Page 33 of Forbidden Protector

I think about this morning. Knox in the tack room doorway, coffee untouched, running the same math.

"He doesn't leave prints," Knox had said. "Not on paper we can find, not on people we can flip."

And I had said nothing, because Knox already knew what I was going to do about it, and so did I.

My hand found the wheel before my head finished the sentence. That's the only answer either of us needs.

The wind finds every seam in the old logs and complains about it. Close to two, she comes half-awake, gun hand loosening, and finds me on the floor with my eyes still open.

"You're supposed to be sleeping," she says, rough with it.

"So are you."

"I don't."

"Neither do I."

She's quiet a moment. Then, careful, like she's testing ice she already knows is thin: "Why'd you turn the wheel right instead of braking?"

"Braking put us in the ditch head-on. Turning gave us a chance."

"You did that math in half a second?"

"Before my hands were on the wheel."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only true one I've got."

She sits up on one elbow, hair loose and wavy over her shoulders, come undone from whatever order she'd put it in hours ago.

I've had her in my truck, my house, my sightline for days running, and never once alone with her like this. No case file between us, no family name doing the talking.

The coals have burned down low enough that her eyes go dark in the shadow of it, hollowed out. For the first time since a truck idled outside an airport terminal, I've got nothing to read off her at all.

My cock goes hard before I've finished the thought, fast and blunt and entirely against my better judgment.

I don't move to hide it. I want her to see what she does to me.

"You could've stayed on the road and let it take the bed," she says. "Instead you put the whole truck between me and it."

"Yes."

"Why?"

I could give her the file answer. Gideon's orders, containment, the job I was handed the night she landed. I look at her instead and decide I'm done giving her that one.

"Wasn't a job."

"That's not an answer."

"Wasn't ever a job."

"Say more than four words to me, Blackwater. Once. See if you survive it."

"No."

"Coward."