Chapter Three
Elise looked on as Dylan followed Sean out of the room. And then walked right back in. They stood in the corner, backs to her and heads together, speaking in low tones she couldn’t make out but giving her one hell of a view.
Two chiseled bodies, the sets of their shoulders so similar they could be twins. Sean’s hair was a hint darker, or that could just be the crappy overhead lighting in this dump Bo had set her up in.
Why she couldn’t analyze the messages from the comfort of her own apartment, she had no clue, but as soon as he’d learned she would have the help of Dylan Knight, Bo had whisked her here.
At least he’d given her the biggest, best monitor on the market to work with.
She wasn’t letting these guys step in and steal her work out from under her. This was far too exciting, and she wasn’t about to hand it over to the Knight brothers.
She chewed at her lower lip as she tried to focus on the work and failed. It was impossible not to wonder what the brothers were discussing in such heated whispers, especially given her guess that they were taking over.
Dylan suddenly straightened with a jerk and Sean turned to give Elise a smile.
Oh no. She was working with one of those guys. The charm-your-panties-off playboy types. That was the last thing she needed. What she required to do her job, and essentially save Americans, was an intelligent, focused assistant. Instead, she was getting Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.
She returned his stare but not his smile. “Look, I don’t give a damn what your credentials are. You’re not pushing me out of this and taking over.”
Sean stared at her. “Why would you think we’re taking over?”
She stood and planted her hands on her hips. “This is my area of specialty, and I’m more qualified for it than two guys who’ve spent their days taking orders.”
Ouch. She wasn’t normally such a bitch, but she was an angry momma bear, determined to protect this mission and see it through to the end.
Sean shook his head. “We’re not here to take over.”
“Well, whatever your problem is, it is no importance compared to this.” She waved at the screen and the thousands of codes to be broken—her first priority, not babysitting two overgrown, though hot, special ops guys.
Dylan turned to face her too, his face red with what she took as anger. “Elise, Sean’s going to be working with us.”
Her gaze shifted to the other brother. A resigned sigh left her. “Fine. Three sets of eyes are better than one.”
She returned to her work, becoming engrossed in seconds. When the men took their seats flanking her, she hardly noticed until a whiff of aftershave wiggled into her psyche. She pointed at two letters, and Dylan nodded.
“What are you seeing?” Sean asked.
She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. Did he really have no clue what he was doing? Please tell me this isn’t your first rodeo.
When she didn’t answer, Dylan spoke. “The letter B is standing in for the fourth letter of the alphabet, D.”
They continued on. When Dylan broke another between two letters, Elise’s excitement bubbled. Together they could do this. They couldn’t fail. Sean picked out a few of the words as well, and within a short time, they had a sentence.
It wasn’t until they decoded the second sentence in the passage when she noticed something going on between the brothers. When Dylan would try to speak, Sean would jump in. Was this some sibling rivalry or the typical pissing match she’d seen among Marines since joining up years ago?
She lowered her eyes and covertly glanced at each man. Dylan seemed to be concentrating on the work, and Sean’s gaze wandered from the words to her fingers on the keys. Or maybe he wanted to take over the keyboard.
Fine, let the jerk have something to do besides sit there making her nervous. She shoved it his way. “You’re welcome to it.”
He twisted his lips and then released them so fast that she might have imagined the small quirk of his lips. Bad boys like Sean Knight would make that expression in their sleep—it was nothing to do with her.
Dylan recited a few letters, which Sean tapped in with precision, his long, tanned fingers spanning across the keys. With Sean doing that part of her job, Elise had laser focus on her work. She had no idea of the shadows falling across the room until a step in the doorway made her look up.
Bo cocked a brow at her as if to say, Everything okay?
She gave the faintest of nods.
Bo cleared his throat. “I assume you’re working through the night, but Elise needs to sleep. She’s been up for twenty-nine hours.”
