Page 12 of Lethal Game

“For what?” she snarled. “Him showing me how to defend myself from an attacker who grabs me from behind?”

Max rocked back on his heels. “Say again.”

“Sergeant Button wasn’t assaulting me, he was demonstrating how to get away from someone grabbing me from behind.”

“He wasn’t...oh.”

“Sergeant, can we try again?” she asked Con.

Shit, he was going to have to prove he wasn’t doing anything funny with Sophia before the colonel made that call to the military police.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She gave him her back and he got a grip on her again. “Go.”

She bent forward, pushing him back with her ass, straightened, rotated her arms around and was free in about three seconds.

“Excellent,” he said. “Now what do you do?”

“Kick you in the testicles and run?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She turned, gave her boss a narrow-eyed look and hooked a thumb at Con. “I’m starting to like him.”

“Starting?” Con asked.

At the same moment, the colonel asked, “Really?”

She looked at the two of them like they were five years old and she had caught them putting a frog down someone’s shorts. “Don’t let it go to your heads.”

***

Sophia was alreadyat her microscope when Connor walked into her office at 0800 the following morning.

She’d met with Max at 0700 to discuss the more worrisome disease hot spots in their part of the world. Neither had brought up the subject of Sergeant Connor Button.

She’d woken with the decision to accept him as her partner, with conditions, but she wanted to talk to Connor first.

“Morning, Sergeant,” she said with a glance at him before returning her attention to the slide she was evaluating.

“Morning, Dr. Perry.” He paused, then asked with audible curiosity, “What are you looking at?”

She didn’t take her eyes off the slide. “A blood smear. I’m checking the morphology of the cells.”

“Morphology... Size, shape, color?”

“Yes, all that and more. Normal cells look one way. Abnormal, every way else.” And this was where he’d check out of the conversation like every other soldier she’d ever met.

Only he didn’t check out, he tilted his head to one side and asked, “What can change how a cell looks?”

Wait, had that been an intelligent question?

She pulled away from the microscope to meet his surprisingly inquisitive gaze. “Everything from your diet to a virus. Sometimes the change is so specific, I can tell you which vitamin you’re deficient in or which virus you have without doing any other tests.”

“Huh. So—” He cleared his throat. “What else do you do?”

“You tell me,” she said instead of answering the question.

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