More Than a Mission - Caridad Pineiro [30]
It occurred to her that there was something odd about his behavior since the other night. Maybe their little excursion would be just the thing to find out what he was really up to.
Her intuition told her Mr. Rawlings was interested in something she might not like.
Chapter 10
Aidan turned his attention to the assorted flowers in the restaurant’s backyard and alongside the cottage. He didn’t have a clue what most of the plants were and didn’t care. His mind was focused on looking for the tall, spiky, purple-flowered plant that would put the final nails in the Sparrow’s coffin.
As he searched and snapped photos with his PDA for good measure, cautiously walking along the edge of the garden, it occurred to him that today’s little display of martial arts had almost iced it for him. What he couldn’t understand is why that bothered him? For two years he’d been searching for the Sparrow and now that she was almost in his grasp, he was actually almost regretting it.
It wasn’t because of the fact that she was attractive. He’d had his share of beautiful women to enjoy.
Was it because she was basically a really nice person from what he had seen of her behavior? Possibly. It definitely wasn’t because of their kisses, or how good it had been with her riding him during their little physical interlude that morning.
He cursed when excitement awoke at the recollection of her above him, pressed tight, rousing him.
Shooting a glance at the cottage, he realized she was already inside. He switched the functions on his PDA just to confirm it. He had rigged his equipment last night to accept the signal from the assorted cameras and with a few swipes of his stylus, he got to the video feed from her bedroom.
She was undressing for the shower, her back to the camera. Totally unaware that anyone was keeping an eye on her.
He swallowed hard as she tossed aside her workout pants and eased off her panties. Her ass was perfection—and those legs…
He swiped at the sweat that popped out on his forehead and blamed the sun and leather jacket he was wearing, but he couldn’t pull his gaze from the PDA.
“Mixmaster. Come in, Mixmaster,” Lucia called out over the earpiece.
“What is it, Red Rover?” he snapped as Elizabeth slipped her fingers under the band of her sports bra and eased it up and over her head, displaying the long sweet line of her back, the flare of her breast as she bent to toss the bra and T-shirt on her bed.
“Bad, bad boy, Aidan. You’re supposed to be looking at the flowers.”
Cursing beneath his breath again as he realized Lucia was observing him, he shut off the video feed on the PDA and returned to camera mode so he could snap off a few photos for additional review. He would send them in via the satellite uplink in his PDA. “Copy, Red Rover. Prep yourself. In half an hour you can try and pick the locks if you’ve got the backup.”
“Walker should be here shortly,” she advised and Aidan extended his search for the foxglove to the front yard. Like the gardens in the back, this was a riot of colorful flowers mixed with green leaves and accented with foliage of burgundy, white and gold.
Nothing resembled the foxglove, and Elizabeth would be down shortly.
He strode across the front yard and was stalking around the corner of the building when he noticed a patch of plants with little spikelets of flowers that weren’t quite purple in his book. More a deep rose color, but the blooms were bell-shaped. As he bent and examined the leaves, he realized they were fuzzy. Fuzzy probably passed for hairy in the plant world and foxglove was supposed to be hairy.
Upon closer examination, he realized that the plants had at one time had another larger, central stalk. It prompted a recollection from the materials Lucia had downloaded for him—it was common to cut down the main flower spike after it was past its prime to produce a secondary flowering.
Bending, he took a plastic