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There was no other reason to kiss her.
Absolutely none.
* * *
The moon wore a frothy veil of high white clouds. One second, pale ivory light illuminated the meadow. The next, the world was almost completely dark.
Walking without stumbling over something—a burned-out cook fire, a sleeping outlaw, a dead one—his guys had done their job well—would have been tough if Dec hadn’t had the goggles on again.
And they damn well made the difference when a figure clutching a long, wicked-looking blade loomed up ahead of them.
In one quick motion, Dec shoved Annie behind him, pulled his SOG-TAC knife from its scabbard, slipped it between his would-be assailant’s ribs and angled the blade straight up into the prick’s heart.
The bandit went down like a stone.
Dec heard the shocked intake of Annie’s breath. He grabbed her hand and pulled her to him. She was trembling.
“Breathe,” he whispered. “Breathe, dammit!” A second passed before he heard air shudder in and out of her lungs. “We have to keep moving. Okay?”
She gave a jerky nod. “Okay.”
Yeah. Right. She was okay. That was why her teeth were banging together.
Unfortunately, there was no time for niceties. He needed her to keep going. Who knew how long these pigs would take to sleep off the booze he’d watched them swill?
The good news was that he and the rest of STUD One had taken out some of them.
The bad news was that there were still lots of them left.
And getting clear of the encampment was only Part One of what it would take to get them to the extraction site. They had a lot of territory to cover and it was anybody’s guess if their escape route would be picked up or not.
But Annie was strong, just as she’d said. She followed his order to lean into him, matching his steps as best she could, and she didn’t make a sound the couple of times he simply wrapped his arm even more tightly around her and lifted her off her feet so they could go faster.
Somebody coughed just a few feet away.
Dec froze.
Annie—dammit, Anoushka! He had to get that straight in his head. Anoushka froze too. She burrowed into him. He could feel the race of her heart, hear the soft rush of her breath. He knew that she was terrified.
He wanted to gather her in, stroke her hair, put his mouth to hers. He wanted to tell her that he would never let anything happen to her no matter what it took…
She shuddered and buried her face against his shoulder.
It was crazy, but standing with her like this, holding her, the dangers around them seemed to slip away. For a handful of seconds, Dec was in another place. He was back in California, watching the sun set over the ocean with Annie in his arms.
He had never been happier.
And she—she had been playing games.
He’d seen a documentary one time about the Amish. Some of the Amish teenagers left their real lives for a year to try a modern kind of existence. Same with kids headed for college who took what they called a gap year and did the same thing. Have fun, forget what was ahead, just get out there and do something totally different.
He had been Annie’s something totally different. Her walk on the wild side.
But not wild enough to include sex.
He’d attributed it to a sweet, old-fashioned modesty, but he knew better now.
Where she came from, a woman hung onto her virginity because sex had nothing to do with her pleasure and everything to do with her value as a bride. And now here he was, the guy who’d helped her keep her virginity, about to deliver her to the guy who’d bought it.
