by Julie James
So he’d told Piser yes.
• • •
John’s cell phone, resting on the table, buzzed with a new text message. He glanced down to read it.
Sorry—on my way.
Jessica. If anyone had told him six years ago that she would be the first person to buy him a drink in congratulations for making HRT, he would’ve laughed in their face. But now, here they were.
About time. How hard is it to take off a pair of yoga pants? he texted back.
His phone screen was quiet for a moment, and then he saw the three dots that indicated she was typing. He braced himself, waiting . . . and then the screen went quiet again.
Saucy quips eluding you tonight? he teased.
I really don’t like you sometimes.
He smiled and set down his phone, the exchange reminding him of the many times she’d sassed him at the Academy. Only this time, he was pretty sure she didn’t actually detest him, which was nice. Heck, she’d even hugged him when he’d told her he’d made HRT. A sweet gesture, that—albeit, also a torturous one, given how incredible she’d felt pressed against him wearing only a tank top and yoga pants.
As his hands had slid around her waist, he’d had to quickly remind himself that they’d agreed they wouldn’t complicate their partnership by getting physically involved. Or, at least, she’d made some proclamations and he hadn’t disagreed. He’d said he wouldn’t touch her again—unless she made a move on him—and he intended to stick to his word. But sometimes, when she looked at him a certain way, he remembered how hot their kiss had been, and how sexy it had sounded when she’d moaned his name.
John.
As if on cue, Jessica strode into the restaurant. Immediately, his grip tightened on his rocks glass.
The woman clearly loved to torture him.
Tonight, she’d shed her usual white-collar-esque attire in favor of a long, summery dress with a slit on one side. The breezy fabric parted as she walked, giving him peek-a-boo glimpses of sleek, bare leg all the way to her midthigh. And for the first time, with the heeled sandals she was wearing, he noticed that her toenails were painted purple.
No clue why that did it for him, but, man, it really did.
“That was twelve minutes,” he growled when she got to the table. “Not five.”
“You’re cranky with me already? I just got here.” She considered this for a moment and smiled. “That’s impressive, even for me.”
Cute. His jaw tightened as she took the seat across from him and flashed more peek-a-boo leg.
She ordered a mojito when the waitress came by the table, then leaned in and lowered her voice once it was just the two of them. “So. The Hostage Rescue Team.” Her blue eyes sparkled. “This is going to do wonders for your ego, isn’t it?”
“You should probably prepare yourself for obnoxious levels of bragging and insufferability tonight.”
She laughed. “I appreciate the heads-up.”
John smiled, thinking it was nice that they could joke around like this. It was a shame, really, their timing. Just when she’d finally stopped detesting him, he was leaving.
Feeling an odd pang, he brushed it off and took a sip of his bourbon.
No sense dwelling on that.
She lowered her voice again, a curious gleam in her eyes. “I’ve never worked with anyone who went through Selection. But I’ve heard a few stories.”
John wasn’t surprised to hear it. Despite the fact that the specifics of HRT Selection were supposed to remain confidential, somebody always talked. And in the thirty-plus years since the team’s inception, the stories that ran around the FBI field offices had reached near-mythic proportions.
At four A.M. sharp that first morning of tryouts, they’d lined up John and his fellow selectees—buck naked—for a weigh-in, and then had put them through a grueling series of physical fitness tests. After that, there’d been a psychological test, and then the selectees had headed out to the shooting range for a preliminary qualification course.
Five selectees had dropped out by dinner that first day. By the end of the fourth day, they’d lost another six.
“What kind of stories?” John asked, playing coy and enjoying this rare moment of knowing something the esteemed Jessica Harlow did not.
Jessica paused as the waitress dropped off her drink, then took a sip of her mojito. “For starters, I heard they practically starve you and then give you only enough food for half the group, to see who will be greedy and who will take care of his teammates.”
“Hmm. That would be an interesting exercise.”
“I also heard they make you race twenty-two miles over the Yellow Brick Road, with full gear.”
That had been day four and, actually, it had been twenty-two and a half miles. She was correct, however, about the full gear; the selectees had each carried backpacks and personal gear that weighed forty-five pounds combined, and had taken turns carrying an additional fifty-pound bag stuffed with medicine balls.
And John’s dinner that night, after rations had been divvied up, had been a banana.
That had not been one of the easier days.
“The details are a little fuzzy. After about mile sixteen, they all start to run together,” he joked.
Jessica remained undaunted. “And I also heard there’s a claustrophobia test, where they make you crawl through the Academy’s heating ducts while blindfolded.”
Also true, but far worse, in John’s opinion, had been the time they’d made him and the other selectees swim through rancid sewer water. That shit had been cold. Literally. “You’ve heard a lot.”
She looked at him for a moment, then shook her head, her tone a mixture of admiration and disbelief. “How do you do this stuff? I barely made it through OC Spray Day.”
