Page 48 of Heart Thief

“I’m eternally grateful. I did not save the world today, but I did make baked chicken thighs, potatoes, and fresh green beans for dinner. Hungry?”

“I am. But I don’t think I can get up. I’m beat.”

“I’ll get it for you.”

“I’m eternally grateful,” he throws back at me.

I bring him a plate stacked high with food just as he finishes removing his boots.

He has also removed his ACU jacket and is now wearing his tan t-shirt, tucked smoothly into his ACU pants, along with a belt. He looks trim and fit. It’s true what they say about a man in uniform. Gets me every time.

“Thanks, Mila. You’re a lifesaver.”

“You’re welcome. But don’t get used to it.” I join him on the couch. “So, tell me how you saved the world today.”

Zane has been here another week now. He closed on his new home, but renovations are being done before he can move in. Ryker’s not happy about it, but once again, he didn’t ask Zane to leave.

I’m certainly not going to ask him to leave. I enjoy his company. But we do keep our distance from one another. No more hand holding or hair brushing. No more intimate dancing.

“Got a call for an emergency response to render safe a chemical agent in a small town in northern California.”

“A chemical agent? That sounds scary.”

“Yep. Technically, it was a nerve agent.”

“Even scarier.”

Zane takes a bite of chicken. “Me and my team responded by helicopter. We get there and the whole place is crawling with cop cars and fire trucks, their lights blazing. A deputy sheriff greeted us, and I couldn’t help but notice we were standing in a high school football field.”

“A high school? Strange place for a nerve agent.”

“That’s what I thought,” he says, spearing green beans onto his fork. “He explained that a high school chemistry teacher had been doing a class project where the students made G-series nerve agent in an enclosure and tested it on rats.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Right? It killed the rats and... let’s just say, they didn’t die a happy or peaceful death. Once they’d completed their experiment, they couldn’t get the desensitizing chemical to the agent inside the enclosure because it had accidentally fallen over in the wrong part of the maze. The teacher panicked when he realized he now had a deadly nerve agent in a classroom full of students with no way to desensitize it without opening the enclosure and exposing everyone to it.”

“Oh my gosh. So, they called you guys?”

“First, the teacher dismissed all the students. Then he called the principal, who called the fire department, who called the police. Each, in turn, looked inside the room, saw all the dead rats in the enclosure, and refused to enter a second time, knowing it was beyond their scope. They evacuated the high school, cordoned off the area, and called the State Emergency Operations Center for help. They called the FBI, and the FBI called the Army, and the Army called us.”

“What did you do?”

“After calculating the downwind hazards, we directed everyone to get farther away from the building. A lot farther away.”

“Smart move.”

“We donned our protective gear and went inside the lab. We found the huge plexiglass enclosure glued to the surface of a table in the middle of the room. This thing was elaborate. It had all kinds of controls and levers so you could move things around inside the maze. The problem was, it was huge and not easy to move. So, the usual fix for this would be a three-to-one ratio of high explosives to nerve agent and blow that sucker in place. Problem solved.”

“But you couldn’t do that?” I ask.

“It would’ve blown up a huge portion of the school. We figured that wouldn’t be appreciated by the community.”

“I think they would’ve been relieved to have the nerve agent gone.”

“Maybe so. But we really didn’t want to blow up the school. We took a break and discussed our options. Moving the table with the enclosure presented a problem because it wouldn’t fit through the door. We didn’t want to turn it sideways and risk any nerve agent escaping into the air.”

“I’m nervous just listening to this dilemma. What did you do?”

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