Page 7 of Echo, the Sniper (Men of PSI #2)

“This crowd is a good sign, isn’t it?” Rory plucked up two laminated menus from the napkin holder and handed me one.

“This place always has a crowd, no matter the time of day. It’s been that way since I moved into this neighborhood.

I’ve always wanted to see what kind of food they had that made people line up out the door just for a taste of it, so I’m glad we’re trying this now. ”

That made me glance up from perusing the impressive list of breakfast burritos. “Wait, you’ve never eaten here before?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Dane.” She said her former husband’s name like that was the explanation to everything. “He said he’d never be caught dead in here because it was possible someone important might see him in a place where the help eats their meals.”

That stopped me cold. The fuck . “The help?”

“Cherrywood Creek has its good points, I swear. But there’s no denying that at its heart, it’s a conclave of social-climbing, country-club-dwelling snobs who’d fall over dead if people ever found out most of them come from backgrounds where dollar-store dinners and pre-owned cars are the norm.

Dane always said the only reason this restaurant wasn’t pushed out into Denver’s city limits was because it was on the cusp of a neighborhood where Cherrywood Creek’s maids, janitors and gardeners lived, and needed a place to eat. ”

“Fuck.” It took a lot to unclench my jaw while I thought of my tía and abuela, and all the amazing creations that came out of that tiny kitchen where I grew up.

Food of the fucking gods, but none of it would have been “good enough” for an entitled asshole like Dane Grant.

“Good ol’ Dane was a real one, wasn’t he? ”

Her little huff spoke volumes. “He wouldn’t even let me cook something like cheese enchiladas for dinner because it was ‘peasant’ food.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“Nope. Can you imagine something as amazing and perfect as enchiladas being looked down on? I love enchiladas. My mom had a killer recipe for enchilada sauce that’s now gone up in a puff of smoke, and since Dane stopped me from putting any sort of Mexican food on the weekly menu, I have no memory of how to make it. ”

“Then you’ve unlocked your first mission of life after Cherrywood Creek and Dane—find the enchilada sauce that tastes like your mom’s.

” I scanned the menu, then reached over to where her uninjured hand curled on the table, and guided her index finger to the enchilada section.

“That’s where you begin your search. Order some enchiladas. ”

“For breakfast?” She looked like I’d suggested she try the breaded kittens.

“I once had two-day old, pan-fried tilapia and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos for breakfast. I didn’t get arrested by the breakfast police, so I doubt you will, either.”

She stared at me in poorly veiled horror. “Wow, that’s... a lot. Serious question—did you survive it with your stomach intact?”

I see-sawed my hand. “Since I hadn’t eaten in two days—I had a stakeout that should’ve lasted twelve hours but wound up landing me in a Mexican desert for forty-eight blistering hours—I had no regrets.”

“That sounds like quite a story.”

“It is. Once it’s no longer classified, I’ll tell you all about it.”

“I’d love to take you up on that.” Her expressive eyes filled with a mixture of awe and sympathy that was so mesmerizing I almost didn’t clock the harried teenaged server zooming toward our table. “I get the feeling you’ve done a lot of living for someone who’s only... what, in your late twenties?”

“Good eye. Twenty-nine, as of last month.”

“Happy birthday, Echo.” She said it so sweetly, like she meant it.

Sappy idiot that I was, I let myself believe she did.

“You’re really something, you know that?

An Army Ranger, an MP, a private security expert, eating two-day-old tilapia, and you did all of that before the age of thirty.

Here I am, a widowed twenty-three-year-old college dropout who’s never had a job, and has an honorable mention from the Colorado Rose Society for my Sweet Spirit grandiflora rose.

Clearly I need to up my game, something I should probably do now that—” A small gasp cut her words off.

I frowned, doing a quick but thorough sweep of the room, only to find nothing amiss. “Now that... what?”

Her peaches-and-cream complexion had gone paper-white. “Nothing.”

“That’s a lie you just told me, Rory, and that’s no way to build up our trust. Remember, we’re working on getting to know each other, yeah? So what were you going to say?”

“I-I was going to say, now that I’m a free woman. But then I realized how that would have sounded, so I stopped.”

I searched her expression, and for once I wished I had a profiler’s ability to figure shit out.

One look at the pained shadows in Rory’s eyes, or the way her delicate brows pinched upward in obvious distress, and our resident profiler, Luke, would have known her every thought and action for the next six months.

But me? Forget about it. The only option I had was to blunder ahead with all the subtlety of a chainsaw and hope for the best.

“I don’t get what the trauma is, Rory. Aren’t you a free woman? Where’s the problem in stating facts?”

