“You’re not going to yak, are you?” Ava’s question made me blink rapidly, struggling to focus.
But then that focus narrowed to her, to her fingers on my skin, to her pretty brown hair that was the color of . . . “Mud,” I said, my mouth feeling like it was packed with cotton.
“Mud?” she asked.
I nodded, felt my head spin in the process, and reached up to press at my temples. Maybe that would stop the whirling.
“What’s mud?” she pressed.
More blinking. More temple pressing. “What?”
A sigh. “Dan, what’s the deal with the mud?”
“Your hair,” I said. “It’s so pretty—”
Ava’s eyes drifted over my shoulder. “How much morphine did you give him?”
“Too much, apparently,” Olive said. “He never takes the stuff. I formulated the dose for his weight.”
“Light bones,” I told them.
“What?” they both asked.
“I’m a light bones.”
“Lightweight,” Ava said. “I think you mean lightweight.”
“Yes, that.” I nodded again, and it was really hard to get my head back up. “I’m a lightweight, and your hair is the color of mud, and it’s so pretty, and—”
Ava’s gaze darted back to mine.
“—and I want to touch it.”
Her eyes widened, lips parting.
And I passed out.
Four
KTS Satellite Headquarters
Munich, Germany
01:46hrs local time
Ava
Holding the hulking mass of muscle against me so he wouldn’t tumble off the table and hit the tile floor, I turned my head toward Laila and lifted a brow.
“Mud?”
My friend, and perhaps the single person on the planet who knew why I hid my emotions behind thick, protective walls, grinned. “But it’s so pretty.”
“Shut up, you,” I muttered.
Laila giggled and glanced back at the computer screen, where she was going through the USB we’d recovered. The files had already been encrypted and sent to KTS’s main headquarters, where they would be gone over with a fine-tooth comb by a team that specialized in this kind of data. But we wouldn’t be good agents if we just sent off intel without learning every bit of information we could. Each agent had some technical capabilities, and while we might not be able to compete with the tech team on all levels, we could hold our own. Plus, we had been trained to be nosy, to squeeze all of the juice out of the proverbial orange, to turn the puzzle over and over and over until it was solved. So, it wasn’t exactly a surprise that we’d be diving deep into the data.
There was a chain of command, of course, which was why the files had been sent off, and why Laila would be leaving in the next few days or so with the hard copy of the data to take back to headquarters. She would personally meet with the tech team while she was there.
The difference between KTS and other agencies was that while their agents followed the chain of command, we also worked outside of it. Laila’s team’s directive was to take down a part of the Russian mob—the Mikhailova clan—and we wouldn’t stop until that was done. For that reason, we didn’t leave the data-combing solely to our techs, just as our techs didn’t spend all their time chained to their desks.
Every agent had skills in combat, in hacking, in compartmentalizing and analyzing information to look for patterns and trends and anomalies.
The most obvious of which was why our source, whose meeting had been set up under the most careful conditions—coded message, untraceable cell phone, a location that was chosen and shared at the last minute—wound up with a bullet in his chest.
Two men. Two bullets. Two chests.
The only difference between the men was that one of the bullets had entered two inches higher, and thus mortality hadn’t been guaranteed.
Thankfully, the right man had lived.
My stomach clenched, the thought circling through my mind and filling me with guilt. Guilt because I couldn’t summon up more than a bit of disappointment that our source hadn’t made it out alive. And . . . more guilt because even if Dan hadn’t made it out alive, I would have compartmentalized his loss away and moved on.
Which just reinforced the notion that I was broken.
Reducing the man I’d worked side-by-side with to two inches.
And not even in a dirty joke sense.
But that was just it.
I was so messed up inside that I couldn’t have a normal relationship with a man. I couldn’t trust a man. Not now. Not ever.
I had accepted that long ago.
I might scratch an itch on occasion, but before my slip-up two years before, I had always picked men who weren’t . . . well, not like Dan.
Not dangerous or smart or able to peek over walls. Or, hell, he was stubborn enough to barrel through the concrete and brick and barbed wire. And he would barrel through, that was for damn sure. I saw the way he still looked at me, knew he’d be back in my pants if I gave him the barest indication it was what I wanted. He should be disgusted, but somehow, he wasn’t. He’d never lost his temper, even after I’d pushed him away in the most abrupt manner, and he’d always treated me with respect and kindness.
But I didn’t want him. That itch had been scratched. Our time was done.
Liar.
Okay fine, my vagina would be happy to get up close and personal with his cock again, but the rest of me—my brain, my sense of self-preservation, and my sanity—knew that I could never let anyone like Dan get close.
He saw too much. He was too good.
And he would want too much.
But more than anything else, he deserved so much more than me and my fucked-up past. I wasn’t capable of giving a man like Dan what he needed and—
This was why I couldn’t keep doing this. I couldn’t function and do my job if I was so focused on my childhood, on what brought me to KTS, on the fucking black hole encased in barbed wire and concrete inside me. I needed to be cold and shut down, to not feel or remember anything, to think of only the next mission, the next job, the person I could save to make amends.
Enough.
Fuck, just enough.
Sighing, I glanced over Dan’s shoulder again and met Olive’s gaze. “He’s heavier than he looks,” I said. “You almost done?”
The doctor snorted. “You’re the strongest person I know, Ava,” she said, her eyes dropping back to where her hands were working. “But, for the record, I am almost done. I’ll just slap a bandage on, and we’ll call it good.”
“Is that what you call what you’re doing?” I asked dryly. “Slapping things around back there?”
Laila snorted.
“Pretty much,” Olive muttered with another plink into the pan next to her, another piece of debris she’d pulled from the bullet wound hitting the bottom of the metal container. There had been far too many of them for my comfort. A rapid plink-plink-plink while Dan had grown progressively paler.
And I’d been the only one to notice.
Which was a fact I was deliberately ignoring.
Because if I didn’t ignore it, if I looked too closely and admitted—even only to myself—that I might be too interested in Dan, might possibly care for him more than a fellow agent, I would be vulnerable. There was a risk if I looked into the razed organ that was my heart, I might see him as a friend . . . or worse, as a man.