Page 47 of The Blonde Who Came in from the Cold (The Blonde Identity #2)

Present Day

Somewhere in Portugal

Alex

In the end, it was the sound that woke her.

Part of Alex’s brain never slept, of course—the part that was always listening and worrying and wondering when her luck was

going to run out. But she’d slept on the island eight years ago. And she’d slept in Berlin. And she’d been sleeping for hours,

it seemed, because when Alex opened her eyes again, the sky was dark outside the tiny cottage and the only sounds were crashing

waves and the deep, steady breathing beside her.

So, it turned out, the common denominator wasn’t blood loss (too bad). It was King.

She looked at the other side of the bed and the man who was stretched out with his shirt off and one arm thrown over his eyes

like the moonlight was going to blind him.

His hair was so much longer now, and she never thought she’d see him with a beard. She certainly never thought she’d like

it. His hair was darker too, like he hadn’t seen the sun in ages, and Alex had to marvel at the difference. People can change

in a decade, and spies change more than most, but as she studied the man in the moonlight, she could barely remember the boy

from the bar with the perfectly pressed shirt and squeaky clean perfection.

“It didn’t scar too badly.”

She hadn’t realized he was awake, but there he was, staring at her across the expanse of white sheets that he must have found tucked away somewhere because they weren’t even a little bit dusty.

He turned on his side, hand reaching out carefully—like he was afraid to touch her. But he didn’t reach for the bandage and

the wound. He reached for the rough patch of skin the size of a nickel.

“I had a good doctor, I guess,” she said as his thumb made a slow, gentle sweep over the scar. Back. Forth.

“You could have bled out tonight.”

“It was just a graze,” she told him. And it was true.

“You could have said, ‘Oh, hey, King, remember when we were being shot at? It turns out I got hit.’”

“I got grazed.” But when she tried to sit upright, she swooned.

“You got shot,” he corrected. Then he tugged her down beside him. He closed his eyes and whispered, “Again.”