Page 5 of Hidden Attraction

Kennedy gave her an encouraging smile. “You got this. And hardly any silver hair!”

Alyssa swallowed a chuckle, then she steeled her back against the airplane seat and clasped the phone to her ear. “General Hemmings.”

The man’s hard-ass tone came through loud and clear. “You’re headed into one hell of a fallout zone, Ambassador Vargas. I hope you’re prepared.”

She twisted her head to look out the window at the miniature buildings on the ground below as they left Mexico City behind.

Then the general began briefing her on the details…and the storm swallowed her whole.

TWO

Chase planted his boots on the cracked tarmac and squinted into the sun. Four short shadows extended across the ground from him and the others who’d traveled to the private airstrip with him.

Their reason for coming to the airstrip was twofold—they were seeing off Henner and May, who were headed to New Mexico to investigate the bomb site, , and Chase and Denver were ordered to meet the ambassador’s plane and act as security for her and her assistant.

Though the light breeze sweeping across the airstrip was warm, icy tension ran from one person to the next.

Henner was worried about keeping May safe. And after what happened to her a few short weeks before, Chase couldn’t blame him. He’d never seen Henner so absorbed in anything, and if his own gut wasn’t coiled with anxiety about the second plane they were here to meet, seeing how Henner and May acted together might have put a smile on his face.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the glance Denver and Henner exchanged. Not two seconds passed before Denver cleared his throat to speak.

“You doing all right, man?”

Chase folded his arms and tipped his head back to peer at the empty sky. Private airstrips weren’t that busy, but there wasn’t so much as a white jet stream cutting across the pale blue sky.

He didn’t answer Denver at first. He contemplated the question for a long moment, examining it from all angles so he could come up with the best answer to get his buddies off his back.

There was a lot to process. The reverberations he felt from Echo team going down in that chopper crash, losing almost every man on his damn team in one massive accident, wasn’t something Chase let himself feel very often. If ever.

He still had a job to do, after all. People to defend, a country to serve. He couldn’t dwell on the past if he needed to fix his sights on the future. But the number of dead men in that picture wasn’t something he could easily shake off.

Especially the one member of Echo who hadn’t perished that terrible day because he was on leave. Max Reece. He hadn’t died in the line of duty or even in the chopper that went down in a ball of flames and twisted metal. He died in a car crash exactlyone monthto the day later.

Chase couldn’t see anythingbuta link. He didn’t know how he didn’t see itbefore.

In his spare time, which he didn’t have much of, he searched for the former members of the Echo team. It was no easy task when none of them existed on paper.

His mind drifted on this polluted current of thought until Denver shifted beside him, bringing him back to the present. He didn’t know how long he’d remained silent after Denver’s question, but he could guess that several minutes had passed.

He dropped his stare from the sky to the ground. Cracks in the pavement ran like trails on a map around his heavy military-issue boots. Some of the cracks branched out and stopped. Others bled into larger cracks to create wider fissures. He couldn’t help but compare the cracks to life.

“There’s a lot weighing on my mind,” he finally admitted in a low voice. “I’ve been carrying around this guilt for so long, I don’t remember a time that it wasn’t part of me.”

Henner wagged his head. “None of it was your fault, Cobra.”

“I know that. But you lose everyone around you, and you start wondering why you were spared.”

May wore a gentle expression of sympathy, and Henner and Denver took turns staring at the cracked pavement too.

Chase swallowed the sharp lump that always formed in his throat when he tried to talk about Echo. “If I can find out what happened to my team, it would give my own survival some meaning. If I can bring down Cypher…”

No one spoke—there didn’t seem to be much to say.

Luckily, the low whine of a plane engine broke the moment. Henner and May’s bags sat on the ground not far from them, and Henner picked them up, slipping the strap of his duffel over his shoulder and gripping May’s bag in one hand.

They stood close together, watching the plane come in for a landing and taxi around for them to board.

Henner held out a fist to Denver, who bumped knuckles with him. He did the same to Chase, his gaze direct. “Hang in there. Stay safe.”

---