Free Dirty Dare: The Rescue (Sexy Suspense) (Part 1, spin-off to the Dirty and Dare Me series) by Julie Leto Page B

and then sat against the cushions beside him. The conversation had somehow gone entirely off the rails, though she suspected Sean had artfully turned the tracks while she was thinking about her parents and the past.
    But she’d told him enough. He now knew more about her than any lover who’d come before him—and probably, more than any who would come once he was gone.
    “So this Jayda Hei,” she said with a snap, making it clear that her turn of personal share-time was over. “She was your lover?”
    Sean cleared his throat, but to his credit, he answered. “Not at first. She was young when we met. I wasn’t much older. I’d been recruited out of Special Forces into the CIA and had been quickly assigned to the Arm. Anyway, her family in China had sold her to a recruiter from North Korea when she was two. Maybe three. By the time she turned sixteen, she was one of their most effective assassins, taking down targets and disappearing before anyone thought to look at the sweet young girl in the Hello Kitty t-shirt. A few years later, she got traded to T-45. Then, seven years ago, she snuck into the States and went off the grid. She was considered a threat to national security, so the Arm was ordered to retrieve her.”
    “You mean you were called in?”
    “Yeah,” he admitted, combing his fingers through his long hair, tugging hard on the strands.
    Brynn smiled. Under any other circumstance, she doubted he’d display such an obvious tic, but this topic had him on edge.
    “And you found her?”
    He nodded. “Eventually. Before it was too late, at any rate.”
    When his eyes met hers, a hard edge sharpened his expression into one she hadn’t seen before. Fear skittered up her spine, reminding her of all he’d endured—and hinting at what he’d dished out when he’d been on the other side. Sean Devlin might have become her gentle, giving lover in the microcosm of this villa, but in the outside world, he was a dangerous man.
    “Okay, wait,” she said, backtracking. “You were sent to find her. Why’d she go off-grid?”
    “She was intercepted by a terrorist sleeper cell,” he answered, his voice absent of emotion of any kind. “They’d lured her there, thinking she’d be easy to break and turn to their cause. They wanted her to take out an important American asset, but we never found out who the target was. They hadn’t gotten that far when I found her. I freed her, but then she didn’t want to go back to T-45. She wanted to defect.”
    Brynn wasn’t intimately familiar with the CIA playbook, but she was pretty certain that taking on a rogue agent after she’d been exposed to potential brainwashing could not have been a popular prospect.
    “Your superiors wanted her?”
    Judging by the set of his jaw, the answer was clear.
    “I talked them into it. Or technically, Dante did. She trusted me, so I was assigned as her handler. Unfortunately, I took that title a bit too literally.”
    Brynn scrunched the blanket around her. Jealousy iced through her veins, and she hated it. But her unreasonable emotions had no place here.
    Sean was not hers to protect or possess. He was only hers until he finally made good on his promise to escape.
    “So the people who took you are looking for Jayda. They thought you could lead them to her. Can you?”
    His gaze froze on hers. “She’s dead.”
    “You’re sure?”
    He looked away, again dragging his fingers through the hair he’d refused to let her trim. “Until a month ago, I was. Now? I don’t know. That’s why I need to get out of here, and I need you to help me. If Jayda is still alive, she’s in danger. I need to find her before the thugs who grabbed me do. Before the Arm or T-45.”
    “What if those thugs are the Arm or T-45?” she posited.
    He reached across the mattress and took her hands in his. When he tugged her back into his space, it wasn’t to kiss her or hold her or remind her of the intimacies they’d shared. He needed her help. To save