They met in the air shower at the entrance to the lab. “What’s up, Louisa?”
“I’m sure this is probably Ivan’s doing, but I had some samples in the refrigerator since Friday, and one of them isn’t there today. I wondered if you or any of your guys had been in the lab to borrow something and maybe moved them around.”
“Certainly wasn’t me, but give me a sec and I’ll go ask.”
Aiden stepped back into the lab, and she saw most of her colleagues shake their heads. “Sorry,” Aiden said when he returned. “Nobody’s been over there. Like you said, it’s probably just Ivan.”
Louisa felt her stomach drop. “Cool,” she said, way more casually than she actually felt. “Sorry for bothering you guys.” She hurried back to her laboratory. This time, though, she didn’t feel the same sense of safety there. She was certain someone had removed the sample from her lab. Her head was filled with nefarious reasons why it could have happened. Which wasn’t like her. She was usually rational. Well, unless she allowed the little voice inside her head to remind her that she could just be being paranoid.
Like her father had been.
* * *
The Beach Boys had had it right. In all of his travels, he’d never seen anything quite like California girls. Andie, the girl in the green dress, had been more than willing to wait for him to finish his job, but instead, he’d gone home alone, thoughts filled with a quirky brunette in tulle. Toward the end of the night, he’d looked for her, wondering if he should make sure she got out okay. He’d wandered to the table she’d been seated at, and found no sign of her barring three origami elephants made from what looked like pages of her speech, one of which now sat on his kitchen table.
Six stepped out of his truck and cricked his neck from left to right. One thing guaranteed to shift thoughts of Louisa North from his mind was a long run along the Los Peñasquitos Canyon trail with its waterfall, volcanic rock, and forest of majestic California oaks that he’d sorely missed while he’d been deployed. He secured his earbuds, and set The Boss to play. Couldn’t beat a bit of Springsteen to get you through time-trial running. He locked his truck and set off along the trail. All in all, retirement was looking like a good choice. He still had the camaraderie he’d loved about the military, even if they all came from different places. Most of the day had been spent getting to know his new brothers in arms. Gareth, a proud Welshman who’d served fourteen years in the Special Air Service, also known as the SAS, was the joker of the bunch but was also as fit as anyone he’d ever met. Gaz was a third-generation SAS member whose father had been involved in the Iranian Embassy siege in the early eighties, and Gaz had shown them the crazy-ass footage on YouTube. Then there was Joel Budd, call sign Buddha, graduate of TOPGUN and qualified civilian pilot for just about every type of aircraft that existed. His was a great hire that would enable them to rent their own private equipment to get them in and out of more remote places. Turned out the guy really knew his shit when it came to combat too. Cabe had put them through their paces earlier, and they’d nailed it.
Stepping up his pace, Six began to sweat. His mom had always said he’d been born with too much energy. Most of his school reports had said the same thing. He didn’t know what to do with it all when he was young. College had been less about his future and more about celebrating his present, and there’d been no shortage of sorority girls willing to join the line for a piece of him. He had no idea what he would’ve ended up doing after that if Brock hadn’t died the way he did the year before they graduated.
Becoming a Navy SEAL had been Brock’s dream, and for all of them, signing up after his funeral had felt like the right thing to do. Mac, who’d blamed himself, and still did, for Brock’s death, had been the most passionate and driven to do it.
But the decision Six had made had taken him from reasonably in shape and aimless to an elite level of fitness and focused. As he ran up the next incline, Six wondered what it would be like to go through BUD/S again, the rigorous basic training all SEALs went through, including the notorious Hell Week, now a distant memory.
He stepped up his pace in an open stretch of trail, determined to hit a personal best on this route, and remembered the realities of the six months spent at the Naval Special Warfare Training Center where he’d had his ass handed to him on a daily basis. Even at his age, if he were to start all over again, he’d kick the butts of the newbies, because he knew something they didn’t yet know. That being a SEAL was ninety percent mental.
