Page 45 of Special Ops Seduction

The look he gave her was scathing. It took all she had not to glance down and check to see if he’d actually flayed all the flesh from her body that easily.

A victory, she told herself stoutly, as he stalked from the room.

It was a victory, all right, but the kind that claimed far too high a cost.

Because Bethan was good at what she did. She prided herself on that. That meant that she didn’t display any kind of reaction when he casually took her hand as they walked into the main part of the house and were confronted with Ellen and all of her bridesmaids. Bethan smiled and leanedcloser into him. Even when he slid his arm around her shoulders as they talked to the various groups of people who were gathering in the foyer to set off for different dinners down in Santa Barbara. Or for the more adventurous, over the mountains to Solvang or even down the coast to Los Angeles.

He touched her as if they’d just had sex. That they really had was something for her to carry inside her until there was a safe place to examine it.

She wasn’t sure such a place existed, so she snuggled in close and smiled dreamily.

But when they finally drove away from the house full of wedding guests, she shifted seamlessly into her usual persona. Because even that was a series of masks, she was well aware. She could no longer separate herself from what the army had made her, but there was a version of her no one else ever saw. Her cabin in Fool’s Cove was a monument to that Bethan.

And it was only here, driving through another gold and deep blue Southern California evening, keeping so many armored little pieces of herself walled off inside, that it occurred to her to wonder how long she could keep all that up.

How long could one person splinter themselves into so many pieces and expect to ever be whole again?

But she had no choice but to shove that away when they met up with the rest of the team in the motel where they’d set up camp in the neighboring town.

“I had no idea you cleaned up pretty, Bethan,” Rory said with a laugh as they all crowded into the motel room.

“Not something you need to worry about, Lockwood,” she shot back, so everyone would laugh at him and stop looking at her legs.

Everyone did. Except Jonas.

After several hours of throwing possibilities around and outlining potential scenarios, all they’d really succeeded in doing was annoying themselves. Because Dominic Carterwas in town, supposedly, but caught in meetings until the rehearsal dinner. Until then, everything was waiting around and conjecture.

“We’re sitting in a motel room in Goleta, and who knows if the scientist is even in North America any longer?” Jack Herriot muttered as Jonas and Bethan got ready to leave.

“I told Iyara Sowande to trust me,” Bethan shot back, one of her walls toppling inside, leaving nothing but the anguish she usually knew better than to show. “I intend to make sure she can.”

She kicked herself all the way back toward the house, through a night gone thick and ripe with jasmine and rosemary. Somehow that seemed to match the man beside her, so silent he ached with it.

He reached for her hand when they left the car out front. And once again, Bethan had to have full-scale intervention with herself as they walked through the house, because it didn’t matter how it felt with their fingers laced together like that. It didn’t matter what her body was telling her, because she couldn’t act on it. She already had, and she was therefore looking forward to a nice, long night alone, locked away in the master bedroom of their suite, where she could process her emotions.

And maybe scream into her pillow while she was at it.

Inside their room, Jonas flicked the lights on, then paused.

No one who didn’t know him would have thought anything of that pause. They probably wouldn’t have noticed it.

But to Bethan, it was like he’d suddenly gone electric. She was in the process of slinging the fussy little clutch she’d been ordered to carry around, because that was what civilian women did, onto the coffee table. When she straightened, she had no notice. She saw only that look on his face, fierce and delicious, enough to make her heart seem to catapult from her chest to her feet and back—

In the next second, he was on her.

He hauled her against him, taking her mouth with a sheer ferocity that made her entire body feel weak and wild at once.

Jonas kissed her with so much passion she wasn’t sure her body could contain it, but God, she wanted to—

It took her a moment to realize that he was saying something, there against her mouth.

Her heart was too loud in her ears. She thought she might combust.

Jonas moved his mouth from hers and made his way along her cheek, her jaw. He lay a trail of explosive fire that made every part of her go tight and soft, as she could do nothing but helplessly arch into him.

All her walls were in rubble around her. All hercompartmentswere wide open.

All he had to do was kiss her and she betrayed herself completely.

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