King Me (Forever Wilde 7)

“Do you worry about running out of air with the smaller bottle?” I asked as he was clipping everything in.

“Nah. If I’m getting into the water at the edge of the marina, it won’t take much air to get to and from the yacht in its slip. And I’ll be just under the surface too which means I won’t use as much with each breath. Worst-case scenario, I have to snorkel. At night, no one will notice.”

Everything he had on was black. Even though he was right, it would be hard to see him at night in the water, I still wished it wasn’t such a full moon. That was something we couldn’t control.

I handed King the face mask and held his fins as we walked toward the water’s edge.

“You remember the signals, right?” he asked with a cheeky grin.

I shot him the bird. “This one?”

“Fine. But safety protocol requires me to—”

I leaned in and kissed him to shut him up. His hand came up and held the back of my head firmly to keep me from pulling away. When we finally did end it, I pulled back and met King’s eyes.

“I’m not going to let anything happen to you. I promise.”

By six that night, Mouse was making a puke nest on the floor in front of the toilet in his bathroom, Linney had set up with her comms equipment in the van, Ziv was bringing up the video feeds from the cameras he’d managed to place around the marina with a drone earlier that afternoon, and King was nowhere to be found.

After searching the house for the millionth time, I let out a frustrated sound.

“He took the car to do some more recon at the marina,” Linney said from the dining room. She’d laid out a nice table and was setting out flowers that had been delivered earlier. The food was scheduled to arrive any minute.

“I know,” I said, feeling like he’d been gone forever. “Just making sure I knew where everyone was.”

She finished arranging things and came to stand in front of me by the open front door. “Don’t worry. Ziv put a tracker on him when he wasn’t looking, just in case.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “You know we all like him, right?”

“Who, Ziv? Yeah, he’s a good guy.”

She lifted her brows. “Really? We’re going to play it that way? King.”

“Mpfh.”

She put her hands on my cheeks. They were cool and dry. “Falcon, honey, it’s okay to like the man.”

“I know that.”

“No,” she said, tilting my head down until I was forced to meet her eyes. “I mean it’s okay to like the man.”

We stared at each other.

“No, it isn’t,” I finally said. “Not really. Not seriously.”

“When are you going to tell him?”

My stomach flipped over. “Tell him what?”

She lifted an eyebrow. “That he’s going after a forgery.”

“I’m hoping he doesn’t notice,” I said softly.

Her expression bordered on pity. “You should tell him.”

“He doesn’t have security clearance. I could lose my job.”

She pulled her hands away and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “There is more to life than the job. And as much as you like to see things in black and white… life isn’t usually like that. It’s a whole rainbow. And that man,” she said, pointing a thumb toward the direction of the cliffs, “is colorful as shit. You need someone like that.”

“He’s an art thief.”

“He said he’s done with that.”

I gave her a look. “And we should believe him. Even if he means it now, what if he can’t stay away from it?”

She threw up her hands. “What if a meteor lands on all of us tonight? You can play the what-if game all day long, if your goal is to go to sleep in an empty bed at night.”

“Lin, how can I spend over four years hunting Le Chaton, convincing the FBI and Interpol he’s our biggest target, and then say ‘oh by the way, I’m dating him…’?” I asked, leaning back on the open doorjamb and crossing my arms. “I’d lose the respect of all of my peers.”

It was unconscionable.

Linney’s face was soft, and she projected empathy the way she always did when she was slipping into mothering mode. “You tell them to fuck off. And if that doesn’t work, you put him in a situation where he quickly goes from being our biggest target to our biggest asset, a situation in which he saves our asses by keeping the United States government from making a fool out of itself on a global stage.”

“No one can know about it,” I pointed out. “Remember?”

“They can’t know about the US government’s role in retrieving the crown, but… they could find out about Le Chaton’s role in delivering it to the Hungarian Parliament Building.” She seemed to be thinking it up on the fly. “What if we make it look like the Greek coins?”