Just for a breath. Just enough to wreck him.
Then she blinked, armor sliding back into place, and turned away, her palm never leaving Flint’s fur as she moved. Bear’s jaw clenched. His pulse kicked hard enough to bruise the inside of his ribs.
She wasn’t gone yet. That look…that moment…was a crack in all her defenses.
A crack big enough for him to get through if he used his voice, spoke his truth.
The ride to Ipanema was fast, with an arm’s-length security escort, nothing unusual. The SEALs sprawled across the seats, laughing and talking like nothing about this city held ghosts. Like this was any other insertion.
It was true that he almost died here. But he’d been in many places, faced down a lot of enemies with the possibility of death. Saving Zorro’s family, his nieces was what stood out to him, not the blood or the pain, or almost losing his life. This is who they were. What they did.
Something else stood out to him as well: Bailee showing up at his hospital room. The touch of her hands in his hair, the way she soaked into his skin, the feel of her longing, her need to make sure he was all right. That was the crack she’d opened up, and it had given him the courage to fight for more.
Bailee sat pressed against the window, watching the coastline race by, her reflection carved in shadow, unreadable. Every few minutes, her breath would hitch, not enough for anyone else to notice, but Bear felt it like pressure in his own ribs.
He wanted to reach across the seat. Wanted to take her hand. Wanted to anchor her to the now instead of the nightmare she was sliding into. But she wasn’t ready for that. He knew that before he even tried.
When the SUV pulled into the circle drive of the Hotel Orquídea Atlântica, Zorro grinned like a man walking straight into good memories. Bear felt Bailee flinch beside him.
Subtle. But not to him.
Inside, check-in took minutes. JSOC covered everything. Rooms on the same secure floor. Bear picked up his keycard, felt the old tension settle into his bones, the kind he only got when something important was slipping away and he didn’t know how to stop it.
Bailee took her key without looking at him.
“Adjoining rooms,” Zorro said with a wink.
Protocol. Safety. Proximity.
Bailee nodded, swallowed, and walked ahead.
Bear followed.
She reached her door, slid the keycard, the soft beep cutting through the hush of the hallway. She would have slipped inside without a backward glance but Bear’s voice broke low behind her.
“Flint. Go.”
The dog moved instantly, trotting to her side, pressing himself against her leg with quiet, instinctive devotion.
Bailee stopped.
Her hand slid into Flint’s ruff, fingers curling like someone grounding herself against a shifting world. A breath left her chest, small, unintentional, soft enough to almost miss.
Then she looked back, a fierce search for his gaze as the air changed. Stirred. Tightened.
Her eyes held him, lit by the hotel’s warm light, wide in a way she never allowed, something unguarded breaking through the armor she’d layered on in the plane, in the SUV, in the elevator.
There was no gratitude this time around. She glowed from within with a light that went deeper, shone brighter. Like something inside her recognized him in a place beyond language.
The part of her that ran. The part of her that remembered. The part of her that wanted.
It punched through his control, a clean, unshielded hit straight to the center of him.
Bear’s breath locked somewhere between heart and throat.
He didn’t breathe again until she looked away.
It had been a flicker, no more than a heartbeat, but it lit him like lightning across open sky.
