Chapter 17 #3
Breakneck rode in silence, eyes fixed on the dark treeline sliding past the window, ribs aching, adrenaline thinning into something sharper and harder to manage.
His pulse still hadn’t settled. Every time he glanced at Blair beside him, the memory of her hitting the ground under his hand jolted through him all over again.
He had worked with women before. Competent ones.
Warriors. Investigators. Operators. Women who ran their lanes with precision and didn’t need his help.
He had never felt compelled to shadow them, never wanted to keep them in his line of sight, never felt this quiet, inconvenient instinct to guard someone who clearly didn’t need guarding.
Blair was different. He hated that he felt it so strongly.
From the back of the SUV came the predictable ribbing, a welcome distraction he couldn’t quite absorb.
“Never seen you move so fast,” Boomer said, the grin obvious in his voice.
“Great shooting on the fly,” Skull added. “Like you were born sideways in midair.”
“That twisting half-gainer was a thing of beauty,” Kodiak chimed in. “Textbook break-dance, junior.”
Beef’s voice followed, amused. “Yeah, that was a hell of a position you got into. Never saw anything like that.”
A low chuckle rolled from Ice. “You always cover our asses, Break.”
Blair spoke last, her tone quiet but edged with awe she wasn’t trying to hide. “I have a feeling that anyone you get a position on is a dead man. The way you shoot is nothing short of masterful.”
Her words hit him harder than the rest combined.
Something in him tightened, fractured, reassembled into a shape he didn’t recognize.
Praise from the team slid off him easily, routine, comfortable, expected.
Praise from Blair worked him over harder than the cartel.
His inclination was to expect manipulation.
He couldn’t look at her.
She had no idea what she was doing to him. No idea how fast he had moved the second she was in danger. No idea how close the RPG blast had come to taking her from him. No idea how much of himself he had lost in the span of three seconds when he saw her, illuminated by fire and death.
He tried to breathe around it. Tried to find the steadiness that usually lived at the center of him, the sniper’s calm, the cold iron inside that never bent or wavered. It slipped from his grasp like water through a fist.
His thoughts scattered and reformed. The mission was done.
Marques was alive. The team was intact. But his mind kept circling Blair’s voice, the way she had said masterful, like she saw something in him worth naming.
Something beyond violence. Something that frightened him more than the blast that had shaved the air above her spine.
He didn’t know why she moved inside him this way. He didn’t know why his will had splintered the moment she spoke. He didn’t know why the instinct to protect her felt dangerously close to need.
He only knew he had to figure it out.
Because the feeling wasn’t small. It wasn’t passing. It wasn’t a surge of post-combat heat or gratitude. This feeling carried weight and shape, an unsettling sense of importance he could not dismiss or file away like he usually did with anything that threatened his emotional equilibrium.
Blair Brown was becoming an unknown. A variable he couldn’t calculate.
A door he couldn’t close. He was starting to understand her in ways he shouldn’t, noticing patterns, micro-expressions, quiet strength, moments of silence where she listened instead of reacted.
All of it sent warning signals through him like electric shocks.
His gut tightened. There was a part of him, small, dangerous, reckless, that whispered he could trust her. That she could hold what he had never given anyone. That she saw him without flinching.
He didn’t trust that whisper. Not for a second.
He knew the cost of exposing himself in the wrong moment. He knew what it meant to get burned on a mission. He knew the consequences of getting too close to someone who mattered when bullets were flying. He knew the danger of letting his guard down with one of the primaries.
Hell, he knew the danger of letting his guard down at all.
Getting this tangled up in Blair Brown wasn’t just a risk. It was a detonation waiting to happen. The kind that blew up lives, not buildings.
His body was restless, keyed up, coiled too tight for the small space of the SUV. His mind kept skidding back to the instant before the blast, to the sound she made when he shoved her to the ground, to the look in her eyes when the dust settled, and she realized he was the one holding her safe.
He turned his head slightly. She was watching the treeline, jaw set, calm and composed, unaware she had become the axis around which his entire world was tilting.
He swallowed, the motion rough.
He’d told himself to keep his hands off her.
Out here, with her voice still in his ear and the smell of burnt earth still clinging to them, he wasn’t sure he could.