Deliciously Dangerous by Karen Anders

fountain to cool off.
    There were very few pedestrians around, but traffic was starting to increase in the area where three roads intersected, forming the square.
    When their breathing had returned to normal, they sat on the edge of the fountain.
    “This is quite beautiful,” Callie said.
    “The fountain was built as a tribute to the aqueducts that supplied water to ancient Rome,” Jammer replied.
    “I’m sure it was an engineering marvel.”
    Jammer laughed and Callie loved the deep, carefree sound of it. She smiled. “What’s so funny?”
    “It’s funny because supposedly a virgin led Roman engineers to the source of the pure water.”
    “Once again, it takes a woman to show men where they need to go.”
    “You’ve never had any problem with telling me whereto go,” he said softly. His voice was barely audible above the rushing water. She had to lean against him, making the moment intimate and romantic. “That’s true,” she said, rubbing her cheek against his.
    Jammer slipped his arm around her, drawing her closer. Callie snaked her arm around his waist. Snuggling into the crook of his neck, she relaxed against his wide, hard chest.
    “Kidding aside, this is more than a mere sculpture,” Jammer said. “It’s a wonderful example of Baroque art with its soft, natural lines and fantasy creatures that embody movement as the soul of the world.”
    Callie was stunned. Simply stunned. Jammer, who looked like he belonged in some smoky bar as a bouncer, was talking about Baroque art in such a way that it made her raise her head and study him. His eyes were a different shade of gray, like a calm, early-morning sky, content in the beginning of the day and warming from the rising of the sun.
    A morning breeze ruffled his short hair, which appeared blue-black in the shortening shadows as dawn broke on the horizon. It was one of those true, genuine moments that she would always remember, like the one when he had talked about his father. A window into the real person Jammer was. The identity of the man she wanted to get to know more deeply than she would have time for.
    Unexpectedly, tears pricked her eyes, and she blinked rapidly to clear them. There was no crying in black ops.
    He shifted their bodies so that she was sitting betweenhis legs. They watched as the sun melted the gold, seeming to wash down the statues and disappear into the water until it, too, changed to aquamarine.
    “It’s the light and shade effects of the marble that make it seem like the clothes and hair of the statues are moving—Neptune is the one standing in the chariot being pulled by two seahorses. To the side stand Abundance and Salubrity, and around the borders of the pool are stone and carved vegetation representing the sea.”
    Callie got a very unique view of a piece of art from a man from whom she had expected only violence and greed. This side of him shook her foundations and crumbled her defenses all the more, until she was scrambling to find a foothold to hang on to her objectivity.
    The struggle to deny her own feelings caused a pressure in her chest that grew and grew, like an inflating balloon. It crowded against her lungs, squeezed her heart, closed off her throat, pushed hard on the backs of her eyes. She had crushed it out before, time and again.
    This was the paradox of being undercover. You had to become the person you needed to be—not role-play, not act, not pretend. She had to guard who she was from Jammer to protect her cover. It seemed ironic to try to hide anything from a man with whom she had shared the most private parts of her body, who had taken her to dizzying heights of pleasure and held her safe in his arms. She had opened her body to him, but she couldn’t ever open her heart and truly share with him everything she was. Gina Callahan could do that, but Callie Carpenter couldn’t.
    For the first time in this crazy relationship that hurt.
    “Who are you?” she asked softly, not sure if he could hear her