“Yeah, yeah, come on!” Slade dared him. “Fight me like a man. Take me on...and don’t just leave me to rot in a jungle like you did before!”
Leave me to rot...
“He didn’t!” Sydney cried out, shaking her head. “Slade, we thought you were dead! That was the only reason we left. If we’d known the truth, we would never have left you in that jungle.”
His twisted grin called her words a lie. “He knew.”
What?
Slade pulled away from Cale and pointed one shaking finger at Gunner. “That bastard, my brother, knew.”
Sydney shook her head.
Gunner just stared back at Slade.
“It’s easy enough to tell if a man’s breathing or not,” Slade continued. “Especially for someone with Gunner’s special training.”
Sydney took a step forward. “We both thought you were dead! We were in a firefight. You went down, and there was so much blood...”
Slade yanked open his shirt, revealed the scars on his chest. She knew those marks. Bullet wounds. “I was down, not dead.” Then he looked back up at Gunner. “But you were hoping I’d die, right? Just leave me to bleed out, and that way, you never had to get your hands dirty.”
This was crazy.
She met Logan’s stare. Logan looked...angry? But guarded. Why? He was Gunner’s friend. He knew better than to believe these accusations. They all knew better. “You’re traumatized,” she told Slade. “Not thinking clearly. When we get back to the States, everything will be—”
“He wanted you.”
The words fell heavily into the room.
Gunner tensed. She saw the muscles of his chest and shoulders tighten.
She cleared her throat. “I—I know things are confusing for you, Slade.” Two years of hell and pain. “But Gunner loves you. He would never have left you if he’d known—”
“He. Wanted. You.”
Slade’s blazing stare seemed to scorch her skin with his rage.
Sydney shook her head.
“I was in his way,” Slade said. His eyes were bloodshot. Wild. “So he saw a way to take me out.”
“This is crazy! We were in Peru back then to save you. Your plane went down. We came in to get you out! Why come in at all if we just wanted to leave you to die?” Surely he’d realize that his words didn’t make sense. He’d start to understand, to see reason.
But his hands were fisting again. “You wanted to save me. He followed you here, because he couldn’t stop you then. He was waiting for his moment, just waiting...willing to do anything to get you.”
Gunner had asked her not to tell Slade about them. But Slade was acting as if—
“He got you, didn’t he? I can see it in his eyes.”
Her cheeks burned.
“Enough.” Gunner’s snarl.
“Not even close,” Slade fired right back. “They tortured me, for two years. And during all those months, just how many times did you make love with my—”
Gunner lunged forward. This time, he was the one who had to be pulled back. Logan grabbed him and held on tight.
“Let him come at me! Let him take me on...instead of running away with my girl!”