FBI Surveillance Chapter 3

David Gabriel Lyons lay in bed listening to the ocean outside his open window. The rhythmic sounds helped calm the ragged unsettled feeling that clawed inside him. Sometimes the sound helped him sleep. Not tonight. Sweat dampened his skin. The coast was getting a blistering-hot summer that had him thanking God he wasn’t stuck in some foreign country, sweating it out with a few hundred of his least best friends. He sat up in bed and swiped irritably through his hair.

He’d spent the past year trying not to think about Lexi or her pain, and yet memories snuck past his guard all the time. Her smile, her caring nature, her unwavering dedication to her best friend, Josephine. When he’d broken things off with her, he’d hoped she’d finally move on. Find herself a man she could marry and have babies she could spoil. But things hadn’t worked out that way, and no one regretted it more than he did. Most likely, she thought he was dead.

Frustrated, he whipped back the covers and padded naked to the open window that faced the ocean. It took a moment for his heartbeat to stop hammering. A moment for the ache in his chest to ease. At nearly forty years old, he’d spent half his life as a black-op ghost and he’d spent plenty of time in nasty third world prisons and would never get enough of breathing in the fresh clean air of freedom.

The dark water before him stretched like a smooth satin sheet all the way to the horizon where the blue and golden moon hung like an ornament. But the calm tranquility was an illusion that disguised deceptive currents and gigantic swells, cold depths and the occasional wicked storm surge.

Working as black-op for NOVA, Inc. was a prison that had squeezed the need for female energy into a tiny corner of his mind and tortured him with it in his dreams. When he’d gotten away, he’d spent two days just staring at the ocean. This was where he belonged. This was where he needed to be. And no one was ever going to take it from him again. Being controlled by an invisible government operation had almost wiped him out of existence, and the worst thing was—he had chosen the life in the beginning. Until he met Lexi. He’d almost lost his life and she had almost died. He was an assassin. If he had died he would have gotten what he deserved.

He’d been away for a year now, but the smells, the memories, the sense of watching his back, were ingrained, tattooed on his brain like most military soldiers wore ink. He’d found his salvation in a talent for private PI work, enough of a talent that he could afford a kick-ass home anywhere in the world. But he’d chosen the small remote strip of land on the western edge of Mexico. Away from the scene of the crime and the only place he found a modicum of peace.

Aimless wandering didn’t appeal to David, and his clients probably wouldn’t approve either. He rubbed his aching neck muscles and headed downstairs for a drink. He’d finish a last photo for his client and take a break.

He shook his head in amusement. Some fancy-schmancy wealthy ranchero was giving him a bucketload to follow his wife. He opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle and popped the top. He had worked some serious magic, wrangling that son of a gun. Only trouble was the bastard only wanted the mysterious wife as a trophy for the political season. What happened after that was anybody’s guess.

The moon was streaked from slivers of clouds that rested across the sky. He was just about to sit his ass down when he saw a shadow flitter near the coconut and mango groves.

He had visitors?

What the hell?

As a military trained assassin, David took serious precautions with his safety. When he’d smoked out some of the local drug thugs last year and participated in their arrest, he’d thought the danger was over. He’d obviously thought wrong.

No one made social calls on David Gabriel Lyons—no one without a death wish. He lived on a peninsula that, due to the terrain, was only accessible by boat. There were about thirty locals living on this side of the inlet, but they were more likely to hand-feed rabid coyotes than drop in for a beer.

Did his visitor know he was out here? Leaving the beer on the deck, he slipped down to the beach and carefully melted into the water.