Leaving her, naked and twisted up in those silken silver sheets this morning, was, without a doubt, the hardest thing he’d done since returning from his final deployment. He would carry the memories from last night with him long after he returned to Virginia. The sounds she’d made, the sensation of her damp skin sliding against his, the way it felt to sink into her warm, welcoming body. Memories of the way she’d responded would stay with him forever, a mental storage bin of erotic keepsakes he could open whenever he wanted to replay one of the most amazing nights he’d ever experienced.

It scared the hell out of him. Because those same memories would no doubt torture him once she was no longer in his life.

Instead of turning left and driving toward the freeway when he pulled out of her building’s parking garage in the early hours before dawn, he’d headed in the opposite direction, grabbed a cup of weak coffee from an all-night diner, and meandered around downtown Austin for a full hour. Concerns over what these past few weeks meant to his future dominated his thoughts. This wasn’t a random hookup that he could walk away from. Last night had left an indelible mark on him. There was no walking away.

Extricating himself from the web he’d allowed himself to become enmeshed in would require skills Daniel wasn’t sure he possessed. Most frightening, he wasn’t sure he wanted to get out of it. He didn’t want to even think about how he would get out of this because he knew it would fucking kill him to leave.

Except he had to leave. If there was one given in all of this, it was that his time in Austin was temporary.

The question was, when he did leave, would he have the chance to tell Samiah goodbye or would he just disappear? It could go either way. He’d had jobs in the past where he was there one day and gone the next. No forwarding address. No Facebook profile for his coworkers to find him. Nothing. He became a ghost.

That’s not how it always went down. Sometimes, he was required to play the clueless coworker. If local authorities were able to execute the capture without his intervention, he would pretend to be as shocked by the arrests as any of the other employees at Trendsetters. And then, out of the blue, one of his grandparents would fall ill, necessitating his immediate return to his family.