“She wants you,” Logan said.
Gunner stiffened. “She wanted to marry him.”
Maybe it’s not him. But Logan wouldn’t have said that he thought it was, not unless the evidence he had was compelling.
Logan exhaled on a rough sigh. “We go out in an hour.”
Gunner’s head jerked in a nod.
“Gunner—”
He held up his hand. “Let’s just get him free.” That was all he could think right now. Do the mission. Save the hostage.
Let everything else go to hell.
“Okay.” Logan’s sigh was rough. “But you’re to stand back on the actual extraction, got it? You’ll provide the cover for the team.”
The way he always did. Shooting, killing, from a distance.
“I’ll need you and Syd to survey the area more. When I left, it looked like they were bringing in more men.” He paused. “Are you going to stay in control?”
Sydney was the only one who could make him lose control. Sydney...who wasn’t his.
“Yes.” He didn’t want the word to be a lie.
And maybe it wouldn’t be.
He didn’t walk back into the room with Sydney then. He walked down the hallway, went outside.
I shouldn’t have touched her. I should have stayed away.
Because now—now he knew what he’d be losing.
What he’d lose, even as he found his brother again.
I’m sorry, Slade. Because he’d just taken the one thing that his brother loved most.
* * *
HER EAR WAS pressed to the door. The resort might be fancy, but the room doors were thin, and Sydney could hear every word that Gunner and Logan said.
There is no me and Sydney.
The words hurt her, pounding through the numbness that had surrounded her ever since Logan had said that Slade might be alive.
Alive? How was that even possible? Gunner had been so sure that he was dead, and she’d seen Slade’s injuries. Too many injuries. Too much blood.
Slade had been dead. She’d been sure of it. If he hadn’t been...
We left him alone? For two years?
A tear trekked down her cheek, and once more, she heard Gunner’s gruff words echo through her mind.
There is no me and Sydney.
Chapter Three
Gunner wouldn’t look at her. Sydney crept quietly through the jungle, stepping so that she wouldn’t so much as snap a twig, and she was too aware of the silence that came from the man behind her.
Cale and Logan were scouting on the west side of the area. She and Gunner were alone on the east side. The chirps and calls from the insects and creatures in the dark jungle drifted in the air.
And no sound came from Gunner.
She stopped. Took a deep breath, and turned to face him. “Say something.”
The moon shone down on him, but she couldn’t read his expression. Like Logan, Gunner was too skilled at hiding what he felt.
“Are you happy? Stunned? Talk to me!” Didn’t he realize that he was her best friend? When she had a secret to share with someone, she always went to him.
He was her rock.
Her...lover.
Slade’s alive.
“It was a mistake,” Gunner told her.
Her heart slammed into her chest. “You don’t think it’s Slade?” Her voice was quiet, so she stepped closer to him. So close that she could feel the seductive warmth of his body. “Logan’s wrong and—”
“We were a mistake.”
Her body trembled, but she kept her chin up. She kept her eyes on him only because she wouldn’t break there, not in the jungle. Not in front of him. “Is that really how you feel?”
She didn’t feel that way. Being with him had been the only thing that seemed right in her world.
Something that felt so amazing, no, it couldn’t be a mistake.
“It won’t happen again. We won’t be together again.”
A bullet wound would probably hurt less. Actually, she knew from personal experience that it would. “It might not even be him.” Her hoarse voice. But it was true. She’d given up on Slade, put him to rest and moved on.
“And if it is?” Now Gunner was the one to take a step toward her. “I left him. I thought he was dead. If he was alive, for all this time, do you know the hell he would have been put through by his captors?”
She didn’t want to think too much about that. She couldn’t think about it now.
“I’m his older brother. I was supposed to keep him safe.” Disgust tightened his mouth. “Not screw his fiancée.”
Pinpricks of heat shot across her cheeks. “Is that what you did? Because I thought we’d been making love.”
Her mistake.
“We need to finish scouting so we can secure the area. “Now isn’t the time to talk about this.”
Right. Of course. But would there ever be a time when he wanted to talk? “It was more to me,” she said, and turned away.
That was when she realized...all of the chirps and calls had stopped. The jungle was eerily silent around them, and clouds were starting to drift across the surface of the moon, making the shadows even darker.
Sydney brought up her weapon, and she knew Gunner was doing the same. She stepped forward, her body tensing now. Something had changed in the jungle. Shifted.
She and Gunner had been hunting before, but now she had the feeling that they were the prey.
The rebel camp should have been about a mile away. No one should be in their immediate area.
But the brush was so thick and heavy.
Sweat coated Sydney’s back and slicked her fingers as she held her weapon.
Then she heard it. The snap of a twig. Twenty feet to the left. She swung around with her gun.
Another twig snapped.
That snapping came from thirty feet to the right.
Trouble.
She felt, rather than saw, Gunner’s movements as he swung to the right. One word whispered through her mind: surrounded.
Her breath barely left her lungs. She reached up with her left hand and tapped the communicator near her ear. “Alpha One...” Her words were a whisper as she signaled Logan. “We’ve got movement in our perimeter. There’s—”
Footsteps thundered toward them, coming fast and hard. She took aim, ready to shoot, but then she saw the hostage. A man who was being pushed through the jungle, with some kind of brown sack over his head. His hands were bound in front of him, and a gun was pressed to the top right side of that sack, just where his temple would be. A flashlight was held on the man, the better for them to see just what trump card the captors held.