The trail ran close to the road as he turned the corner, and he could see traffic racing by. Another runner passed him, and then he noticed a woman walking up the hill toward him. For a second, he thought she was Louisa, but he shook his head. So much for a run clearing it. It was funny how she had stuck in his mind—
There was a loud crash, the sound of metal on metal like a tank hitting an IED, and he imagined bodies blowing into the air. On autopilot, he scrambled for cover, hitting the dirt and pressing himself up against the shrub line, but he almost immediately realized what he’d done. Motherfucker. His hands shook, and the acrid sting of adrenaline coursed through him.
“Are you okay?” a female voice said.
Shit, the woman who’d been walking toward him. “I’m fine,” he mumbled, trying to control his breathing.
“I think that was my line, wasn’t it?”
The woman crouched down next to him, but he was too stunned by the whole thing to figure out exactly what was going on. “By the looks of it, there’s an accident on the road over there,” she said.
Six looked up to find Louisa staring back at him through that thick hair of hers. “I don’t know what just happened,” he blurted. For a moment he questioned why he hadn’t made up some kind of excuse like tripping over a branch or needing to stop and tie his shoelaces.
Louisa blew her bangs out of her eyes, and he noticed that her cheeks were really pink. “Did you fall down, or did the sound of that car crashing scare the shit out of you?” She got to her feet and offered him her hand. He took it and received a shock of static electricity. Louisa shook her head and helped him to his feet.
Maybe it was the way she said the words so bluntly, like it was no big deal, but he felt the need to answer her truthfully. “It’s just loud noises out of context,” he said. “Ex-military and all that.” Six dusted off his shorts, doing his best to play down whatever the hell had just happened while the blood rushed around his body so quickly that it felt like he was going to pass out.
“I hate being around people,” Louisa offered casually and picked some grass off his arm. “Walking up the hill toward you, I suffered anticipatory anxiety. Panic at the thought of walking past you. So I get it. I study neurology, yet I can’t figure out how to make it stop.”
“Your presentation on Friday was great,” he said, not wanting to talk further about what had happened.
“Case in point,” she said. “You had your back to me the entire time. You just couldn’t see the way I was white-knuckling the podium. The way I didn’t make eye contact with a single person in the room.”
“Well, you don’t need to worry. You were amazing. Even I understood what you were saying.”
“Didn’t stop my amygdala from firing glutamate into the region of the brain that made me freeze, the same way your amygdala flooded glutamate into the region of your brain that makes you involuntarily jump. In both cases, our hypothalamus triggered our autonomous nervous system, which elevated my heart rate and prompted adrenaline through my body, just like it’s doing to you now.”
Six took a deep breath and looked out across the canyon. Medical descriptions he could deal with, but if she veered anywhere close to something that smelled like sympathy he’d be pissed off. It was no big deal, and he didn’t want her making it one. He looked in the direction he’d been running and then back in the direction of the parking lot where he’d left his truck and where Louisa had been headed.
“Anyway, I’d much rather be alone in my lab or hom
e, which is where I should head back to. Are you okay?”
Finally, he looked at her directly. In the daylight, the hair that he’d thought to be simply brunette had strands of spun gold through it. She wore ink-blue denim jeans that fit her like a second skin and were cuffed at the bottom, aqua-colored Converse, and a simple white T-shirt that hugged her curves. And yet none of these were the reason he wanted to spend a little more time with her. She intrigued him, the two sides of her—the scientist and shy human—seeming at odds.
“I’m good,” he said. “Seriously, but I don’t feel like running anymore. Will you let me walk with you for a little while?” Unable to resist, he reached toward her and pushed her hair to one side. There was something compelling about her. Perhaps she wasn’t traditionally pretty, but she was arresting in her own way.
Her cheeks became even more flushed, and she stepped away from his reach.
