The Reveal Read Online Free PDF Page A

cock.
    God, those lips. That mouth. That body.
    But it was only a fantasy. A delicious, diverting dream. He wasn’t going anywhere until he figured out if the man who’d spooked Brynn was a real threat.
    Sean watched a pair of low-level kitchen workers drag another pile of refuse to an overflowing bin. He listened to their conversation, glad his brief interactions with Brynn’s associate, Marisela Morales, had renewed the unused pathways to his scant knowledge of Spanish.
    Apparently, the chef was a bastard. This information lent nothing to Sean’s reconnaissance, but neither had the maître d’s smoke break, the waitress’s quickie with the line cook in the alley or the bartender’s trip to his car with a case of port the owner would probably never miss. So far, the only thing Sean’s surveillance had revealed was that since the storefront entrance had been locked at the end of service, the delivery guy had remained inside, helping one of the busboys clear the glasses from behind the bar by tossing back the leftovers.
    As disgusting as this sounded, Sean considered it valuable intel. A guy who’d swallow down the dregs of a stranger’s drink was desperate for a buzz and probably desperate for money, too. This was a dangerous combination. If someone offered him enough cash, he’d give up information on his own mother. If he had recognized Brynn from her previous trips to this town, he was a potential problem.
    Or an asset—depending on who had the bigger wad of cash to throw around. Luckily for Sean, Brynn always traveled with a generous supply of euros.
    It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that someone in San Sebastían knew who Brynn was. If she’d been a frequent client of the sought-after document forger who lived here, then so might a lot of other people in need of that type of service—precisely the same kind of people who’d be on the lookout for a wayward ex-CIA agent and the head of one of Europe’s preeminent security firms, particularly one whose founder had been a charter member of the shadow group, T-45.
    Of all the things he’d learned about Brynn, that scrap of intel had caused Sean the most concern. As an organization, T-45’s reach extended to the highest echelons of international relations. No one knew the precise number of assets under T-45 control, but the CIA had estimated a scant one hundred spies and specialists who’d sworn their loyalty to profit and danger over code and country. They’d been a concentrated pain in the ass to legitimate agencies since their inception.
    The fact that Jayda, Dante and Brynn were all connected through a mercenary covert ops consortium could be no coincidence.
    Sean waited another half hour. One by one, the employees of the restaurant left. By the time the delivery guy finally came out, Sean had the shakes from a combination of secondhand smoke and lack of movement. Cold and in no mood to fuck around, he watched the guy stumble toward the street, slurring assurances to the waitress he’d followed out that she wouldn’t be sorry if she took him home for the night.
    “Go on home, Liam,” the waitress snapped. “You’re drunk.”
    “Just got a buzz on,” the man argued. “Won’t stop me from performing to your liking, lass. That’s a promise.”
    “One you’ve made before, and all I got for my trouble was a bad reputation. Go home.”
    Sean kept to the shadows, following the pair down the block, blending into the shadows of a storefront while the waitress unlocked the door of a two-seater coupe.
    “Give me a lift at least?”
    She snorted. “You live around the corner. Or did your landlord lock you out again?”
    Liam continued to harass his co-worker even after she rolled up her window and drove away. The guy wasn’t Sean’s idea of a criminal mastermind. He was a drunk opportunist, but Sean saw no evidence that his chance meeting with Brynn had in any way altered the course of his evening.
    He was a dead end.
    Sean turned,