“Ahead, on the left,” Tracy announced, as she spotted the sign with the stylized ocean waves for the Seaside Heights Motor Lodge a fraction of a second before Decker did. The neon lights were faded and dull in the still of the early evening, and most of the letters were missing—it said only SSD HGTS. The road was divided and they had to pass the place and U-turn to get to its parking lot.

“Somebody needs to buy a vowel, and wow, hourly rates?” Tracy craned her neck to look at the place as they went past. “Very classy. My mother would be so proud.”

Decker glanced at her. She’d been quiet for most of the trip from the beach—even during the endless crawl in hellishly heavy traffic that had made the forty-minute drive take nearly an hour and a half. Of course, they’d stopped to pick up sandwiches, which had tacked on thirty additional grueling minutes.

“Not that I’m going to tell her. I mean, even if I did, she would just look at me as if I were certifiable.” Now that she’d started talking, it was clear she didn’t know how to fall silent again, because she just kept the babble going. “She thinks I’m overqualified, and that Troubleshooters is just a fancy name for the local Rent-A-Cop company. She doesn’t get why I’m not sending out my résumé to every doctor and his dentist brother in Southern California. She actually e-mailed me a list that was called something like ‘Eligible Men in the Medical Profession Across the United States,’ and I’m like, Why stop there, Mom? Why not send me the ‘Fifty-Two Years Old and Unhappily Married’ list, while you’re at it. As long as I’m marrying for mercenary reasons, why not be a home wrecker, too.” She exhaled her disgust. “When she’s not pushing the receptionist-marries-the-doctor plan, she’s trying to get me back together with Lyle. My ex. She’s like, All men cheat, Tracy. That’s just the way they’re wired—”

“It’s okay if we don’t talk,” Decker finally cut her off as he braked to a stop behind a line of traffic sitting at a light, waiting to make the turn. “I know you’re still upset with me.”

“I’m not,” she lied, and he looked at her again. “I’m not,” she insisted. “I do think you’re a total loser, but at the same time I feel sorry for you, because you’re obviously going to spend your life alone and pathetic.” She paused for maybe a sixteenth of a second before adding, “Of course, when I walk into this flea-ridden, no-sleep-all-sleaze motel with you, the forty private investigators hiding in the parking lot, staking the place out, are going to think that we’re here to get it on, and maybe that’s enough for you—having people think that—”

“Your mother’s wrong,” Decker changed the subject, because getting it on with Tracy was a topic he wanted to avoid. Especially when she was right. Anyone who saw him approach the motel with Tracy was going to think that he was one lucky, lucky son of a bitch. And he could be, with just a small amount of effort. Still. Even now. Even after his thoughtlessly cruel comment about Zanella running away screaming.

He paused to see if she’d shut up, and what d’you know? She had. She was waiting for him to continue, although he could tell from her eyes that she had at least several more paragraphs of opinion to impart. So he changed the subject more completely, by saying, “All men aren’t wired to cheat.”

“I know that,” she said, but then she asked, “Did you?” The look of stunned surprise he shot her must’ve held some confusion, because she felt compelled to be more specific. “Ever cheat on what’s-her-name? Your former fiancée. Emily?”

Jesus. What an intensely personal question to ask anyone, let alone a co-worker. Especially since he couldn’t recall ever discussing with Tracy the fact that he so much as had a former fiancée, let alone that her name was Emily.

But apparently she didn’t care that her question was also an admittance of the fact that she’d been gossiping about him with someone in the office, because she simply sat there, looking back at him, as if she expected him to answer. So he did.

“Yeah,” he said, as the light turned green and the cars in front of him started to move.

Tracy reacted as violently as if he’d reached out and smacked her, sitting back in the seat and all but gasping at his confession. “Seriously?”

“I cheated on her,” he confirmed. “After she cheated on me. It was...” What had Tracy called it? “Revenge sex. But I think the ultimate revenge was Em’s, because...” Tracy was still watching him, waiting for the end of his sentence. So he gave it to her. “I knew it didn’t matter what I did. I knew she wouldn’t care. She hadn’t moved out yet, but inside of her head, she was already gone. There was nothing I could do or say to change that. And the sex—cheating on her to do unto her, you know...? It only made me feel like a bigger piece of shit.”

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, but then surprised him by adding, “but that’s such total male crap. There was nothing I could do or say to change that.” She mocked him, pitching her voice ridiculously low. “Of course there was something you could’ve done, you just didn’t want to make the investment.”

