shot at her? On the heels of that thought was the understanding that had the projectile been an inch more to the right she would be missing a knee and an inch more to the left and Sargent …
She quickly looked up from Sargent and into his master’s gaze. The understanding she had come to was already written clearly in his eyes, and she could see the rage flooding and darkening his beautiful green-blue irises. The darkness in them took her breath away. The idea of coming within an inch of being shot was nothing compared to the heart-clenching alarm that filled her soul. What she was seeing was something so virulently dark that her human instincts, watered down by centuries of domestication, came racing to the forefront, warning her to hightail it out of there.
She watched his head whip to the side, watched as he narrowed all of that rage in a single direction as if he knew exactly where it had come from. No guessing. No debating. He seem seemed to think on that for a momentn when ed to just know.
A second projectile snapped out of the trees and right before her eyes she saw it tear open a massive hole in Jackson’s chest, the force of the shot jolting his entire body back into a tree.
Yet he did not go down, did not flail. Did not panic. How? How was he standing when it was clear the attacker had just tried to blow a hole in Jackson’s heart? The only thing that had saved Jackson from an instant death was his flack vest.
Thank god
, she thought fervently. Oh thank god he had that vest. And then, in the very next instant she realized the exact thing Jackson was realizing.
She
did not have a vest.
Jackson did not so much as flinch. Not a single motion in response to the fact that someone had just tried to kill him. He didn’t drop down into the brush like she did, her hands covering her head … as if that would do anything to stop a bullet.
Marissa opened her mouth to shout at him, to yell at him to get down before he got his fool head blown off. But before a single sound could pass her lips she watched him unfurl his hands from the fists that they were in, watched him throw up both of his rigid palms and, with a deep, roaring shout of pure outrage, jolt forward as if shoving against a wall.
A huge blast of energy exploded outward, coming from nowhere and blossoming out from Jackson’s capable body so roughly that every single tree bent under the power of it. Some even snapped in two, making the woods in front of Jackson come alive with the sound of cracking, falling branches. She watched gape-mouthed as he clenched a thick dominant fist, and as though hewere yanking on an invisible rope, he jerked the whole of his powerful body back. Then, as if the other end of that invisible tether were wrapped around it, a huge pine tree came tearing toward him, plowing through other trees and bracken, rich loamy soil churning up in a dark black path behind it. It came screeching to a halt mere inches from the tips of his toes, a shower of old and new pine needles raining down on him. The roots of the tree remained buried in the soil, as if it had grown up in that very spot all along.
Sounding slightly hysterical in her own head, Marissa found herself thinking that the act gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “moving heaven and earth.” And there, up in the mid branches, sat a man who was clinging to the trunk of the tree.
However, the instant the tree came to a halt the attacker within it burst free of the branches, a power-filled explosion of cracking wood and even more pine needles raining down on Jackson as he leaped up from the ground and into the tree with a mighty flex of uniform-clad thighs. But strong as he was, human strength couldn’t account for the distance he covered in that single leap. He made it all the way up to the attacker’s former position. Then, using it as a secondary launching point, he burst into the air with a roar of fury that made her blood run cold. The two men connected in midair, a
She quickly looked up from Sargent and into his master’s gaze. The understanding she had come to was already written clearly in his eyes, and she could see the rage flooding and darkening his beautiful green-blue irises. The darkness in them took her breath away. The idea of coming within an inch of being shot was nothing compared to the heart-clenching alarm that filled her soul. What she was seeing was something so virulently dark that her human instincts, watered down by centuries of domestication, came racing to the forefront, warning her to hightail it out of there.
She watched his head whip to the side, watched as he narrowed all of that rage in a single direction as if he knew exactly where it had come from. No guessing. No debating. He seem seemed to think on that for a momentn when ed to just know.
A second projectile snapped out of the trees and right before her eyes she saw it tear open a massive hole in Jackson’s chest, the force of the shot jolting his entire body back into a tree.
Yet he did not go down, did not flail. Did not panic. How? How was he standing when it was clear the attacker had just tried to blow a hole in Jackson’s heart? The only thing that had saved Jackson from an instant death was his flack vest.
Thank god
, she thought fervently. Oh thank god he had that vest. And then, in the very next instant she realized the exact thing Jackson was realizing.
She
did not have a vest.
Jackson did not so much as flinch. Not a single motion in response to the fact that someone had just tried to kill him. He didn’t drop down into the brush like she did, her hands covering her head … as if that would do anything to stop a bullet.
Marissa opened her mouth to shout at him, to yell at him to get down before he got his fool head blown off. But before a single sound could pass her lips she watched him unfurl his hands from the fists that they were in, watched him throw up both of his rigid palms and, with a deep, roaring shout of pure outrage, jolt forward as if shoving against a wall.
A huge blast of energy exploded outward, coming from nowhere and blossoming out from Jackson’s capable body so roughly that every single tree bent under the power of it. Some even snapped in two, making the woods in front of Jackson come alive with the sound of cracking, falling branches. She watched gape-mouthed as he clenched a thick dominant fist, and as though hewere yanking on an invisible rope, he jerked the whole of his powerful body back. Then, as if the other end of that invisible tether were wrapped around it, a huge pine tree came tearing toward him, plowing through other trees and bracken, rich loamy soil churning up in a dark black path behind it. It came screeching to a halt mere inches from the tips of his toes, a shower of old and new pine needles raining down on him. The roots of the tree remained buried in the soil, as if it had grown up in that very spot all along.
Sounding slightly hysterical in her own head, Marissa found herself thinking that the act gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “moving heaven and earth.” And there, up in the mid branches, sat a man who was clinging to the trunk of the tree.
However, the instant the tree came to a halt the attacker within it burst free of the branches, a power-filled explosion of cracking wood and even more pine needles raining down on Jackson as he leaped up from the ground and into the tree with a mighty flex of uniform-clad thighs. But strong as he was, human strength couldn’t account for the distance he covered in that single leap. He made it all the way up to the attacker’s former position. Then, using it as a secondary launching point, he burst into the air with a roar of fury that made her blood run cold. The two men connected in midair, a
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