He should head right back to Arlington as she demanded, but he knew that wasn't really an option. He couldn't let it become an option. He'd be leaving his brother and Summer to face a Russian warlord alone, uncertain of the backup they may or may not have.

They worked well together, but he remembered what happened the last time they'd gone against Dragovich without adequate backup. Their former teammate couldn't be considered "backup," let alone "adequate."

Son of a bitch.

He couldn't do this, yet he had no other choice.

Summer was chaos and she made him insane.

She was everything he and Falcon had ever wanted in a woman and everything they couldn't have, couldn't afford to lose. And she thought they were just going to walk away and leave her to face this alone? Leave her to trust some damned stranger to cover her back, someone Raeg had no idea if they could be trusted or not?

It simply was not going to happen.

"I need to pack." Tension filled her voice, but at least she was no longer on the verge of crying. "The two of you need to go home. Thank you for letting me know what's going on, but I can handle this from here."

She could handle it from here, could she?

And Falcon simply snagged Summer's dessert plate, and began silently eating her cake as though his brother and his former partner weren't about to strangle each other.

As though whatever Summer decided was law.

Before he realized what he was doing, before Summer could evade him, he was in her face, nose to nose, ignoring her surprise.

"Go ahead and fucking pack," he snarled. "We head out in an hour for Cliffton. And by God, I don't take orders from a spoil-assed little Southern socialite I can't seem to keep my damned brother away from. I guess you're fucking stuck with me."

Her eyes narrowed. "You are handling that F-word far too often." She sniffed disdainfully. "And I don't have to worry about you staying long. You won't make it five minutes around my family, and you'll be stealing all Dragovich's fun when you kill them yourself. Or they kill you."

With that, she swept from the kitchen in a cloud of subtle spicy scent and affronted feminine anger.

And Raeg had a feeling he just placed the first nail in his own coffin.

"She bakes those goddamned cakes herself, you moron," he snapped at his brother when there was no one else to yell at. "When are you going figure that out?"

Falcon scooped up the last bite with relish before lifting his brow with a knowing smile. "Since the first one I ate? Try learning how to deal with her, Raeg, maybe then she'd cook for us. I hear she's quite good at it. I'll be waiting in the car. Make sure she doesn't run."

"Me?" he growled. "Why me?"

Falcon shrugged, moving for the door. "Because. You're the one who pissed her off."

Chapter.

THREE.

Her brother Caleb was waiting for them when they stepped into the kitchen from the attached garage of her house. The low light from the counter illuminated the large, country-style room with its wide work island, breakfast nook, and multitude of cabinets and windows.

She'd had the house completely remodeled after she'd bought it from her brother. She was an agent, with all the paranoid tendencies that went with it. Exterior walls were lead-lined, windows were bullet resistant, shades made to screw with infra-red and heat-detecting technology. The inside window shutters were merely added security.

The security system wasn't just installed by her brother, it was created by him as well, right down to the footfall detector on the walk leading to the porch and on the porch itself.

"So far, there's no sign of a sniper," Caleb informed them as he carried a pot of coffee to the table as Whitt, one of his former Special Forces team members, collected cups. "Watchers are having problems watching the houses," he grinned. "They don't care much for the alligators that creep around the grounds at night."

"Who needs security guards?" Summer murmured.

Caleb chuckled at the comment. Even in the low light, his eyes-nearly the same color as hers-gleamed in the near darkness. Short black hair, beard, and mustache. He looked like a pirate. He had been known to act like one on occasion too.

"We'll go over everything I've pulled in since Falcon and Raeg showed up in the morning," he promised. "Daddy's expecting all three of you at the house before breakfast. He likes to chat on the front porch over coffee, and Momma likes Summer's help in the kitchen." He gave them all a warning look. "That's you and Falcon as well, Raeg. You don't want the major to come looking for you."

Oh God.

That was going to be a disaster.

Her daddy would take one look at Falcon and Raeg, then give her one of those disappointed looks she hated so badly. And that was just the beginning.

Her daddy knew her, could read her like a book. That meant she was really in trouble.

"Daddy's askin' questions, Summer," he warned her next. "Especially about the work you've been doing with Falcon and Raeg that had Dragovich coming after you. He was on the phone with Davis Allen when I left the house earlier."

That was not a good thing. It was bad. It was so very bad, and she was just in so much trouble.

"Daddy will take a switch to me," she groaned. "I am such dead meat, Caleb."

She was aware of Raeg frowning at her and Falcon's curiosity as they listened to the exchange.

