Page 31 of Explosive Vengeance

“When we were first sent into the Program. My first roommate washed out and was transferred to somewhere else, so they paired me with Megan.” She drew her bare legs up, tucking her feet beneath her. “I was the indoc class rebel. Based on our personality and psych profiles, they thought she’d be a stabilizing or calming influence on me.”

“And was she?”

She grinned. “A little. Mostly I was a really bad influence on her.”

“You know, somehow I can picture that.”

She lifted a shoulder. “I’m pretty proud of my rep.”

“I can see that too.” They shared a half-smile. “And what about your family?”

All traces of humor vanished, her expression going eerily blank, as if a mask had covered her face. “What about yours?”

He’d hit a nerve, though he wasn’t sure why. What was he missing? Maybe her relatives were assholes and she didn’t like talking about them. “I’ve got an aunt, uncle and cousins back home in Connecticut.”

“No parents?”

He shook his head. “Never knew my dad. My mom died when I was young.” His stomach muscles tensed at the mention of her.

“What happened?”

His initial reaction was the same as hers had been—to shut down and redirect. But he’d learned sensitive things about her, and after knowing her only for a few hours, he sensed that revealing his past was probably the best way to start earning her trust. “She was murdered.”

Chloe didn’t gasp or react with horror the way most people did when they found out. Her expression was calm. Watchful. “By whom?”

“Her ex-boyfriend.” He didn’t think of that worthless asshole often anymore, but when he did, it still sent a wave of white-hot rage through him.

Her eyes narrowed. “Bastard. Happens way too often.”

It did, and though he rarely talked about this with anyone, even Ty, he found himself opening up to her about it. “She always picked guys who treated her like shit. I watched her get the shit beaten out of her on an almost weekly basis for years, until the last one she broke up with snapped and strangled her.” He’d come home from school to find them loading the body bag into the back of an ambulance. The shock and pain had been so overwhelming when the social worker had told him what happened, he’d fallen to his knees there in the dirt, an inhuman sound of agony and grief ripping from his throat.

“The old ‘If I can’t have her, no one can’.” Chloe’s voice was hard. Icy.

He shook off the awful memory, forcing his mind back to the present. “Yeah. He’s in jail, but he’s up for parole in a couple years.” How fucked up was that? He didn’t deserve to be breathing, let alone have the chance at parole.

“I’d have killed him.”

Heath stilled. More than her words, the deadly calm tone told him she meant it. And he believed her. “Sometimes I wish I’d had the guts to.” Even at that young age, he’d fantasized about emptying a magazine into that son of a bitch’s belly and leaving him to bleed out on the ground.

“You’re not wired that way.”

Her insight into his personality surprised him. “No.” He’d taken lives in combat, but that was different. He’d done what he had to, to ensure he and his brothers-in-arms and his patients made it home. But it hadn’t been enough, because some of them hadn’t, and that hurt would never go away.

“And that’s why you became a PJ. You couldn’t save her, but you can save others.”

He didn’t respond, momentarily at a loss for words. Jesus, he felt uncomfortably exposed with her so deep in his head, in a place he’d only acknowledged a few years ago.

“I get it. It’s why I do what I do now. In spite of all the training, in spite of all the brainwashing and ability to compartmentalize…I still feel.” The halting way she said it told him it wasn’t an easy admission for her. “After completing a mission, it was never killing my targets that bothered me. It was the innocent victims I hadn’t saved. So now I’m doing something about it that I couldn’t do before. It might be just a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things, but it matters to the ones I save.”

He nodded, his heart thudding in his ears. “That’s exactly right.” Damn, she got him in a way few others ever had. They had way more in common than he ever would have thought.

She smiled slightly, and it was different from all the others so far. This one was softer. Real. One kindred soul recognizing and connecting with another.

Heath felt that same connection form deep in his gut. An undeniable physical and emotional pull toward the woman seated across from him.

Before he could gather his thoughts, Chloe lowered her feet to the floor, stood and started toward him.

He read the heat in her eyes, read the intent there, but he still didn’t move. Didn’t do anything but hold that hot, bold stare, his whole body tightening as he imagined pulling her down into his lap, tangling his fingers in that gorgeous hair and tasting those sexy lips.

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