The voices trailed off. The goons didn’t seem to be coming closer. They were...retreating? No way. Flynn was in head-to-toe desert camo gear, no doubt coated with dust and debris—maybe they looked like a rock? We might get lucky if our camouflage works.
Dark silence dropped like a blanket. A gulp stuck in her throat. Too scared to whisper, she forced herself to stop panting, ignoring the need in her lungs. Was Flynn’s chest rising? Was he breathing? Be okay, be okay.
A guttural curse scraped out of him. She relaxed into the ground. A swearword had never sounded so beautiful. He lifted off her with a groan, like it was a huge effort. She lay still a second, the sudden absence of his weight giving her the sensation she was levitating.
“Too close,” he moaned. “You okay?”
“You die or you don’t,” she rasped, rolling onto her back. He leaned over her, a shadow against the stars. She patted down his chest, his ribs. Intact. “I thought you’d...” She swallowed.
“I’ll live. You good to walk?”
She lurched to a sitting position. “I think so. You sure caused chaos.”
He pushed up into a crouch, grabbed her upper arms and lifted them both to their feet. “It wasn’t all me, sunshine,” he whispered. “That was some crazy shooting of yours. Not bad for a—”
“I hope you’re not going to say, ‘Not bad for a woman.’”
He groaned, dropping contact. “Not bad for a woman who couldn’t bring herself to kill a mouse a few hours ago. Jeez, Germaine.”
She wiped her dusty hands on her dusty trousers. “Honestly? I have no idea what just happened. What was going on down below?” She nodded to the gully. “Before we moved, before those guys...” Before I became a killer. “Someone else stepped on a mine?”
“I exploded the one you found.”
“How...? Wait—the reflective strip. You shot it.”
He winced. “It was meant to be a diversion. They were closer than I’d thought.”
“The screaming—it stopped. Abruptly.”
In the shadows, something crunched. A walkie-talkie crackled with static. Flynn pulled her behind a tree, his arm tight around her waist. Her rifle bumped a branch. She caught it. Beyond the spindly foliage the outline of a man passed, his movements jerky, too fixated on scanning the ground to spot her and Flynn. Chaos was right. These guys were spooked. Hell, so was she.
Another guy appeared—no, a woman—farther away, creeping in the same direction. Flynn tightened his grip, his fingers digging into her hips, his muscles tensed against her, all the way across his arm and shoulder and down his thigh. Last night—was it only last night?—she’d run her hands down those long, powerful legs. Yes, focus on that, not the goons with guns passing a few feet away. Then, Flynn had been a very fit body. Now he was every other kind of sexy, too—smart, brave, witty, protective. An all-round menace.
Words buzzed from the walkie-talkie. Nothing discernible. The woman looked directly at their tree, frowning. Trying to make out the message, or trying to identify the suspiciously thick shape? Tess held her breath. She’s staring into space. She hissed something to her friend and they skulked off.
Tess stood rigid. The soldiers melted into the darkness, their silhouettes no longer distinguishable from the trees. As silence returned, her scalp tingled. She stretched and fisted her fingers to stop the trembling. It didn’t work.
“We’re clear,” Flynn said, releasing her. “Let’s move, fast and quiet.”
At the next boulder he pulled out a fresh water bottle and offered it. She bent double, resting her hands on her thighs. She could barely inhale, let alone drink.
“Can you hyperventilate a little quieter?” he whispered. He laid a hand on the middle of her back. She suppressed the instinct to flinch. “Like I say, it’s a numbers game. We’re the needles, this is the haystack. We’ll stay here a minute, let them sweep on ahead. Enough enemy have been through that they’ll mark off this sector as checked.”
She took a deep, settling breath, resisting the urge to let it out in a hiss as she would to calm her nerves before a live report from the field. Straightening, she took the water. As she gulped, he slid her rifle off her back.
“If luck’s on our side, they’ll assume we’re pressing on toward that hill,” he said, ejecting the clip. “You have one more burst left.”
“Thought you didn’t believe in luck.”
“I didn’t say that. I said we create our own luck—and we have.” He checked his own clip.
Luck. There was a relative term. Was she unlucky to be stuck in a minefield, stalked by an army of goons, or lucky to be out of the dungeon with a kick-ass soldier on her side? Probably on her side.
Definitely on her side. Sheesh.
And the fact she was growing more attracted to him by the minute—would that prove lucky or unlucky?
Huh. Luck? Plain stupidity, more like. About time she cured her weakness for alpha military crap.
After today. Today, alpha military crap was keeping her alive, in body and hope. Next week, when all this was a memory of the did-that-really-happen kind, she’d make a psychiatric appointment. A lobotomy should take care of it.
He silently took the water bottle and slipped it into the pack, and handed back her rifle. “We keep going west, toward the village. You okay to lead? If you can concentrate on the ground, I can look out for enemy.”
“Oui, Lieutenant.”
She stared downward until her eyes adjusted enough to make out—or perhaps imagine—individual stones among the shades of black, then crept out from behind the rock. It felt like a boa constrictor was wrapping around her chest. Flynn grabbed her arm and pulled her into him. Oh God, what now?
“Not on the ridge,” he growled. “We stay under it. No silhouettes.”
She scooted downhill. They made steady progress, skirting suspect shapes on the ground—too round, too square, too regular, too pointy. She was probably seeing things, but at least it gave her something to focus on. Every foot they traveled eased the tightness in her stomach. Maybe this would be a lucky day.
Don’t say that.
Thank God for Flynn dropping into that hole—he might not believe in luck, but for her that’d been a blessing from above. Even if she’d managed to get out by herself, she’d have been caught in minutes. Her mind didn’t work nearly as quickly as his—but then, this kind of thing was his job. In her work she didn’t do anything—she dug into other people’s experiences and put them into words and pictures. All talk, no action.
Was that why she liked military guys? They were all action, from boots to buzz cut. Flynn must have some interesting stories—starting with his own history. Drawing that out would be a challenge, for sure.
After twenty minutes, the terrain began to level and they passed another triangular sign, facing away from them. She pinched her eyes shut for a second. Out of the minefield. Thank God. Flynn nodded as she pointed at the sign, but his focus was fixed ahead. Down a slight slope, light filtered through the thinning trees. Male voices trickled up. She squinted as Flynn inched ahead, the weak beam drilling into her brain, right behind her eyes. Two lights—headlights? Yes, a hefty vehicle parked at an angle. One of al-Thawra’s white Ford Ranger trucks. Crap.
Flynn made the get-down signal and dropped noiselessly. She crunched into a stack of dry leaves, silently cursing. He crawled over.
“They have NVGs—night vision goggles. Only one of them has them on his eyes right now. They’re probably part of a perimeter block.”
As her sight adjusted,