"Eh, not this week," her brother promised, highly amused. "His knees are acting up. Just run. Hell, you could outrun him in those four-inch heels you wear if you wanted to."

Her momma would do it then.

"Breakfast, boys." Caleb lifted his hand and headed for the garage door. "I'd get there early, Summer. Help Momma with breakfast. You know how she likes that. Then she might not chase you down for Daddy when he mentions that switch."

He just wasn't going to be nice to her tonight, was he?

"You're bein' ugly to me, Caleb," she sighed, pretty much resigned. "And that is so not fair."

Without answering the accusation, he shot her an amused grin before he disappeared into the garage. Seconds later a muted beep to her cellphone had a map flashing on screen of the yard, showing his and Whitt's progress.

At least the security system worked.

Rising from her chair she stared at the cups still on the table and the coffee pot Caleb hadn't returned to the maker, and held back a sigh. Collecting them, she quickly washed them in the sink, aware of both Raeg and Falcon as they moved through the house. They checked the security system as well as the footfall alarms on the wraparound porch and cement walk.

By the time they finished, she was getting her luggage, wondering why the hell Caleb always managed to forget his manners with her. He should have carried them right to her room himself. She was going to tell their momma on him first thing. Maybe she could be distracted from being put out with Summer by getting put out with her son instead?

Doubtful. But she could hope.

"Here." Falcon grabbed the two suitcases she was struggling to haul from the Suburban. "We loaded them, dammit, did you think we wouldn't unload them?"

The tone was completely irate and Falcon was hardly ever irate with her.

"Now you're gettin' ugly with me?" she asked as she grabbed her makeup bag and headed into the house. "Just what I need, you in a bad mood too."

It always took a while to settle in when she arrived home, Summer remembered as she led the way to her upstairs suite. The transition was always a pain in the ass.

"Summer, do you always have to travel with half a dozen bags?" he asked, more amused than irritated as her brothers or even Raeg could get. But his expression was still a little tense.

"I try to travel light." She shrugged, wandering to the balcony doors and unlocking them before stepping outside.

And there it was.

The fog was rolling in from the swamp, steamy and thick, coming in as floating tendrils, fingers of humid moisture reaching out and creeping across the backyard.

She could hear the gators, bellowing out an eerie sound into the night. In the distance, a big cat called out-panthers or even cougars were known to wander the Okefenokee.

When she was younger, her daddy had tracked a cougar that had killed one of his calves. He'd never caught it, but he'd come back with tales of monster alligators, panthers stalking him from the tops of the trees, and a fog so thick and heavy he swore it moved him through the swamps as if it had a will of its own, for miles at a time.

Watching it now, the thick threads reaching closer to the house, she could well imagine such a thing happening.

"Now that is eerie as hell," Falcon whispered as his arms slid around her, pulling her closer to his obviously aroused body.

Summer let her head settle against the chest behind her, her hands resting against his linked ones where they came together low on her stomach.

It took everything she had to control her breathing, to fight back the heat that rose inside her whenever he touched her like this, whenever he let her feel how much he wanted her. But it also calmed her whenever he held her. No matter how upset she was or how worried, when he pulled her against him, Summer could almost feel herself drawing on his strength and his power. Sometimes, those qualities seemed inexhaustible in Falcon.

"It's beautiful," she whispered. "Soon, it will surround the house like a blanket, ghostly white, that little bit of moon giving it a glow that sends chills up the spine if you're not used to it. And those fingers of fog will seem to be probing at the seams of the door, the windows, as though hungry to reach the inside and consume it as well."

She was used to it, and still, she'd been known to give a little shiver.

Aunjenue would actually sit out on her balcony sometimes when it came through as though soaking up the moisture, enjoying the tendrils that wrapped around her. Summer avoided them. Not that she was scared of them, or spooked by them, but the curious-like threads of moisture always seemed far too sentient to her for comfort.

"You've missed being home," he murmured. "I was seeing it in you before we took that job with Davis Allen."

She had missed home. Learning her dearest friend in the world was in danger had been far more important though. Home was always waiting, but Alyssa might not be if she didn't get there in time.

She'd gotten there in time, but that job had gone to hell so fast she still had trouble acclimating herself to the consequences.

"I always miss home," she revealed, something no one but Alyssa had known before now. "When I'm away for too long, I begin to feel off balance. The person you've always known isn't who I am, Falcon," she revealed sadly. "This is where I'm me. This is where all my hopes and dreams began and where I hope to live to an old old age. This is where I took my first breath and it's where I want to draw my last breath."

