“Were you ever alone with him?”

Her heart jerked hard in her chest. Memories flooded her mind, the silent screams of a small child, the pain wracking her body, a knife slicing through her chest. Her heart ceasing to beat and then jerking awake, just as it was now. She slammed the mental door shut hard. That way lay madness. She never looked at those memories unless they served a valuable purpose and there was no such reason now.

“We are a traditional family in many ways,” she replied enigmatically, avoiding a lie. She wasn’t above lying to serve her mission, but not to Sam, not if she could help it.

His eyes warmed. “So we’re back to you giving me instructions on how to properly court you. Do I ask your brothers’ permission?”

He was stealing her heart with his sincerity. She shook her head. “I am not a woman who would be practical in your life, Sam. You need a home and family . . .”

He laughed, interrupting her carefully chosen words. The sound was pure masculine amusement, sending a curling heat through her and making her forget everything she was going to say.

“I’m a soldier, Azami. That’s who I am. What I am. My woman will be my home—my family. Beyond that, who knows? I believe you’re that woman.”

Thorn swallowed hard. Now her breath was coming too fast, her lungs burning. He shook her like no one else ever had with his stark admissions. His honesty. Who in the world was like him? “You are an intellectual like my brother. What drives you to put your life and your tremendous brain on the line?” She couldn’t prevent that little bite in her voice. He was made for great things and yet he chose combat.

“You tell me,” he fired back.

“I have a duty to perform that is sacred to me. Perhaps the attraction between us is strong because our values are so very close.”

She wanted that to be the reason—or that for the first time in her life she’d met a man she truly couldn’t resist. Her attraction to Sam Johnson had nothing to do with Dr.Whitney. The idea was simply impossible. She’d been thrown away long before Sam had applied to the GhostWalker program. Even had Whitney paired Sam with Thorn, he couldn’t have paired Thorn with Sam. The wild churning in her stomach settled a little. Her attraction to Sam had to be the real thing, not manufactured by a monster for his own purposes.

“I understand duty,” Sam said. He looked around him. One helicopter down. Two Jeeps and many soldiers dead. The cleaning crews would hopefully be able to identify where the threat had come from. “Do you think these soldiers came after your brother?”

Thorn’s gaze followed his careful study of the battlefield. Did she believe the soldiers had tried to kidnap her brother? Nothing else made sense. The soldiers hadn’t attacked the compound where Lily and her child resided and they’d retreated the moment help had come. It was actually a very well-coordinated attack. They couldn’t know that Sam’s GhostWalker team had strewn the forest with hidden bunkers or that she and Sam would be able to teleport so skillfully.

“Yes. I think someone with a great deal of money has orchestrated this attack in order to kidnap Daiki. It is the only real possible explanation that fits.” She waited a moment and then into the silence breathed his name. “Sam.” It was improper to address him by his given name, as he did her, but these were extraordinary circumstances. She waited patiently until his eyes met hers. She needed to look into his soul when he answered her.

“Do you work for Dr. Peter Whitney? Are you affiliated with him in any way?”

His frowned deepened. “Dr. Peter Whitney has committed indescribable crimes against humanity with his experiments. He’s operating outside the law. The man is a criminal and needs to be stopped. He’s our greatest enemy.”

“Then why are you working with his daughter?” Thorn asked, her voice dropping low with accusation.

Sam pushed a hand through his hair. He looked tired, a great oak tree, swaying in the wind. She’d almost forgotten his wound and loss of blood. The Zenith had helped, stopping the bleeding and providing the adrenaline needed to keep going, but the drug was wearing off and Sam needed medical attention.

“Is that what you think? You’re so far off base. You came here thinking she would be just like her father. Lily is as much a victim of Peter Whitney as everyone else he’s ever come in contact with. She works harder than anyone else to uncover his location, but he’s got powerful friends who help to hide him.”

She could see that was all the information she was going to get out of him on the subject. He was fiercely loyal to Lily and despised Peter Whitney. He hadn’t bothered to disguise the loathing in his voice.

“You might want to sit down, Sam,” she advised softly. “The Zenith kick is fading and you’re going to crash hard.”

Thorn couldn’t prevent herself from stepping forward and slipping her arm around his waist. “If we get to the tree line, your people can find us easier, but we’ll still be protected. Do you think you’ve got enough left to make it to the edge of the road?”

His arm circled her shoulders and he pulled her beneath his arm, but she doubted the gesture had anything to do with weakness. He didn’t feel weak at all. His body had no give to it, muscle flowing beneath his skin, almost as if he were made of steel. He didn’t lean on her, but she couldn’t let go of him. They walked in silence through the forest, avoiding the areas where there were dead bodies. She had no doubt the cleaners wouldn’t find anything useful to identify them. If the men in the Jeep had come back to kill the two fallen Mexican soldiers, fingerprints would be useless.

“You know they shot those soldiers to keep us from questioning them,” Thorn said.

Sam nodded, concentrating on each step. He wasn’t going to appear weak in front of her; after all, he did have some pride.

