King Me (Forever Wilde 7)

I hated a know-it-all, and it seemed this airplane was full of them. Falcon snorted and Linney grinned. “He’s right.” Falcon added. “You’d do this without us. Just for the sake of it.”

I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms. “You’ll never know, will you? Since I’ve already agreed to work with you on it. What happens to the crown after we take it? Is it going back to the Hungarian Parliament Building?”

Linney glanced at Falcon, waiting for him to answer the question.

“Yes, of course,” he said, clearly leaving something important out.

I narrowed my eyes at him. There was no way I trusted the man. That’s why I’d had MJ sign off on the immunity deal before I got too involved. I was going into this mission with the assumption that at some point Agent Falcon would try to screw me. I just didn’t know how quite yet.

But if I was the one stealing the crown, the joke was on Falcon. He who had the crown had the power, and I didn’t plan on handing it over until I knew for sure I was in the clear and the crown was being returned to its rightful owner.

Linney opened up her laptop on the coffee table in front of her and angled it so I could see the screen. “Can we get back to the plan? Here are the schematics for the house. I want to know how you would enter it so we can start working on a timeline for the retrieval.”

I scanned the monitor trying to hide my wince at seeing the confirmation in plain sight of what I already knew. That Elek had built our dream house. All ten excessive bedrooms of it perched on the edge of the sparkling Aegean.

I exhaled, trying my best to relax and not think too much about it. “Okay, let’s get started. First of all, these aren’t the right schematics.”

Linney looked up at me, her expression a cross between outrage and horror. “How do you know?”

Falcon’s eyes bored into me. He knew I knew more than I was saying. After rubbing my hands over my face, I glanced at him. He was going to find out anyway as soon as I started planning the op. “Because I designed this house. And I know it like the back of my hand.”

Everyone stared at me in shock. Ziv whistled low in his throat. Mouse sucked in a soft breath. Linney’s eyes went straight to Falcon’s.

And Falcon’s nostrils flared in anger. “Get on with it.”

5

Falcon

It was hard enough dealing with King when he was acting surly, but when he turned on the arrogance, it was impossible. Still, I couldn’t seem to drag my attention away from him. And since he obviously had critical information for our mission, that was just fine with me.

He ran his hand through his hair. “Let’s just concentrate on the schematics for now. There is actually a tunnel from the wine cellar to a spot way out in the rocks by the ocean wall. At least, that was the plan. We’ll have to do some on-site surveillance to determine if it was actually created. The rocky terrain could have affected how it was ultimately built, if it was built at all.”

Linney began typing on the laptop, muttering, “Let me see if we can catch anything like that from the satellite images.”

As we moved further into the strategy session, King’s hair got messier and messier from running his fingers through it. I eventually figured out that it was a gesture he made while thinking things through, and by the time we were halfway to our destination, his hair was sticking up so much, he looked like he’d just been fucked.

The exact moment my brain threw that image up onto my mental movie screen, King looked over at me. “What?” he asked, tilting his head at me in confusion. It only made a piece of his hair flop over again.

“Huh? Nothing,” I grumbled, standing up and turning away from him before he could catch sight of my tightening pants. I made my way forward to the galley for a coffee refill.

“Is he always this grumpy?” I heard him ask the others.

“Only when he’s chasing something that’s eluding him,” Ziv responded pointedly.

I smiled as I reached the galley, but the flight attendant mistook it. She jumped up. “Sorry, sir. What can I get for you?”

“Oh, just coffee. I can pour it myself. Sit back down. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

The attendant had spent a good portion of the original flight to California keeping me company with funny tales of trips she’d taken when she’d been a flight attendant for one of the major commercial airlines.

“It’s my job, Agent Falcon,” she said with a smile, nudging my hip with hers to move me out of the way. “If passengers start pouring their own coffee, I’ll be out of a job.”