"Think I don't know that the woman that flits and flirts around DC isn't really you?" he questioned her softly. "Do you think I don't know the sweetness that exists beneath the woman you show the world?"

Perhaps he did. Falcon always saw deeper, probed at the layers of a person until he could reach the inner parts. Not because he was nosy or because he felt they were being secretive as Raeg did. He did it because he genuinely cared about people. He wanted to know who they were and what they were.

"Maybe you do," she sighed, watching the fog come closer. "I hated leaving you though. As bad as I wanted to be home, I want you to know that. I hated walking away from you."

And Raeg. Though she left that unsaid. Falcon would know, just as he'd known she wasn't the person she showed the world.

"You didn't come straight home." He rested his chin against the top of her head, meeting her gaze in the reflection of the glass door. "Why not?"

Why hadn't she?

It had been six months, and there had been times she'd ached to find her own bed, to hear her momma's laughter, her daddy's booming voice, in person rather than on the phone.

She'd needed to heal first though, she'd thought. She hadn't been able to shed the person she was in DC as easily as she had in the past, because the wounds that had been left in her soul had seemed to fuse that part of her to the woman she was inside. She couldn't face her family like that. She wasn't herself. Just as she never showed the inner woman to the world, she never allowed the agent she was while in the world to return home with her, where her dreams and laughter awaited her.

"I was too ragged," she finally answered honestly. "If I had come home then, Momma and Daddy would have worried and Caleb would have headed straight to Arlington to demand even more answers from you. I couldn't be me, yet. And I didn't want them to see or to know who I was away from them." Her eyes closed as his head bent further, his lips brushing over her bare shoulder.

"I would have avoided him just as I always do," he promised her, the light Spanish accent he still carried washing over her senses. "I would have protected your secrets if I could have, Summer. Caleb knew them though. When we arrived here to warn him of Dragovich and see if he knew where you were hiding, he already had all the answers. I warned you long ago he no doubt knew exactly what you were doing."

Yeah, that sounded like Caleb. He'd ask questions even when he knew the answers. That was just his way. And she should have known he was aware of what she was doing. He was too nosy. There had just been no indication of it, so she'd hoped he'd accepted her explanations.

Her eyes closed as Falcon's lips moved closer to the sensitive column of her neck. In the next heartbeat she forced herself to step away from him and turn back to the bedroom, only to come to a stop.

Raeg stood leaning against the wall, just on the other side of the bed, his expression shadowed but not enough to hide the lust she could see in his face.

For once, there was no sense of anger or judgment coming from him. As though he were simply enjoying the sight of her and Falcon, of hearing them talk, their voices low. Could he find pleasure in that? Was that part of what caused these two men to share something so intimate as the women they both desired?

"Falcon knows where the guest rooms are," she told him, uncertain now what to say, or what to do. "There's one on each side of this suite, and they're comfortable."

"From the looks of things, Falcon doesn't need a guest room," he pointed out, though without a sense of jealousy or even his normal insulting, snide attitude.

"Falcon is not nearly that lucky," his brother grunted, pausing to kiss the top of her head before walking across the room. "Just sometimes, when I'm a very good boy, she allows me to pet her a little." He shot her a teasing smile over his shoulder before turning back to his brother.

Raeg still held her gaze, his dark eyes probing, intense. If he said something nasty to her, she simply didn't know if she could handle it.

His gaze moved over her, and Summer felt her breasts swell further, her nipples aching, her sex melting. And how futile was the arousal rushing through her, flooding her body and her senses? Falcon would never take her without Raeg, and Raeg despised her. Oh, he became aroused by her occasionally, but actually touching her was something he wanted nothing to do with. He'd made that plain over the years.

"Good night, Summer," he told her softly, nodding his head before straightening and leaving the room ahead of Falcon.

"He hates me," she whispered as Falcon paused, then turned back to her. "Why?"

His expression softened, his pale blue eyes, normally cool even when he wasn't, darkened with those shadows she'd always glimpsed in both him as well as his brother.

"He doesn't hate you." There was a heaviness to his voice that left her confused, aching to know the origin of his pain so she could soothe it.

"I think he does." She used to hope he didn't, had tried to tell herself he didn't. But now? Now, she just didn't know.

Falcon shook his head. "And I know he does not. What he does feel though, we may all have to work through eventually." His gaze touched hers. "And that may be far more dangerous to us than we ever imagined Dragovich being."

With that, he left her bedroom, leaving her to stand in the darkness alone as the fog reached her balcony doors, spreading over them, easing against each crack and crevice, searching for an entrance that didn't exist.