Sean’s head whipped up and the muscle of his thigh closest to her tensed. She guessed that if she touched the denim-covered muscle that it would be the same makeup as concrete. Confusion made her look between her ex-husband and the man she’d just met.
A gasp of understanding hit her lips. They must be acquainted, and some dislike was making them circle each other like angry dogs. Their teeth might not be bared, but she sensed it nonetheless.
Either way, she didn’t have time for it. “I’ll crash here if I need to. Go on home, Bo.”
Sean made a rough noise that drew all of their attention to him. He cleared his throat to cover the moment, but he definitely didn’t have something caught there. What the hell had been foisted on her? Dylan was fine—intelligent, professional. Why did he have to drag his brother into this?
She looked to Bo again. Lines of fatigue ran from his eyes to the corners of his mouth. If anyone needed to hit the pillow, it was him.
She raised her chin, indicating he should go. He nodded and turned to leave.
As soon as Bo was out of the space, Sean stood and stretched. His big frame shaking as joints popped.
She gave him the side-eye. Why was a stretch so damn hot? It shouldn’t be.
Dylan stood too and walked over to part a grubby blind with his fingers and look out. This block of the city was pretty desolate, and she doubted even a stray cat wandered the streets.
“I think takeout is out of the question. Nobody’s going to deliver back here.”
“We don’t need takeout. There’s a fridge in the other room packed with drinks and food, as well as a microwave.” Her statement made both men gawk at her.
“Why didn’t you say something? I’ve been sitting here with cotton-mouth for hours.” Sean strode into the other room and returned with two bottled waters and two sub sandwiches cupped in one large hand.
He set these before her.
“Thank you.”
“Can’t have you dropping over from hunger or fatigue. Why don’t you eat and then sleep? I saw a padded booth out there that would serve as a pallet.”
She didn’t like the way his concern flowed so easily from his lips—she got enough of that from Bo, and there was only room for one Bo in her life. She cracked open the water and downed half of it while Sean watched her, sipping at his own drink.
Dylan made a grunting noise that had them both turn to eye him. He glanced from the window. “What if the letter U isn’t a factor at all?”
Elise set down her bottle and leaned forward to peer at the screen. Her mind worked furiously over Dylan’s statement, but the low growl emitted from Sean had her head snapping.
The man stared at a point across the room and at nothing in particular, the sub and drink forgotten in his hands. His eyelids fluttered. “It’s an equation.”
She shot to her feet, torn between getting this straight in her mind and continuing with their breakthrough. “Wait. You’re new to this game, so how are you figuring this out?”
“Sean’s a quick study,” Dylan said.
Sean spouted an equation that left her reeling. “Holy shit,” she whispered. “That’s the burn rate. Mass ratio, delta v and exhaust velocity.”
He nodded slowly, as if in a trance.
“Jesus, Dylan. Is your brother some kind of savant or something? He looks like he’s going to drop to the floor and have a seizure. Or maybe he’s channeling the man who wrote the code.” She stared at Sean, who hadn’t moved a muscle.
Dylan drifted to the big table serving as a desk and leaned over to look at the screen. He grunted. “I’d say he’s right.”
Stunned, she watched Sean return to normal and take a bite off the sub sandwich so big it seemed his jaws could hardly manage to chew it. But he gnawed it down to nothing and then swallowed, flashing her a grin.
What the hell? She’d never seen anyone operate like this man. It was hard not to be impressed, but she knew better than to show it. She’d lived with a cocky Marine for six months, after all. Heaping praise on Bo had been like tossing dry leaves on a raging fire. It doubled, tripled the man’s ego.
But damn, he was good. She shook her head, unable to stop her smile from stretching her lips. Maybe for the next few days, there was room in her life for another man like her ex. But for now, she was dead on her feet, swaying with fatigue, her mind already clouding and her eyelids drawing downward as if weighted.
“I’m going to crash,” she muttered, heading to the front room. As she fell into the booth, she felt something warm and soft cloak her shoulders. Cracking an eye, she saw Sean hovering over her.