He laughed his disgust as he made the U-turn far too fast, on tires that squealed their protest. “I didn’t make the investment? I’m sorry, but that’s total female crap. She didn’t want me—if she did, she wouldn’t’ve had a problem with my being gone so often. I was a chief with the SEAL teams, for God’s sake. I invested in everything but the reality—which was that we were doomed from the start—because she was investing all of her time and effort into trying to turn me into someone that I fucking wasn’t!”

Jesus Christ, what was it about Tracy Shapiro that caused him to lose his shit so quickly? He made a point never to raise his voice, and yet here he was, damn near shouting at her again, peppering his speech with a word that he’d noticed she very rarely used. In fact, the only time he’d heard her say it was when she’d used it as a verb. “Excuse me,” he appended. “I’m... sorry.”

She was thinking close to the same thing. “You know, I can always tell when you’re not really angry, because you get loud and you swear a lot. When the anger’s real, you’re quiet and it’s way more scary.”

He didn’t slow down enough as he pulled into the potholed parking lot for the motel, and the truck bounced crazily, gravel spraying as he hit the brakes too hard. There was a too-small spot between two badly parked sedans, and he zipped the truck in, still going too fast, because the asshole in him wanted to make her squeak with alarm.

Which she did, making him feel like an even bigger asshole.

“I’m not angry,” he agreed as he put the truck into park. “I’m incredulous that you would have the audacity to argue with me about a relationship that you know nothing about.”

“I wasn’t arguing.”

Jesus, was she really going to argue about this now, too?

She continued before he could laugh in her face. “I was challenging your version of the truth. Every story has two sides, and I’m pretty positive Emily’s is different than yours. Did you love her?”

Her question again caught him by surprise. “What does that have to do with—”

Tracy cut him off. “Everything,” she said in a voice laden with an unspoken you moron. “It has everything to do with... everything.”

“Yes,” he answered her honestly, because why the hell not? “I did, okay? Very much. But not enough to throw my own self away to turn into her fucking—freaking—Stepford Husband.”

Tracy nodded. “She was wrong to want you to change. She should have loved you enough to... Well, I mean, who did she love, really? You? Or someone else—someone that she wanted you to be?”

Decker blinked at her. Neither one of them made a move to leave the truck, and they both just sat there in the flickering light from the neon sign. “So now, what? You’re suddenly on my side?”

She nodded, unperturbed. “Yeah, because you were right. If she was trying to change you...? I mean, sure, you’ve got a nasty streak—which, yes, is probably why I find you so attractive—but most of the time you’re a pretty sweet guy. And she just throws something like that away? I’m betting she wasn’t all that bright.”

“She was plenty bright,” he said. “But she didn’t understand what she was getting into. And I didn’t make it any easier for her. And then when—”

He stopped himself abruptly, clenched his teeth and jaw against the words that had almost come out. And then when Andy died, I checked out for a while. For too long. Hell, I left the scene permanently. Em left me, yeah, but the cold truth is, I left her first.

“When... what?” Tracy prompted, almost gently.

Decker took the keys out of the ignition and opened his door. It clunked against a blue sedan that had too many dents and dings for him to worry about one more. So he didn’t. “I don’t know how long Tess and I are going to be at the airport. You might be waiting here at the motel for a while. Which of your massively huge bags do you want me to bring inside for you?”

She hesitated only briefly at his pointed change of subject and ignored his dig. “I’ll just take my laptop case,” she told him as she opened her door, too. “I’ve got some books in there. As long as I’ve got something to read, I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t sign online under any of your own e-mail accounts,” he reminded her as he got out of the truck’s cab, grabbing the bag of sandwiches that they’d stopped and picked up. “Let’s be extra safe.”

“You must think I’m a slow learner,” she said, slamming her door shut behind her. “I mean, we had this exact same conversation just a few hours ago.”

“Let’s continue to be extra safe,” he amended.

As they met at the front of his truck, he reached to take the computer case from her, but she put the strap up over her head, so its weight was across her chest. It was a solid I don’t need your effing help, loserman, so he backed off.

He wasn’t surprised—he was learning that, with Tracy, there was no telling what she’d do or say next—when she looked him in the eye and said, “If you ever want to talk about it—the fact that Emily cheated on you—I’ve been there, done that. I walked in on Lyle and one of his bitch paralegals. Heather Something. He screwed her in our bed.” She cleared her throat. “I still feel hurt and, yeah, really angry, just thinking about it. And I really am just talking about talking. You’ve made it very clear that... But that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.”

Friends. Decker stood there, looking into Tracy’s blue eyes, trying to remember the last time he’d wanted to kiss someone as badly as he wanted to kiss her. Last woman he’d kissed had been Jo Heissman, and he really hadn’t kissed her. He’d just reached out, blindly, and she’d been there on the other end of his mouth. Before that had been Caroline, Andy’s twin sister. But their hookups had been few and far between. The first time had been on one of the crushingly awful anniversaries of Andy’s death, right after her divorce and many months after Em had moved out. It had been about comfort in the face of that still-gaping loss—tinged with far too much sorrow ever to turn into anything real and lasting.