“I’m sorry, Louisa. I shouldn’t have done that.” Shit. He hadn’t meant to make her feel bad, but just being around her was bringing his heart rate back under control. “Look, I’ll leave you to your walk. I’ll even give you a head start so it doesn’t look like I’m stalking you.”
Louisa shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “You were … fine. I mean, I didn’t mind, I just stepped back because … Well. I don’t know what it is about you, but somehow I don’t feel quite so weird around you compared to other people.”
The words tightened his chest, and while he wasn’t sure how he felt about that, he was more than willing to go with it. “Does that mean we’re walking?”
With a smile that completely transformed her face, she turned herself in the direction in which she’d been walking and kicked her toe into the dirt. “I suppose it does,” she said, and started off.
It felt like the most natural thing in the world to walk alongside her, and he wasn’t prepared to question why.
* * *
“You want to race there, Louisa?” Six teased as she marched them toward the parking lot.
The confusing thing about stress response was you couldn’t always be one hundred percent certain what had caused it. Certainly if someone pushed you off the top of a tall building, it was a reasonable assessment that it was being caused by the fact you were hurtling to your death at chronically fast speeds. But having a borderline pathological response to shyness while walking alongside a now shirtless and sweaty Six, with abs, and tattoos, and … Urgh, who the hell knew why the adrenaline was flowing? All she knew was that it was telling her flight, even though she was intellectually willing herself not to listen.
Louisa forced herself to slow down. To enjoy the experience. To take in the nature around her rather than how low Six’s shorts hung on his hips. She noticed a large scar on his stomach that had long since healed. “What branch of military were you?” she asked, hoping he’d believe her breathlessness was a function of exertion, not … well, whatever it was.
“Navy, ma’am,” he said. “A proud member of the SEAL brotherhood.”
Holy shit. There was no military in her family. Spending Friday evenings at home watching movies like American Sniper and Lone Survivor constituted her only brushes with it, but even she knew that SEALs took on the toughest jobs in the toughest places. “That’s pretty badass,” she said, lamely. It wasn’t like she was known for her witty repartee on the best of days, but around Six, even her most basic conversationalist skills withered like the shrubbery that lined the canyon path. “Wait. This is the part where I am supposed to thank you for your service, right?”
Six laughed. “You’re funny, Louisa, and no, you don’t have to thank me. It was my pleasure.”
Shit. She’d spent the last five years in particular avoiding small talk for this very reason. “Well, I do thank you. Seriously, I do.”
His hand slipped around her wrist and he pulled her to a stop. She turned to look at him … up at him. Christ, the man was tall.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
Her attempts to avoid eye contact failed miserably, and she was drawn to his face. Damn. It all felt a bit too close. Suffocating. She turned and started to walk down the other side of the hill. Suddenly going for a hike to wind down, to take her mind off the missing sample in the lab, didn’t seem like such a great idea.
“What are you doing now?” she asked, more in an effort to kill time until she could dive into her car and retreat to the safety of her patio with a glass—no, bottle—of pinot. Then she’d fire up her laptop and chat with some of her online friends.
“I own a private security firm with two of my buddies from school who were SEALs too. It’s called Eagle Securities. We have a building not too far from here.”
“So you do things like last night? Protection, bodyguard-type stuff?”
From the corner of her eye, she could see Six nod his head. “Yeah, that and other things,” he said vaguely.
Louisa felt her phone vibrate in her pocket, and out of habit, because it was her preferred method of communication, she pulled it out and checked it. It was a message from Ivan.
Didn’t move any of the samples. Too focused on postmortem of failed test, and board meeting. Sorry. Check with Aiden.
First thing in the morning, she was going to orchestrate a thorough search of the lab. Top to bottom they were going to check every shelf, not because the missing sample was dangerous, but because it was the innocuous one with the poisonous one’s label on it. They couldn’t afford to have something like that happen ever again. After all, what if an actual dangerous sample disappeared?
