At six foot five, every inch of that honed muscle, his comrades didn’t mean a friendly house cat, either.
They meant the kind of cat that lived like a shadow on the edge of the mountains, or in the deepest forests and the darkest jungles, where men were afraid to go. They meant the kind of cat that was big and strong and silent. They meant the kind of cat that could go from relaxed to ready to pounce in the blink of an eye. They meant the kind of cat that had deadly and killing instincts.
Those instincts guided Connor across the room on silent feet to the door that had a faint sliver of light slipping under it. His movement was seemingly unhurried, but his muscles were tensing with lethal purpose.
Though most people would have detected no scent at all, when he paused on his side of the door, just under the aroma of coffee, Connor could taste the air. He knew someone was on the other side of that door. He also knew they were not directly in front of it—a hint of a shadow told him someone was to the left of the door. It was not a guess. His muscles tautened even more. His heart began to pick up the tempo. Not with fear. No, there was no fear at all. What he felt was anticipation.
Adrenaline coursed through his veins as Connor flung open the door.
He was nearly blinded by sunlight in the hallway, but it didn’t stop his momentum. He hurled himself left, at the figure, back to him, rising from a crouch beside his door well. His hands closed around slender shoulders.
Slender?
A scent he had not noticed before tickled his nostrils.
Perfume?
His mind screamed, Abort! It was too late not to touch, but not too late to temper his considerable strength. Instead of taking the culprit to the ground, he used the existing momentum to spin the person skulking outside his door toward him. The force of the spin caused a stumble, and as luscious curves came in full contact with him, Connor recognized the truth.
Her.
Connor stared down into the eyes of the woman he had just attacked, stunned. It wasn’t that women couldn’t be bad guys, but this woman so obviously was not. He cursed under his breath, and her eyes, already wide, widened more.
She seemed to realize she was still pressed, full length, against him, and she pushed herself away.
“Ma sei pazzo!” she said. Her voice was gorgeous, husky and rich, a note of astonishment in it that matched the astonishment in her huge, wide eyes. She definitely had the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen.
Eyes that, at the moment, were wide with shock. Now that she had pushed away from him, her hand went to the sweet swell of her breast, and he could see where her pulse beat wildly in the delicate column of her throat.
Connor, ever the soldier, and still in that place of heightened awareness, took in every exquisite detail of her. She had long, dark hair, luxuriously thick and straight, that was capturing the incredible morning light that poured in through the arched windows of the hallway they were in. Her hair fell in a shimmering waterfall of dark chocolate past slender bare shoulders.
At least a foot shorter than he was, the woman had on a bright, flower-patterned dress. It was sleeveless and accentuated the lovely litheness of her figure. The dress was pinched by a narrow belt at a tiny waist and then the skirt flared out in a way that made him able to picture her dancing, that skirt flying around her. She had sandals on her delicate feet, her toenails painted a soft shade of pink.
Her coloring looked as if it was naturally pale, but golden from the sun. Her skin was flawless. Ma sei pazzo. It occurred to Connor he was not in Iraq. Or Somalia. Not Afghanistan, either.
He cringed inwardly at his mistake. “Jeez,” he said, out loud. “I’m in Italy.”
It all came back to him. He was in a small town in Tuscany on a puffball mission for Itus Security, the company he and his friend Justin had started after Justin’s injury had made them both leave the US Navy SEALs, though for different reasons.
“Sì, Italia.”
Yes, he was in Italy. And it was not a secret. Everyone in his world, including his mother, knew exactly where he was. In fact, his mother had been thrilled for him when he had told her the Tuscan village of Monte Calanetti was on his itinerary.
Italy? she had said breathlessly. She had looked at him with ridiculously hope-filled eyes and said softly, The land of amore.
If anybody had a right to be soured by love, it was his mom, who’d had him when she was barely sixteen and had suffered through all it meant to be a single mother at that age.