He’d last gone to see Caro about a year ago—his first visit post the disaster that had been his Kazbekistan encounter with Sophia. He’d gone looking for God knows what, but when he’d tried to turn her kiss hello into a trip into her bedroom, Caro had pulled back. And told him she’d been meaning to call him—that she was getting remarried, to some professor at the university, at the end of the month.

She’d told him that she’d thought long and hard about it, but had decided it would be best not to invite him, since it had been so long since they’d even so much as spoken on the phone. Subtext: You total piece of shit—using me for sex and then sending flowers, as if that would make up for the subsequent zero-contact for well over a year.

And maybe that hadn’t been Caroline’s subtext, but was instead the subtext Deck himself had interjected. Because, Christ, it had been a long time since he’d so much as given a single thought to her.

“Okay,” Tracy said now. “No response. So, that’s a big negative on the friendship thing. Maybe I am a slow learner.” She turned to the motel—a 1950s-era two-story building that looked as if its most recent renovation was the new roof someone had slapped on, back in 1978. “Room 114 is...” She squinted at the numbered doors in the deepening twilight, and pointed past the empty swimming pool. “Looks like it’s over this way.” She started down the cracked concrete path, walking with her usual attitude.

And that far end of the motel exploded in a roaring ball of heat, noise, and flames.

The force flung Decker back and he jettisoned the bag of sandwiches he was carrying in order to grab for Tracy. He tried to catch her, to take her down to the ground and cover her, to protect her against the flying debris. But as he wrapped his arms around her, her laptop bag caught him hard in the chest and he went down like a bowling pin, losing control of his feet, his head hitting the concrete with a crunch—hard enough to scramble his brain. Still, he didn’t let go of her and together they bounced and scraped across the dusty yard, with him beneath her, like a human sled, even as he coldly, logically assessed the situation.

Bomb.

If they hadn’t been caught in traffic, if they hadn’t lingered in the truck, they’d both be dead right now.

No one in that part of the hotel—certainly no one in Room 114—could possibly have survived a blast of that magnitude.

Which meant that Tess and Jules were dead.

They’d been vaporized. Decker knew that with a stab more painful than any blistering heat could ever be. Still, he found himself turning his head as he held tightly to Tracy, as he tried to regain at least a little control, to roll with her toward the parking lot, toward his truck. He turned his head so as to best be able to gauge the height of the flames and the direction of the wind—to use his years of expertise with explosives to figure out the best way into that holocaust, so he could search for survivors.

But Deck well knew from the size of those flames, from the roiling cloud of dark smoke in the early-evening sky, even as he heard his own voice shouting—“No!”—he knew there would be no survivors. Tess and Jules were dead. And Nash, too, was as good as dead. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—survive losing Tess this way. It would prove to be too much, too awful. As it would be for Robin, left without Jules.

Jesus Christ.

They’d gambled and lost. Lost hard, lost big.

And even knowing all of those things, Decker dug his elbow into the ground so that they finally skidded to a stop. He made sure Tracy was conscious and alert, pulling her chin so that he could see her face. It was smudged with dirt, but her eyes—although conveying her shock—were clear.

“Dial 9-1-1,” he shouted over the ringing in his ears, and she nodded, reaching into her handbag.

He pushed himself to his feet—Jesus, he’d rug-burned his entire upper back—and headed toward blazing rubble.

Which was when he was shot.

He felt the slap in the side of his arm, and actually saw the bullet as it left his body with a surreal, almost beautiful fountain of blood. And he turned, spinning, crouching, zig-zagging back to Tracy as he heard the retort of a sniper rifle and then another and another.

Was it one shooter or two? He couldn’t tell. But the bullet that had hit him had come from behind them, probably from across the street, from the roof of the Rings of Saturn Motel, another crumbling flophouse. Unlike the Seaside Heights, it was a whopping three stories, which wasn’t great, but it was far better than the ten-story Holiday Inn a quarter mile down the road. Ten stories gave a shooter a high enough altitude to pick his targets off like fish in a barrel. Three stories was the equivalent of squirrels in the backyard. Hell of a lot harder to hit. Provided the squirrels didn’t do something stupid, like stand still.

Decker grabbed Tracy and dragged her to the truck as his back window shattered. He threw her inside anyway, reaching for his keys with an arm that didn’t work as well as it should have. But he had two arms, and he jammed the keys into the ignition with his left hand even as he used his right knee to put the truck into reverse. He stood on the gas, all the way out to the road, shouting, “Help me. Tracy! Put it into drive when I say now—Now!”

