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He toweled off with a curse and left the towel draped over the door. His shirt had hit the floor on the way in, landing somewhere near the sneakers he hadn’t bothered to untie before toeing them off. Back in the bathroom, he trimmed his beard close. Instead, he rubbed a faint trace of blended oil from his culture between his palms, something warm and dark, smoke threaded through with rose, and smoothed it through his beard, across the hollow of his throat, under his arms, and into the pulse points at his wrists.
He was halfway through buttoning his navy-blue shirt when her face drifted back into his mind. Again, immune to cold water and discipline. Not her body this time. Her voice. Dry as sand, warm as sun. That face like a locked room. Those eyes that had looked through him like she already knew what she’d find.
He snorted softly and shook his head. What were the odds? Why did a part of him wonder what it’d take to run into her again, this time on purpose? He shrugged it off. Pointless. What would she want with a broken SEAL, a man whose past was a shattered reel of images he couldn’t line up, whose future looked like a door already closing?
He grabbed his black leather jacket and keys and headed down to the rental. They’d offered him a driver. He declined. He preferred handling his own coming and going. Fewer questions. Fewer chances to be surprised.
The morning air was crisp, mountain-bright, the kind of dry that cracked your knuckles and cleared your head. He took the turn onto the main road, let the wheels eat the distance, passed a sign for Garden of the Gods, and didn’t slow down. The OrdoTech Strategies facility rose out of the red earth like a bunker dressed up in glass, slick lines, dark panels, too clean to trust.
Security let him in without a pause. No badge. No questions. Just a nod and opening doors. He scanned the ceiling. Drones in the corners. Eyes everywhere. Which meant Caspari’s audit story was in place and working as intended.
A man in a fitted blazer met him at the front, said nothing but pointed him down a hall and through a secondary checkpoint. The place smelled like paper and power, like recycled air and cold coffee. They led him to a glass-front office.
“This’ll be your workspace,” the man said, then stepped back into the hall.
Nash exhaled once, noting a woman with impossibly red hair… No…couldn’t be.
She turned in her seat, sleeves rolled to the wrist. No expression to read except for the clarity in her gaze.
“Grace Harlan,” she said, her gaze dragging deliberately over him. “If you work like you run,” she added, “we’re going to get along just fine.” Her voice still held that dry edge, like she had learned early on that silence could be a weapon but words, when used right, cut deeper. “We’re chasing something.”
He wasn’t sure if she meant the case. Or him.
CHAPTERTHREE
The space was exactlyas she remembered it from yesterday’s tour. Too clean. Monotone. Designed for people who made clean breaks.
There were two chairs, and she carefully, deliberately chose the one facing the console. The one that let her back face the door. If she had to look at Nashir Rahim while she tried to function, she wouldn’t.
She placed her bag beside her chair, smoothed the front of her jacket, and sat. Her fingers trembled once on the edge of the keyboard. She pressed them flat to the desk. This wasn’t a crush. It was a problem. An unanticipated variable she hadn’t accounted for.
The trail looped behind the OrdoTech compound, carved into a dry ridge lined with half-dead pine, scrub grass, and the occasional security drone disguised as a wildlife camera. The air was cool, thinner than Phoenix, and carried the sharp edge of high-altitude stillness.
She hadn’t meant to be on the trail that early. But the sterile luxury of her suite at the hotel had offered no comfort for her restless mind and the intrusive flashes of the man she’d collided with that morning. Sleek floors. Polished chrome. White noise vents disguised as air purifiers. The kind of place meant to feel expensive without actually feeling human.
Sleep had been a suggestion, not a reality. Again.
The night had been half-code, half-coffee, and a full-body reminder that she was better with patterns than people. Better with systems than silence. The room had been too quiet, but not the comforting kind, more like waiting-room silence. Like bad news was coming and hadn’t knocked yet.
She’d paced for two hours. Checked her firewall redundancies twice. Reviewed the initial audit files. The code was clean, but the procurement trail wasn’t. Not exactly. Not obviously. Just enough to itch.
The run helped for a while, until the path curved and the mountain hit her. Literally.
The impact reverberated, even when she took her clothes off back at the hotel, even when she got under the spray. The scent of him, warm cedar, spice, sun-drenched muscle memory still lingered at the edge of her senses. Like she’d inhaled him too deep and couldn’t quite exhale.
She scrubbed harder than she needed to. Pulled her hair back tighter than usual because recklessness would get her into too much trouble. Buttoned her blouse all the way up, like containment could be stitched in cotton. She didn’t pick the black pumps. Too loud on tile. She chose flats. Gray. Silent. The kind worn by women who disappeared easily into background noise.
She told herself the run was about oxygen. Alignment. Not being the first analyst to break on day one.
His file suggested that Nash Rahim may be difficult. Possibly charming. Definitely intense.
She hadn’t expected him to rearrange something inside her.
He was rattling her nervous system like an unanticipated earthquake. Shaking the pillars she lived by. One collision. One arm around her. One scent that wouldn’t leave her skin. Suddenly, her bubble didn’t feel reinforced anymore. It felt fragile. Hairline fractures under pressure.
She curled her fingers tighter against the desk. She would not break. Not here. Not in front of him.
Mistakes were the enemy. That’s how she’d survived being buried, by being useful. Controlled. Invisible. But now she was vibrating with the weight of what she hadn’t been ready for. Then she felt it. A shift in the air. A ripple in the silence. The door opened behind her. She didn’t have to look. She knew it was him.