“It’s fine. I’m not too keen on the idea of involving more people, but I take it you all are a packaged deal?” She crossed her arms while waiting for a response she clearly already knew the answer to.
He cocked his head and smirked. “It’s almost as if you got a thing against ice cream, distracting me with conversation, so I don’t go rescue it from melting.”
“I’ll admit I’ve never been a fan of anything sticky. I hate when it gets all over my hands as it drips down the side of the cone.” She scrunched her nose.
“Now I’m thinking you’ve been eating your ice cream wrong.” He opened the driver’s side door as she came over to stand beside him, shielding her eyes from the sun to view him.
“You haven’t answered my question,” she reminded him.
Yeah, well, she went and distracted him with thoughts of licking a little chocolate off her hand. Putting her finger in his mouth. Sucking it clean.
Damn, his dick was gonna get as hard and stiff as a pole if he didn’t get his head on straight.
He sat behind the wheel and restarted the engine. “Not sure who you met last year or if you remember them,” he began, “but Wyatt decided to stay in D.C. since his wedding is coming up soon.” His smile broadened. “So, it’ll be Chris, Finn, Roman, and Harper heading here. Harper was planning to stay in D.C., but she decided it’d be better to have someone watch over us down here in case we need a quick digital assist with anything.”
“The women are the brains behind your work, huh?”
“We’re not so bad ourselves, but thank God for them, that’s all I can say.” When his phone rang from where it was positioned on his dashboard, he sighed. “The bags of ice and ice cream are gonna be as good as gone if they bake out in this heat much longer, even with the A/C running.”
“How about I bring the SUV into the garage and unload the groceries, and you handle the call?”
He snatched his phone and hopped out. “The key to the door is under the third rock to the right in that flower patch over yonder. You can open the garage door once inside.” He pointed to the flowerbed and brought his phone to his ear.
When Ana was out of earshot, he answered Wyatt’s call. “We’re here. Good timing.” Minus the ice cream issue. “Any news?”
“Ana’s still not on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Not yet, at least. Feds have searched her home and are going through her phone records, though,” Wyatt replied, knowing full well that was what A.J. was asking. “Her unit is definitely tossing her name around as the potential mole, especially since she’s the newbie on the team. Plus, I guess something about her background is not what it seems, and we’re not quite sure what that means yet. But all of this isn’t exactly going to do wonders proving her innocence.” Wyatt paused as if regretful at the news he’d delivered. “Running doesn’t help, either.”
“Not really running,” A.J. defended, trying to shirk the concern about Ana’s background now creeping into his mind. “And for all the Feds know, she could be missing, same as her sources and Porter.”
“It is shaping up to look like the Volkovs, not the SVR, hired The Huntsman to kidnap Katya in New York, which means they may be behind the disappearance of the other sources,” Wyatt said. “Well, that’s what our contact at the Bureau told Natasha, but we need to do our own digging.”
“Shit, okay. I’ll let Ana know.”
“The guys and Harper should be setting up in Birmingham by nightfall,” Wyatt added.
They didn’t have a safe house there, so they’d need to rent a place. “You sure they don’t want to stay here?”
“And if I say yes, you’ll kill me. You know you want a chance to spend time with Ana. Hell, you wouldn’t shut up about her on the way to the airport Saturday night.”
Hence the drunken call. “I hit my head. Plus, I was intoxicated. Bad combination.”
“Sure, sure. So, you’re not risking our necks because you got feelings for the woman?” Natasha chimed in.
“Am I on speakerphone?” A.J. lifted his sunglasses a touch and cocked his head, his eyes glued to the scene before him. Ana, in those tight white pants, sashaying toward the flower patch. Fuck if she didn’t have a gorgeous body. He let his glasses go, brought a fist to his