Darkness at Dawn Read Online Free

blue eyes and an Angelina Jolie mouth . . . The woman was distraction itself in a room meant for business. Serious business, judging from the top honchos in US security who were taking their seats on the other side of the table.
    Interestingly, Hot Babe was seated on the power side, right next to the DD/O, looking utterly out of place.
    Mike wasn’t a Neanderthal. He worked well with female officers. He’d grown up with a strong stepmother he loved and respected, and he had a half sister who’d kick his ass if he ever showed a woman disrespect. So it wasn’t the woman’s femaleness that bothered him. Per se. Though that degree of sex quotient should be illegal.
    Once he got his mind out of his pants, though, he realized that his first instinct was right. She doesn’t belong.
    There were other women in the room, types he was very familiar with. No-nonsense professional women, dressed well, even expensively, but for the office. They came equipped with BlackBerries, Macs and briefcases the way eagles come equipped with feathers. They scowled and gave off I’m very important vibes that were almost palpable.
    Hot Babe was dressed for a dinner date with a guy she liked a lot, in a soft curve-hugging sweater with some shiny bits in a blue that exactly matched her eyes, straight black skirt with a flirty little something around the hem, black stockings, black high heels.
    Where everyone who wasn’t the head of a multibillion-dollar government agency was burdened down with sheaves of papers and communication devices, she was carrying nothing but a purse, though it looked like one of those purses that cost more than his Remington 700.
    Above all, she didn’t look self-important, didn’t check the other people in the room in an instinctive settling of pecking order as everyone else was doing. She looked a little bored and a little amused.
    The big door closed. Everyone who was supposed to be here was here. Voices died down as the business of the day was ready to begin.
    Something about the intensity of his stare must have charged the air between them because she suddenly looked up and met his gaze from across the ten shiny feet of table.
    Mike’s breath stopped in his chest. Fuck. She was gorgeous . Movie star beautiful. Hardly any makeup, so it was all her. Her look was direct, intelligent and . . . sad? Could that be? He was mulling over what she could be sad about, and why someone who didn’t have government agent written all over her should be here in this room, when Secretary Connelly tapped his finger against the microphone for everyone’s attention, something Mike hated.
    And just like that, his head was back in the game. Whatever it was that they had called him in for, interrupting an extreme training mission, which would cost him in lost acclimatization and leave a group of elite soldiers leaderless, was about to be explained.
    It better be good.
     
    “THIS meeting is called to order,” Secretary Connelly said.
    He was tall, had a shock of blindingly white hair and was as dumb as a rock. Her mother used to say it was a miracle he could tie his own shoelaces. Lucy remembered her parents making fun of his blank expression when he’d been the senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia.
    She’d been called away from her squash soup, a lovely wine and two perfect peaches to listen to this bozo?
    Lucy tried to wipe the boredom off her face and found it hard. Then she sneaked a glance at Uncle Edwin and straightened up, suddenly no longer bored.
    Uncle Edwin looked tense, deep brackets around his mouth, nostrils white with stress. Lucy had never seen him looking even remotely like that. Even at her parents’ funeral, he’d looked sad and devastated but not tense and anxious. He’d been a top security official for well over two thirds of his life, and he’d seen everything, twice. Whatever was going on was serious.
    She looked around the room while Connelly droned on about the “grave threats to our way of life”