“The enemy didn’t want to leave anyone behind who could help us unravel the conspiracy.” The first bullets had gone to kill the dying soldiers, giving Azami and Sam a few seconds to escape. They’d been lucky. “We have dental and faces, even if no fingerprints. We’ll get a hit. And no one will lose our tails. We have one on the Jeep and one on the helicopter,” Sam assured. “We’re pretty good at what we do.”

Thorn looked up at his face and his breath caught in his throat. The sun slid through the heavy foliage and kissed her flawless skin. Her lashes fanned down, two thick crescents and her body moved against him in a rhythm that sent the now familiar heat coursing through his veins.

“I’m sure you are,” she replied.

With another woman he might consider she was throwing out an innuendo, but Azami didn’t flirt. What she’d given of herself to him had been freely given. She was extremely composed and very private. He counted himself very lucky that she’d responded to him at all.

“Daiki is . . .” She hesitated. “Important to the world. His work is unsurpassed by anyone as of yet and many countries would love to get their hands on him. It is virtually impossible to infiltrate our company. Our staff is kept small and is moved from country to country when needed.”

“How can your security be that tight? You have to hire . . .”

She was already shaking her head. “Sam, we are our own security. Everyone who works for Samurai Telecommunications is known to us since our childhood. The majority were trained by my father from the time they were children, and after his death, by one of his children. We employ family and family of family—if that makes sense.”

Sam knew it was a common business practice in Japan for employees to work for the same company for years and their children and children’s children to follow suit. He snuck a peek at the distance to the road. He could just make it if he concentrated and kept putting one foot in front of the other. He’d managed to block out the pain for some time, but now it was pounding at him hard, demanding acknowledgment. He didn’t want anything to interfere in the last hour or so he had alone with Azami. Once they were back in the compound, they might very well become enemies. Certainly, until they had satisfying answers, he would have to protect his team.

“It makes sense. And it’s smart. If Daiki is responsible for what I understand is groundbreaking software, who developed the optical lens? From what I understand there is nothing even coming close to it on the market?”

Azami glance up at his face. “I believe Lily has that information.”

“I didn’t think to ask her. I only know they were talking very excitedly about the satellite and what it could do for us.”

Azami shrugged. “He’s written up in all the magazines. It isn’t a secret. Eiji developed the lens. Between the two of them, there isn’t much they can’t do.”

“So Eiji is every bit as valuable as Daiki in the making of the newest satellite system. If he were to fall into the wrong hands, your company would pay a great deal to get him back. Or he could be forced to reproduce the lens to enable another faction to reproduce the satellite.”

The trees lining the road seemed to be getting farther away, not closer, which made absolutely no sense. Every step was like wading through quicksand, and if he remembered correctly, he was in forest, not swamp.

His mind seemed to stay sharp enough and his focus remained on Azami—every breath she took, the scent of her enveloping him, the way her soft hair slid against his arm and chest. He felt her tighten her arm around his waist. She was surprisingly strong for such a small woman. He shook his head. No, something important was eluding him, slipping through his mind so fast he couldn’t grasp it long enough to discover what it was.

He moistened his lips and looked down at the top of her silky head. “You’re really beautiful, Azami.”

Thorn looked up at Sam’s unguarded face. He was crashing fast. He’d lost too much blood and the Zenith had kept him going, but he was going to need medical attention fast. “Sam, call in your people now. Tell them you need a medic and blood.” She enunciated each word carefully. “Tell them you’re wearing two patches of second-generation Zenith.”

“That’s the important information.” He smiled down at her, as though happy she’d helped him remember.

Thorn nearly groaned. He was very far gone. “Sam. Call in your people right now. Tell them to come now.”

He stumbled to a halt and stood there swaying, rubbing at the frown lines between her eyes with his fingertip as if that was far more important than his wounds. “How would you know about second-generation Zenith being in existence? Only we know about that. And how did you have access to it?”

“Sam.” She used her sternest voice. “We need your team now. Call to them.”

He went down, a giant oak tree chopped off at the trunk, his legs completely giving out and he was on the ground, staring up through the heavy canopy at the clear blue sky, eyes wide-open. Thorn went down with him, trying to cushion his fall, a thread of desperation running through the calm. He must have lost more blood than she’d first thought. She should have pushed him much earlier to call his team, to let them know he was injured. She hadn’t because … well … she just hadn’t been smart.

“Sam, open your mind to mine. All the way, let me in.” She used her voice shamelessly, a warm honeyed tone, slipping inside his mind to settle there. He had to let her inside. She searched for threads, anything that might lead her to his team. She knew, without a doubt, that he’d communicated telepathically with them. She’d never tried to get inside another mind deep enough to find a path to someone else. If she didn’t, help might be too late.

She understood that his team’s first obligation would be to rescue Daiki and Eiji, transporting them quickly to safety. The cleanup team could take its time. And anyone coming to get Sam might think they could drive. They needed a helicopter and a medic fast. Second-generation Zenith didn’t break down the body and cause it to bleed out as the first generation had done—Sam wouldn’t need an antidote, but that didn’t mean the blood loss wouldn’t eventually kill him. The drug had forced his system to speed up, not slow down, and any wound inside his body—and he had a hole through him—might continue to bleed internally.