Glancing quickly at the display, Lilly couldn't help but bite her lip in indecision. She had a feeling she knew what was coming.
Sighing loudly, she reached to her ear and activated the bluetooth.
"I'm on my way, Raisa," she told the other woman.
"Yeah, like we'll get to talk when you get here, bitch," Raisa laughed goodnaturedly. The other girl's explicit language no longer fazed Lilly. The exotic Afghani girl had taken to defying all the rules she had been raised to live by when she had watched her parents die before her eyes, then had "died" herself in a war that had destroyed every dream she had ever known, she had told Lilly.
"We'll find time," Lilly promised her.
"Like hell," Raisa said. "I want the scoop now. Did you get you some? Because I swear if anyone ever needed a little sack time with a tall sexy man, then it's you." Lilly flushed, suddenly thankful that this conversation was on the phone rather than face to face. Raisa was terribly intuitive, and Lilly knew the other girl would see all the things she wanted to hide.
Things Lilly wanted to hide even from herself.
"I had a mission to finish, not sack time to accomplish," Lilly informed her, fighting to keep her voice even. "Damn, Raisa, maybe you're the one needing the sack time with a tall, dark and handsome."
"Only if I have my knife at his throat and he's tied to the bed," Raisa snorted.
"Anyway, we're discussing your sack time, not mine." Striking and darkly beautiful, Raisa was the one agent Lilly considered least likely to go looking for a one-night stand. It wouldn't surprise her in the slightest to learn that the other girl was a virgin.
She had "died" at age sixteen and the horror of the hours she had spent at the hands of the enemy still brought Raisa awake screaming from the nightmares.
"No sack time, Raisa," Lilly lied. "Sorry."
"Damn, you're no fun." Raisa sighed. "I miss those bad boys, Lilly. They make life interesting."
And Elite One did make life fun. sometimes. Whenever she or the other girls were sent to gather information before Elite One went in to complete a mission, there was always a few days spent briefing them on what they had learned. It was days spent going over the intel, eating pizza and sometimes a few practical jokes played by Wild Card or Heat Seeker. At times, there had been stolen moments of sensual teasing between Lilly and Travis. Raisa had walked in one of those times.
She hadn't stopped teasing Lilly since.
"I'm almost home," Lilly finally told her. "Put on a pot of coffee and a snack of some sort. I'm starved."
"Already working on it," Raisa promised her. "And you're right on time. We have several missions coming through. A few of them actually look interesting." None of them were interesting.
They were all dangerous, they were all soultiring.
"Be there in five then," Lilly said.
"We're watching for you. See you soon." The line disconnected as Lilly reached up and deactived the link before pulling into the warehouse district that housed Elite Two's headquarters close to London's docks.
The long drive back to the warehouse had passed quickly. Stepping from the SUV, Lilly
paused and looked around. She took in the brick buildings that sur-rounded the Elite Two's headquarters, the darkened windows, the almost sinister feel of the area, as heavy storm clouds rolled in overhead.
She suddenly felt on guard. She could almost swear she felt the scope of a sniper's rifle aimed at her own head. Her commander had once stated that when you'd been the hunter
long enough, you would know when you had become the prey. Suddenly, she definitely felt like prey.
Reaching inside the SUV, she pressed the activation on the steering wheel as she quickly bent and reached for the weapon lying on the passenger seat. It happened then. As she
moved. As she heard her commander's voice through the communications patch, the explo-
sion of a gunshot came barely a second after agony engulfed her head.
She felt, not for the first time, images of her life tearing through her mind. This time, it wasn't the memories of a child's laughter, or a father's voice that she heard. This time, it was the voice of a lover who should never have been her lover. A man who had stolen her heart. His voice whispered in her ear, and the feel of his lips caressing her flesh almost washed through the pain as she felt her body fall. In that millisecond true regret wasn't for the life she had lost before, but for the man she couldn't return to.
She saw eyes the color of gold and brown and flecked with green. She saw his face, felt him against her, and wished she had done things differently. As darkness closed around her, a single word slipped past her lips, rife with regret, pain, and an aching sense of loneliness.
"Travis."
Chapter 1
Two months later
a steady, rain-filled wind whipped around the dark helmet covering Travis Caine’s head, sang around the leather pants and jacket he wore, and whispered a caress over the full, face-shielding helmet he wore. Heavy boots covered his feet, protecting him against the elements as rain poured down from the skies, and lightning lit the darkness with jagged forks of power.
The Harley he rode roared down the open highway, throbbing with the increased power it had been customized with. The display beneath the handlebars was lit with a muted glow indicating speed, time, and location. The embedded electronics in the night-vision shield of the helmet provided other readouts considered imperative in his line of work.
According to that information, he was growing closer to his destination and a mission he still wasn’t certain he was prepared to be a part of, because of the woman he was partnered with, because of a night they shouldn’t have shared.
He shouldn’t have loved her.
No, he shouldn’t have f**ked her, he corrected himself. He immediately felt an edge of distaste at his attempt to make that night into something unemotional. Something less powerful than it had been.
It was a night he hadn’t been able to forget. In the past two months it had tormented him, torn at him, and left him hungry for more of her in ways he had never hungered for another woman before. She was the last woman he should have ever touched.
What the hell was she doing to him?
Elite Two and the women that were a part of that team were a hidden, rarely mentioned section of Elite Ops.
The Ops was more than the one team Jordan commanded, Travis had learned. For years he and the other agents under Jordan’s command had believed that Elite One was the only sanctioned operation and that the women they had helped train were meant to be backup, nothing more.