“It’s just my coat to keep you warm. I’ll see what they can do about setting us up in a nice hotel so you can at least have a bed next time. Sleep, cher.”
Her eyes slammed shut but her mind worked on and on—not over the codes or the equation Sean had spouted, but over the strange look on his face as he stood over her, covering her in his coat.
* * * * *
Sean leaned back in his seat, stretching the sore and stiff muscles of his spine after long hours hunched over the table, staring at a screen. Numbers and letters floated before his eyes, along with some spots that told him he was too tired to go on. He needed to break.
“This is a bullshit place. Did Hawk set Elise up here? If so, he must be into torture. No comforts, no amenities. She’s out there sleeping in a fucking old booth on ripped vinyl.” He waved toward the front of the building where Elise slept. He’d been checking on her hourly. So far, she’d been dead to the world for four hours. In that time, he and Dylan had uncovered so much more.
They were looking at more international involvement than they’d originally thought.
Dylan stared at him after his outburst but only gave a shake of his head. “I think this place is used often by OFFSUS. It’s ideal for undercover operations really—no foot traffic, no nosy people peeking in the windows.”
“It’s a bad part of town that no woman should be traveling to alone.”
Dylan leveled his gaze at him. “It’s likely that Hawk brought Elise here. She wasn’t alone. Besides, you know she’s a decorated Marine, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But do you know took care of that KKK Grand Wizard up in Tulsa?”
Sean’s brows shot up. “That was her?”
Dylan nodded.
“Holy shit.” Stories got stretched but the bottom line was that Elise had crept into a white supremacist church and gotten several teams on the scene to confiscate all the weapons there. She’d done her job and could have walked out, but then she’d set eyes on the Grand Wizard and taken matters into her own hands.
Sean blew out a whistle. Brains and skill—sexy as hell.
Dylan nodded.
“What do you know about her and Hawk?” he asked.
For hours he’d been trying to puzzle out the relationship or the odd vibes he’d gotten from Hawk and Elise when they were in the same room, and he couldn’t. If they were lovers, he had no idea what Elise saw in that arrogant bastard.
“No more than you. You look like hell and if you don’t sleep, you’ll be no good to any of us. Get up and walk around or go find a corner to sleep in.”
What he wanted to do was crawl into that booth with Elise, curl around her body and keep her warm and safe.
At that moment, she appeared in the doorway. Straight hair slightly mussed and a vinyl imprint on her cheek but still stunning. Sean’s nuts could attest to just how hot she looked.
What he wouldn’t do to rouse her from sleep and slide into her tight little body…
“What’d I miss, boys?” She strode across the room and looked between them.
“There’s a lot of information.” Dylan pointed at the monitor.
Sean stood to allow Elise to pass to her chair in the middle. She still smelled of a sweet vanilla musk, which shocked his senses. In fact, the scent seemed to be more intense after sleep.
She sank to the seat and her jaw dropped. “Holy shit.”
Sean and Dylan nodded.
“Did you send this on yet? Hawk will need to see it—to get it to the right people.” She pivoted to look into Sean’s eyes. For a second, he was blinded by her direct stare, and all he could think about were steamy nights with entangled limbs and soft sighs. The state of the country’s security had flown right out of his head.
“I haven’t forwarded it yet. I thought you should see it,” Dylan said.
She spun back to the screen, checking their work like some special ops schoolteacher. What a sexy thought.
“But… this looks off. Are you sure this is correct? It’s a place, so we need to ensure it’s correct and I’m not sure…”
Sean and Dylan leaned in to stare at the grouping of words she was speaking of. Sean blinked to clear his vision, his eyes bleary, and he smacked a hand off the desk. “Dammit, it’s wrong and that’s my fault.”
He jerked to his feet and paced to the window that looked out on… well, nothing. It was pitch-black outside, and the city didn’t seem to bother with streetlights here. He couldn’t even see a glimmer of the moon.
