But he shook his head. “No . . . that . . .” He took her hand, pressed it against his carotid artery. Met her eyes.

Fast. Too fast. His pulse hammered under her fingers. He put his hand around her wrist.

Then, just like that, Colt dropped to the ground, out cold.

EIGHT

You could have drowned me,” Colt said. He sat on the dock, the dark sky littered with stars glinting down upon him, the air brisk, laden with the scent of the dark lake.

Despite the blanket around his shoulders, Colt shivered, his body sodden through, the cold embedded deep in his bones.

“Stop being a baby. I was right there.” Tae sat beside him, also wet, also wrapped in a blanket. Also shivering.

He glanced at her, and she smiled, a shadow in her beautiful eyes that betrayed the trauma earlier that night. The one where he’d fought with an intruder—although not just an intruder but some sort of secret government agent. And then he’d nearly died again, thanks to the rocketing of his heart.

“You didn’t have to drown me.”

“You had tachycardia, and when you passed out, you were in real danger of arrhythmia. I had to shock your system.”

“So throwing me into the lake was your best idea?”

“It was either that or an ice-cold dunk into the bathtub. This was quicker.”

Last thing he’d remembered before passing out were the words Disney World, as in the happiest place on earth being the source of the bioattack. If that thought wasn’t enough to give a guy a full-on cardiac arrest . . . But even before that, his pulse had rocketed, and not just from the fight with the attacker, but the fact that Tae knew said attacker.

He’d been the one who warned her about Sergei . . .

Colt had been milliseconds away from getting the guy back into a headlock.

Then everything went black, and he’d woken fiercely, painfully, abruptly, with a rush of ice and fire coursing through his body.

He sucked in a lungful of water even as he launched himself out of the lake, blinking hard into the night, coughing, spitting, gulping for breath.

Sure, Tae had been right there, up to her waist in water. And next to her, the man he’d been fighting who’d helped drown—er, save—him. But Colt’s lungs still burned and he’d almost lived one of his many dark nightmares, death by drowning.

So, after he’d emptied out his lungs—and stomach—he shook himself back to the living, spotted Roy, and nearly took a swing at the guy again. Would have, except for Tae’s voice.

“Colt! Calm down. You’re safe. Just breathe.”

Seemed like a sort of mantra for his life. He’d whirled around and spotted her, standing under the moonlight, her blond hair glistening, her eyes big, her hand on his arm.