Riding The Edge - Elise Faber Page 0,1

memory of that secret week two years ago to the forefront of my brain.

We’d pretended nothing had happened for two years. Or Ava had pretended. We’d gone back to work, and it was like nothing had changed for her.

Except, everything had changed for me and—

Focus.

“Took one,” I gritted out, locking down the pain, the memories. I’d had plenty of practice at that. Inhaling sharply, I pushed to my knees. I wore a bulletproof vest, though, of course, Murphy’s Law would dictate the shot had hit one of the few spots on my torso with no protection. “But I have the package and heading to the extraction point.”

“Negative,” Ava said. “Stay put. I’ve got eyes on the target.”

It went against my every instinct to listen. I might not be the leader of this team, but I’d made it a point to be the first in and the last out when it came to the missions.

But . . . something was really wrong here.

This was supposed to be a simple pickup of information.

And within minutes, it had devolved into something that was absolutely FUBAR. Our informant had shown up bleeding, staggering into the abandoned warehouse that was the meeting point. Gunshots had rung out moments later, and I’d covered the informant with my body as I’d yanked him to the side.

But even with that intervention, the man had barely taken two more breaths before he’d gone into the afterlife.

Leaving me to pick through the dead man’s pockets like a fucking graverobber for the USB with the files my employer needed.

KTS was a private military operation, unofficially sanctioned by the U.S., British, and German governments, but not technically under the purview of any of them. We operated on the fringes, our edict simple.

Erase the really fucking bad guys.

Which wouldn’t have a chance of happening unless the USB in my pocket made it safely to headquarters.

Plus, if I died, I’d never get another chance with Ava.

“Agent?” came the crisp voice. “Stay down. Do you copy?”

I blinked, yanked my mind into focus. It was wandering, shifting to unimportant things because of the injury, the blood loss, the pain. Grinding my teeth and pressing my free hand to the wound on my chest, I hissed out a breath then said, “Copy.”

All went quiet.

And I was silently bleeding out on a cold concrete floor.

Two

Munich, Germany

21:35hrs local time

Ava

This was bullshit.

The whole op was a complete and utter disaster.

Starting with the late arrival of our contact—a bleeding and now dead contact—and ending with the agent I was supposed to be covering getting shot. And if I knew anything about Dan, it was that he tended to overestimate his ability and underestimate his injury level.

Not that he wasn’t a talented member of the KTS team.

It was just that he was a man.

A slice of masculine deliciousness I’d tasted every inch of two years before—which so wasn’t the point. Because it wasn’t just that we’d scratched an itch together.

I liked him. Respected him.

Pretended to hate him when all I wanted to do was dive into his arms and have a repeat of that glorious week.

Dan was a male who didn’t subscribe to the notion of the Man Cold, wouldn’t be found moping in bed over some sniffles. He was a person I’d seen take serious internal damage and keep going until the mission was complete.

Some might say it was reckless.

And, I supposed, it probably was.

But I was right there with him, had pushed through instances when the circumstances had surpassed dangerous and moved into deadly, ignored times when I should have stopped or retreated. Dan had been there, at my back, had in fact pulled me out of several close scrapes . . . even though I’d hurt him.

I knew I had.

But I’d had to. There was no other choice, not with Dan.

He was too good for me to drag him into my special circle of Hell.

Still, that one week in Georgia haunted me.

It had started as a break between missions in the middle of summer, when he’d offered to show me part of the U.S. I hadn’t seen before. We’d driven through tiny towns, stopping at Dan’s small cabin set on a peach orchard, the air unbearably humid and rainstorms coming out of nowhere, drenching us in sheet after sheet of precipitation. It had stretched into us spending a week there, eating ripe peaches off the trees, juice dripping down our chins, getting drunk on whiskey and lemonade, and learning every inch of each other’s bodies.

For a full week, it