Silence descended on the room. For a moment, Dylan and Elise didn’t speak. Probably secretly laughing behind his back at his fuck-up, a mistake that could have sent the Knight Ops in the wrong direction in search of the warheads.
He slammed the heel of his hand off the window frame. “Fuck!”
Dylan was by far the better man for this operation, and Elise was an expert as well. Sean was just in the way. So why couldn’t he bring himself to walk away and join the rest of his team?
A chair creaked as someone got up. He didn’t turn.
A second later, warmth washed over his skin, and he knew it wasn’t Dylan coming to speak with him. He glanced down at Elise. Christ, the top of her head only reached his shoulder. She carried herself in that tall, proud way only a Marine could and if he had any doubt as to how she’d ended up in this position, he didn’t now.
“Sean, it’s an easy error to make. The reversal of two letters.”
“Knights don’t fuck up.” He sent Dylan a look and got a nod of agreement. His brother wasn’t going to sugarcoat it and tell him it was okay that he’d made such a monumental mistake.
“Everyone fucks up. It’s why there are more than one of us on this job. Because we can catch the errors before they get too far.”
“She’s right,” Dylan added with a yawn. “Besides, you’ve only been doing this for what—eight hours? You’re practically just learning to crawl.”
Fucking Dylan. Leave it to him to put things in perspective and expose his soft spots all in one fucking sentence.
“Get some sleep, Sean,” Dylan said.
“The booth’s not half bad,” Elise said, her brows stitched with concern, or maybe a grimace at the thought of sleeping in that uncomfortable place.
“I’m getting Jackson on the phone and finding us better accommodations. This is bullshit. And I can’t take the booth—my shoulders won’t even fit to lie down.”
Elise stood so close, her heady scent overwhelmed him. He was tired and his ego was slightly bruised. All he wanted was a juicy steak, a beer and a long, slow fuck followed by a solid night’s sleep where he didn’t have to worry about warheads in the hands of people who could destroy what their country had worked hundreds of years to build.
He sucked in a deep breath, filling his head with Elise’s perfume and in turn, his cock twitched to semi-hardness. When she met his gaze, his stomach dipped like he’d just stepped off a cliff. It almost immediately righted itself, but a trail of heat burned low in his groin.
Her lips parted, and he watched her draw her lower one in to nibble at the plump flesh.
Hell, now he was fully hard. A throb began.
He searched her eyes for a long minute, attached by some invisible thread, unable to look away.
She broke the connection first, twisting her head aside and looking back toward Dylan. “Stretch out on the floor then. Just get some sleep. And don’t worry about the error—we work as a team, and it doesn’t just fall on your shoulders.” She looked up at him again, gaze locked on his left shoulder and slowly traveling to the right as if measuring them with her eyes.
His cock throbbed harder. He had to get out of here, away from her, before he acted on this crazy lust pounding his system. She wouldn’t appreciate any move he might make, and he wasn’t going to embarrass himself further.
“Maybe I should carry this intel back to Jackson myself,” he said.
“No, Bo’s coming back for it. He doesn’t trust just anyone.”
A growl rose unbidden in Sean’s throat. It was bad enough she called Hawk “Bo,” but it sounded as if she looked forward to his return.
“Fine, I’ll go close my eyes for a bit. They’re blurry anyway.” He avoided Elise’s stare as he walked out of the room. In the front, he glanced at the booth. Absolutely out of the question. If he managed to squeeze between the table and the seat back, he’d need the Jaws of Life to free him.
He spotted his jacket Elise had used as a blanket folded neatly and draped over the back of the booth. His chest tightened as he picked it up and brought it to his nose. Yep, it smelled like her, and he wanted to roll in her scent.
The thought caught him off-guard. He’d never thought these things about another woman, nor had he ever imagined he would. He—
The door opened behind him, and he whirled, weapon drawn and trained on the one man he actually felt like shooting right now.
“Fuck off, Knight.” Hawk closed the door and locked it again. “You leavin’?” He looked to the jacket in Sean’s hands.
