The words struck a little too close to the nerve for his peace of mind, especially considering how soon he would ship out. He needed his full concentration for his Afghanistan deployment. He didn’t need attachments.
He didn’t need to spend every waking minute of every day worrying about what kind of trouble a fearless woman like Sunny was getting into. He didn’t need the mind-bending stress of worrying about her stepping on some kind of land mine—
Shit.
His mother was the one who’d stepped on a bomb. Not Sunny. And hello Dr. Freud, it was too creepy that he was mixing them up in his head.
Irritation grated his nerves much like how the ragged ice along the roof jabbed and poked, making him snap back. “What makes you such an expert on love? Last time I checked, you’re as bad as Franco, never dating a woman more than a week—long enough for a one-night stand.”
Silence settled on the rooftop thicker than a morning fog. McCabe was staring at him with a you’re-a-dumb-ass look. Franco still stared through the scope of his rifle. But his knuckles were stark white.
Damn.
Franco had been a serial dater since he’d lost his wife and kid. Razzing the guy about his relationship history was pretty much taboo, and if he weren’t so damn wrapped up in himself he would have remembered that. His pal had been wrecked then and was still half-cracked now.
And Wade was wondering if maybe he understood where Franco was coming from a little better today than he ever had before. With torturous images of his mother being caught in a bomb’s blast hammering through his brain, all he could think of was keeping Sunny safe. She needed to take off those Pollyanna rose-colored glasses from her isolated upbringing and stay put, stay safe. Let people like him, like his team, like Agent Lasky, handle bomb-building fanatics.
“Heads up,” McCabe called, tapping a finger to his earpiece. “One of the explosives-sniffing dogs have found something.”
***
How did bomb squads manage to do this for a living, day in and day out?
Sunny hooked arms with her sister and watched the power plant in the distance, the metal structure nearly swallowed by morning mist. And watched. And watched with Flynn and Agent Lasky and his team once the bomb had been located. The rest of the plant workers were still behind the fence, about fifty yards farther than where they’d been since the initial evacuation. At least she hadn’t been hustled out of there, that much farther away from Wade.
As much as she tried to help, he kept shuttling her behind guards and into a secured room to look at pictures. She wanted to protect herself as much as anyone, but she knew her community. She had valuable profiling insights to offer on every person in that town. They’d all come through her business at one time or another, working out, grabbing a quick muffin, or using the Internet service.
God, she felt so helpless and angry. She hated not being able to help and was so enraged that she hadn’t somehow known a person in her community, a person close to her, could be capable of something this horrendous. To think that all of their emails, their primary form of communication with the outside world, had been so horribly manipulated made her ill. How many town members had used her Internet?
A hand clamped around her arm and she damn near jumped out of her skin. Looking up sharply, she bumped her head against… Wade’s chin.
She sagged with relief. “Thank God, it’s you. You scared the crap out of me, sneaking up like that.”
“You need to go,” he said abruptly.
The roots of her hair burned with apprehension. She lowered her voice to keep from risking a panic in the crowd. “Have they found a bomb? Is it about to go off? Is that why we were all evacuated so quickly?”
His face tight and closed off, he ducked his head to her ear. “Yes, they’ve found an explosive device. The bomb squad feels confident they can defuse it, but I don’t want you anywhere near here.”
“Wade, if this wasn’t a safe distance, I believe the authorities would have moved us farther out. I want to be on hand in case they catch whoever’s responsible…” Dread closed her throat for a gasp. “Or do they already have someone? Is my brother here? Are you trying to get me away from here so I won’t freak out about my brother? Be honest with me.”
Her voice rose with panic, but it was all she could do not to grab Wade by the parka and shake some answers from him. She could handle anything, except being kept in the dark.
He clasped her shoulders and guided her away from the eavesdropping crowd. His steady, determined step crunched along the ice until he stopped beside a boat dock tucked by the bay. “You need to calm down and do what I say.”
And didn’t that just rub her every last independent nerve the wrong way?
She jerked out of his grip. “Excuse me? Are you ordering me back to the kitchen to rustle up some supper while you go save the world? Do you not grasp that I’ve guided tour groups from our town out of blizzards? Pulled survivors out of avalanches?”
“Is it so damn wrong of me to want you to be safe while I do my job? I can’t be in the middle of a mission in Afghanistan wondering if you’re back here tangling with ecoterrorists or falling off the side of some mountain.”
She resisted the temptation to check for water in her ears because she couldn’t possibly be hearing him correctly. Since when were they talking about his deployment? Wasn’t this an argument about the here and now?
“Is this a backdoor way of asking me to wait for you while you’re overseas?”
“And if it was?”
“I don’t think this is the time to talk about that.”