Carla Neggers - Heron's Cove

She realized there was only one pillow left on the bed, and they were sharing it, facing each other. Colin kissed her on the forehead but didn’t say a word.

* * *

Colin ended up on the outer edge of the bed, with Emma asleep in the crook of his arm. The milky light of dawn brought out the honey tones of her hair, and he noticed her black lashes against her creamy skin. He’d slept, but not a lot. She was right about the need for decompression and reintegration. They were as important to his work as training, preparation, reports, analysis, experience and instinct. Fatigue bred mistakes. Mental and physical exhaustion put not just his own life in danger but other people’s lives, and it jeopardized the mission. It led to burnout and it frayed relationships.

The problem was, he seldom recognized when he was past the point of no return. His ability to push through exhaustion and fear was part of what made him good at undercover work, but he also knew that it made reentry into his home life—his real life—tricky, even difficult.

What made it even harder was his distaste for lies and deception.

His bruises ached, but not as much as before making love to Emma. Pain wasn’t what had awakened him and kept him awake. His instincts had. He trusted them, and they were hammering at him now, telling him that Emma’s Russian jeweler and her warning about a Russian collection weren’t just some obscure Sharpe matter.

He pictured Pete Horner’s supercilious smile. “I see you’re back from the dead.”

Back, but determined to finish the job he had started when he set out from Maine last month. He wanted Horner, Yuri and Boris in custody. He wanted to find out how they planned to get weapons now that Colin’s stash was no longer an option. Did they have other contacts in Vladimir Bulgov’s old network—access to the same stockpiles of Soviet-era weapons?

When had Horner and his Russian colleagues discovered their turncoat undercover agent had jumped into the Intracoastal? Had they searched for him? Had they tried to go back to the rented house but realized it was crawling with feds?

Had they figured out he wasn’t a turncoat after all?

Were they the type to seek revenge? Did they still think they could force him to help them?

Who was their buyer?

Colin had run the same questions over in his mind for hours.

He didn’t see himself spending the next two weeks kayaking, drinking whiskey and digging bean holes with Finian Bracken.

Making love to Emma, yes.

She and Matt Yankowski both were holding back on him. Did Yank know about this Tatiana Pavlova?

The wind rattled the windows, reminding Colin that he needed to get the house ready for the winter. He could do that over the next couple weeks, too. Caulk windows, stack wood, clean the chimney.

Dwelling on his frustrations and questions in the middle of the night wasn’t helping anything. He looked at the woman lying next to him and put emotion and desire aside. The Sharpes were a family with sixty years of investigations, contacts and secrets behind them. Emma had worked art crimes with her grandfather from childhood—long before she’d become an FBI agent.

Colin didn’t expect to know everything about her in the short time they’d been together, but he doubted even Yank knew what all lurked in the Sharpe family vault of secrets.

She shifted slightly, throwing back a slender arm. Colin held her close, and she rolled over, touched her fingertips to a deep purple-and-yellow bruise on his side. “They did this to you?”

“It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“You could have said something before we—”

“Trust me, sweetheart, I wasn’t thinking about my aches and pains while we were making love.”

“There are more bruises?”

“A few. I heal fast. Being back here helps.”

“They were trying to kill you—”

“Not when they hit me. They were just trying to get me into their car, show me they were in charge. They disagreed on killing me.”

“They knew you were a federal agent,” Emma said.

“By then, yes. They thought I was playing both sides and was willing to sell them weapons at a cut rate.” Colin thought a moment, then said, “Yank is getting the go-ahead to involve the team, but there were three men. Pete Horner, a private pilot out of Florida. He flew planes for Bulgov but wasn’t one of his regular pilots. He wanted to wait to kill me.”

“The other two?”

“Russians. Yuri and Boris. They wanted to kill me right away. Yuri is in his late forties, with short, thinning gray hair and blue eyes. Boris is younger—maybe thirty. Medium brown hair, brown eyes. Good-looking. Yuri’s kind of flat faced.”

Emma sat up slightly. “You’re describing them to me because you think I might recognize them.”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“They could be anywhere. They could have split up, or they could still be together. They could have new IDs. Another boat. They could have had a car or a plane waiting for them. I had to bail too soon—”

“It sounds as if you bailed in the nick of time.”

“You mean before they fed me to the alligators?”

She gave him a faint smile. “Your sense of humor is a coping mechanism.”

He leaned in close to her. “What’s funny about alligators?”

“Do they believe they could force you to get them weapons?”

“Hard to say. They want to be arms merchants. They have contacts, resources, funds—seed money, Horner calls it.”

“Will their buyer be mad at them for not coming through with weapons?”

“Oh, yes. Very mad.” Colin realized suddenly how much he appreciated her approach to a problem. “I made it easy for Horner by turning up with orphaned weapons that I wanted to unload.”

“They knew you didn’t want a career as an arms merchant,” she said. “Just a profit. Everyone has good reason to be mad at you. Horner, the Russians, their buyer. Are they the type to exact revenge?”

Her skin was warm, as soft as anything Colin had touched in a month. “They’d have to find me first,” he said.

“And they don’t know who you are.”

“That’s right, they don’t—unless your source tipped them off.”

“My source isn’t one of them. I can tell you that much.”

“Did you break rules to find me, Emma?”

She let her fingertips drift over his chest. “I would have.” She looked up at him, her eyes as green as he’d ever seen them. “But I didn’t need to.”

“Why not?”

“You’re good at undercover work.”

It wasn’t an answer. Colin saw that she knew it, too, but he didn’t care. Not right now. He kissed her, then let the curve of his hand drift over her smooth, cool skin. “I’m good at this, too.”

6

LUCAS SHARPE SLOWED from a run to a light jog as he entered St. Stephen’s Green, a welcome oasis in the heart of Dublin. The lush greenery, flowers, statues and fountains were dripping as much as he was, if only from the early-morning rain and not a mixture of rain and sweat. He had pushed himself hard on his five-mile run. Nothing like an enigmatic, irritating email from his one-and-only sister to propel him into the Irish rain in sweats and running shoes:

I need everything you and Granddad have on London jewelry designer Tatiana Pavlova and her interest in the Rusakov collection. I’ll call tomorrow.

Btw, Colin is back.

Hope you’re enjoying Dublin,

Emma

She had sent the email at 8:00 p.m. Maine time, 1:00 a.m. in Ireland. Lucas had picked it up when he had awakened at seven in the spare bedroom of his grandfather’s Dublin apartment. Checking messages first thing, before he even crawled out of bed, was a habit he was trying, with limited success, to break. Given the five-hour time difference, there was even less point to diving onto his iPhone at first light in Ireland than in Maine, where at least he could rationalize that he wanted to stay abreast of what was going on in Europe.