she still avoided looking at the man in question, Davis tried again. “Are you sure?”
Her hands dropped to her sides as her cheeks flushed. “How can you stay so calm?”
The look was not a mystery. Just like always, anger slowly replaced the other emotions clashing inside her. Lashing out was her natural reaction.
If they had ten extra minutes to do this dance, he’d probably welcome anything that took her away from being scared, but right now he needed her to focus so he could get her out of there.
“Practice.” He glanced through the house and out the back door right before he did another visual sweep of the front. Next he turned to the clock above his fireplace and calculated the lead time they’d need if this guy had a partner.
“That’s your response?” Her voice dripped with sarcasm.
Good. He could handle that reaction. “I was being honest.”
She snorted as she stepped around the downed attacker and came closer to Davis. “Right.”
Yeah, she’d definitely shifted to the anger phase. He’d seen it coming. He welcomed it but he also knew he’d have to sit down soon.
He had taken a huge body blow and all that scrambling had knocked something loose inside him. His breathing hovered at the wheezing point. Fearing the damaged rib had slipped from aching to broken, he walked, partly doubled over, to the edge of the couch.
The color left her cheeks as quickly as it had come. “Davis?”
“I need a second.” He had to think. Somehow his work life had once again intruded on her safety. She didn’t even know about the guy who’d threatened her a few months ago and ended up in the morgue. That guy learned the hard way not to come after the woman of a former Defense Intelligence Agency agent turned private-security expert.
Before Davis could blink, she was at his side. Her hand went to his hair and her eyes filled with concern. “Oh, my…your stomach is black-and-blue. We need to get you to a hospital.”
He hissed a sharp breath through his teeth when she tried to wedge her shoulder under his armpit and get him to his feet. “Whoa, honey.”
“I’ll call 9-1-1.”
He caught her around the waist before she could race through the room looking for a phone. Even through the thin shirt, he could feel the heat of her skin and his fingers tightened.
His temperature spiked as his gaze lingered over her breasts. He justified the need rumbling through him by thinking about the adrenaline aftermath. Never mind that he’d never had the desire to kiss anyone else but her after a work takedown. Seeing those big eyes and soul-stealing face, he felt his common sense go on the fritz.
It had always been this way between them. Hot and pulsing, both desperate to get the other into bed. They could communicate between the sheets. Real life was the problem.
“The ribs are from my last job.” And Davis doubted they’d heal anytime soon.
“You got jostled.”
He slipped his hand over hers, trapping it against his stomach. The dull ache caused by the touch was totally worth it. “Jostled?”
This time it looked as if she wanted to roll her eyes. She refrained but likely not by much. “Davis, don’t do that thing where you grab on to words I say and then repeat them back to me in order to ignore or stall a tough discussion.”
Most important to Davis, she didn’t pull away. Not even when he slid his fingers through hers. “You know me too well.”
“Exactly.”
“Then you know what I’m going to say next.” He pulled her in a little closer and her eyes sparkled with that compelling shade of light brown. “I need to call my team and we need to get out of here.”
Her shoulders stiffened. “Police.”
“Not until my people—”
“You have ‘people’ now?”
“—check for identification and scan records to see what hole out of my past the guy crawled up and out of.” She glanced down at their joined hands and he thought he saw a smile tug at the corner of her mouth, though what she could possibly find amusing about the situation was beyond him.
“You’ve never referred to the team at the DIA that way before.”
“I’m not working there now.”
The smile vanished as fast it had come. “What?”
He understood the tension that suddenly appeared around her mouth and eyes. His job had been a huge wedge between them. Truth was his current position was much more dangerous than the old one, and she’d made it clear the old one had scared her to death. “I’ll explain that later, but the ‘people’ I plan to call first is Pax. He’s my brother and, like you, he could be a target, too.”
“You think the attack is about you?”
“What else could it be?” With the Corcoran Team, a private group contracted out to government agencies and private companies to assist in high-priority but under-the-radar kidnap rescue missions, the bad guys were very bad.
Davis and his team worked off the grid, taking on the missions others couldn’t do within legal parameters. That slapped a bull’s-eye on their backs, and it looked as if someone had come looking for payback.
The only question was why they’d included Lara in the plan. Knowing who the attacker was and whom he worked for might answer that question. Until then, Davis was not letting her out of his sight, no matter how much she argued. And he was pretty sure she’d fight the protection.
“You’re forgetting the guy who killed the lieutenant commander didn’t even know I was in the house,” she said, acting as if the out-of-context comment explained everything.
But the news crashed through Davis’s mental walls. He’d just come up with a plan, and then she threw this new information at him. Kind of an important piece, too. “Go back. Someone was killed?”
“I mentioned that.”
“Uh, no. That’s a fact I’d remember.”
“I’m not going to argue about who knew what when.” Her hand left his stomach and she started pacing. When she got close to the body, she came scurrying right back to Davis’s side. “For a second I forgot there was a dead guy on the floor. What does that say about me?”
The conversation threatened to veer off course again, so he brought it back. “You were talking about the murder of a naval officer?”
“Let’s just say that’s the second time today I fought a guy off with a lamp.”
The information nearly stopped Davis’s heart. The idea of her injured and scared tore through him with the force of a hurricane, leaving behind a hollow emptiness in his gut. He could go a lifetime without seeing the look he had seen on her face a few minutes ago. But this went beyond fear. She’d
