Page 11 of Deadly Lies

“They just took a girl back. I’m not sure if it was to see Joaquín.”

“So, what are you talking about?”

She turned to me, her lips quivering. “The girl looked just like Tiffany.”

6

Ashley

MIA WAS RIGHT—I HAD seen a ghost.

Tiffany Reynolds. In the flesh.

Were my eyes deceiving me?

I knew that I wasn’t taking care of myself, as usual. Married to my work. Living off fast food and Red Bull. Sleep? What was that? Hell if I knew.

This case—Sienna, Mitch, Joaquín, the Se7en Deadly SEALs—consumed me. I ate, slept, and breathed them. Hell, I’d even slept with Mitch. I was now part of their world. And after this latest “Joaquín may be innocent” revelation, one thing had become abundantly clear—I was making mistakes. Crucial mistakes. Mistakes that may have cost Joaquín his freedom.

Mistakes that could cost Sienna her life.

And this latest mistake could be the deadliest of all. Was Tiffany alive?!

I flashed back to the night of Tiffany’s murder. I had been told that Agent Meeks had fitted her with a wire. She had been offered a deal to go undercover after she’d been arrested for prostitution with a SEAL.

But Meeks never told me the SEAL’s name. I had always assumed it was Joaquín. Though today, I would put my money on Paul.

Could Tiffany possibly being alive be connected to Paul’s murder?

I was no longer undercover, but I could easily fix that. Tiffany didn’t know that I was an NCIS agent. She thought I was just another stripper. I wasn’t. But I was in charge that night. And I had, like so many times in my life, fucked up.

The scent of whiskey and testosterone had disarmed me that night. Though I had been sent to watch all the SEALs, for some reason, I had focused on Grant, not Joaquín. Joaquín was Tiffany’s job, her target. All the rest of the SEALs seemed to look up to Grant. Technically, Paul had been the officer in charge, but the men respected Grant.

And, so did I.

It felt almost wrong for me to think about that night while I was standing next to his shell-shocked wife, Mia. But Grant was not Mia’s that night. No, far from it. Grant was a broken man. Mia had left him high and dry. His green eyes were sad, and he’d been drowning his pain in liquor. And in me.

I was not Ashley that night. I was Autumn—the good-time stripper. And what a good time we’d had.

Grant undressed me with his bloodshot eyes, which wasn’t hard to do when I was wearing nothing more than a crop top and short shorts. “What’s your name, babe?”

“Autumn.”

“My favorite season. I’ll drink you up like a pumpkin spice latte.”

Normally my reaction would be to roll my eyes. The line was cheesy, yes, but Grant didn’t seem like the rest of these men. He wasn’t grabbing my tits or my ass. He hadn’t once called me or any of the other girls “whores,” and though I could tell that he wanted me, he hadn’t been disrespectful. He treated me like I was some girl he’d met at a bar, not some stripper his Team was paying to entertain him.

And that was the thing—I wasn’t a stripper. I was deep undercover in the SEAL Team, trying to crack the case of a drug cartel. I was an NCIS agent, an Ivy League graduate with a degree from Harvard, a woman who was still incredulous that she had to use her sexuality on her job.

But ever since I had become Autumn, something in me had changed. I no longer judged women for doing sex work. And more importantly, I cared about these girls. Just because they took off their clothes for a living, didn’t give men the right to sexually harass or assault them.

And there was something about Grant that stood out to me. In a good way.

I forced my gaze off Grant’s chiseled face and turned my attention across the room to another SEAL.

Joaquín Cruz.

Damn, he was gorgeous, but totally in the opposite way of his buddy Grant, or even their sexy scumbag friend Mitch. Joaquín was perfection. Tall, dark skin, tattoos for days, and eyes that could seduce a nun. But there was something more to him. Something sinister. Something twisted. Something silent.