Tracy was shouting—he could see her mouth moving—but she did exactly as he asked.

“Good girl—get down now—keep your head down!”

With a squeal of tires, as she scrambled onto the floor where Jo Heissman had so recently sat, Deck, too, scrunched down and rocketed east, driving hard and fast, zigging through the still-heavy traffic, taking a right turn from the left lane as the horns of disgruntled drivers blared behind them.

He sat up a little then, looking into the rearview. No one had followed them onto the side street. Still, he wasn’t going to take any chances. As he took a bridge that crossed the 5, he saw that traffic was finally moving, and he took a left, heading for the nearest entrance onto the freeway.

“I can’t find my phone,” Tracy was saying, her words muffled as she dug frantically through her oversized bag. “I can’t find it—”

“It’s okay,” he said as he got onto the 5 and NASCARed his way into the left lane. His own voice sounded distant, tinny, but his ears were surely fucked up from the blast. The world also had a weird, surreal quality to it that came from the fact that he, and he alone, knew that Tess and Jules were dead. The entire population of the planet should have been down on their knees, out in the street, screaming their outrage to the sky. But that wasn’t happening. Even he himself was still driving, still talking, still moving, still living. “I was just giving you something to do,” he told Tracy.

He could feel his heartbeat pulsing in his injured arm, and it occurred to him that the strangeness he was experiencing might be due to a loss of blood.

“I have to call Tess,” Tracy told him, her head practically inside of her bag, as he steered with his knees so he could reach around to touch his upper arm.

His hand came away drenched with his blood. He wiped it on his jeans as he took hold of the wheel and exited the freeway at the last split second, again pissing off commuters who were no doubt already pissed off enough about having to work late, people who had no idea what did or didn’t matter.

Tracy looked up at him. “I have to make sure she got out of—”

“She didn’t,” Decker said quietly.

“Don’t say that! We don’t know that!”

She was fierce in her hope, so he let her keep it as he scanned for police cruisers before running the red light at the end of the ramp.

He had to get to a place where he could stop his bleeding and check Tracy—make sure she wasn’t in too much shock to realize that she, too, had been shot.

“I need to find my phone,” she insisted. “You used it last and...” Her voice trailed off, and as he slowed to take a left onto a smaller, less traveled street, he glanced over and down to see her poking her finger through a hole in the top flap of her leather computer bag. “Was it possible that someone was shooting at us?”

“Me,” Decker said as he almost missed the right turn into the little residential neighborhood. Yeah, this was the right place. He hadn’t been here that often, so he was feeling his way. “They were shooting at me. You just happened to be standing too close.”

Small but well-maintained houses, most of them brightly lit, lined a quiet street. No one was out—everyone was inside, eating dinner. Which was good, because a truck with its back window shot out was likely to draw a second glance, and maybe even inspire a phone call to the police. And while Decker wasn’t paranoid enough to believe that any of the local officers were on the Agency’s payroll, he was certain that whoever had just killed Tess and Jules had access to the SDPD’s computer system.

“Oh, my God,” Tracy breathed, her search for her phone finally abandoned. “Decker, you’re bleeding! Oh, my God!” He took a left as Tracy poked her head up so she could see out the windows. “Where are you going? We need to get to a hospital!”

“We can’t,” he told her. “We walk into an ER, and we’re as good as dead.”

“If you bleed to death,” she pointed out, “you’re not just as good as dead, you actually are dead.” She moved up on the seat to get closer to him, never mind the fact that she was now sitting in a growing pool of his blood. “And I, for one, am not going to let you die.”

“Honey,” he told her, “I’m already dead. My goal right now is to keep you among the living.”

“You need to stop the truck,” she insisted as she reached to look beneath the sleeve of his overshirt. “Oh, my God, Deck. You really need to let me apply pressure.”

“Ow,” he said. “Don’t! We’re almost there.” And there it was.

“Isn’t this...?” Tracy peered out the window into the rapidly darkening night as he pulled into the drive.

“Sam and Alyssa’s,” he told her.

“It doesn’t look like they’re home.”

“They’re not.”

“Then why—”

“Tracy.” He cut her off. “I need you to help me. See the keypad next to the garage?”

She peered out the front windshield again at the standard two-bay garage, and he turned on the truck’s brights. “Over to the right.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“I have the alarm code.”

She understood what he needed. “Tell me and I’ll do it.” She opened the door, but he stopped her.

“Wait. We need to get this truck into the garage and close the door behind us—as quickly as possible, but... We can’t leave any blood on the driveway.”

