Page 170 of The Wild Charge

She looked confused, as he pulled away.

He winked. “Call me, Dixie.”

He was nearly to the door when shedidcall. Across the room, to say, “Don’t call me that!”

He chuckled to himself as he went down the steps.

~*~

Fox had learned over the years that a few stolen hours of sleep often left him groggier than no sleep at all. He bought a Red Bull out of the vending machine and unpacked his entire bag across a hotel mattress to begin his slow, methodical inventory process. Checked every piece of equipment he would wear or carry on the op. He was halfway through testing the sharpness of his knives when Eden slipped in, closing the door quietly behind her.

A fast pang of regret flared in his stomach, quickly tamped-down by necessity. A better man would have pulled her into his arms and apologized for all that was happening. Would have striven to make her feel more included – necessary, even.I can’t do this without you. I need you here when I’m done.

And maybe he did need that, but it wasn’t something to which he was accustomed, nor something he knew how to articulate. There’d never been any softness in his life.

Without speaking, Eden moved to sit in the chair in the corner of the room, chin propped on a fist, watching – not with any displeasure, he noted, after a quick glance – him get organized.

Even with Eden, there still wasn’t much softness in his life. A notion that would have chafed at a better man, but which he found comforting.

He sheathed his knives and laid them out in the order in which he’d strap them on: biceps, forearms, small of his back, hips, thighs, boots. Then he started in on his magazines.

Eden finally spoke. “I know you don’t go in for flattery.”

He loaded rounds of .45 ammo, click after satisfying click, the skin at the back of his neck prickling with awareness.

“So I’m not going to offer any,” she continued on a deep breath. “But. There’s no one who could do this but you.”

Magazine loaded, he set it down beside its corresponding gun and turned toward her, finding her expression startlingly open: lined with concern, intense and earnest.

“I dunno,” he said, pulse quickening. That wasn’t normal; he didn’t get nervous before ops. “There’s probably a SEAL team or two out there who could handle it better.”

She didn’t smile; it was a lame, halfhearted joke anyway. Instead, she stared up at him, eyes bright with…with faith, maybe. Some sort of encouraging emotion he couldn’t remember ever being on the receiving end of. “No. This isn’t about titles – or training, which you do have.” Her smile was a small, unsteady scrap of a thing, but it shoved him in the sternum. “I don’t know that you even realize how much you care – you’d deny it if I asked you point-blank, and I’ve long since made peace with the fact that you’re never going to show it the way other people do – but you do. You care a hell of a lot. I know you won’t come out of that building without Reese and Tenny both.”

His next breath shivered in his lungs. “Even if that means I don’t come out of it?” It wasn’t the first time he’d thought such a thing. Death was always a possibility, one that had never bothered him.

But as Eden stood, and closed the distance between them, he was acutely aware of the way her shirt shifted over the slight outer curve of her stomach, of what that meant.

Of what dying meant.

Or meant missing out on.

It didn’t change anything, though. He was still going to get Reese back, and get him and Tenny out of there in one piece, no matter the cost. It just…left him a little shaky, this time.

Eden pressed her hands to his chest, smoothing them over the old, worn t-shirt he was going to cover soon with his flak vest. “I’ll be here,” she said, and then, gaze darting downward, she ghosted a hand to her own stomach. “We will be. Go get him.” She leaned in and kissed him, a light press that managed to convey so much of what they never said to each other. “Nothing else matters right now,” she murmured against the corner of his mouth.

Shegotit. It didn’t matter what their relationship looked like from the outside, to people with more traditional love lives. She understood. He could have kissed her for that.

So he did, hand tangling in her hair, drawing her in. One last taste of calm before the storm.

Forty-Four

Left alone, Reese was able to determine a few things about his surroundings. When he craned his head down, he could see that the floor was composed of two-foot-by-two-foot dark gray tiles with narrow, dark grout lines. When he craned it up, as far as it would go, he saw that his chains were attached to a ring set in the ceiling by a carabiner, the kind with a section that unscrewed to leave a gap for removal.

If he could reach it.

The plastic sheeting was affixed to the acoustic ceiling tiles, walling him off from the rest of the space in a rough, opaque circle. Battery-powered lanterns offered a cool glow. As he hung, arms long past the point of feeling, blood pooling in the bottoms of his feet, the light beyond the plastic slowly brightened, silver then yellow: sunrise. He was above ground, then. He was somewhere with lots of windows, and the plastic was being used to keep him from seeing exactly where.

Office building, he thought. An empty floor. The AC kept kicking on with a low thrum, which meant it wasn’t an abandoned building. There were other people here, somewhere, above or below.

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