Page 22 of Covert Affections (Shadow Agents/PSI-Ops #5)

Chapter Twenty

Jesse

Jesse found the social media post about the job fair.

Up came the picture of Charley in a bikini.

Jesse had to fight down the urge to scrub the picture from the internet.

Jesse had the skill set to make it happen.

He was of the opinion Charley should wear a potato sack, and all men who dared to look at her should have their eyes gouged out, but it wasn’t his place to say as much.

He was acting like he was her father.

He wasn’t.

Still, he felt protective of her. Like she was family or something. Odd since he still thought her father was a total dickhead.

Jesse dug deeper into Charley now that he’d found her again.

She wasn’t using the surname of Eyres anymore.

She was using Barnes instead. If memory served, that was the same surname Hargraves had been using all those years ago when Jesse and the rest of the retrieval team had attacked the ranch.

It couldn’t be a coincidence that Hargraves was back in the area at the same time as Charley, could it?

Jesse began a digital deep dive into the new name, uncovering the fact that Charley was now a veterinarian who had recently opened a horse rescue.

Strangely, that left him feeling warm and fuzzy, knowing she’d beat the odds and was doing something she was passionate about.

When Jesse noticed the address of the rescue and realized it was located on the very same property her father’s horse ranch had once been, his jaw clenched, and the warm and fuzzy feeling vanished.

“Come on, Samuel, use your fucking head,” Jesse said, keying in a set of search parameters for a dark web dive, his goal to locate Samuel and then wring the man’s neck for letting his grown daughter anywhere near the ranch or the area.

Having Charley back here was like sending up a giant fucking flare for The Corporation to see. Their interest in their past test subjects had never waned. They’d give anything to get their hands on Charley or any of the children from that batch of experiments.

The thought made Jesse’s cat side snarl. Was Samuel’s head planted up his ass? How could he ever, in a million years, permit Charley to be anywhere near the old ranch or this area of Colorado? She shouldn’t have been allowed in the state, let alone the same town they’d hidden out in years ago.

Fuck. This was a mess. One he was smack dab in the center of.

It was painfully obvious that the hybrids had help from an outside source.

He’d been tracking them long enough to know what tech skills they did and didn’t have, along with what information they had access to.

None of it pointed to anything that would have tipped them off that Charley was Samuel’s daughter.

Yet they knew. Someone had told them. But who?

That was yet another mystery for Jesse to unravel.

First, he needed to protect Charley in any way he could without drawing the attention of The Corporation.

It would be an issue enough dealing with the hybrids, but add in a strike team or worse…

no. There was no way he could take on all of that with any degree of success.

Not by himself. And it wasn’t as if backup would come out of thin air.

He was an island. A rock. Alone. That was how he preferred it.

“Pull your head out of your ass and get down to business,” he chided himself.

Jesse read the job fair listing carefully and found himself chuckling at the wording.

It had a list of prerequisites the poster wanted in any men brave enough to show up for the open positions.

The list of requirements had little to do with helping on a ranch but everything to do with being eye candy.

It was evident that Charley hadn’t been the one to post about it all, and if she had, he planned to have a long sit-down with her father whenever he found him.

As Jesse located the social media profile responsible for the posting, his smile faded fast. His moment of amusement was quickly replaced by something else.

Something that felt a lot like raw need.

The hybrids had been right about the woman who had put the job fair listing on social media.

However, saying the woman was hot was an understatement.

She was the sexiest woman Jesse had ever seen in his entire life— if her photos were real and not doctored.

Since filters seemed to be all the rage anymore, it was hard to tell.

If they were to be believed, she had long dark hair and killer curves.

The kind a man could get lost for hours or even days exploring.

The photos the raven-haired goddess had on the site weren’t risqué or anything, but they might as well have been with as much as they were making Jesse’s mouth water.

In most, she either had her head turned or sunglasses on, obscuring his view of her eyes.

He wasn’t sure what color they were, but the rest of her was smoking hot. He bet her eyes were too.

A stirring in his pajama bottoms caught him off guard. Glancing down, he found a tent forming on his lap. Confusion filled him, followed closely by surprise when he realized he had an erection. That was something he’d not had in years.

“Holy shit,” he mouthed, lifting the waistband of his bottoms to get visual confirmation like the feel of it wasn’t proof positive enough.

Yep.

There it was, hard as a fucking rock.

He eased a hand under his waistband and gripped his shaft.

A soft groan escaped him. It throbbed against his fingers, hot, hard, and real.

He moved his hand slightly, testing its validity.

A groan escaped him as he felt just how responsive and sensitive the flesh there was.

His beast stirred, pleased with the development.

He entertained jerking off to take full advantage of whatever caused his cock to spring back to life, but his gaze slid back to the three screens mounted to the wall.

Each now had photos of the woman who had posted about the job fair—Lindy Delgado.

Had she done the impossible? Had she awakened his sex drive? If so, why her?

He kept one hand on his dick while the other helped widen his online search on the woman.