He laughed, the reference bringing back another memory from their time together at Quantico. “OC Spray Day” was one of the most universally dreaded days for special agent trainees at the Academy, when their defensive tactics instructors hit each of them with a burst of pepper spray and then made them—while incapacitated—defend their firearm and get an attacker on the ground in a spread-eagle position.
John had been through a similar exercise as a Ranger, so he’d known what to expect. Others had struggled more, including Linguistics PhD, who’d gotten yelled at by the instructors for keeping his eyes closed while fighting—they had to have at least one open to pass—and then had thrown up in the grass afterward. But what John remembered most vividly about that day was Jessica, coughing, eyes red and teary, as she’d drawn her training pistol and had forced her attacker to the ground with authoritative command. FBI! Don’t move!
Actually, he’d found that part of the exercise pretty hot.
“What are you talking about? You did well that day,” he told her.
“You did well that day. I passed.” She made a face, saying the word distastefully.
He grinned teasingly, leaning in. “You don’t have to get an A-plus in everything, you know.”
“Says the man who fought me tooth and nail for the one high mark he didn’t already have in the bag.”
Fair enough. John took another sip of his bourbon, then looked at her for a moment, noticing how the blue pattern in her dress was nearly the same shade as her eyes. He had a random thought then, that this was the kind of flirty, summery dress she would probably wear back home in Chicago if the two of them went out on a date.
She cocked her head at his look. “What?”
There was something he needed to know. “Did you really hate me back then?”
She seemed surprised at first by the question. Then she swirled the straw in her glass. “I was aggravated by you. Wanted to throttle you most days. And I was jealous of you, of course—we all were. But hate you? No.”
His eyes held hers. “Were you attracted to me?”
; Her poker face was stellar. “I’ve already admitted you were the best-looking guy in our class.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
She conceded this with a slight smile. It was the kind of look that had him thinking again—this time, about the silky-softness of her skin as his fingers had slid up her thigh.
“Would you two like another round?” asked a voice, to his left.
John blinked at the waitress’s interruption, then glanced at his and Jessica’s near-empty glasses. His eyes still holding hers, he answered for both of them.
“Yes. We would.”
• • •
After their second round of drinks had arrived, in keeping with Jessica’s post-undercover tradition, they decided to order dessert. Over spoonfuls of dark chocolate brownie topped with warm salted caramel and vanilla ice cream, John played good cop, asking Jessica about her family, her new condo, and what she thought so far about the Chicago field office.
His motives in this were twofold. First, he was curious and genuinely wanted to know more about her. And second, when she talked, his gaze naturally fell to her lips.
He really liked looking at her lips.
They were interrupted at one point by a flurry of text messages from her sister and brother—Maya and Finn, he learned—who, apparently, wanted to throw an anniversary party for their parents and couldn’t agree on a location.
“How long will they do this?” John asked, fascinated, watching Jessica’s phone, which rested on the table. She’d long since turned off the ringer once the twins had started texting, but her phone vibrated and lit up every time a new message came in.
“It usually lasts about a half hour, and then they burn themselves out.” Her smile was affectionate. “It’s annoying, I know, but you get used to it. Actually, when I was in L.A., I found myself looking forward to their daily text spats. I could practically hear them arguing—it was like being home again.”
He caught her word choice there: that Chicago was home. Not Los Angeles, apparently, despite the fact that she’d lived there for several years.
After a brief skirmish between them over the dessert’s one maraschino cherry, he asked Jessica how she’d gotten into undercover work. This was something else he’d been curious about, ever since they’d partnered up.
“My second year in L.A., the violent crimes squad asked me to help out in a kidnapping investigation,” she said. “They’d tracked down the suspect and the three-year-old girl—his stepdaughter—to a room he’d rented at the Fairmont Hotel in Santa Monica with a stolen credit card. They had him under surveillance from the room next door, and they were trying to come up with a way to get him to open the door without taking any extreme measures that could possibly put the child in danger.”
“Of course.”
“So . . . they asked me to dress up as one of the housekeeping staff.”
John let out a bark of laughter. “Get out. Of course that’s what the L.A. office would do. That’s like something out of a movie.”
“Maybe. But it worked. I put on the uniform, rolled a housekeeping cart up to the guy’s door, and told him I was there to do the turndown service. He let me into the room, and . . . well, let’s just say, thirty seconds later, he was facedown on the ground wearing my handcuffs.” She smiled at the memory, then turned more serious. “When we reunited the little girl with her mother . . . that’s a moment I’ll never forget. It wasn’t even my case, barely more than a walk-on role, but I’ve had the undercover bug ever since. So much of what we do as agents is behind the scenes, but undercover work is on the front lines; it’s up close and personal, actually meeting with the bad guys and getting them to trust you and tell you all their dirty little secrets. It’s exhausting at times, and unpredictable, but every time I go out on an assignment I feel that same rush I did four years ago.” She blushed, as if embarrassed for having gone on so long. “Well, you know how it is.”
He nodded, feeling a twinge of nostalgia that this would be his last undercover case.
Yes, he did know.
She gestured. “What about you? How’d you get into it?”
