Rose cleared her throat. “What are you reading?”
He handed the book to her, fingers brushing hers, his knee pressing against hers and not moving when he sat back. The simple contact, heated through two layers of clothing, subtly reminded her that he knew something about her, something she hadn’t known she wanted or liked. She could, she realized, trust him because he hadn’t explicitly gone all alpha-male badass on her. If he’d come on to her, said You know you liked it, baby I got what you need right here, she wouldn’t have given him a second thought.
Which made him so much more dangerous.
The right thing to do was to hand him back his book and go back upstairs to actually work. That was the practical, pragmatic, sensible thing to do. Instead, she turned the book over to see the title.
“The Iliad,” she said. “Preparation for this trip?” They were visiting Troy after Ephesus, but even as she flipped to the back cover copy, then paged through the book, she knew he’d carried this around for far longer than the last couple of weeks. The corners of the cover and pages were blunted, dusty, stained with what looked like coffee. It smelled like Jack’s belongings when he came home, a distinct combination of sweat, dirt, and superhuman effort.
He shook his head. “Do you know the story?”
“I have a business degree,” she said. “I took art history to satisfy my humanities requirements, then promptly replaced everything I learned with organizational theory. I saw Troy, though. And 300.”
“That’s Greece,” he said. “Sparta, to be accurate. The Iliad is the ultimate story of war. When I first joined the teams, I read it for the glory.”
“And now?” she asked, watching him closely.
There was a short silence during which he framed his answer. “Now I read it differently.”
His answer piqued her curiosity about the book, and him. “I brought my e-reader,” she said.
“Too bad you can’t work from that,” he quipped.
“If I thought I could jerry-rig it, I would,” she said. “But I’ll download the book and read it.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he said.
“I want to,” she said, surprising both of them. “We’re visiting the site. I read Rumi’s poems in preparation.”
“All of them?”
“I read some of them,” she said. “A few. That Grannie sent me. But I’d like to read The Iliad.”
She offered him his copy, but he held up his hand. “Keep it.”
“Thank you,” she said, smoothing her hand over the cover. “I’ll take good care of it.”
“Don’t worry about it, Jetlag. It’s been through more missions than I can count.”
Carefully she laid it beside her laptop, away from the sweating beer bottles, then checked the email download process. Thirty-two percent complete. “This is a complete waste of time, isn’t it?”
She half expected him to repeat his line from the previous night, that he could take her mind off it. He didn’t. Instead he watched her for a long moment, until she looked away.
“You’re afraid,” he said.
“No, I’m not,” she said quickly. Admitting fear was tantamount to being the slowest gazelle in the herd. “I’m … on completely new ground. No map. No project plan,” she said quietly. “That kind of … loss of control … I don’t like it.”
He relaxed, signs she could read only because she was watching for them. She was studying Keenan’s body with the focus she normally reserved for the really important things. Management committee meetings. Negotiations with vendors. That sort of thing.
“So it’s not about the threat of violence. It’s about the loss of control.”
“Always,” she said. “Always.”
He thought about this for a moment. “If it helps, it’s not a loss so much as a surrender.”
She laughed. “What’s the difference?”
“When you lose control, it’s taken from you. When you surrender it, you’re giving it away. It’s still yours, in a way.” When she shook her head, he continued. “BUD/S feels like a loss of control. The instructors have total control over your body and mind, and they beat the hell out of you in every possible way. But it’s actually a surrender. I gave them everything, knowing that at the end of the course, I’d get it back, sharper, stronger, honed like a blade.”
Her eyebrows were in the vicinity of her hairline. She got them under control, but there was nothing she could do about her heart, alternately skipping in her chest and thumping a slow drumbeat of desire. “I didn’t know I could want like this,” she said.
“You can know it better,” he said.
His knee still rested against hers, his hand resting on the arms of the chair, fingers relaxed. But there was no denying the tightly leashed male demand simmering under the surface of his skin.