A smile curved his lips, and I inhaled, my hands curling into fists. The urge to reach out and touch him was strong, so strong that I actually found myself standing again, heading toward the door.
This was why I didn’t spend time with him any longer, why I hardly spent time with anyone. Laila was the only exception, and my team leader had pretty much bullied me into friendship, or at least, she’d pestered me into it, dragging Olive into the mix for good measure. But those connections made me nervous. Shit got real when feelings were involved, and I’d been careful to not feel anything more than respect and professional admiration for anyone.
First Laila. Then Olive. Then Dan—
No.
“Hey.”
His voice was close enough that I had to lock down my body in order to not react and not to react violently.
Calm. Calm.
The man was recovering from a gunshot wound.
I could not knock him on his ass.
“You okay?”
Slightly hysterical laughter bubbled up in my throat, and I swallowed hard to prevent it from escaping. “Just peachy,” I said, reaching for the door handle.
Except for the fact that I was ridiculously attracted to this man I worked with, a man who was dangerous to me, who was insightful and would look too deeply into my past, who, once he knew all the dark fucking secrets of said past, would look at me in disgust.
That was the danger that laid down the path of me thinking I might be able to have a normal relationship with anyone, with him.
That couldn’t be.
His hand dropped onto my shoulder, spun me gently to face him. “What is it, Ava?”
I took a page out of his book and said, “I’m fine.”
“That’s a lie,” he said. “Something happened. And it’s not me getting shot or Olive’s orders. What put that look into your eyes?”
My past.
That’s what put it into my eyes.
My past once again reminding me that I wouldn’t ever be normal.
“Dan,” I said, shaking my head, stepping out from beneath his hand. “I—”
And fucking horror of all horrors, my voice broke.
He came closer, reached out as though he were going to hug me. God, it was pathetic how much I wanted to be hugged by him, to be held gently against his chest. The last time the team had been in San Francisco, I’d watched him hug his sister, had envied the statuesque blond hockey player.
I hadn’t ever been hugged.
Not by a parent. Not by a family member. Not by a friend or lover. I’d not known what I was missing at first, and later, I hadn’t been able to let anyone get that close.
But Dan had hugged me.
That week on the orchard he’d held me close, stroked his fingers through my hair.
And I’d liked it . . . too damned much.
“Don’t,” I said, skittering back when he came closer.
One sharp word.
“Hey,” he said, his hand brushing my arm again, “you can—”
One sharp movement.
I spun out of his grip in one of those moves I’d practiced over and over and over again in my twenty-nine years, until it had become instinctive, until it had been permanently ingrained in my muscle memory.
“Oof,” he grunted as I pinned him against the door, my elbow to his throat.
“Don’t,” I repeated, holding him for only a second before guilt swelled up and bubbled over. I was manhandling someone who’d been shot all of two days before. What kind of sick fuck did that?
A Toscalo did.
A member of my fucked-up family did.
Because violence was ingrained in my blood, my history, my DNA.
Because I was just as bad as the rest of them.
“Ava—”
I pushed past him, wincing again when he grunted in pain. But I didn’t have the strength to stop, not when my eyes burned with tears, not when I was feeling so weak inside.
Not when I might reveal everything.
Seven
KTS Headquarters
Northeast England
15:05hrs local time
Dan
It wasn’t until two weeks later that I saw Ava again.
After the incident at the gym, I’d stifled the urge to go after her, deciding she needed some space. But a few hours later, when I’d gone to the room she’d been assigned, I’d found it empty, any sign of her presence erased.
Well, except for the faint scent of peaches in the air.
But no clothing had been left behind, the bed had been stripped. All of the towels had been removed from the attached bathroom, the sink cleaned, the counters wiped down.
Ava was gone, having requested leave to coincide with the light duty I was on for two weeks.
She’d left me in Munich, split off from my team while they dealt with the information on the flash drive.
Not that they’d intentionally cut me out.
Ava had given me my own copy of the data, asked me to get my brain working on making heads or tails of it until I felt up to traveling to KTS’s main headquarters and meeting up with them. So, I’d hung in Germany for a few days, recovering on Olive’s orders, feeling mostly fine, if a bit weak still, but I hadn’t returned to England right away because part of me had expected Ava to show up. For us to go through the files together.
Before the gym incident, we might have.
Before I’d pushed, she might have stayed, might have allowed me to inch closer.
But I’d pressed her.
And she’d gone.
Some agent, huh?
I’d been impatient and driven Ava away, and now I’d spent the last two weeks pouring over some fucking files on a flash drive that made up a puzzle I didn’t have any clue how to solve.
Now, I itched to apologize, even knowing she would dismiss it, that she would pretend I had nothing to say sorry for.
And as stupid as it was, as clear as she’d made it to me she didn’t want it, I still wanted to hug her.
To hold her close and erase whatever had made her so sad.
Which was laughable, I knew that.
Still, even with me knowing that, the urge to comfort didn’t go away. I was a protector by nature. She was a teammate, and that alone would have been enough for me to put my life on the line for her. But she was also a person I respected, and just because she could hit a target from over a thousand meters and could kick my ass in hand-to-hand combat didn’t mean that the urge to protect just disappeared.
Of course, all of that was complicated by the fact that she was a woman I wanted with a need that bordered on desperation.
I’d had a glimpse of that oasis in the desert, and I wanted more.
“Thanks for coming,” the object of that desperation said to the small group that had gathered in the conference room.
Our whole team was there—Laila and her husband, Ryker, Olive, me, and Ava.
Five people with one goal. Five people who made up one of many teams at KTS, all with that same goal.
To protect the innocent.
In whatever format that required.
We all murmured our greetings then sat back and got ready to listen. Ava hooked up a laptop to a dongle, and the familiar files I’d been going through line-by-line over the last two weeks appeared on the monitor on the wall.
Lettuce.
Fucking lettuce shipments.
It made no sense. We all knew the data on the USB couldn’t just simply be lettuce shipments, but neither our team, nor the specialized technical arm of KTS had been able to unearth any hidden data or deduce a code that indicated the seemingly innocuous shipments and invoices were more than produce.