Page 19 of Operation Heartbeat

He let out a snort as if he didn’t buy into what she told him.

“Not to mention special ops training is the most difficult in the military. Only twenty to twenty-five percent ever complete it.”

He gave a small shake of his head. “And you say I’m the one with memorization skills.”

“I told you, I read a lot.”

“Now you want to read my file.”

“Fine, I’ll compromise—let me seemyfile.”

Though they were sitting down, she got the feeling they were standing toe-to-toe. On even playing ground. Maybe her little outburst had leveled things up. She hoped so because she deserved more than commands to do this, go here, follow him, get in the vehicle.

He waved a hand in dismissal. “You want to see it now? Like you said, we have hours before we land.”

“If you want me in—and I meanallin—I want to see my file.”

He shifted his jaw in contemplation, creating a small bulge in the crease.

She squeezed her fingers into a fist to keep from reaching over and smoothing it.

He tipped his jaw toward the aisle. “Let me out and I’ll grab my tablet so you can see your file.”

When she slipped out to let him pass, his big arm brushed against hers. He was hard. And warm.

The skin on her arm hatched into gooseflesh under her cotton sweater.

She’d barely recovered from her body’s reaction or the view of his hard backside moving up the aisle before he was back, computer tablet in hand.

He passed it to her and took a seat across the aisle.

“Thank you.” She lowered herself to the chair and settled in to read the file on herself.

A doctorate in mathematics and computer science. There were details about her lesson plans and how she lectured on how technology changed society.

That was all to be expected. What she read next had her throat tightening.

Her ex-husband, Benjamin Maloy, was also a professor at Princeton, and taught in the same field as her.

Yes, and that caused a lot of problems.

She took the Cipher Award—five years running—and professional jealousy reared its ugly head in Benjamin. He couldn’t handle having fewer accolades than Sophie, and to make up for his shortcomings, he cheated on her. With his assistant, who was a grad student at the time. A grad student with cute bangs that she flipped all the time.

Sophie skimmed over the rest of the information about her upbringing and where she went to school. It even had her height and weight, which she blushed at.

When she swiped a finger over the screen to close out the file, she didn’t meet Con’s stare that she felt lasering into the side of her face.

She held out the device for him to take. Did he read all this? Did he know about her relationship with Benjamin?

“This is just data. It doesn’t show who a person is. It has my resume, addresses I’ve lived at, awards and accolades. But you can’t quantify a person on paper. This isn’t the whole story.”

Suddenly, she felt all the energy go out of her like air from a balloon. This had been the longest day. After getting up so damn early and teaching several classes on top of all that happened since then, she needed a little break from it all.

Only there was nowhere to go but to Turkey.

With Con.

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