rasped. “Someone sure had perfect audio.”
“It’s because he’s wired.” She swallowed. “I knew he was wired on some of our talks. It only made sense that he was wired that day, too.” The day the world burned.
Tyler tilted his head. “So is Thaddeus the one he was giving the intel to? The bastard is right there—Louis could give it to him at any time?—”
“ Esme isn’t guilty ,” Louis said at that moment. He spoke in perfect English.
In the video, Thaddeus shook his head. “All signs say that she’s guilty as sin. We just can’t get anything to stick to her. Just like it can’t stick to her father.”
Her father.
There it was. The ugly suspicion. Big and bold and breaking her heart.
“I want the proof you’ve gathered,” Thaddeus ordered. “This operation has been compromised. You’re compromised. We need to get the hell out of Paris before it’s too late.”
Louis glanced around the café. “I’ll bring everything I have to you tonight.”
“You were supposed to give it to me now. ”
“It’s not safe now. I’ll rendezvous with you later. Okay? Now, look, you need to go. You shouldn’t even be here. We can’t be seen together.”
“You’re planning another meeting with her, aren’t you? You are compromised.” Thaddeus stood up. “If I know it, others will, too.”
“I’m in control.”
“The hell you are.” Thaddeus spun away. He marched for the exit.
Esme sucked in a sharp breath. Her heart stopped.
Louis remained at the table. His fingers drummed on the top. There was a faint vibration of sound. The softest peal right before Louis pulled out his phone and looked down at his screen. A moment later…
The whole café exploded.
Tyler cursed.
She realized she’d dug her fingers into his shoulder. Too hard.
“Esme…”
She couldn’t seem to relax her grip. “He was there.”
“Thaddeus? Yeah, but he got clear before the blast.”
“ He was there. ”
Tyler had closed the file.
“Open it again,” she ordered, voice frantic. “Play it again.”
He did. He reopened the file. He played it again. She heard Louis’s voice, and the past washed over her once more. They’d been using each other. Love? No, not love. But something that might have been close if they’d had a chance. And there it was…right after Thaddeus left.
A moment that would change everything. An image that would seal her fate. And Tyler’s.
“Stop.”
Tyler froze the screen. She stared at the man on the far-left side of the image. Caught for the briefest of seconds. His profile was so familiar to her. Even the old, black flat cap he wore. The cap her mother had tried in vain to replace so many times.
I would know him anywhere. How could she not? “That’s my father. He was there that day.” She could barely breathe, much less speak, so the words trembled as they spilled out. “I was told…” She’d paid so much money. Worked in the darkness so long to obtain the intel. “I was told that the man who’d really pulled the strings was in the café right before the blast. Jorlan had proof. He had power because of his proof.” It hurt so much to have her suspicions confirmed. “ He was there. ”
Her father walked out. She hadn’t seen him at the café when she arrived because he’d gone out through the back door. She could see him rushing that way.
She’d come in the front door. “I saw Louis looking down at his phone. I called his name. I don’t think he ever heard me.”
Tyler’s index finger tapped. The video played once more. Louis looked down at his phone.
The world exploded.