Page 105 of Lethal Threat

I’d have pursued her like a possessed man. Only she held my gaze and grazed the tip of her tongue over her lip, and I knew it was game on.

It’s a wonder something didn’t ignite in that meeting room, because the sparks between us could have been measured in megawatts.

I scrub my hand over my face.Holy mother of sanity.“One thought about that day and I’m a freaking wreck all over again.”

Simona grins at my discomfort, and I scowl at her.

“When did you know you loved her?”

I laugh darkly. This is one ofthosestories. “Literally, the moment I laid eyes on her.”

She waves a hand, scoffs, and says in her accented English, “I don’t believe in love at first sight.”

“I get it. Neither did I.”

She tips up her water bottle and sips. A few seconds later, she thoughtfully says, “Lust maybe. Sure. But there’s no way you can know that someone is right for you so fast.”

“Oh, I had lust alright, but there was a knowing in my gut that this girl was going to bethewoman who left a lasting mark on my world.” I shove my head back into the seat. “That knowing has never gone away. Hell, it’s only gotten deeper and harder to deny every single day since Sierra walked into that meeting and stole my sanity right alongside my heart.”

Leaning toward me as if I’m suddenly an exotic animal in a zoo, Simona studies my face. “Love, huh? What’s that feel like?”

Shifting in my seat, I try to ease the ache inside of my chest. “Big.”

She stares at me expectantly.

I shake my head once. “I’m not a poet. It felt fucking big. Huge. Like my insides couldn’t hold in the energy that filled me up every time I looked at her.”

Emotion takes hold of my voice, making it rough andsparse. “We were like wildfire. And that flame brought new life to me, like it does to the forest when a fire burns it down. She brought me back from the brink of something so dark it was eating me whole.”

Simona inhales swiftly. The look in her eyes is unmistakable. It’s crystal-clear understanding. The kind that happens when you recognize a piece of yourself in someone. In a rough whisper, she says, “You were going to kill yourself.”

I glance away. “No. Yes.Hell,I don’t know. I was wrecked and didn’t even realize how bad it really was. Sierra recognized it for what it was, PTSD. She got me to see the value of therapy. Which is ironic, given that I didn’t think therapy was the right thing for her brother. But I wasn’t punching and kicking an innocent woman."

I shake my head. Not the time for this.

But, I keep on talking. “I just felt like shit. Three friends from my unit got killed within six months. They were good men. And left behind wives and babies. It rocked me. I’d seen so much death and war. I was just broken. And?—”

She looks me in the eye. “You don’t need to explain.”

I shift in the now uncomfortable seat. “Have you ever been in love?”

She presses her mouth flat as her eyes skate away toward the window. “Men don’t love women like me.”

Without another word, she gets up and walks to the restroom at the front of the plane.

Shit. Aren’t we a pair?

Feeling even more out of sorts, I unbuckle and lurch from the seat. Near the rear of the plane, I find Marshall at a conference table. His head is dipped low as he works on his laptop.

His gaze moves over me. “Good timing, Cole.” Hemotions to the chair across from him. “Since you said Sierra will go looking for her brother, I wanted to know more about the guy. What I found isn’t good.”

My mind tracks to the worst outcomes first. “Did someone find his body?”

“Nothing like that. But came across some rumored shit about the guys in his unit that might shed some light on Bryan’s downward spiral. Do you know if he was using B-zene?”

Shaking my head, I say, “Never heard of it. I didn’t know what he was using when she and I broke up. He was a mess.”

“Be glad you haven’t heard of this crap before. It’s a new synthetic drug that’s added to other drugs. The results are really fucked up. More addictive. And people are super aggressive when on it. But here’s the weird part. They are also highly controllable by people they see as their source.”