Release. Jo Leigh

look he gave her was priceless. She’d only said it to shock him. For a grown man, a man who’d been to war, he sure shocked easily. She probably shouldn’t take so much pleasure in making him blush. But he looked good that way, and…oh, God, she needed to get out more. “Let me see you put it on,” she said, dropping his arm and replacing it with her coffee, which she picked up easily with her left hand, just to be obnoxious.

      He noticed, but he didn’t say anything. He just went about putting on the sock, which he did with his right hand and his teeth, then he got the prosthetic out of the top drawer of the small dresser in the corner of the room.

      She wondered if it was uncomfortable for him to sleep here every night. It wasn’t so much a cozy basement as a trauma room, complete with portable X-ray, surgical tools, every kind of medicine she could think might be needed and a handy defibrillator. She’d tried to plan for every kind of emergency—and good thing she had or Seth could have died from that gunshot wound.

      When Nate had proposed the idea of setting her up like this, she’d been shocked, knowing it would be outrageously expensive. But he’d come up with the money and she’d stocked the basement to the gills. She hadn’t had to use it until three months ago. Now it had become Seth’s home. She’d offered him the spare bedroom, but he’d turned her down. All he did upstairs was shower and make himself ham-and-cheese sandwiches. She’d never met a more stubborn man. She just wished he’d use that trait to get acclimated to his new life.

      He grunted as he struggled with the hand. It wasn’t a difficult task, but it was terribly awkward. His left shoulder kept moving, an unconscious response he wouldn’t lose for a long time, if ever. There were a million and one things the nondominant hand is used for, and the brain didn’t take to this kind of change easily. Finally he was set up, and while the manufacturers tried damn hard to make the fake hands look real, they didn’t. They were substitutes, ungainly ones, but in time Seth would find his way.

      He looked at her with a surprising lack of satisfaction. “Okay, it’s on.”

      “Open and close,” she said, leaning against the long cabinet.

      He went through his paces inelegantly, which was to be expected.

      “How many hours did you wear it yesterday?”

      Seth shrugged. “About five.”

      “I want you to wear it for a minimum of eight. Which works out well, since that’s the minimum you’ll be at work.”

      “I’m not going to be an aide, Harper, so forget it.”

      “No? What, are you planning to sell your body to earn your keep?”

      “If I’m that much of a bother, I’ll leave.”

      “And go where?”

      “I can hook up with Nate.”

      “No, you can’t. You’ll just be in his way. He doesn’t have time to babysit you.”

      He flushed again, this time with pure anger, but she didn’t care. The man needed a reality check. He had to get on with it, just as they all had to get on with it, whether he liked it or not.

      “Fine. When do we leave?”

      She checked her watch. “Be ready in forty minutes. I’m making breakfast. If you come up in ten, there’ll be food for you.”

      “I’m not hungry.”

      “Tough. You’re going to need your strength. Deal with it.”

      As she headed for the stairs, she heard him curse her under his breath. She didn’t say anything, though. Maybe she was a cold bitch. Hard times called for hard measures.

      2

      THE FREE CLINIC WAS in a run-down part of Boyle Heights, a sad suburb of Los Angeles where the median income was right at the poverty level, and the people who showed up on the doorstep were a damn sad bunch. They were mostly meth addicts, but there were still the unwanted pregnancies, the search for birth control pills, the folks with the flu and the cough and the red itch “down there.” No one came to the clinic if they had somewhere else, anyone else.

      All Seth could think about when he walked in the doors was that he’d seen it before. Maybe not this color and maybe there were different posters on the walls, but the poor people all over the world always ended up in rooms like these. With overworked doctors and nurses with sore feet.

      If he had to get a job in the outside world, then he supposed this was the safest place to do it. What were the odds that someone here would recognize him? He looked nothing like the man they’d flashed on television or the Wanted picture in the post office. His hair was the longest it had ever been, and the posters didn’t mention the missing hand, but that wasn’t even it. Since Kosovo, he’d changed. He had lines in his face, around his eyes. He looked tired all the time, and his skin was sallow and pasty. He felt like an old man despite his daily workout.

      Now that he was dressed in hospital scrubs, with an old Dodgers baseball cap on his head, no one would pick him out as a soldier or a traitor. He looked at himself in the clinic’s bathroom mirror and pulled his cap down a little farther.

      He finally understood what Kate had meant when she’d said she’d been invisible as the room-service lackey at the downtown L.A. hotel.

      She’d been a forensic accountant for the UN in Kosovo and she’d been the one who’d gotten the Delta Force team involved. She and Nate had been an item, and when Kate had discovered that something fishy was going on, she’d talked it over with him. She hadn’t known it at the time, but she’d found the first proof that a faction of the CIA, calling themselves Omicron, had created a mighty nasty chemical agent and they were planning to sell it to the highest bidders, who would then use it to kill whomever they chose—mostly civilians. To add to Omicron’s crimes, they’d recruited a Delta Force team, his team—one of the best in the world—to do the dirty work of wiping the evidence off the earth. Their original mission was to go to a secret laboratory in Serbia, collect all the files, kill the scientists working there and destroy the lab. What they hadn’t mentioned was that the scientists in that particular lab weren’t working on the nerve gas—they were developing the antidote.

      Some of the team had escaped—Nate, Boone, Cade and himself. They’d convinced Kate and Harper to come along because they clearly knew too much. The one scientist to make it out alive had been Tamara. She’d come back to the States, and Nate had found her a safe place to do her research. She’d had to distill all the notes from her colleagues to try and recover their progress and then she had to make sure the antidote not only worked but could be dispersed to save whole villages.

      Last Seth had heard, Nate was trying to get some money together for more of her tests. He did security work, real high-tech stuff, state-of-the-art, for which he charged a pretty penny. No one complained, as his customers were as shady as they come. A lot of bookies, some conspiracy nuts, an arms dealer or two. But ever since his picture had shown up on Wanted posters across the country, Nate couldn’t afford to be picky.

      The work had been easier when there’d been two of them. When Seth had been there to cover Nate’s back.

      Pounding on the bathroom door made him reach for a weapon he wasn’t carrying. He closed his eyes and tried to chill, but it wasn’t easy.

      “You gonna stay in there all day?” It was Harper, of course. “Other people need to use that john.”

      He gave himself another look in the mirror, then his gaze moved down to the plastic masquerading as his hand. He had to focus to open and close the thing. None of it felt natural or intuitive. But he couldn’t hide forever.

      He opened the door in time to catch Harper walk into the cubbyhole she called her office. After he grabbed his regular clothes, he followed her, the scent of cleaning fluid and rubbing alcohol as bright and intrusive as the overhead fluorescent lights.

      Her head was bent over an open file as she sat on the edge of