Jesse was no longer concerned with chatter about The Corporation or his other search parameters.

Only she mattered. He dug into every social media account she had, as well as her background.

She was one of those people who over-shared their day-to-day activities on various platforms, which gave a false illusion of safety.

The woman didn’t seem to understand just how easy it was for someone with a little bit of tech knowledge to take what she shared and start tracking her.

Between what she freely gave away to her followers on social media and what he’d found while hacking local government databases, and then the dark web, she was twenty-nine and had a birthday that was just around the corner.

She wasn’t married. She had no children.

She drove a small hatchback car and paid her bills on time.

She had a book-buying addiction, which he found oddly endearing.

The biggest expense she splurged on was getting her nails done regularly.

According to her bank statements, her favorite food was Chinese, and she was a frequent buyer at a local bakery.

She co-owned The Hell Tap , which was the bar hosting the job fair.

The co-ownership was fairly recent in the scope of things, and from her bank statements and taxes, she’d invested a fair amount of money into the bar and was starting to turn a small profit.

Her co-owner was listed, but the woman’s home address showed Florida.

He didn’t bother diving deeper into that woman. His only concern was Lindy Delgado.

Desperate for anything else he could find on the woman, Jesse deepened the search, plugging her social media photos into facial recognition software designed to scan the dark web for webcam streams of the same person.

He expected the search to take a while. There were hundreds of thousands of webcams streaming on the dark web, most of which the camera owners were unaware were being viewed by others.

They assumed they were private. That no one but them saw what was being seen through their cameras, be it home security ones, laptop or desktop ones, and even ones built into smart televisions.

Hell, Jesse had once seen someone’s robot vacuum’s feed live. Nothing was safe or private anymore.

Not in the digital age.

Within a minute, his system beeped, indicating he’d gotten a hit on the facial recognition scan. He pulled up the results and froze. The webcam footage was live, which meant Jesse was getting a real-time glimpse of Lindy.

“Fuck me,” Jesse breathed out long and slow, his left hand still wrapped firmly around his erection. He didn’t dare move a muscle for fear he’d explode then and there.

The woman looked exactly like her pictures. She didn’t use filters. She didn’t have to. She was gorgeous. A raven-haired goddess sent from the heavens above. The lighting in the room was low, so he couldn’t get a great look, but from what he could see, she was amazing.

Lindy had large, black-rimmed glasses on and was wearing a T-shirt that pulled tight across her ample breasts.

The shirt had pink lips printed on it. The sleep shorts she had on rode up slightly on one side, gifting Jesse a view of her upper thigh and part of her ass cheek.

Never in his life did he think he had a sexy librarian kink, but it was pretty fucking evident that he did because he couldn’t look away from her.

Blood shot straight to his already hard cock, and his hips thrust slightly, wanting to pump his cock in his hand. He resisted, his attention locked on Lindy.

Her pictures alone had already given him a monster erection. Seeing her on a webcam was about to make him come all over himself.

Leaning back in his chair, Jesse soaked in the sight of the raven-haired goddess quietly reading her book. He couldn’t see the cover or the book’s title, but whatever it was had her completely absorbed. He should have felt guilty for invading her privacy. He didn’t.

He’d done far worse things in his life for his employer, so his moral compass was askew.

His beast stirred within him more, clearly approving of the sight before him.

He glanced down at his lap and chuckled to himself at the sight of his rock-hard cock.

It was acting like the video stream was hardcore porn.

“You get this isn’t porn, right? No naked chicks.

No sex. Just a hot girl who is reading.”

His cock and his shifter side were absolutely fine with the visual Lindy was presenting. Though neither would be upset if she decided to show more skin.

As if reading his mind, Lindy shifted on her sofa, and the movement caused her shorts to ride up higher. Jesse's grip on his shaft tightened as he imagined running his hands up those glorious thighs. The way she bit at her lower lip while turning the pages of the book drove him insane.

Had he known watching a hot chick read would be such a turn on for him, he’d have started hanging out in libraries long ago.

“Fuck,” whispered Jesse through clenched teeth, his hand still wrapped around his cock.

He wasn’t sure he could handle seeing any more skin on her.

Increasing his pace as he jerked off, Jesse’s breathing grew ragged.

His beast pushed at him from within, demanding more.

It didn’t want computer screens between them.

It wanted to smell her, to taste her, to take her.

Jesse ignored it, focusing instead on how her breasts strained against her T-shirt with each breath she took.

His orgasm built faster than he'd expected.

Years of celibacy left him with no stamina, but he didn't care.

All that mattered was the goddess on his screens and the pleasure coursing through him.

When Lindy stretched, arching her back slightly, her shirt pulling up enough to show her stomach, Jesse lost it.

He came with a growl, his release coating his hand and abdominal muscles.

As his breathing steadied, Jesse stared at the monitors in disbelief. Not only was his dick working again, but it seemed determined to make up for lost time. Already, he could feel stirrings in his groin of renewed interest as Lindy shifted positions on her sofa.