Page 97 of Deadly Strain

“No, that’s the problem,” he said in a tone that sounded casual when the words were the opposite. “How fine is the line between a situation you can salvage and one you can’t?” He stood and left her considering her answer.

She didn’t know.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Someone found Sharpa backpack and he jammed in every weapon he could get his hands on, along with extra water and energy bars.

He found himself wishing Grace wasn’t the damn good soldier she was.

Then there was her tendency to do practicallyanythingto save another person.

He’d seen her, goddamn it, seen her leave a place of safety and put herself in harm’s way to save another soldier. Him. She’d do it again. She’d do it over and over. It was the way she was built, for service and sacrifice.

If she were a man, she’d have made an excellent Special Forces soldier.

Green Berets were trained to get the job done and to think outside standard warfare tactics. Grace and Max were the only two people who understood the weapon their enemy was using, and neither of them were disposable. Max, at least, was doing the smart thing by staying out of sight and getting the lab work done. Where he wasn’t smart was sending Grace to do the fieldwork.

She was a wild card. She didn’t think in terms of warfare, she thought in terms of life and death.

Black and white.

No compromise. No surrender.

It hit him like a two-by-four to the back of his head. She thought like their enemy thought, in terms of all or nothing. She was willing to die to defend her people, like their enemy was willing to die to kill them.

If only Marshall knew he had the perfect weapon in the woman he seemed to be trying to destroy.

She also probably saw them as friends with benefits. Could he be satisfied with a pseudo-relationship? A part-time girlfriend, a woman not totally his own?

No way in hell.

He wanted her, all of her, twenty-four-seven, no holding back, no hiding anything. He wanted to shout to the world that she belonged to him and he belonged to her. She was the best partner he’d ever worked with at anything. Her laughter, her smile, her gorgeous eyes. He couldn’t imagine a future without her in it.

Ohfuck. Helovedher.

Smoke appeared in front of him. “You ready?”

---