“There’s no problem.” She paused as the teen server at last landed by our table to take our orders—Rory’s three cheese enchiladas and my chorizo and egg breakfast plate with lots and lots of coffee.

“I just didn’t want to sound disrespectful about my late husband.

But the fact is, I... I wasn’t free,” she added, and there went that little chin jut again, a stubborn lift that I was beginning to learn was a signal she was about to embark on a Barbie-cute tirade.

“You have no idea how completely not free I was.”

“Enlighten me.”

“I had to turn in weekly menus on Saturday so that Dane could approve them by Sunday. That was the only way I was allowed to have grocery money, and therefore food in the house. If I didn’t do that, he would eat every meal out for that entire week, and I.

.. I would eat what I could find in the house.

I also couldn’t touch the handles of the exterior doors. ”

I did a double take. “What?”

She nodded, looking pained. “To leave that house, you’d have to touch a door handle, right? Well, I couldn’t touch the door handles without his permission. There were two times that I did in the three years we were married, and... well, I’ve had two broken fingers in my life. You do the math.”

“Holy shit.” Rage swelled, so intensely I had to set my utensils aside before I bent them into twisted metal balls.

Again, she nodded. “To get the permission I needed to open those exterior doors, I had to have a detailed itinerary of where I was going, and why. Any time I opened the front door or garage, even if it was to tend the roses out front, he’d set up our security so he’d be notified the exterior doors were opening.

And every time I opened a door without first letting him know I was about to do it, he’d drop whatever he was doing so he could come home and.

.. and teach me to never, ever open doors without his permission. ”

That mother fucker . “Rory, you’re saying that Dane—”

“I’m not going to talk about what Dane did or didn’t do.

” Her voice was jagged, while her shoulders hunched as if she were trying to make herself smaller.

In my sniper’s mind, I registered what that meant—a smaller target was harder to hit.

That’s what she was trying to become, whether she realized it or not.

She doesn’t want to be hit ... “I just know what it is to not be free. That’s all. ”

Drop him, drop him, drop him, drop him...

The familiar drumbeat to drop the enemy was so loud in my head, it was a wonder the rest of the diners didn’t hear it.

It was the drumbeat of death, something no civilized person could understand or accept.

Drop meant kill , a relabeling coping mechanism I’d learned to do early on in my military career of being what they’d trained me to be—death from afar.

If the civilians crowding this restaurant were capable of hearing the deadly drumbeat inside of me, they’d think I was a raving serial killer, a true monster in their midst. But I knew better.

The real monster was Dane fucking Grant, and I now understood my own mission—I had to kill this fucker in Rory’s mind so that he could no longer hurt her.

I just had to be patient on how I went about it.

Good thing patience was the ultimate character trait of every sniper worth his salt.

“So, what I’m hearing is that you could use a few basic lessons when it comes to being free and answerable to no one—except to the bodyguard who won’t let you dance down the middle of a street or sit in some sidewalk café right out in the open,” I added as an afterthought, because that shit had to be said up front.

“But overall, I think this is a good beginning of getting to know each other. In just a few minutes we found you a new mission, and a new way of life to explore. Not a bad day’s work, and you haven’t even had breakfast yet. ”

“That’s you getting to know me ,” she pointed out as plates of steaming, spicy-scented food slid before us. Eagerly she sampled her enchiladas, made a so-so motion with her injured hand, then eyed my plate. “What about me getting to know you? And what is that you ordered? Looks interesting.”

“Chorizo and eggs make the best breakfast tacos on earth—pure pork protein to fuel the body and enough spice to make your tastebuds stand up and do a happy dance. Try,” I added, unwrapping my utensils from the paper napkin, scooping up a spicy bit of chorizo and egg onto my fork, and holding it an inch or so from her mouth.

She took it without hesitation, a little baby bird eager for a new experience.

It wasn’t until those plump lips closed over my fork that the raw sensuality of the moment hit me, and suddenly all I could focus on were those lips.

Glistening. Soft. Full. They wrapped around my fork like a wet dream, and all too easily I could imagine that pouty little mouth stretching to close around the blood-darkened knob of my dick.

Fuck.

“Mm, that’s amazing.” Delight bloomed in her eyes, and in an instant the grunting caveman in me devoted myself to the ambition of putting that dreamy look on her face as many times as humanly possible.

“I guess that means my first discoveries about you are that you have excellent taste in breakfast food. And that you don’t mind sharing. What else should I put on that list?”

“I’m sure we’ll think of something.” By some miracle, I managed to keep the rampaging lust out of my tone.

God only knew how much longer I’d be able to keep that up.