Page 3 of Riggs (The Maddox BRAVO Team #2)

Riggs

The sky over Seattle is the exact color of gunmetal, a soft, stubborn drizzle hazing the windows as the plane taxis.

I clock the sheen of rain on the tarmac, the crawling line of ground vehicles, the way the jetway shudders when it locks.

The air out here always smells like wet concrete and jet fuel. I’ve worked in worse.

“I’m freezing,” Vanessa whispers, and without even thinking about it I pull off my hoodie, handing it to her.

“Here. Stay warm.”

She pulls it over her body, and I have to admit… she looks damn good in my clothing.

Vanessa’s shoulder brushes mine as we wait for the door to open.

She’s got the hood of my gray sweatshirt up, her hair tucked inside, chin tipped down like I taught her on the flight.

She looks like a college kid who stole her boyfriend’s hoodie, not a woman half the internet can’t stop talking about.

My hoodie. I push that thought away as fast as it appears.

“Still good?” I ask, my voice dropping an octave.

Her eyes flick up, bright even in the fluorescent wash. “Still good.”

I believe her. She’s been a trooper. But the second the door opens and we step into the jetway, the noise shifts. The hum becomes a buzz becomes a rip. I can feel it in my teeth.

Trouble is waiting.

We clear the jetway and spill into the terminal.

Sea-Tac looks like it always does—vendors hawking coffee that could strip paint, the souvenir place with Mount Rainier on everything, harried families with strollers—but today the energy’s all wrong.

Heads turn like weather vanes swinging to one wind. The single wind is us.

The first camera flashes before I even spot it.

That’s the tell. I scan left. There’s two men, cheap telephotos, no press lanyards, posted like pylons by the gate rail.

Passengers squeeze past them. Beyond security, near baggage claim, I catch a shimmer of reflective vests and the distinctive crouch of shooters bracing for their money shot.

Three. No—five. There had to be a tip-off.

Had to be the woman back at Saint Pierce.

The one who asked for a selfie. She must have snapped off a picture when we weren’t looking.

Fuck.

The comm in my ear vibrates once. Nolan, our driver and also a member of Seattle Delta Force, is curbside. “Suburban on the departures level, Lane Two,” he says. Calm. “You’ve got heat inside. Want me to swing lower?”

“No,” I murmur. “Hold position.”

A new wave of people surges, phones lifted, faces gleaming blue-white with screen light.

“Vanessa! Vanessa!” They say her name like it’s proof they exist. Someone shouts, “Who’s the guy?

” Another voice: “Vanessa, look here! One pic!” Then the questions turn, sugar to acid.

“Is that your boyfriend? Did you dump Kellan? Vanessa, look at me!”

Who the fuck is Kellan?

The tide is forming, a semicircle that’s about to become a full ring. Terminal security isn’t here yet. They’ll come, but they’ll be late, and I don’t have thirty seconds to let strangers plug holes in my plan.

“Eyes on me,” I say to her.

She does. The hood shadow lays soft across her cheekbones.

I can see the pulse in her throat ticking up, feel my own steady to match hers.

I angle us toward the wide corridor that leads to the escalators, but we’re already choking the feed.

The bodies close in, elbows and camera bags and the ruthless need to capture, claim, own.

Somebody steps in front of us and stops short as if by accident. Classic block move.

No way through clean.

I could go brute force—shoulder through, forearms up, “excuse me, coming through,” let my size and tone do the work.

I could draw attention to my badge, but that invites policy and questions, and the second we involve airport authority we lose our timetable, our anonymity, maybe our vehicle.

She’s a prize, and they’re the ocean. The ocean doesn’t negotiate.

So I do the one thing I tell rookies never to do unless they’re willing to eat the fallout.

I take away the shot.

“Trust me,” I whisper. Not a question.

Her yes is a breath against my mouth as I lean in, my palm cupping the back of her head under the hood. I close the distance carefully—no rush, no jolt—and kiss her.

It’s supposed to be cover—my body making a wall, my profile stealing the frame, her face shielded from every lens.

It is cover. It’s also a live wire, a flare hitting dry brush.

Her fingers flex in my sweatshirt at my ribs, and the taste of her slips under my guard.

My other hand finds her waist and the world funnels.

The shouting blurs. Flash pops go distant.

Everyone gets what they came for and I get what I didn’t know I wanted until the second I had to take it.

