And wrap my arms around him.
Lightly. Briefly. A hug that is closer to a professional handshake than an embrace—my arms circling his torso at the lowest possible emotional temperature, my cheek barely making contact with the chest that I’d been using as a pillow this morning, the entire gesture calibrated to communicate care while maintaining the maximum possible deniability.
He goes completely still.
Not the casual stillness of a man receiving routine physical contact. The absolute, molecular-level stillness of a body that has stopped all non-essential functions—breathing included—in order to dedicate full processing capacity to the fact that Hazel Martinez is voluntarily touching him.
“Thank you,” I whisper against his chest, and the words are harder than any command I’ve ever issued, harder than any suspect I’ve ever interrogated, harder than the karate chop that started this morning, “for going out of your way to do something that protects me.”
A breath.
“I don’t…know how to express my happiness. So this is what I just learned.”
Another breath.
“So don’t be a douche about it.”
I pull away.
Fast. Before the moment can settle. Before the significance of what I’ve just done can fully register in either of our bodies—the first voluntary, initiated-by-Hazel physical contact between us in over a decade, delivered in a gravel parking lot outside a fire-damaged station in a town that neither of us chose.
He stares at me.
Ice-blue eyes wide. Mouth slightly open. The expression of a man who has been hit, hugged, and thanked in the span of thirty seconds and is still on the first stage of processing.
The blush returns.
Volcanic. Consuming. The kind of full-face, scalp-to-collarbone thermal event that makes me want to physically remove my own skin to escape the heat.
“Ugh. Let me go get the key from my car.”
I take a step past him.
Toward the cruiser. Toward the fifteen yards of gravel between me and the driver’s side door where the storage room key sits in the center console where I’d left it this morning.
His hand catches my waist.
Not the wrist. The waist. His palm settling against the curve of my hip with the same precision he’d used to catch me this morning when the world tilted sideways—not grabbing, not restraining, just redirecting. Interrupting my forward momentum with a contact that sayswaitin a register my body obeys before my mind can question.
“Hold on.”
His voice is different.
Not the competitive bark. Not the childish whine of a man whose forehead has been karate-chopped. Something else. Something that activates beneath the register of normal conversation—a frequency I recognize from the academy, from the sparring sessions where he’d gone quiet right before executing a technique that would change the outcome, thecommander’s instinct translating sensory data into action before the conscious mind has identified the threat.
My thumb has already found the key fob in my jacket pocket.
My finger has already pressed the unlock button.
The cruiser is fifteen yards away.
The signal travels.
And the car explodes.
CHAPTER 15
Shrapnel And Shadows
