Page 34 of Lethal Illusion

He raised one eyebrow.“Don’t you trust me?”

“That’s not the point,” she said.“My feet are swollen from walking all day.If I take them off, I might not be able to get them back on.”

“Sure you will.”

“And what happens if we need to get moving in a hurry?”

His voice softened, as though he were trying to reason with a child.“From this vantage point, I can see if anyone’s coming from a good distance away.You’ll have plenty of time to put your shoes back on.”

She crossed her arms.“I don’t know…”

“What’s the problem, Sloane?”His lips curved up on one side.“Do you have some sort of puritanical fear of an adult man seeing your bare ankles?”

“No, not at all.”

“Do your feet look like they should be attached to a creature that can swoop down over a lake and snatch a fish out of the water?”

Laughing, she swatted his shoulder.“My feet aren’t the most attractive part of my body, but they don’t look like they belong on a dragon.”

“Then there shouldn’t be any problem.”He sat on the forest floor and unzipped his rucksack.

She lowered herself to the ground beside him, and she could have sworn her muscles gave a collective sigh of relief.“Do you have some sort of foot fetish that I don’t know about?”

“Quit stalling and take off your boots.”

Resigned to her fate, she blew out a breath.“Fine.”

She unzipped her boots, and the simple act of tugging them off felt as if she’d released a pressure valve.It was like her feet had been holding their breath all day and could finally exhale.

Navarre shifted position and propped her feet onto his lap.He picked up her right foot, used his thumbs to apply pressure to her arch, and she couldn’t stop from moaning out loud.

“Oh God, that feels good.”

He did it again, applying a little more pressure this time, and she clamped her jaw shut to keep from making more noise.

“Who taught you how to do that?”she finally managed to choke out.

His hands stilled a moment before he continued his ministrations.“Buddy of mine in the Army.”

Okay, she hadn’t expected that answer.It snapped her out of her massage-induced brain fog.“A buddy?”

“You learn a lot of weird shit when you’re stuck with each other in the middle of nowhere for an extended period of time.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it.”

His hands moved from her arch to the ball of her foot, gentle strokes soothing tired muscles, and it felt so incredibly good, her eyes nearly rolled to the back of her skull.“There was this time.I don’t know, maybe six or seven years ago.We were sent to an outpost as part of an operation to neutralize insurgent forces in the area.”

“When you say neutralize, you mean kill, right?”

“Not always, but that was the general understanding for this op.Anyway, we cleared out a few cells that had been working in the area before winter set in.All in all, the locals were pretty happy about it.They invited us to the village for a celebratory feast of…well, I assumed it was goat, but who knows.”

He gave each toe individual attention, and she could feel the stress leaving her body.“Then things got quiet.And cold, really cold.But we still had to go out on patrols, because you have to make sure new insurgents don’t move in and take the place of the old ones.A day out in the rocky terrain is murder on your feet.One of the guys in my unit was dating a massage therapist.He showed us a thing or two.”

Finished with her right foot, he switched to the left and gave it the same glorious treatment.“He was a good guy, one of the best I ever served with, the type who always found a way to get along with anybody.He was planning to ask the therapist to marry him the next time he went home on leave.”

“Are you still in touch?”

“No.”A shadow crossed his features.“Our convoy got ambushed the following spring.The armored vehicle Cory was driving got hit with a rocket.Poor bastard was still alive when we pulled him out of the wreckage.The damage to his body was so extensive the medic didn’t know where to start.”Navarre had a faraway look in his eyes, as though he were reliving the memory.“Long story short, he never got to marry the therapist.”

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