“Get under here and shut-up,” he ordered.
She stood there blinking at him like a… a woman.
Kruze stepped into her personal space, towering over her, and still breathing hard from that slide down the mountain. He was damned if he was going to take any lip.
That did the trick. Mizz Banks tugged her skirt up and dropped to the ground, then flattened her body, and scurried on her hands and knees beneath the undercarriage. While she rolled over and shifted her backside into one of the ruts, Kruze tugged his blanket, which was plenty ratty and dirty, from inside his camouflaged jacket and climbed down with her. Before Banks could pitch another hissy-fit, he rolled onto her much smaller, narrower body. A less than ladylike grunt ground out of her. He shook the blanket out as far as he could, given the restricted space under, then tossed one end of it over his legs and pulled the other end up until it covered his shoulders and head. And her.
By the time he’d finished, Kruze was on his belly and face to face with Mizz Brianna Banks, breathing the same air. She whimpered when his full weight mashed her into the dirt. Well, too damned bad.
“Shut it, Princess. I’m only here to get you out of the country alive, not marry you.”
“Th-thanks for helping me,” she whispered. Banks almost sounded sincere. That should’ve altered his opinion, but it didn’t. Journalists just like her had made his brother Chance’s life a living hell for too damned long and in too many ways. They’d known nothing about the details of his covert op into South America, less about Kruze and Chance’s mother’s death, which had happened during the same time. So what’d they do? They’d invented, hypothesized, and outright lied, created sensational, twisted tales full of so much crap, that Chance had come damned close to committing suicide. He’d lost most of his SEAL team on that op, and had nearly lost his life. America’s press corps thought they could say whatever they wanted under their first amendment rights? Well, Kruze had news for them, this woman in particular, and it started with a vehement effing F-off!
By the time he was through remembering why he detested journalists, Kruze was flaming pissed all over again. Gawddamnit, yes, he was the emotional middle brother of Scarlett Sinclair’s three boys, and he’d struggled with the shortcoming all his life.
But like his friend Julio had taught him to do, Kruze forced his mind and soul back to zero. Breathed in. Breathed out. Tried like hell to let the past go, to forgive and forget and—yeah, not happening. Not only no, but hell no. He’d never forgive the press for their lies or his mom for not telling him she was dying of cancer. Or Chance for wanting to kill himself after he came to in the hospital and found out he’d lost everything. What a fucked up month that had been! How was a man ever supposed to get over all that?
Didn’t matter how much Kruze had tried, he plain didn’t know how to let those sorrows and grudges go. He’d adored his mom, still did, and he would always idolize his older brother. Losing his mom had been gut-wrenching, but losing Chance at the same time? That would’ve been the cruelest blow. Kruze didn’t know how to get back to the man he’d been before Chance had almost pissed his life away. Didn’t know if he wanted to. Pagan, the youngest Sinclair, seemed to have found a way to deal with those betrayals, but Kruze didn’t know where to begin.
In the still of his mighty struggle to zero his anger, Kruze’s mind settled on the sensation of the much smaller heart pounding against his belly. The journalist’s heart. Odd, that the steady thump of this foolish, selfish woman’s blood flowing through those chambers grounded him in the middle of a nightmare situation that could still get them killed. Yet it did. There was something familiar to this moment, something tugging at the back of his memories. He almost felt—better.
No, gawddamnit. Kruze shrugged that notion aside. Miss Brianna Banks was nothing to him. She wasn’t brave, surely wasn’t any kind of patriot. She was a user, a prima donna of the highest magnitude, some rich man’s privileged daughter. All she’d wanted when she’d sneaked into Turkey was a sensational story that would sell. She wanted to be famous.
He might block his thoughts and opinions, but Kruze could still smell the sweet, musky scent of her body, the perfumed oil in her straggly hair, and her fear. Red scarf or not, arrogant or just plain stupid, Banks was awash with panic. She was breathing hard, scared for her life. She damned well should be. She’d brought this shitstorm down on herself. His job was just to get her dumb ass safely back to America. He didn’t have to like her to do that.
The Earth quaked. Then roared. What now? Kruze ducked his face into Banks and lifted his arms over her head, shielding her from the furious cloud of rocks and dirt suddenly pummeling the convoy. The landslide had arrived. Thick dust and all sizes of rocks battered everything in its way, like a dry ocean wave, make that a tsunami. Kruze could barely breathe. The landslide’s throaty roar turned into bouncing thunder that grew closer and closer until—
BANG! BOOM!
You have got to be kidding me! A boulder as big as a gawddamned house—an American house, not the hovels these poor mountain people lived in—landed square behind the convoy. It nearly kissed the rear gate of the jeep he and Banks were hiding under. Holy shit! Talk about one helluva close call. A yard nearer and it would’ve crushed the jeep and them with it.
Shock waves from the impact shook the ground. Kruze worked his jaw to keep his eardrums from blowing out, even as he stiffened his body and enclosed Banks
