Pushing the Limit Read Online Free PDF Page B

to her room was around a corner from his. It was slightly open, yellow light from inside peeking out into the darkened corridor. He tapped his fingertip on the door, half as a knock, and half to push it open. He took a breath to slow his pumping heart as he opened the door.
    “Hi,” she said from the desk chair. Glasses were perched on her nose as she held the piece of metal up. “Try as I might, I can’t find anything special about it.”
    His eyes were on her tiny frame, dwarfed by the large leather swivel chair that seemed out of place in the otherwise spartan room. Her legs were pulled up beneath her, and her sweatshirt had slipped further, so now her whole shoulder was exposed. It shouldn’t have been sexy in and of itself. But he’d never wanted to kiss anything as bad as he wanted his lips on her bare shoulder.
Play it cool, Stanning.
    He moved toward her, and she threw the piece at him. He snatched it out of the air and dragged his eyes from her. As soon as he saw the piece, his attention was arrested, completely, as if Henrietta weren’t in the room. It was two pieces of metal, actually, fused together by heat. He’d seen it hundreds of times. An explosion had caused this. He already knew that the part number stamped on one side of one of the pieces identified it as being a part of a C-130 aircraft.
    Now the question was, was the explosion an accident, an act of war, or something else? He sat on the bed as he rubbed his thumb over it, trying to think.
    “What do you see?” Henrietta asked.
    He’d missed her closing the door behind him and pulling the swivel chair toward the bed so she could lean back and prop her feet next to him.
    “Nothing good. I’ll need to come out to the site with you tomorrow. Something happened to this aircraft, and I need to find out what.”
    “I thought JPAC was responsible for the location and repatriation of troops’ bodies,” she said slowly.
    “We are. I am.” He shook his head, distracted. “That’s what I’m here for. You’re right. Someone else can find out what happened.” He needed to stop trying to solve every problem that came across his path. His commander had drummed that into him when he joined the JPAC team. EOD guys were problem solvers. It was his nature. But it wasn’t his job anymore.
    A dinging sound came from her desk, and she got up to look at her phone. The light shone around her golden hair like a halo. As she sat to check her e-mails or texts or whatever she was looking at, he closed his eyes briefly to give himself time and space to think of a plan. A plan that wouldn’t piss off his commander, or make him feel guilty at not taking action.

Chapter Four
    When Harry awoke, she had to take a moment to remember what had happened the night before. An unfamiliar lump weighed down the feeble mattress on one side. Matt. He’d fallen fast asleep in the three minutes she’d been checking her e-mail from the Foundation, so she’d poked him until he slid down to sleep horizontally on the bed. He hadn’t woken up, and she’d wondered just how long he’d been awake to cause that kind of deep sleep.
    For her part, she’d taken off her sweatshirt and left on a tank, donned sleep shorts, and curled up on the other side of the bed.
    She opened her eyes and turned toward him, blinking away the blurriness. He looked so different. At peace. No hint of the player he liked to show. Dark hair cut short around the ears and left slightly longer on top, not short enough to be obviously military, not long enough to look unkempt. A strong chin and cheekbones brought to mind a statue of Apollo she’d helped bring to the surface in the Aegean Sea in Greece a few years back. She wanted to reach out and touch him like she’d wanted to touch the statue. Okay, maybe not exactly in the same way. Scruff darkened his jaw.
    His eyes fluttered open, and she saw his muscles tense in his neck. His stare was alert in less than a second. “Henrietta?” he