She looked at him. Looked at herself. They were both a mess, but at least she wasn’t bleeding—at least that he knew of. Without a word, and without his having to ask, she kicked off her sandals and unfastened her belt. “What’s the code?”

He told her as she shimmied out of her bloodstained pants, giving him an eyeful of smooth, tanned thighs and panties that were gleamingly, virginally white. She perched on the end of the bench seat, where his blood hadn’t yet spread, as she reached again for the door handle, repeating the string of numbers he’d told her.

She did a quick check of the neighborhood, making sure no one was watching, then opened the door and crossed the driveway as quickly as possible, hopping as she stepped on a stone with her bare feet.

And okay. So much for virginal, because her panties were thongs. He lowered his brights, because it was obvious that she didn’t sunbathe in the nude.

And yeah, the cure for his out-of-control libido was to witness the death of Tess Bailey, the woman his best friend loved more than life.

He was sitting here, staring at Tracy Shapiro’s near-perfect—if cave-fish white—ass, and it was his arm that was throbbing. His dick was numb. All he felt was sick with misery.

And dizzy. Jesus.

As the garage door went up, Tracy turned to give him a thumbs-up for victory, her hair and breasts bouncing like some starlet in a horror movie, and he focused hard and put the truck back in gear with his left hand.

He was in luck—he didn’t have to back up. Both sides of the double bay were empty, and he could pull right in. Tracy followed as he did, and—good girl—she quickly found the button so that the door lowered behind them.

Decker cut the motor and killed the lights.

A cell phone ringtone, on a very quiet setting, ran up and down and up and down a scale. He searched for Tracy’s missing phone—it had to be hers—cursing as he jarred his injured arm by reaching under the seat. Jesus, the pain almost made him black out, and as he retrieved the phone, he sat for a moment with his eyes closed, seeing stars and willing himself to remain conscious.

He had to get a message to Dave and Sophia—he wasn’t going to be able to meet them at the airport. And Jesus, he had to contact Alyssa and tell her about Jules and Tess.

Tracy opened the driver’s-side door, and her voice seemed to come from a long way away as she said, “That’s my text message ring.”

Decker looked down at the phone in his hand and saw on its screen that Tracy had indeed received a text message.

“9-1-1.” Tracy leaned closer to read the message aloud. “Head for home STAT. Trying 2 reach U.” She laughed, taking it from him. “It’s from Tess. She sent it less than a minute ago. My phone’s regular ring was set on silent—I have twenty missed calls, from her and Jules both.” She looked up at him, joy on her beautiful face. “Deck—I was right. They’re alive!”

Decker reached for Tracy’s cell phone, no doubt needing to see Tess’s text message with his own two eyes.

Which would’ve been fine with Tracy, except that his eyes very literally rolled back in his head and, if she hadn’t dropped the phone and caught him, he would’ve face-planted on the concrete floor of the garage.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Decker! Deck!”

But he didn’t rouse. He was completely limp and much heavier than he looked and she sank under his weight—dead weight. God, no. She tried to lower him down without hurting him, or at least not hurting him worse than he already was.

“Decker,” Tracy kept saying, “Deck!” She bumped into something hard—his gun in a shoulder holster—as she wrapped her arms around him. Gravity won and she fell backwards, smacking her butt on the cold floor, as his head lolled and one of his booted feet caught on the running board of the truck.

And oh, merciful God, as she cradled his head, she felt a huge lump already formed in the back, beneath his hair, and yes, her hand came away smeared with blood. It fact, it seemed possible that most of the blood on his clothes and in the truck cab had come from that cut on his head. “No,” she heard herself saying. “No, no...”

She was almost entirely underneath him, and as she shifted to get him onto the floor without letting go of his poor battered head, her elbow burned. She dismissed the pain as she gently lowered him to the concrete.

His face was slack, his eyes open a small but frightening slit as, kneeling beside him, she felt for his pulse. Both his neck and her fingers were slippery with blood, and it had been a long time since she’d checked another person for a pulse. It was vastly different from monitoring her own heartbeat during an aerobic workout at the gym, and she couldn’t find it, and panic surged.

“Please don’t be dead, don’t you dare be dead—”

And the overhead light went out, plunging them both into darkness.

The fixture must’ve been set on a timer, hooked up to the opening garage door, rigged to shut back off after a limited amount of time.

But before she could react, before she could even start to wrap her brain around what to do next, she felt it.

Bump. Bump. Bump. Decker’s heart was beating—steady and even strong beneath her fingers—and her relief almost knocked her over. “Thank you, thank you!”

The pitch darkness was disorienting, and she knew that the door to the truck was hanging open, somewhere over her shoulder. The last thing she needed was to smack into it and knock herself unconscious, too.

