Cesar derived an annoying amount of pleasure in reminding her of that very thing on an unnecessarily frequent basis.
So no. He hadn’t been hard. It’d just been her mind—and all her fantasies for the last sixteen years—playing tricks on her.
Of course, if she’d thought his backside was epic, then there wasn’t a word in the English language to describe his frontside.
Pecs for days. Those delicious square-shaped numbers topped by flat brown nipples and peppered with more of that crinkly, black man-hair. A flat stomach rippling with muscles. And his Adonis lines?
The stuff dreams are made of.
Wetdreams.
Yet, despite the visual smorgasbord, the things that’dreallygrabbed her attention were the bruises mottling his skin. Their green and yellow hues told her he’d recently been put through the wringer. And then there were his scars. A jagged line here. A puckered circle there. Some looked fairly new, still raised and red. Others were obviously old, having faded to white.
She knew his work was dangerous. But the evidence left behind on his body told her justhowdangerous.
He called himself a private defense contractor. But that was just a prettied-up name for what he really was.
A warrior.
A man who put his body in the path of peril as a matter of course.
And the most startling proof of this was the puckered, angry-looking scar on his neck. A scar that said, at least once, he’d come close to losing his life.
She tried to imagine a world without Sam in it. But the idea was so horrific she shoved it aside and returned her attention to the conversation.
“The thing is, we’re not just talking about the financial repercussions for Texas.” She dutifully rubbed her chin against Peanut’s head when the cat butted her for attention. “A calamitous failure of the state’s infrastructure would send shockwaves throughout the entire country. They have the second largest GDP in the U.S., after all.”
“So why frame you for Red Square and Dominion when what you were focused on was the threat to Texas?” A line appeared between Eliza’s dark, arching eyebrows. “I mean, why not make it look like you were in cahoots with the Chinese in the plot to take down the Lone Star State’s electrical grid?”
Hannah frowned. “I’ve been thinking about that. The only thing I can figure is that, unless I’m wrong about all this and my report to my superiors regarding Texas actually made it up the D.O.D food chain, then no one but me…and nowyouguys…knows about the danger to the Lone Star State. Trying to make it look like I was helping the Chinese would draw attention to the scheme. But Red Square? They’ve already implemented a zero-day attack on Dominion. The feds know about it. I’m sure the president and her joint chiefs know about it. Heck, it’ll probably be in the papers tomorrow morning. So why not link me tothat, right?”
She punctuated her thinking by lifting a finger. “If I’m in FBI custody for helping Red Square take down Dominion, I’m not going to be out here raising a ruckus and checking to make sure Texas takes their vulnerable power plant offline before it can be hit by the malware.”
“Two questions.” Fisher raised a hand, his heavily lashed eyes bright with intelligence.
“Shoot,” she told him, scratching beneath Peanut’s chin, causing the cat’s eyes to roll back in his head.
“What’s a zero-day attack?”
She opened her mouth, but it was Ozzie who answered. “It’s a cyber-attack that exploits a previously unknown vulnerability in a computer application.”
“Ah.” Fisher nodded and pinned his gaze on Hannah. “Okay, so ya said it’s one power plant that’s vulnerable. How does one vulnerable power plant take down the state’s entire grid?”
She was struck once again by just how pretty the man’s mouth was. And not only his mouth. The whole of him was almost too beautiful to look at, like Jude Law and Alex Pettyfer got put in a blender and swirled together.
Serious eye candy.
Too bad she was still smitten with Sam and therefore had no real interest in Mr. Tall, Tan, and Tasty.
There was no use continuing to deny it as she’d done with Cesar earlier. Sam was sitting a foot away from her, but every single one of her cells leaned toward him like he was a magnet and she was metal.
Of course, her preference for Samuel Harwood over Fisher could be blamed in no small part on her preference for scruffy types. Give her a full beard and hair that could use a cut any day over a clean shave and a face that was so glorious it was like staring into the sun.
Which was why even though Sam had made it clear he’d never like herlike that, she was still drawn tohimand not Fisher. Fisher, who was making it just as clear that even though he wasn’t Mr. Right, he’d be more than happy to play the part of Mr. Right Now.
“Hannah?” Mr. Right Now pulled her from her thoughts.
“Huh?” She blinked at him.
