Page 15 of Out of Control

“Yeah,” he said quietly, “I still think about you too.”

Spencer swallowed hard but didn’t reply. His gaze slid away from Drago’s. Damn. He’d really been hoping Spencer had loosened up a little in the intervening decade. But apparently not. Disappointment made his next breath heavy in his chest. Without further comment, he held out his wrists.

Spencer stared at him for a long moment more. “Do you swear on your honor you won’t try to escape from me?”

“I do. Till death do us part.” Sudden butterflies jumped in Drago’s gut. What was up with that? He had no intention of ever settling down, let alone finding a nice boy and marrying him.

Spencer stepped forward and unlocked the handcuffs. “This doesn’t mean I trust you any further than I can throw you. It just means a truce until we get away from here.”

“Understood. And agreed. You have my word of honor on it.”

Their gazes met again, but this time hard and determined, two operatives in lockstep with each other. They would get out of here alive, and if that meant setting aside their mutual dislike and working together, so be it.

For now.

“This is a bad idea,” Spencer muttered. “I’m an idiot for trusting you, or at least for taking you at your word.”

“What choice did you have?” Drago asked reasonably. “You can’t very well run around in a war zone with an uncooperative prisoner in tow. Particularly one who can probably pop off those cuffs with impunity and stands a good chance of both kicking your ass and knowing how to make a successful escape.”

Spencer scowled at him. He didn’t like to have the obvious pointed out, huh? Tough shit. Drago didn’t owe Spencer squat. That, and he took a certain perverse pleasure in throwing the man off-balance.

“Let’s get out of here,” Spencer growled.

“Lemme help you with the gear. Thanks for fetching mine, by the way.”

Spencer shrugged under his beige SEAL operator’s shirt, a ripple of muscles so pretty it made Drago’s dick stir with interest, even though he still felt like the crusty smashed dog shit a person would scrape off the bottom of a shoe.

Spencer hefted three of the five big duffel bags with breathtaking ease. Whoa. Good call not to pick a fight with the guy until he was at 100 percent himself. “I figured you might have classified CIA tech with you, and I couldn’t very well let that fall into the hands of the local warlords or ISIS.”

It was his turn to shrug. “Same diff. The local warlordsareISIS.”

“All the more reason for us to get the hell out of here.”

“Lead on, Captain Sunshine.”

Spencer gifted him with an eye roll worthy of a teenage girl.

They were just tossing the bags in the back of the Land Rover when they heard it: a slow-building whistle that started distant and grew into a scream so loud, it drove a guy to the ground whether he willed it or not.

“Take cover!” Spencer yelled, diving at Drago, laying full out in midair.

Spencer slammed into him like a freaking linebacker, driving him backward and flattening him on his back beside the back wall of the restaurant. He grunted as Spencer’s full body weight landed on him, crushing the breath out of him.

Ka-BOOM!

Mamma mia, that was close. No more than a block away.

“Russian air-to-surface missile,” Spencer bit out in his ear.

He could tell that just from the sound of it? He didn’t want to know how Spencer had picked up that grim little skill. “Get off me.”

Spencer stared down at him, and abruptly everything came rushing back. The long, steamy nights in Beirut. Spencer’s introduction to sex, Drago’s introduction to no-kidding, head-over-heels infatuation. They’d done things with each other, said things to each other, that he’d never done or said with another living soul, not before or since. And here they were, belly to belly, dick to dick, face to face.

Like before, their hard bodies softened when they came into contact, molding and fitting to each other, a delicious tangle of legs and arms.

Awareness streaked through Spencer’s gaze as well—a rapid widening of his pupils, black overtaking the blue of his irises. And then heat flared in that mesmerizing gaze. Possessiveness. Desire.

Drago’s breath caught in his throat, and suddenly he remembered exactly why Spencer Newman was a fever he’d never entirely cleared from his system.

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