Fatal Heat: A Navy SEAL Novella Read Online Free PDF Page B

world. A serene, successful, single woman who lived alone with a dog.
    Where he’d spent the last years of his career, right now a woman like Paige would be lashed and then stoned, her dog whipped and despised.
    He was really glad he’d worked so hard to create a world where that kind of horrific cruelty could be defeated. He didn’t regret anything. Particularly not now, in this light-filled room with a beautiful, smiling woman.
    There was just something about her. The world needed women just like her. Needed women who could make things better just by being.
    And right there, in Paige’s colorful kitchen—sipping a glass of excellent chilled white wine with Her dog dancing around her feet, watching her move so gracefully—something happened to Max.
    He’d spent years in very bad places. Culminating in that last year in Afghanistan, which broke his heart and his body. And then the hospital, lashed to the bed by pain and weakness. Dark years, years with feral beings around him, years feeling that the world was hung together with fraying ropes and fraying hopes.
    Right now, right this moment, watching the evening light flood the pretty apartment, something powerful moved through him, some force that was strong enough to shift the darkness in him that was heavy as iron, hard as rock. Something made of light, intangible yet very real, very strong.
    Whatever it was, it was intimately connected with the beautiful woman humming to a tune on the radio, set to a soft rock station. Suddenly, he wanted to know all about her, find whatever it was in her that could lift those iron weights in his soul. Find out how she could fill a room with light.
    “What’s it like, being a plant geneticist? What do you do? How does a plant geneticist fill her day?”
    She turned to him in surprise, soft hair shifting on her shoulders. A fleeting expression crossed her face, one he was unable to decipher, the merest hint of darkness, as if a bird’s wing had come between her and the sun. Then it was gone.
    But when she answered, her voice was light and amused, and he wondered if he’d imagined the darkness. It was almost impossible to connect this woman with any kind of darkness.
    The full, luscious mouth turned up at the corners. “It’s sort of hard to explain, and boringly technical.”
    “I went to school,” he said softly. Actually he had two master’s degrees. One in military history and one in political science. From the days in which he tried really hard to understand the world. Those days were gone. Now he just tried to defend his little corner of it and survive. “I could try to follow.”
    She stirred something with a wooden spoon, tapped it against the pot, and put the spoon on a ceramic dish. Man, whatever it was she was cooking, it smelled heavenly.
    She switched the burner off. “Okay, it’s done, but it will take about ten minutes to settle. Why don’t we sit at the table and enjoy our wine?”
    “Sounds good.”
    She’d set two places, at right angles instead of across from each other. They were so close he could smell that flowery something above whatever was cooking on the stove. So close he could touch her without any effort at all. He picked upn pHe pick his glass and took another big gulp.
    Goddamn it. Even the fucking wine was perfect.
    She sipped her wine, head tilted to one side as she studied him.
    “Coming back to what we were talking about, I’m really sorry if I gave the wrong impression. I didn’t mean you can’t understand what I do, in the sense of being unable to. What I meant is that, like most jobs, what I do day to day is the tip of the iceberg, and you’d have to know what I did yesterday and what I plan to do tomorrow to get the full picture. The short version is I research how Mother Nature designed plant life, and then think of ways to improve on that. The big picture is really exciting because in a way we’re unlocking the secrets to life itself. But the day-to-day stuff is really