Page 71 of Colombian Chemistry

“And another time, she was unarmed and managed to kill five armed men on a train with her bare hands?”

“Yes. She’s unstoppable,” he agreed. “But that doesn’t mean I want you to waltz right into the cartel we’ve been trying to protect you from.”

“They won’t recognize me,” I said with certainty, gesturing to my dark hair. “I even have colored contacts to make my eyes brown. Piper said she’ll do contouring makeup, and with a totally different look, they’ll never for a second think it’s me. Plus, they think Irene Saltzman has gone back to the States. Why would they ever suspect the brunette walking in with them is the very same girl?”

“Hiding in plain sight,” he said. “It’s not untrue. I barely recognized you yesterday.”

“But you did recognize me.” I smiled, remembering the look on his face when he’d realized who I was.

“I did. You have a way that you walk that’s unmistakable.”

“I do?”

“Yep. The way you move your hips. It’s sexy.”

“I move my hips sexy? I had no idea.”

“Yep. And my heart... it raced when it saw you. It knew before I did who you were. It was then I knew it was you.”

My own heart sped up at his admission. “Even not recognizing me, your heart raced?”

He nodded. “Yep. It just goes to show that it’s not just your gorgeous looks that make me feel the way I do about you. There’s a connection between us, and I don’t think we’ll ever be able to explain it away. Even you with your crazy high IQ and you being the smartest girl in the world, we’ll never find an answer to explain it.”

I laughed. “It’s one-sixty-two. It’s high, but there are people with higher IQs than me.”

“Not many.” He chuckled.

I lifted a shoulder. “Also true.”

“My beautiful, brilliant Irene.”

I blushed when he said beautiful, and it didn’t go unnoticed.

He stroked a hand across my face, and I pressed my cheek into his palm.

I glanced down at his muscular, naked body and trailed my fingers across the hard lines of his abs. “You’re not so shabby yourself.”

He laughed when I waggled my eyebrows.

“Did these hurt?” I asked when I reached one of the scars on his torso.

He glanced down. “Yeah. That was a knife wound from a recon mission in Afghanistan. Barely missed my liver.”

“And this?”

“Gunshot in Panama. Hurt like a bitch.”

He gave me a quick synopsis of every scar on his body as I touched them. Then I dragged a finger down the numbers etched in black ink on the side of his ribs. “What are these?”

“People in the agency I was in all got numbers tattooed on us to help identify us in the event of our death if we get separated from our head.”

I scrunched up my face. “Oh. That’s terrible.”

“Not really. We aren’t allowed anything else on our bodies that could identify us.” He reached up and touched the metal tags around his neck. “We also wore these. No name on them or anything like regular dog tags. Just our personal number. And no tattoos that could be used to identify us. We had to be ghosts.”

I scrunched my brow, remembering the ink covering so much of Knox’s huge frame. “But Knox has a lot of tattoos.”

“He got those all in the last couple years. He always wanted a ton of tattoos, but regulations prevented it. Once he got out, he went a little tattoo crazy.”