“Hell no.” And he wasn’t going to close his eyes now either, now that this asshole was here.
Hawk dismissed him and strode to the doorway. A “Hi, Bo,” came from Elise, and Sean rushed to the door too, determined to catch some look on her face that might reveal what Hawk was to her.
But Elise hadn’t looked up from the monitor. Dylan glanced at Sean but said nothing. At least his brother knew when to keep his mouth shut when necessary.
“What, no greeting, Elise?” Hawk moved forward and she finally gave him a smile.
Sean clenched his fingers in his jacket, mashing the cloth and wishing it was Hawk’s balls.
“I did greet you. You don’t get a parade in your honor as a way of hello.”
He strolled to her side and rested his hands on her shoulders, lightly kneading them. A pleasured sigh left her as she dropped back into touch. “That feels divine. I’m so knotted up.”
“But you got some sleep. I can tell.”
Fuck, he could tell? That must mean he’d seen her sleep deprived as well as rested. Sean’s growl made them all look up. Dylan wore a curl of a smile at the corner of his mouth, and Sean wanted to punch it off his damn face.
Hawk went back to massaging Elise’s shoulders. After another half a minute, he stopped and looked at the screen. “How much do you have for me?”
“About fifteen pages.”
He straightened, his demeanor changing entirely from that easygoing friend of Elise’s to commander. “That’s all?”
She pushed to her feet, facing down the mountain of muscle. If Hawk laid one hand on her, Sean would end him. No hesitation. He and his brothers had enough skill to hide the body of a self-important OFFSUS agent in the swamps too.
Dylan made a noise of warning, but Sean continued to glare at Hawk as he accused Elise of slacking on the job.
Except he didn’t have to—she was laying into the man with the sharp edge of her tongue. “Why don’t you give it a go, you know-it-all man?”
“Fifteen pages is hardly worth carrying.”
“It has some excellent intel. Things we—”
“Elise, it’s not enough. Do you understand the pressure they’re putting on me to give them the jump they need? I don’t have time for this.”
“Well, then give us some damn help. This isn’t a few short love letters, Bo. It’s a fucking bible worth of information to decipher, and it’s by far one of the most complex…”
“Lay off her,” Sean said quietly.
Oh shit. That wasn’t good. When he went quiet, shit went down and heads rolled.
Hawk spun to pierce him in his glare.
“She’s been at it forty hours with just a few of rest.”
Hawk lifted a brow, and Sean took a menacing step forward. If this was how it had to be, then he was prepared for hand-to-hand combat.
“If it’s not fast enough for you, then do as Elise suggested and give us help. More teams and some fucking better accommodations, for Chrissakes.”
Elise stared at Sean, wide-eyed. Then she raised a hand and rested it on Bo’s forearm. “We have a world to save—getting it right is as important as getting the intel in time.”
“Fine. Consider it done. I’ll move you right now and get you the help you need.” Hawk didn’t look down at Elise as he spoke but gazed at Sean. “Your team’s heading out.”
Dylan and Sean exchanged looks. Would Dylan argue about who stayed and who joined the Knight Ops? Frankly, Dylan was the better man for the job, but Sean couldn’t walk away from this challenge.
Dylan nodded. “I’ll go.” He moved around the table and picked his way across the crowded space to reach Sean. He held up a hand, and Sean clasped it, squeezing.
“Take care, bro. Guts and glory,” he recited what had been their motto the past few missions.
“Guts and glory.” Dylan clapped him on the back with his free hand and then disappeared.
Sean faced Hawk once more. Elise stood next to him, no longer touching him. That was something to celebrate, at least. Sean needed something good to think about rather than the fact that he was abandoning his team—his brothers—to do a job he was unskilled at.
For what? So he could remain close to Elise?
But a thrum deep inside him told him he was doing the right thing. He folded his arms across his chest and stared back at Hawk. “Get those accommodations made. And make sure Elise has her own bed.”