She used Deck’s prone body as a frame of reference, turning, intending to follow his leg—his foot was still hooked into the cab—to the open door of the truck, where she could turn on the headlights, and jeez, this wouldn’t be a problem if, like normal people, he’d set his interior light to go on whenever the door was open and...

Okay, that wasn’t his thigh beneath her outstretched, exploring hands. “Sorry,” she told him, even though he would never know that she’d groped him in the darkness. As embarrassing as it would’ve been, she desperately wished he was conscious and alert and talking to her.

Honey, it’s all right. I know you didn’t grab my junk on purpose. Just be careful of that open door, turn on the headlights, and then I’ll tell you where Sam and Alyssa hide their extra key so we can get into the house, get cleaned up, and figure out how to contact Tess and Jules so they don’t think we’re dead.

His actual leg was solid, and she followed it all the way to his foot. She had no idea where the switch for the lights was, but she felt her way to the usual places in the dashboard. Nope, that was the windshield wipers. Nope, those were the emergency flashers. Okay, the flashing was obnoxious, but they provided just enough intermittent yellow light for her to find and turn on the headlights—thank goodness—before she switched them back off.

She had to slide Deck forward slightly to unhook his foot. She lowered it to the ground—his boots weighed about four tons; no wonder he was buff, walking around all day in them—and then scrambled to the door that obviously led into the house, and found and flipped the switch for the overhead lights and swiftly looked around.

As far as garages went, it was neat and clean. Orderly. Everything was hanging on the walls, from work tools to bicycles—except for a pint-sized pink bike with streamers at the end of the handlebars and a license plate saying “Haley,” no doubt ready for use by Sam’s daughter when she came to visit. It was parked near a lawn mower and a weed wacker and it was all so suburban-normal that it gave Tracy pause. Or it would have given her pause if the unconscious man on the garage floor hadn’t been potentially bleeding to death from a gunshot wound.

In truth, she’d imagined an arsenal of weaponry hanging on the walls. A collection of swords and knives, stakes and beheading tools. Alyssa always made her think of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Sam... Former SEAL Sam Starrett made Tracy think of perfect sex—the kind that ended with her unbelievably handsome lover smiling into her eyes and saying in his adorable Texas accent, Darlin’, I’m going to love and cherish you forever, but please, right now? Would you let me clean your refrigerator while I do your laundry? It would make me the happiest man in the world.

She hurried back to Decker, stopping to scoop up her cell phone. The battery had come out when it had hit the concrete—she had no idea if it was broken or simply dead from temporary lack of power. Either way, she knew she couldn’t use it. Deck had warned her, repeatedly, back when they were on the beach, that it wasn’t secure.

Still, she would use it—to call for help—if it looked as if Decker were going to die.

She knelt beside him, gingerly pulling back the open front of his overshirt to take a look at his gunshot wound. But she couldn’t get it over his shoulder, so she tried instead to pull up the short sleeve and...

Oh, jeez, oh, no. There was what looked like a furrow, about three inches long, in the side of his upper arm. It looked raw and painful and it was still oozing blood—but at least it wasn’t pouring out of him. That was good, wasn’t it?

Still, she looked around for something relatively clean to use to apply pressure.

Sam and Alyssa’s washer and dryer were out here in the garage—along with one of those utility sinks—and Tracy headed for the dryer, praying for a load of towels or sheets. But it was empty, which wasn’t really a surprise, knowing Alyssa, who was too perfect to leave a load of anything anywhere before she left her house.

Tracy’s pants—only partially bloody—were still in the front of the truck, and she grabbed them and returned to Decker, wrapping them as tightly as she dared around his upper arm, tying the pants legs together.

She realized that she had to check him for additional gunshot wounds—for all she knew he’d been hit more than once. His jeans were sodden with blood, mostly on his right side, which could’ve come from his injured arm or that cut on the back of his head. But it was impossible to tell whether or not he’d been hit in the leg, too. She tried running her hands across the denim, checking for holes—little tears like the one in her computer bag and...

Computer!

She had her computer, and her plug-in-anywhere Internet access. She could e-mail Tess and Alyssa and Jules—at least let them know she and Deck were alive.

She yanked the case from the front seat and brought it back over to Decker. She took the computer out and set it on the floor and—she hadn’t turned it off after leaving the beach. It had only been hibernating, so it sprang immediately to life.

Tracy quickly accessed her address book, found Tess’s, Jules’s, Alyssa’s, and Sam’s e-mail addresses, and typed a short, quick note, fingers flying over the keyboard. Alive. Need help. Gunshot and poss head injury. Phone not secure. We’re in garage. Key?

