Shiver

the hell had he gotten them?
    Since Danny couldn’t tell the truth, the whole thing just got awkward from that point.
    Even if he had to disassemble a crutch if the shit started hitting the fan again, it was a lot better than being unarmed, as he had been the last time the cartel had found him. An optimist might believe that there wouldn’t be a second time, but Danny considered himself a realist.
    And realistically, the whole point was for the Zetas to be chasing him rather than the real Marco. The exercise got kind of pointless if there was no trail. And if there was a trail, the team the Zetas had in place would sooner or later pick up on it. Because Marco knew where all the bodies were buried, and they were desperate to silence him before he could point them all out.
    Dangerous situations were what he excelled at, the latest fiasco notwithstanding, and Danny wouldn’t even have been much more than glumly resigned to the prospect of being found again if he’d just had himself to worry about. But now there were Sam and Tyler.
    They added a whole new layer of concern to the situation.
    The kid was a kid. By virtue of that fact alone, Danny wasn’tabout to let him get hurt or killed. Whether he liked him—which he did—or not didn’t matter.
    And Sam—well, he wasn’t about to let her get hurt or killed, either.
    For a whole host of reasons, including the fact that she was a girl, and an innocent bystander, and he owed her, and . . .
    Face facts, she was getting under his skin.
    He should never have kissed her.
    Danny would have cursed himself for letting it happen, except that was an absolute exercise in futility. Bottom line: learn from your mistakes, don’t do it again.
    Ordinarily he wouldn’t have done it the first time, no matter how hot Sam was or how attracted he was to her. He was on the job, working undercover, and he was professional enough to maintain a certain degree of detachment from an unsuspecting civilian who had accidentally gotten caught up in the investigation and was now, as a result, under his protection.
    He blamed the damned painkillers. They made him just loopy enough so that his inner self-control system was shot to hell.
    The solution was easy enough, even if he cringed when he thought about it: no more pain pills for him. When the pain came back, as it was going to do, and pretty shortly, too, he was just going to have to hurt till he healed. Dangerous as the situation was, he needed a clear head anyway. Along with no distractions: as in, lay off the girl.
    She was beautiful, sexy, just his type with her lovely face, long black hair, and big blue eyes. He liked the attitude shegave him, admired her guts. Add to that, her lips were soft, her mouth hot, her body killer. Plus, she’d been surprising him from the beginning, when he’d looked up from his prison in the car trunk to see her frowning down at him. She’d kept surprising him at every turn since. The biggest surprise of all might have been the way she had caught fire when he’d kissed her. He definitely hadn’t seen that coming. In his experience, beautiful girls—the latest woman he’d been seeing (read sleeping with) in the weeks between assignments being a case in point—tended to be lacking in the passion department. Not Sam. She had caught fire as quickly as he had. Impossible to miss the fact that she had been vibrating with eagerness to get naked and get it on with him.
    Hot and horny: when it came to women, it was his favorite combination. How could he resist taking what she was obviously ready, willing, and able to give?
    Libido-squashing answer: because he had to.
    Her life, her kid’s life, and his own life were on the line here. For all their sakes, sex couldn’t be allowed to enter into the equation at all.
    No matter how much he wished things were otherwise.
    Without really even meaning to wind up there, Danny found himself standing at the doorway to Tyler’s bedroom again. Behind him, the bathroom light was still on; it provided enough illumination for him to easily see the pair on the bed.
    They were curled up facing each other, both black heads nestled close on the same pillow. Clutching a small teddy bear close to his chest, Tyler looked small and frail under the protectionof Sam’s arm, which was draped over him. Sam looked—well, the only word he could come up with was delectable. Her hair fanned out over the white sheets like a banner, and her features, seen in profile, were strong