Backblast by Candace Irving (miss read books TXT) 📕

the fact that her watch wasn't encircling it. Had she dumped that on her bed last night, too, and simply forgotten? Or had she taken it off in the shower and tossed it on the floor in front of the toilet, along with her socks?

Either way, it was just one more nauseating piece of gear to clean.

The only silver lining of the morning would be embedded in her clothes.

Since she'd had no idea of her destination when she'd packed for this trip back at Campbell, old habits had kicked in. She'd stuffed two additional sets of ACUs and two blue "CID" suits into her duffel, every one of them blessedly bloodstain free.

But the suits would need ironing. On a ship.

The camouflage won.

She was going to have to clean her boots anyway. God willing, she wouldn't have a follow-on meltdown in the process. Frankly, she didn't have the time. She had two Marine embassy guards, and a handful of chopper and Osprey pilots and their crews to interview. A murderer to find and a cave victim to identify. A traitor to locate.

A partner to investigate.

John wasn't the only one who desperately needed to get to a phone. One call to Mira Ellis and she'd have all the information she needed about Sam Riyad. Even if it took Mira trading in a few NCIS special agent markers of her own to get it.

Last night, shortly before John had pulled her back into his chest and gruffly ordered her to sleep, she'd told him about Riyad's end run around her planned chromatography tests on the coffee dregs with the microTLC Colonel Tarrington had loaned her—and especially how the disbelieving spook had rerun Tarrington's tests on the translator's blood with John's stained ACU top.

That hadn't seemed to surprise John either.

But he'd already asked for her patience while he conducted his own, unorthodox investigation into the spook, so she hadn't pressed it.

As for her investigations?

Regan swung her legs out of the bunk. The uniform tee John had removed from his torso last night so that he could use it to cover hers slid down to mid-thigh as she stood. With her eyes adjusted to the dark, she headed for the shadowy flap of steel that formed the stateroom's desk and reached into the void for the switch.

Her night vision evaporated on a flare of blinding white. She swung away from its source toward the chair John had shoved up against the end of the bunk as she willed her vision to readjust to the manmade light of day. It did. But as she spotted the boots on the deck, tucked between the chair's legs, and the nest of gear clustered together on its seat, she was forced to lean back into the wall unit for support.

It wasn't enough.

She slid all the way down the steel unit until her ass hit the gently rolling deck. Her vision blurred again as the tears welled up…and spilled over.

There she sat, for how long she did not know, absorbing the implications.

Sixteen months ago, between those torrid sessions in John's bed, he'd confessed that he'd rarely dated as a teenager and had stopped altogether at twenty after he'd discovered his sister was alive. Between caring for Beth, his commitment to the Army and getting his degree at night so he could get commissioned, he'd had very little spare time and even less desire to squander what he did have on anyone other than his sister. Once Beth had settled into college life, he'd dated a bit between deployments, but none of his relationships had gone well—especially his last.

His ex had ended things a year and a half earlier, at the eleventh hour on the eve of his deployment to Yemen, no less. When John had asked why, he'd discovered that he possessed a litany of selfish sins up to and including the fact that not only was he late for almost every date—the ones he didn't cancel outright—he'd never once marked a special occasion or anniversary. And he had never sent flowers.

Evidently his ex had finagled knowledge of the abuse he'd suffered as a boy out of his sister and had decided that John just didn't have "normal" inside him.

In short, he was not, nor would he ever be, relationship material.

John had admitted the truth to Regan that night in his bed. He'd never thought about flowers, or cards and gifts. As for the other accusations his ex had tossed at him, she was right about those too. The job came first with him. It had to. His men's lives were on the line, his country's safety. He couldn't just drop what he was doing—especially when he was on a mission—to make a call or text.

Once his head was in the game, it stayed there. By the time he got back to camp, he was either writing up his after-action reports and too damned exhausted to do more than crash on a cot or a bedroll somewhere, or he was already prepping for the next push.

He'd thought his ex had understood.

But after that night, he'd gone over his paltry relationships in his head and had eventually admitted that maybe his ex was right. Maybe the way he'd grown up with his bastard of a father had scarred him. Permanently.

Hell, even when he was stateside, the gestures that women always seemed to want from him just…weren't inside him.

Regan hadn't argued with John then, nor could she argue with him now. Not until they'd had a chance to get to know each other better. John might be right. Flowers just might not be in his makeup. Ever. She had no problem with that. Wouldn't even miss them. Because as she stared at her keys, watch, boots, holster and sidearm—and, yes, even those CID credentials he still wasn't crazy about—she knew the gestures that were important to her were inside him. Several hours ago, her boots and her gear had been saturated with Nabil Durrani's blood…and now they weren't.

Every single item was spotless.

While