Then he passed out for a while, waking to look at the stars. Blood dripped into his eyes, and he wiped it away, struggling to sit up and move toward the two men who’d been thrown from the blast earlier. His vision faded, and he fought against passing out again.

They were dead, too. Saul and Jose. Gone.

That left Rock and Billy. Where the hell were they? He couldn’t stand, so he crawled past the still burning truck toward the MTV, seeing a prone body. Billy? He’d been away from the explosion. Why was he down?

The world wasn’t making sense, and an ominous ticking sound echoed between Wolfe’s ears. He reached Billy to find a bullet hole neatly placed in the back of his large head. In the back? There hadn’t been insurgents near—he would have seen them.

“Rock?” Wolfe croaked, looking for the motorcycle. It was gone. So was Rock.

Wolfe let the ground take him again, awakening briefly when troops arrived and then again in a medicopter. He wanted to tell them to leave him with his team, but his voice wouldn’t work.

The dream morphed to the hospital in Germany where he’d recuperated. To the moment when the investigators determined that Rock had been the inside guy who’d stolen the heroin and killed the team. Anger had propelled Wolfe to heal and survive, at least temporarily. There would be justice.

The dream again changed direction, this time to images of Dana in the woods, in that pink corset, in his bed. An explosion rocked through his house, and she screamed as she was burned.

He sat up on the sofa, gasping for breath. Sweat soaked his chest. His hand trembled as he wiped his eyes.

Nothing would stop him from protecting her. Then, he would find justice.

* * *

Dana ignored her headache as Wolfe drove through the thick air to their office building. They’d both been silent on the drive in, and the inscrutable expression on the man’s face hadn’t encouraged discussion. This close to him, her body hummed with need, now that she had firsthand proof of how well he could handle that need.

He parked near the door and turned toward her. “We’ll leave around three for Tennessee.”

She paused in the midst of reaching for the door handle. “Huh?”

“For the wedding. We can drive about four or five hours today, stay somewhere in West Virginia for the night and get on the road in the morning. I’ll have you at your folks’ by noon, which is when your plane would’ve landed.” He opened his door, his voice matter of fact. “The wedding is at five, right?”

She tried to make sense of his words, opening the door and stepping down. Heat blasted her. “What in the world are you talking about?” She shut the door and jumped over a puddle before reaching the cracked sidewalk.