“Everything okay, Louisa?” Six asked.
She looked around and realized that she had stopped walking. “Yeah. Just some lab stuff that’s going on. Sorry.” Louisa started to walk again. “So what made you leave?”
“In all honesty, I’d always thought I was a career SEAL. But two of my friends decided they wanted to be out by our mid-thirties and that we should start saving to open a security firm. So we did. And that time we spent saving just flew by. Before I knew it, I was packing up my bag and moving back home.”
“You’re from around here originally?” Now that she was paying attention it made sense. He had that laid-back vibe about him.
Six nodded. “Yeah. Born and raised in Encinitas. Drank more seawater than milk growing up. Spent more time in the ocean than out of it. That, and being on the swim team in college, gave me a huge advantage during training.”
Their hands brushed against each other as they walked, and it was hard to miss the way Six quickly retreated from her. His hand had been warm against hers, and she wondered what it would feel like if she took the plunge and linked her fingers with his. But she’d obviously scared him off when she’d stepped away as he’d brushed the hair from her eyes, not realizing that her bangs were her shield.
“Sounds like you were made for the navy,” she said.
“What about you, Louisa? How did you end up doing what you’re doing?”
She considered taking a step to her right and putting them in closer contact so she could possibly feel her hand brush against his one more time. It was one of those things, however, that felt relatively simple as a thought but was impossible to put into practice. “My father died when I was twenty as a result of having Huntington’s disease. He’d been living with the symptoms for a while longer than that. So I made up my mind quite young that I was going to go into research to see if I could find a cure. After getting my MD and spending time as a neurology resident and then fellow at Johns Hopkins, I moved into private research because I found the bureaucracy of the big hospitals tied my hands.” She left out how she’d blown through her degrees, doubling down on courses, always scoring the highest GPA.
Six placed his hand on her lower back, his palm warm through her T-shirt. “I’m sorry, Louisa. That really sucks.”
Feeling uncharacteristically brave, she pushed her bangs to the side and looked at him. “Thank you,” she said quietly. Time could only be stopped, she knew, if the body was tra
veling at the speed of light, and even then it was only a perception of the body itself, relative to space and time. But when Six’s eyes caught hers, she could have sworn that it happened.
She sighed deeply and turned into the lot where her car was parked. “I’m over here,” she said. She dug in her pocket for the key and pressed the button to open the locks.
“That’s me.” Six tilted his chin in the direction of a silver truck. “Look, about what happened back there. Can we keep it to ourselves?”
Unable to resist, she reached out her hand and rested it on his arm. “That goes without saying. It’s nobody else’s business but your own. But I know a thing or two about the brain. And whether the damage is neurological, psychological, or anything at all pathological, it is very rare that it just heals itself.”
Six looked back out over the canyon and sighed. The sunset was beautiful, rich shades of orange, red, and purple all painted into a fiery sky. She wondered whether he saw the pretty colors, or whether he was so lost in thought he didn’t see them at all.
“I know I said it already today, but thanks, Louisa. And I hear what you’re saying. I just … I don’t know … I guess I just want to see if this’ll fade with time first.”
It wouldn’t, she was certain, but it wasn’t her place to tell a man she barely knew how to live his life. “Wait here,” she said as a crazy idea took shape in her head. She jogged over to her car and opened the trunk, where she’d put her purse. After rummaging through it for a business card, she hurried back to him. “I’m sure you’ve got tons of friends and family, or a girlfriend or wife that you can talk these things through with,” she said, extending the card to him and willing her hand not to shake. “But if you ever need someone to talk to, I do great motivational pep talks through whatever app you like to use.”
Six swallowed hard. He studied both the back and front of her card. “Louisa North,” he said, “you are quite the woman.”
The moment needed humor, she knew, but it had never been her strong suit. “I do better Internet conversation than I do in real life. And however fast you type, I guarantee I’ll be faster.”
Under Fire Page 3