I pull back slowly. Her hood still shadows her, and I keep my shoulder between her and the longest lens I can see.

“Move,” I murmur, and we do—smooth and unhurried, like we planned the whole thing. Like we’re those people. My hand at her back is hot. She fits under it like she belongs there.

The crowd parts in the oldest ritual there is.

People make space around what they think is love.

They gawk and they film and they sigh, but they also blink and hesitate and in that heartbeat I thread us through the gap.

Down the escalator, onto the moving walkway, off again near the rideshare sign.

A couple of civilian Good Samaritans smile at us with “aww” faces, unknowingly blocking the angles I don’t love.

I use them like chess pieces. My job is ugly when it’s done right.

“Left,” I say softly, and she lefts. “On my mark, we pick up the pace.”

“Mark,” she echoes, a ghost of a laugh in the word.

Now. We break into that not-quite-jog designed for airports—fast enough to chew distance, slow enough to look like we belong.

Nolan chirps on comm that he’s in position.

I steer us through a service corridor cut-through that smells like fryer oil and old mop water, and then the doors blow open to the outside.

Cold air slaps. Rain needles my neck. The departures level is a string of red brake lights and impatient horns.

The Suburban noses into view, black and gleaming like a shark. Nolan pops the rear door before I even look at him. I sweep the lane—no hostile tails, no crouched feet where there shouldn’t be—but someone is sprinting to our right with his phone already at shoulder height.

I pivot, stepping into his space. “Not today,” I say, and let him see it in my eyes—polite, firm, unmovable.

He stutters to a stop like he’s hit a glass wall.

Vanessa slides into the back seat. I go in after her, slam the door, and Nolan shoots the gap like he was born to it, merging, signaling, all of it clean and boring to anyone who might be paying attention.

The kind of driving that keeps you invisible.

For a block, nobody talks. The wipers thwump.

The interior smells faintly of leather and the citrus cleaner I approve for vehicles.

Rain pebbles the glass. I feel her next to me, small in the oversized hoodie, the hood now off.

Her hair is a little mussed. I have the stupid, caveman urge to smooth it.

“I’m okay,” she says first, a little breathless, like she’s checking with herself and then me.

“You did good,” I say. My voice is rougher than I mean it to be. “You did perfect.”

Her mouth slants. “That’s because my security guy kissed me in front of half the Pacific Northwest.”

“That was a tactic,” I say. I keep my eyes on the side mirror. “It took away the shot.”

“It did,” she agrees, and then she looks at me in that way she has, the look that makes it feel like the car is smaller than it was a second ago. “Also… it was not terrible.”

Understatement of the year. The memory of it hits me like a second delayed impact—the give of her mouth, the soft inhale right before, the way my hand wanted to span her waist and never move. My chest tightens, a pressure I don’t like because it doesn’t belong to the job.

I force a breath through my teeth. “We’ll debrief in the room,” I say, because that’s the safest sentence I own.

“About the kiss?” she asks, too innocent.

“About the route,” I counter, but I can’t quite keep my mouth from kicking up.

Her phone buzzes. Another. Then it goes from buzz-buzz to constant. She unlocks it, and her eyebrows shoot up. “Oh.”

“What?”

She turns the screen so I can see. It’s a blast furnace of notifications.

Mentions. Tags. Headlines already cropping up from accounts that exist only to be first. The image on top is a blurry still from the terminal—my shoulder, the hood, the angle of my hand.

A caption: VANESSA MERCADO’S NEW MYSTERY MAN?

followed by three fire emojis and a heart.

“Viral,” she says, half-amused, half-not. “We’re trending.”

I close my eyes for half a second, then open them. I’m already pulling my phone, already thumbing open the encrypted app we use for internal traffic. I type fast.

SEA arrival compromised. Pap presence heavy. Used cover to extract. Photos everywhere. Need direction. Potential reassignment to reduce risk?

The reply is nearly instant. Dean doesn’t sleep, and if he does, it’s with one eye open.

CALL.

I tap the phone icon and he answers on the first ring. “Talk to me.”

I lay it out clean. He grunts once when I reach the kiss. That grunt could mean a dozen things, but with Dean it usually means something like good thinking, bad optics, we’ll deal.

“Option A, we fight the story,” I say. “We deny, we firewall, we try to reset. Option B, we lean in and use it. Option C, you put someone else on point and move me off the line.”

“You want off the line?” he asks, bluntly.