He rested his arms on the table. Funny story, that. “I’d been in Detroit for two years, on the organized crime squad, when they roped me into a walk-on role. Another agent on the squad was trying to infiltrate a motorcycle club we’d been investigating for a laundry list of criminal activity, and we wanted to bolster the agent’s credibility as a bad guy. So we decided to stage an altercation at a bar that the club members hung out at.”
She cocked her head. “What kind of altercation?”
“Ah . . . how naïve you are, my white-collar-crime friend, that you even have to ask. See, life on the organized crime squad isn’t about posh beach hotels and snazzy suits. We tend to be a little grittier. More real.”
“I see we’ve entered the bragging and insufferability portion of the evening,” she said dryly.
He chuckled. No offense taken. “The plan was that another agent would go to the bar, pretend to be a drunk patron, and start trouble with the undercover agent trying to get in good with the motorcycle club. Things would escalate into a fight, the second agent would lose—convincingly—and the club members would see what a tough guy the first agent was.”
“And you were the second agent?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I see.” Her blue eyes sparkled. “So . . . basically, your first job as an undercover agent was to get your ass kicked.”
He looked up at the ceiling. “I sense I’m going to regret telling you this story.”
“You know, instead of kicking your ass, the other agent could’ve just faked like he was hurt and then pulled you to the ground in an arm-bar hold. I’m told that can be a very effective maneuver against a man of your size.”
John gave her a withering look.
“Give it time. In another six years, that joke’s going to be really funny,” she said cheekily. “So, how real an ‘altercation’ are we talking about here? Did you actually get hurt?”
“Not really. Just a black eye, some bruised ribs, and fifteen stitches in my hand.”
Her eyes widened, her tone instantly turning serious. “Oh my gosh. What happened?”
Actually, this was his favorite part of the story. “The other agent and I had choreographed the whole fight, right down to a theatrical beer bottle smash that I would duck away from just in time. And that all went as planned, except, apparently, some glass from the bottle landed on the floor by our feet. So the other agent and I are going at it; he’s acting like a tough guy, and I’m hamming it up, slurring my words and pretending to be drunk out of my mind. Finally, he ‘throws’ me to the ground”—he used air quotes, because the other agent had been all of about five-eleven and 170 pounds and, well, come on—“and my hand lands right on a chunk of glass from the beer bottle.”
Jessica grimaced. “Oh, that’s bad.”
“No, it was perfect. It sliced my hand open, so there’s blood everywhere: on me, on him, all over the bar—it totally made the fight look even more authentic. My squad leader was so impressed, as soon as they released me from the ER, he took me and the guys on the backup squad out for beers.”
She stared at him for a long moment. “I think you organized crime guys might actually be a little crazy.”
He flashed her a proud grin. “We prefer to think of it as ‘dedicated to our craft.’”
She considered that, then beckoned with her hand. “All right. Let’s see this ‘perfect’ battle scar of yours.”
He slid his left hand across the table. The scar ran across the top of his palm, about two inches long. He’d worn it like a badge of pride these four years since his debut undercover assignment, a symbol of his dedication to the job and his willingness to go all-in for a role.
Jessica picked up his hand to take a look, wrapping her finge
rs around the back of his hand.
He went still at her touch.
She frowned, and then flipped his hand over as if looking for something. “Are you sure this is the right hand?”
“Ha ha.” He moved to take his hand back, but she held on.
“I’m kidding.” She turned his palm back up and gently traced her finger over the scar.
He drew in a breath.
She peered up. “Does that hurt?”
He met her gaze. “No.”
A pink flush crept over her cheeks, and neither of them moved or spoke as the air seemed to go still between them.
Then she cleared her throat, letting go of his hand as the waitress approached.
“Whenever you’re ready—no rush,” the waitress said with a polite smile, leaving the check on the table.
After the waitress walked away, Jessica looked over her shoulder at the empty restaurant. “I didn’t realize we’d shut down the place.”
He had.
He’d just been enjoying himself too much to care.
• • •
Since it was a nice night, they decided to walk along the beachfront path to their rooms. It was nearly a full moon, and a light breeze coming off the ocean cut through the thick humidity in the air.
“What did your family say when you told them the news about HRT?” Jessica asked.
John stole another look as the breeze parted her dress. Those legs. He pictured them wrapped around him, the heels of her sandals digging into his back as he—
She stared at him expectantly.
Right. They were walking and talking here. Probably he should pick up his tongue off the walkway before she tripped over it in those heels. “My brother mocked me, as expected, and asked if I would have to wear tights and a cape now that I’ve graduated to ‘full-time superhero camp.’ That’s what he calls HRT. As for my dad . . . I haven’t told him yet. I want to give him the news in person. He wasn’t thrilled when I went through Selection.”
Jessica sounded surprised. “He doesn’t want you to be on the team?”
“I think it’s more that he doesn’t want me to move to Virginia. Ever since my mom died a year ago, it’s pretty much just been him, my brother, and me.” He frowned. “I need to figure out how to make that situation right before I leave.”