Page 51 of Legacy Found

So he followed me. Or close enough — he's watched me vanish every afternoon for weeks and finally decided to see where, and being Torres, he didn't ask anyone's permission. He just showed up and made himself at home.

I glance at Luke.

Luke has gone very still.

He doesn't say anything for a moment, and the moment stretches, and I watch his jaw tighten before he goes back to wrapping his hands with a little more focus than the job needs. "This is a training session," he says finally. Cool. Clipped. "Not a spectator sport."

"Good thing I'm not here to spectate." Torres drops into a stretch, unbothered, meeting the chill head-on with an easy grin. "I'll pull my weight."

Something passes between them — quick and male and completely over my head, two very different men taking each other's measure across a mat. Luke's face doesn't change, but the temperature in the room drops about ten degrees.

I decide, cheerfully, to ignore whatever that is.

"Well, I think it's great," I announce, because I do, and I bump Torres's shoulder with mine. He bumps mine back, easy, familiar.

Luke's hands go still on the wrap for half a second. His eyes track the shoulder-bump like it personally offended him.

"Warm up," he says. Flat. And turns away.

Here's my problem, and it announces itself thirty seconds in, Luke's taken off the academy jacket tonight.

He's training in a fitted shirt, and I have trained with this man every single afternoon for weeks and somehow never — until this precise moment — fully registered the situation happening under that shirt. The shoulders. The forearms. The controlled power of him when he steps through a demonstration.

He's showing me a combination. I'm supposed to be studying his technique. I'm studying something. I'm not a hundred percent sure it's the technique.

"You following the footwork?" Luke asks.

"Mm-hm," I say, with the confidence of a woman who was absolutely not following the footwork.

I glance over and Torres is watching me with one eyebrow raised nearly to his hairline, because Torres notices everything, and I give him a look that says, very clearly, shut up. His grin widens.

"Something funny?" Luke asks, not looking up.

"Nope," Torres and I say at the exact same time.

Then Luke comes to fix my stance, which he's done a hundred times, which should be the least remarkable thing in the world. Tonight it is not the least remarkable thing in the world.

"You're opening up here," he says, and steps in behind me. One hand settles on my shoulder, adjusting the angle. The other comes to my waist, repositioning my hips, and my brain — my traitor brain — goes completely, embarrassingly quiet.

"Am I?" I manage.

Luke pauses. "Yes."

"Right." Riveting stuff, Jessica. Truly.

He moves me again, and his chest nearly brushes my back, close enough that I feel the heat coming off him, close enough that I become suddenly, acutely aware of how much bigger he is than me—tall and solid and warm, right there, while my pulse kicks up for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with a combat lesson.

"Try it again," he says, stepping back.

I try it again. I botch it completely.

Luke looks at the mess I've made of a movement I've done right forty times. Then he looks at me.

"Your fault," I inform him.

His eyebrow lifts. "My fault?"

"You distracted me."