She didn’t want to be more specific than that, and it really wasn’t going to be that hard for them to figure out. Tess didn’t have a garage—their apartment building had a carport. And Jules didn’t live in San Diego, which left Alyssa and Sam.

Before she hit send, she added Can’t help D&S—please provide backup, because there was no way Decker was going to make it to the airport to pick up Dave and Sophia. Even if he miraculously came to right now, his truck was missing its back window. Not to mention the fact that there were an unknown number of mad bombers and gunmen scouring the city, quite probably looking for them.

Tracy also zapped a quick e-mail to Lindsey, her best friend at Troubleshooters—petite, Asian American, and a former detective with the LAPD. You home?! 9-1-1—need help now.

She turned up the computer’s volume so that she’d hear when a response entered her inbox.

And then she turned back to Decker—who may or may not have been bleeding to death from a second gunshot wound in his leg.

She didn’t have a choice; she just had to do it. She took a deep breath, exhaled hard, and unfastened Decker’s belt. Silently apologizing to him, she unbuttoned and unzipped his pants, then pulled them down to his knees.

His thighs were like tree trunks—well, okay, maybe not redwoods, but still... For a man of Decker’s size and seemingly slender build, he looked as if he ran marathons in his spare time. She knew he didn’t—she would’ve heard about it by now, in the office, over coffee. Wouldn’t she have? Maybe not from Decker himself, but from someone.

His legs were tan, with crisp, springy man-hair that, on his right side, was damp and matted with blood, but beautifully uninjured. Except—shit—his tightie-whities were dark red, again on his right side, and Tracy took another deep breath and pulled them down, too, freeing—eek!—an extremely impressive package that she had no business looking at, so she didn’t, except God, it was right there, flopping about as she made sure he hadn’t been shot in that vulnerable juncture between leg and groin.

She tried to be businesslike, tried to think in medical terms as she then tipped him onto his side to make sure he hadn’t been shot in the gluteus maximus. He hadn’t been. Nice gluteus maximus. Okay, wrong, wrong—that was another inappropriate thought, and she shouldn’t be thinking it, except it was true. It was a simple fact. A completely no-ulterior-motive, emotion-and attraction-free observation—nice glutes—and yes, maybe later she could attempt to sell herself the Brooklyn Bridge.

She pulled up his overshirt and T-shirt, and his back was smooth and tan and muscular and unmarred, save for what looked like a terrible raspberry all across his shoulder blades—no doubt from sliding in the dirt, pushed back by the explosion as he’d tried to shield her from harm. She had several similar rug-burn-like scrapes on various parts of her own body, she was sure, but none as bad as that one.

Tracy lowered him back down as gently as she could, and there were his man-parts again—which she was really only looking at because she was trying to decide whether or not to pull his blood-soaked briefs back up, or find him a clean pair from his luggage in the back of the truck, when she realized...

His eyelids were fluttering.

“Oh, my God,” Tracy said, her heart leaping into her throat as she leaned over him. “Decker! Deck!”

She pushed his hair back from his face, touched the rasp of unshaven beard on his lean cheeks, and he opened his eyes.

He opened his eyes!

And he looked straight at her, frowned slightly, and said, “Tracy. What the hell...?”

And Tracy couldn’t stop herself. “Thank God you’re all right,” she said, and burst into tears, which was stupid—she knew it was stupid—and foolish and girly and all those things she tried so hard not to be. Tried and nearly always failed.

But it hadn’t just been the threat of his bleeding to death that had scared her. That bump on his head had also been a terrifying prospect.

Sam Starrett liked to tell a story about their boss, Tom Paoletti, who’d once been his commanding officer when they were both back in the SEAL teams. Tom had received a near-fatal head injury while out on an op, in the middle of some godforsaken desert. Sam occasionally did an imitation of Tom walking around and giving orders—and then gingerly lowering himself to the ground and saying, “Tunnel vision’s getting worse. Sorry to be such a motherfucking pain in the ass, men, but I’m checking out now. Goddamn son of a—”

Everyone always laughed when Sam did his impression, closing his eyes and going limp mid-sentence. Tracy had always assumed that Tom’s walking and talking right up to falling unconscious was an exaggeration—part of the good-natured mocking and ribbing that happened daily in the office, but Tom had told her, no. Even with a head injury bad enough to put someone into a next-step-is-death coma, there was often a stretch of time called the “lucid interval.” And it could end rather abruptly.

It seemed unlikely that, if the drive from the motel to Sam and Alyssa’s house had been Decker’s lucid interval, he would rouse from a coma without extensive medical intervention.

