Page 1 of Deadly Strain

Chapter One

“I’m so dead.” Dr. GraceSamuels stared at the chessboard. There was no hope. None. Not a single move left open to her.

Except for one.

She sighed, shook her head at the patience on her opponent’s face. “I concede.”

“Want to know where you went wrong?” he asked as he cleared the board. He set the pieces up again. Those big hands of his could bandage a wounded soldier, field strip a 9 mm and box her into checkmate with equal skill.

“I sat down in this chair,” she answered with a straight face. The mess hall was busy with soldiers, American and Afghan alike, either beginning their day or ending their night.

“No,” he said. “You played the board.”

Grace thought about it for a second, but it still didn’t make any sense. Then again, it was 0600 and she’d only been up for twenty minutes. “Huh?”

Special Forces Weapons Sergeant Jacob “Sharp” Foster looked at her earnestly. “You played the board,” he repeated. “You should have been playing the man.”

He winked, and she had to fight not to roll her eyes. When she first met him she’d thought his flirting was for real, and had been worried she’d have to shut him down. She didn’t want to, because he was hilarious, but still, she wanted to keep things professional. Then, she discovered everyone was a potential target of his wicked sense of humor. Everyone.

“Then I suppose I’ll have to study you.” She leaned forward and made a show of giving him a thorough once-over.

He grinned and spread his hands wide. “By all means, study me.”

Sharp was a big man, about six-two, and she’d guess he weighed about two hundred pounds. He flexed his biceps and waggled his eyebrows in response to her joke. Though he had brown hair with a mustache and beard to match, he had the lightest blue eyes she’d ever seen—like looking into glacial ice.

Right now, those eyes were challenging her. She just wasn’t sure if it was regarding the game or something she didn’t want to talk about. At all.

Unfortunately, Sharp wasn’t going to leave it alone. The chess game should have warned her. They usually played poker.

She watched him reset the chessboard while, for the first time in a week, letting her mind go back to the moment she realized she was in trouble. On her way to her quarters late at night. They’d arrived at Forward Operating Base Bostick the week before, and she’d been introduced to the base commander, Colonel Marshall. He’d glared at her for exactly two seconds before turning his back to her. A move that communicated his disdain for her loud and clear.

She’d never met the man and had no idea what she’d done to piss him off.

So why was he waiting for her outside her quarters with clenched fists and a face so blank she knew he was in the grip of a powerful emotion?

The colonel wasn’t known for any kind of emotion.

She stopped several feet away. “Can I help you with something, sir?”

One corner of his upper lip lifted in a sneer and he snarled, “I wanted a private conversation.”

His words triggered every internal red flag she had. “At this hour?”

When he didn’t respond, she asked, “What about?”

Marshall’s response was two words. One name. “Joseph Cranston.”

A name she wished she could forget. But she couldn’t. His face was etched onto her mind, features covered in blood spatter, eyes open wide and sightless. “You...knew him?”

Scorn turned his words into weapons. “He was my son.”

Oh God.

Grace took an involuntary step backward.

The colonel followed. “I’ve read the report of theincident,” he said, one corner of his lip curling in disgust. “You got him killed.”

Marshall’s eyes. Now that she knew, she could see the son in his father’s face, the same eyes and jawline as the young man who’d saved her life at the expense of his own. As if conjured, his shade floated in front of her mind’s eye, thrusting her into a memory she wanted desperately to erase.