In addition, Connor knew exactly what his years of service in the world’s trouble spots and danger zones had made him. He knew only a mother could look at a battle-hardened and emotionally bereft specimen like Connor and hope love was in his future.
“Do you speak English?” he asked the young woman. He kept his voice deliberately quiet, threading it with calm. The woman was still watching him silently, with those doe-like eyes, and just like a doe, was ready to bolt at one more wrong move from him.
She nodded warily.
He deserved her wariness. “Sorry, ma’am,” he muttered. “I seem to have a bit of jet lag. I was disoriented.”
“You came out of that room as if you expected an assassin!” she said accusingly, finding her voice.
No point sharing with her that was exactly what he had been expecting. There was something sweetly angelic in her face that suggested that would be entirely foreign to her world.
Looking at her, it did occur to Connor that if a man was not completely hardened to life, the woman in front of him—beautiful and angelic, yet still sensual in an understated way—might have made his thoughts go to amore.
“I said I was sorry. I hope I didn’t hurt you.” Connor had tempered his strength, but even so, she was right. He had come out of that room expecting trouble of one variety or another, and his force had been substantial.
“No. No, I’m not hurt,” she insisted hastily, but then she folded her hands over her shoulders and rubbed them.
He stepped in close to her again, aware of her scent intensifying. He carefully pried her hands off her shoulders. She stopped breathing, staring up at him, her hands drifting to her sides.
If he was not mistaken, he stopped breathing, too, as he leaned in close and inspected the golden surface of her shoulders for damage. He stepped back and started to breathe again.
“There are no marks on your shoulders,” he said quietly. “You won’t be bruised.”
“I told you I was fine.”
He shrugged, looked away from her, ran a hand through his hair and then looked back. “I just thought I should make sure. What does that mean? What you said to me? Ma sei pazzo?”
“It’s an exclamation of surprise,” she said.
It was her eyes sliding away from him that alerted him to the fact there might be more to it than that, so he lifted an eyebrow at her, waiting.
“Specifically,” she said, looking back at him, “it means are you crazy?” She was unrepentant, tilting her chin at him.
“Ah. Well. I can’t really argue with that, or blame you for thinking it.”
His senses were beginning to stand down, but even so, the woman’s scent tickled his nostrils. Her perfume was very distinctive—it had an exotic, spicy scent that was headier than any perfume he had ever smelled. He looked once more into the liquid pools of green and gold that were her eyes and recognized a weak inclination to fall toward those pools of light and grace, calm and decency.
Instead, he reminded himself who he really was. He let his thoughts travel away from her and down the road to the sense of failure that traveled with him these days, around the globe, like a shadow.
What had just happened was precisely why he’d had to leave the only world he had known for nearly two decades. He’d started making mistakes. It was why he had left the SEALs when Justin had. In his line of work, mi
stakes demanded a price be paid. Often it was a huge price. Sometimes it was an irrevocable one.
And he knew, from firsthand experience, it was even harder when it was someone other than yourself who paid the price for your mistakes.
“It’s all right,” she stammered, and he realized she had seen something in his face that he would have preferred she hadn’t seen.
And of course it was not all right to be attacking innocent civilians. Now that the initial shock had worn off, Connor could see she was trembling slightly, like a leaf in a breeze, and her eyes were wide on him. Her gaze flitted down the length of him, and then flew back to his face, shocked.
He glanced down at himself.
“Sheesh,” he muttered. “Would that be adding insult to injury?”
“I told you I wasn’t injured,” she stammered. “And I’m not sure what you mean by insulted.”
“It’s an expression,” he clarified, “just like your ma sei pazzo. It means on top of giving you a good scare, I’ve embarrassed you with my state of undress.”
Her eyes flew to his state of undress, again, and then back up to his face. She confirmed that she was indeed embarrassed when her blush deepened to crimson.
He would probably be blushing himself if he had any scrap of modesty remaining in himself, but he did not. He’d lived in the rough company of men his entire adult life and guys had a tendency to be very comfortable in their underwear.