Chapter 8 #2
Panic stabbed through him sharper than any bullet.
He wasn’t sure he could stop the unraveling in a few days.
Without Brawler, everything he experienced had no sounding board.
He needed Brawler…now. His team was fractured, his anchor torn away.
Inside, the cold realization settled. Maybe his father was right.
Maybe he wasn’t saving a damn thing. Maybe he was just losing it.
Flash forced a grin that didn’t touch his eyes, shoving the words out between clenched teeth. “I was following the family just to make sure they got out safely. Just tripped. Jungle’s a bitch.”
But the look in Tex’s eyes was sharp calculation. “I didn’t give you an order to follow them. But it doesn’t surprise me you protected them.”
Flash tried to grin, but his mouth wouldn’t seem to obey.
He reached for his humor but the wit he relied on felt dull, unreachable.
Instead, he shrugged. Lying to his CO and his teammates was such a breach of their trust, but Flash had no choice.
He could barely look them in the eyes, the cracks widening inside, no duct tape in the world strong enough to hold them together.
Emily moved ahead, shoulders brushing against broad leaves, the jungle as familiar to her as the streets of Manhattan.
The humid air pressed close, thick with the musk of loam and the faint sweetness of fruit gone overripe.
She stopped briefly at one of her cameras, sliding the card free with practiced fingers, relief warming her chest when the light blinked green.
Sombra’s path was stable again. The cat was still circling her territory, the cubs alive.
That steadiness felt like a small miracle.
She tucked the card away, then started to reach for her SD card stash, but hesitated. She looked over at Brawler… Christian . Wow the name still made her stomach do flips. “Ah, do you have another SD card to spare? I’m running low, and I have more upcoming cameras to change out.”
“You asking me for a favor?” his gruff voice held a note to it…a soft undertone that hit her in the heart before she even knew it was coming.
“If your next question is what do you get out of it? I might think about?—”
“Nut-punching.”
She giggled, giving him a sidelong glance. “As tempting as that is…no, rubbing you down with pixie dust and turning you free in front of Flash.”
“Low fucking blow.” He swallowed hard. “Possibly worth every smart-ass remark from that bastard if it means having your hands on me.”
She rose from her crouch and approached him. “Maybe we’ll see how much ground I can cover.”
He unsnapped his helmet and removed it, securing it by its chin strap to his ruck. He bit his bottom lip and her system went haywire. “Is that a threat?”
She moved in closer, her hand going to his waist. “A promise, Big Bad Wolf.” She removed a bandanna from her back pocket, slid her hand under his vest, gripping it for balance as she went up on her tiptoes, leaning into his chest. Carefully wiping away the sweat from his brow, she then gently fluffed his hair with her fingers, the damp strands like silk against her skin. God, she wanted more.
“Emily,” he whispered, closing his eyes.
She would never get sick of her name spoken in that gravel-rough voice, soaked in something so sweet, her breath caught. Ben never said her name like that. Not one man ever had. But every woman should find a man who uttered the very core of her identity with that kind of emotion.
“Worth an itty bitty SD card?” she said in a cajoling tone.
There was that smile again. His eyes opened, lids heavy, gray irises molten like storm-light simmering behind glass.
At half-mast, they weren’t just watchful.
They were sultry, lazy-dangerous, the kind of gaze that made her stomach flip and her pulse hammer.
Not just pewter steel, but softer at the edges, almost liquid, the color deepening as though he’d let her see something private, something only for her.
“You playing me, working your pixie magic?” he asked, voice low, husky.
“Yes.”
Her grin widened when his laugh rolled out, rich and carefree, the sound vibrating through his chest under her palm.
“God, that smile should be illegal,” she muttered, swiping a smear of dirt from his cheek before leaning away from him.
She meant it as teasing, but his reaction wasn’t teasing at all.
His smile faltered, eyes locking on hers like she’d just crossed a line no one else dared.
He caught her wrist, brought it to his mouth, and kissed her there.
Then, impossibly, his mouth curved wider, softer, as if she’d cracked him open further than he intended.
Her skin tingled where the warmth of his lips had touched. No one kissed her like that, reverent and claiming all at once. “Give me the card before we get ourselves into something…more dangerous than the people hunting us.”
He crouched, set his pack down, pulled out a leash, and set it down on the ground, rummaged around, and produced the card. “You may be tiny, but you’re mighty.”
