The Impossible Alliance

She was a split second from exploding when her fury simply…evaporated. Stranger still, she wasn’t as stunned by that as she was by the intense urge to weep that supplanted it.

Weep?

No way. She did not cry. Dammit, she’d cried a total of three measly times in the past fifteen years. The first when her father died. The second when her aunt Rita had passed away. The third pity-fest had taken place four months later, halfway through graduate school, the day she’d discovered just how much the love of her life wasn’t in love with her. She hadn’t cried since.

So why the devil was she blubbering now?

“It’s the coma.” He tipped her chin. To her utter humiliation, he reached up and smoothed the tears from her cheeks.

“I swear, I never—” She sealed her shame with a violent, shuddering hiccup.

“I know. I told you, it’s the aftereffects of the coma.” He pulled her close and guided her head to his shoulder, stroking his hands up and down her back as she continued to sob for all she was worth, drenching the inky strands of his hair along with the wool sweater beneath. “Shh. It’s okay. The anger, the crying jags, the mood swings. They’re normal, I promise. They’ll pass.”

Eventually they did. At least this one did. Unfortunately, by that time she managed to pull herself together, the shame had set in. She tried backing away, but his arms stopped her.

“Don’t.”

She flinched as he tucked her hair behind her ear. She was simply too raw to prevent it. “Please. Let me go.”

“No.” His fingers slipped beneath her chin. “Look at me.”

Why? It was too dark.

Except it wasn’t. Not this close. Not anymore. The blanket of clouds had thinned even more, spreading apart to leave a generous three-quarter moon and a broad swath of stars behind. The twinkling lights studded the canopy of the pine forest, allowing her to make out that tawny gaze with painful perfection. She didn’t want to see it. To see him. And she certainly didn’t want him seeing her. Not like this. She’d hadn’t felt this exposed in her entire life. In less than two hours, under the obscuring cover of night, this man had managed to see far too much.

God only knew what he’d see in the harsh light of day.

“Are you okay now?”

Not by a long shot. “Yes. Will you please release me?”

He did.

They both breathed easier.

She stepped away from the pile of gear as he hunkered down, fully aware that she was affording herself room, rather than him. He dug through his ruck and pulled out a dark T-shirt. Before she could stop him, he’d stripped the sweater from his chest and he held it out.

“Put it on. We’ve got a decent hike ahead of us.”

“No, you keep it. Since you’ve read my file, you know I did my grad work in Colorado. I doubt I’ll even notice the cold.”

“You’ve also been in a coma for three weeks. Trust me, you’ll notice.”

Three weeks? Just like that, the vertigo returned. She swallowed the nausea that came with it. “That long?”

He nodded…and held out the sweater.

This time she took it. Evidently he was right about the mood swings, because she couldn’t muster the brazenness she’d ridden earlier as she’d stripped the prosthetic from her chest in front of him. She left the filthy shirt tied beneath her breasts and pulled the thick turtleneck on over it. His tantalizing scent swirled through her, suffocating her. Worse, the sweater still carried his heat.

Ignore it.

Somehow she managed—until she glanced up and caught the glimmer of moonlight slipping across that seriously sculpted, dangerously dusky chest. A moment later the rippling muscles disappeared beneath the T-shirt. Disappointment warred with relief as he tucked the hem into his jeans, then leaned down to repack his rucksack. But at least her lungs had kicked in. She breathed deeply as she pushed up the sweater’s sleeves.

Shock yanked the air right back out.

Blood?

She raised her right arm and fingered the damp stitching again, the raw edges of the rip. She leaned closer, this time sniffing the knit fabric, and cursed.

“You were shot.”

He nodded as leaned down to tuck his jumpsuit into the ruck. “Grazed.”

“Let me take a look.”

“I already did.” Before she could argue, he reached into his first-aid kit and pulled out another cravat. He flipped the green fabric over itself and wrapped the resulting triangle around his right biceps as he stood. “But you can tie it off for me.”

Alex retrieved the ends as he stepped in front of her, avoiding the man’s steady gaze as she pulled the fabric snugly against the muscle bulging beneath the bandage. His subtle, smoky scent swirled through her. Dammit, he was fantasy fodder, nothing more. A figment of her dreams. She secured the knot quickly and stepped back. “How far?”

His dark brows rose as he glanced up.

“The hike,” she clarified. “I assume we’re headed to a safe house.”

“We are. Four kilometers.” He flipped his thumb over his right shoulder. “That way.”

“And this new assignment? It has to do with Karl and Bruno DeBruzkya, doesn’t it?”

Jared took a step back, as well. But he said nothing.

He was holding out on her. She could feel it. The air between them had changed. Grown cool, distant. Almost wary. Like him. For a man who’d been tasked with a mission, a mission he’d already told her she shared, he was suspiciously closemouthed. Why? All she’d done was ask about DeBruzkya and—

“Karl.”

Jared reversed his direction, this time stepping toward her. Still guarded, still wary. If anything, even more so. His body language sealed it. Her memory might not have been functioning up to par, but her instincts were. She took a deep breath, sucked up the pain and regret and just said it. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Jared nodded slowly. “When ARIES lost contact with you, they went searching for Karl. He wasn’t there. Not in your room or his. He didn’t settle his hotel bill, nor did he attend his own lecture scheduled for the following day. He just vanished. Our recon team found traces of blood in his room. His type. A week later his body turned up on the outskirts of town. It wasn’t pretty.” He reached out and cupped his hands to her shoulders. “You okay?”

“No. He was a contact, but he was also my friend.” She grimaced at the irony of it. At her pathetic self. Karl might have been her friend. But he hadn’t even known she was a woman.

“H-how—” She swallowed the tears that threatened for the second time. She refused to give in to them. Nothing would be gained by it. Karl would be better served if she focused on finding the bastard who murdered him. She pictured her friend. His shaggy blond hair. His awkward, hulking body. That damned goofy grin. The passion that radiated off him when he spoke about his true love, physics.

It worked.

The tears dried and the pain in her heart eased, if only slightly. But at least she could think about Karl without that stifling sense of suffocation that had clamped down onto her lungs since she awoke. She could even see him at the conference, in his hotel room— “That’s it!”

“You remember seeing him?”

“Yes. We were supposed to meet in his hotel room. We did. I was furious, too.”