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She hadn’t expected him. Not like that. Not at a dead sprint. Not on top of her.
But the second his arm wrapped around her to break the fall, her body knew.
The weight. The reflex. The shield.
She didn’t say his name. Didn’t even let her eyes widen. She just cataloged the details while he tried to play off the impact, breathing like a freight train and still somehow steadying her like she was the fragile one.
Classic operator conditioning. Entirely unnecessary. She was fine. More than fine, if she was being honest, if her pulse had anything to say about it. Not that she’d admit it.
Not when he looked at her like that. Like he was trying to fit her into a box he didn’t even realize was two sizes too small. Like he didn’t know she already knew more about him than he wanted anyone to. She did. Of course she did. She’d read his file three times.
Then she’d closed it because the file didn’t explain the spaces. The parts that didn’t track. The pieces that had been redacted or rewritten so many times, they no longer resembled truth.
That was why she was here.
But she hadn’t expected him to look like that. The picture with the file had him in tactical gear, and it didn’t do him justice.
Now they had to work together.
Perfect.
Uneasiness slid over her. She’d thought it would be awkward. She hadn’t counted on it being this intimate, this fast. Not the way his hand had pressed to her back when they fell. Not the way he’d looked at her after, like she’d just made a fissure in his armor, and he wasn’t sure if it was lethal. Had he been testing the edges of her bubble, her barrier, the one she’d erected after…everything, so that everything wouldn’t destroy her?
She should’ve said something. Should’ve acknowledged him.
Instead, she let him go. Let him walk away with that same alpha-stalking grace all warriors carried before they remembered how to be civilians.
Now she was sitting in a sterile glass box at OrdoTech, trying not to think about the fact that he had been a face in a file, and when she finally did meet him, it was upside down with pine needles in her hair.
She folded her arms as footsteps echoed in the hallway. No one had warned her that he’d gotten stronger than the man in the SEAL report. Quieter than the photo suggested. Heavier in ways a file could never capture.Caspari hadn’t said,By the way, Nash? He survived what killed the others. He looks like he carries every one of them on his back.
She just had to get to her station. Get back to the code. Get her breathing under control before he?—
Then the door opened.
Nash Rahim didn’t just walk in. He entered, like gravity arriving late to the equation, tension bleeding off him like steam, moving with a stillness born from noise, the kind that only came after chaos, after everything inside had already shattered. His eyes scanned corners, vents, surveillance domes. Not paranoid. Pattern-trained. Like a man who’d entered too many rooms that hadn’t let him leave again.
Her breath caught, not for the body, though God, the body was a structural masterpiece, but for theabsenceof everything he used to be.
He was built differently than in the photos. Leaner. Sharper. All edges and silence. Then his gaze found hers and stuck. Just a fraction too long. Not unprofessional.Calculated.She could totally understand that. Like he’d filed her under “unresolved variable” and was already running the math.
“Grace Harlan,” she said, steady.
He was just a man. A mountain of a man with battlefield eyes, scars behind his restraint, and a body built like a weapon, but still, just a man.
So why couldn’t she stop shaking?
His brow didn’t twitch. But his voice, when it came, was lower than it had been on the trail. Almost cautious. He closed the door behind him.
“You look pretty good for a woman who got hit by a mountain only this morning.”
His face hadn’t changed much, but ithad. Sharper now. More defined. High cheekbones, square jaw, a close-trimmed beard that shaded his mouth like an unfinished secret. His eyes, deep, dark, unflinching, held a kind of black fire that scorched.
She’d read the file. Memorized it. But nothing had prepared her for this, forhim. That body was still all precision. Corded muscle. Long lines. Built not for show, but for the kind of work that left scars.
Something warm pierced her poor, beleaguered bubble.
Charming.