Free Beneath the Surface by Melynda Price

give her the silence she needed to process. Grief was a tricky thing . . . You think you’re fine one minute and the next you’re not. It was a traumatic shock, seeing someone you cared about dead like that—especially when you weren’t used to it. He knew what she must have been going through—been there, done that, too many times to count. He was no stranger to grief. The doubts, the guilt, and the what-ifs that plagued your mind during the day and haunted your dreams at night. They’d eat you alive if you didn’t find a way to shut them off. After all these years, he still remembered his first. S’pose you never forget your first anything.
    The problem wasn’t always shutting the emotions off—sometimes that was the only way you could survive the next five minutes. No, the problem came when you refused to turn them back on, which had become the problem for many men like Jayce, and the temptation Asher lived with every fucking day. Once you become numb to everything—eventually your conscience just withers up and dies. He’d seen it happen time and time again to good soldiers—great men—destroyed by the atrocities of war.
    Everyone had their breaking point, and Asher had reached his two years ago when he’d watched one of his best friends gun down a kid on the streets of Kandahar. He couldn’t have been any older than thirteen. Then again, many of them were killers long before that. The kid was reaching into his jacket. Slater thought he was carrying a bomb and reaching for the detonator.
    That was the day Asher decided he couldn’t fucking do it anymore and resigned from the Special Forces, taking an early out. He knew if he didn’t, there wouldn’t be anything left of him and he’d be blowing his brains out just like Slater did after he’d realized his mistake. He was one bad call from a pine box.
    He should have just retired. If he’d known then what he did now, he sure as shit would have. But no, he’d gone and started up his own private security consulting agency. He should have fucking named it Mercenaries “R” Us, because that’s exactly what they turned out to be, but it didn’t quite have the same ring to it as Tate Security.
    Their last mission was doomed to fail from the start. Then again, how in the hell would he know the job they’d been hired to do was a setup to undermine the emergence of the Iraqi military? Asher couldn’t help but wonder if Del Toro had taken that job when he’d offered it, instead of Peterson, would things have ended differently? There was a good possibility seventeen people would still be alive.
    Shoving his own mental shit aside, he cleared his throat and focused his attention on his houseguest. He almost didn’t want to disrupt the unspoken truce that seemed to have settled between them, but he knew she wouldn’t volunteer the information on her own and he needed to know what the hell was going on. “I discovered something I shouldn’t have in Haiti” just wasn’t going to cut it. If he was going to risk his life for her, he damn well wanted to know why.
    “You’re staring . . .” She spoke into her bowl of peaches without looking up.
    Yes, he supposed he was. But he was still having a hard time believing Quinn was actually here. He hated to admit how many times in the past four months he’d thought of her, none of those times fondly, however. But nonetheless, she’d gotten under his skin at that wedding—bad.
    Mumbling an apology, Asher dragged his hand through his sweat-dried hair. He needed a shower and to wash off this dirt clinging to him like a second skin. The heat index was pushing ninety already, and he’d shed his sweaty shirt to work out Jack, the horse he’d left behind when he’d gone to scout the property earlier this morning. So far, there wasn’t any sign she’d been followed.
    “I need to know what happened in Haiti, Quinn.”
    She tensed but refused to look at him. It was just as well. He was a sucker for those