Ice Cold by Cherry Adair Page B

appearance made Rafael want to haul her into one of the bedrooms, pluck the pins from her hair, fill his hands with her firm ass, and plunge deep to see if she was icy to the core. Two brief kisses hadn’t been enough, and as much as he hated to admit it, Rafael wanted more. Another thing that wasn’t gonna happen.
    It was always good to want things, and better, too, for all concerned, if he didn’t get what he wanted.
    If his better judgment didn’t deter him, past experience was there to club Rafael over the head whenever he needed a grim reminder. Been there, done that, got the physical and emotional scars to prove it.
    Love was just a lure to lull a man into a false sense of security. An offer of a sweet, bright, shiny apple, only to have the prize whipped away when a guy least expected it. He’d had love once. It might’ve been fleeting, short-lived, but Jesus, it had been everything. When she’d died, the hole Rachel left inside him annihilated him for years.
    Just the memory of that pain made Rafe’s balls retract and his chest ache. Nope. No temptation was powerful enough for him to risk his emotions again. And another fellow operative? Not gonna happen.
    Rafael’s comm vibrated in his pocket. Nielson. Control calling was rarely good news. They’d each talked to her at various times throughout the morning. “Navarro.”
    “The Croydon location was just blown to hell.”
    “Putting you on speaker,” he said, giving her the head’s up as he did so.
    “Croydon location just blown to hell,” Nielson repeated. “Three dead in the house with at least seven others injured. Two neighboring houses uninhabitable. High explosives.”
    The safe house in Dresden and now London. Someone, Rafael thought grimly, on the inside . “So Dresden wasn’t collateral damage.”
    The room fell silent, all eyes on him.
    “Doesn’t appear to be.” Nielson’s voice was hard. “Don’t break up the team. I’ve dispatched Pickett and Tanalgo to the scene. They’ll report to you when they have anything.”
    “You’re checking—”
    “Disgruntled company employees? Hell, yeah. Tell me, Navarro, is there a connection between the safe houses and the banks? Do we have a rogue operative on our hands?”
    He gave Winston a quick nod, indicating she should be the one to answer.
    “We don’t have any connection with the breach at the city center safe house and the bank sites. Rocha is making progress on his end, but, as is typical of Black Rose, there is not much to find.” Honey paused, looking at her computer screen, and something Rafe read as doubt flashed across her face for an instant before the frosty mask returned. “I’m onto a new line of inquiry, initial indicators are promising, but I need to expand the data set to maximize the results. The probability that the bank assaults are connected to the attacks on the T-FLAC locations is still small, but the team intel for this new device may alter the equation.”
    “While I don’t believe in coincidences,” Navarro continued, “so far we’re not seeing that the events are connected. The Croydon house was miles from the bank and sixteen hours later. Maybe? Possibly? We’ll run the two investigations side by side, see if there’s any connection.”
    “Watch your six,” Nielson warned before disconnecting.
    Great. Now they had to watch each other as well as the tangos.

    Finally. Blissful quiet.
    The men had talked and paced, their comms had rung, beeped , and vibrated, they’d had simultaneous conversations and yelled questions from one side of the room to the other. Food was delivered and consumed with gusto. More coffee. More food. It was a madhouse for several hours.
    It gave Honey a headache, which, now that the men were gone, might go away with a soothing cup of chamomile and one freaking question answered. Any question would do at this point, Goddamnit!
    How did they work like this? Give her a quiet lab and her computer any day. The virtual private