So it was far more likely that his head injury wasn’t all that massive. And for that, Tracy sobbed her relief. She wanted to grab him and hold on to him, but she was afraid to jar his injured arm, and—oh, yeah, don’t grab him there—he was naked from the waist down. Well, not totally, since his boots were still on and his pants and briefs were around his knees. It not only looked really awkward, it was really awkward. And embarrassing.

“Good news! You weren’t shot in the butt,” she wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t get the words out, she was crying too hard.

And he didn’t seem to care, because he started to sit up, wincing as he put weight on his injured arm, but then lowering himself back down. “Whoa. Light-headed... I’m... Jesus...” Still, he reached up to touch her, to push her stringy, straggly hair back from her face so he could better see her. “Are you hurt?”

She couldn’t answer. She just shook her head no, as she tried—and failed—to stop crying.

“You sure?” He looked like he was going to give sitting up another try, light-headedness be damned, so she put her hand on his chest, to keep him lying down. He touched her arm with a hand that was warm, with fingers that were slightly rough against her bare skin.

And she forced some words out. “I’m sure. I’m fine. But you’re not.”

“What the hell happened?” He winced again as he shifted his injured arm, checking the makeshift bandage she’d applied—and she realized he was still foggy.

“You were shot,” she said. “You also hit your head when the bomb went off. At the motel...?”

As she watched, his memory came stuttering back. She could see his growing awareness—coupled with confusion—in his eyes.

She helped him along by telling him, “We’re hiding in Sam and Alyssa’s garage. We’re safe. You made sure we weren’t followed.”

And suddenly he did sit up, banishing his light-headedness with sheer will as he grabbed both of her arms, his face suddenly fierce. “Did we really get a text from Tess? She and Jules are alive? God, please say yes.”

She nodded. Said it. “Yes.”

It was quite possibly both the craziest and the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. It was certainly the last thing she’d expected, but as Lawrence Decker gazed at her, his eyes filled with tears. “They’re alive,” he whispered, not exactly a question, but not an absolute statement, either—as if he couldn’t quite believe it.

Tracy nodded, laughing even as she, once again, began to cry.

Decker laughed, too. “Thank you, thank you, sweet Jesus,” he breathed. And out of all the solemn and self-proclaimed-holy religious services Tracy had attended back when she still lived with her parents and they made her go both to temple and to church, his six barely voiced words were the most heartfelt and sincere prayer of thanks she’d ever heard in her life.

He pulled her against him in a crushing embrace that was probably no more than a dodge to keep her from watching him fight to push his tears away, but Tracy didn’t care. He was warm and he was solid and he was alive, and she wrapped her arms around him, too. She held on tightly as she sobbed shamelessly into his shirt, nearly overcome by her own relief.

She wasn’t relieved—as he obviously was—about Tess and Jules, because she’d never truly believed that they were dead. No, her relief was all about this man with his beautiful never-the-same-color eyes. They’d been mostly green in this light—or maybe it was the sheen of tears that had made them look so exotic.

“It’s okay,” he murmured, his arms tight around her, his hand in her hair, stroking down her back—warm and soothing and solid. “It’s going to be okay, thank God.” His voice was a rich rumble in his chest, but she felt it catch, felt his body shake, and she knew he was fighting like hell to keep himself from crying the way she was, and it didn’t seem fair.

“It is okay,” she pulled back to tell him, but then there he was—his face, those eyes, that usually tight, grim mouth—mere inches from her.

Which was when he kissed her.

And again, she knew instantly as his mouth crushed down on hers—demanding and hard—that his motive was purely about not letting her see him cry. Or maybe he was kissing her so that he wouldn’t cry. Maybe it was a substitute release that would keep those tears that brimmed in his eyes from overflowing.

But then, God, it didn’t matter why he was kissing her—only that he was. Because kissing Decker was nothing like she’d expected. She’d imagined that locking lips with him would be not unlike surfing the lava spilling out of a volcano. But she was wrong—it was a thousand times more extreme. He was rough, he was hungry, and he was completely in charge. No hesitation, no May I? No maybe about it. No hidden sweetness beneath the maelstrom. Just pure unadulterated, passionate sex, laced with ownership and domination as he took total possession of her mouth with his tongue, with his lips, with his teeth, and it should have turned her off, feminist that she was, but it didn’t.

It only made her want more.

Which he gave her by touching her, his hands sweeping down her back to cover her bare butt, pulling her closer, massaging her—fingers slipping beneath the silk back of her thong, even as his other hand claimed her breast. There was nothing even remotely gentle about his touch as he found and caught her nipple between thumb and forefinger, and she heard herself moan as she kissed him and kissed him, as the heat she’d been fighting for seemingly years now pooled, liquid and hot, between her legs.

Which was when he pulled back. “Where the fuck are my pants?!”