“Do not start calling me Mighty Mouse.” She shoved his shoulder, and he chuckled.
“It fits,” he murmured, and his tone told her he meant it in ways that had nothing to do with cartoons. “But we could make a deal. You retire Jolly Green Giant, and I might consider it.”
She huffed out a scoffing laugh. You’re just teasing me, aren’t you?
His grin gave him away. “Maybe. It could be that I like all your nicknames for me, and I’m just giving you a hard time?”
“Okay, then that, my friend, is a deal-breaker. Not a chance in hell. Although, you’re living up to your namesake just a tad more than, oh, say when we tumbled down that hill.”
“Shortcake,” he growled with nothing but exasperated affection.
She changed out the card, aware of every inch of that sexy man.
She couldn’t imagine Ben engaging with her like this, playing to her teasing side, stirring her up with his reactions to her touch.
God, she just wanted to touch him all the more.
She hadn’t felt that, ever. Could I possibly deserve it?
Noticing he’d forgotten the leash, she scooped it up and tucked it into her belt.
Shepulled a branch from the undergrowth. With quick, efficient sweeps, she dragged it behind her boots, brushing away the line of prints. The jungle floor gave away too much. She knew. She’d kept track of Sombra easily.
Brawler’s voice rumbled behind her. “We should cut around. Easier ground.”
She shook her head, tilting her chin toward the gray hump of rock rising out of the green. “No. If anyone’s following us, the stone will break the trail. They’ll lose our tracks.”
His scowl was so heavy she could feel it between her shoulder blades. “I’m aware. It’s steep. Risky.”
Ah. Not the terrain. Her. He didn’t trust she could climb it.
Emily started to snap back, but his next words stopped her cold.
“You can probably handle it,” he said, surprising her. “That’s not the problem. No broken ankles on my watch.”
She blinked at him, thrown off balance. He wasn’t questioning her skill. He was questioning his ability to protect her. “You seem to think I can’t take care of myself. I don’t need you to baby me out here.”
He cleared his throat. “It’s what I do.”
“So, I’m what?”
“Chaotic, stubborn, independent to a fault. I don’t understand you sometimes, especially when it comes to danger.
” She heard it threaded through his words in the lines of that big, beautiful body, and it hit her.
This wasn’t about her at all. This was about his need to be essential, and didn’t that fit perfectly for a Navy SEAL? Capable. Big. Strong. Skilled. Trained.
She stepped closer to him. “We’re in this together, Brawler. You, me, Beast.”
His features softened when she included his dog. Beast tilted his head in the most adorable way. It was clear she wasn’t just falling for his big handler. “You really should have been named Fluffems.”
“Emily….”
“What? Look at him.”
Brawler looked down and growled, “No wardog should be named Fluffems . He’s a badass.”
“Exactly. It’s like when you call someone heavy-set Tiny or someone thin Jumbo.”
He chuckled. She loved that he was doing that more often.
He was larger than life, and he filled her up with his presence.
It made her giddy sometimes…joyful not just to argue with him, but in these moments when he was being so…
him. Something cracked through her, something that made her mind buckle and her heart stall.
That’s not for you to have , a little voice said.
That doesn’t belong to you, not after what you did.
He was the source of that joy. God, that scared her.
He scared her because the more time she spent with him, the more she got to know this rough-and-tumble man, the more she wanted.
Joy had been a stranger for so long she barely recognized it, and the part of her that hadn’t shriveled at her own harsh words hungered for more.
“Your screwball logic.” He shook his head, his eyes narrowing, steady, like he was reading her pulse through her skin.
“Is my own. I don’t pretend to be someone I’m not.”
The humor slipped, replaced with something sharper, more attuned. It was unnerving, the way he could feel the shifts in her before she even spoke them. The giddy warmth, the crash of guilt, the hunger curling sharp under it had him reacting like he’d caught every jagged piece.
“Good,” he said roughly. “Don’t. The world’s got enough fakes.”
Her breath caught. For a moment she wondered if he even knew how tuned in he was, how precisely he could track her when she hadn’t said a word. Ben had never noticed. None of them had. But this man? He felt her. That sensitivity scared her almost as much as it drew her closer.
“I’m a master climber. Going through the rocks will be safer in the long run.”
“Can’t argue with that.”