While young doctor Adam Morrow resigns himself to an uninformed existence, world-weary assassin Ian Abbott struggles with a life he never asked for. When the two strangers meet by chance, the attraction is immediate. And deadly, as Adam walks in on Ian in the middle of a hit. The situation spirals out of control once Ian discovers he and Adam share a connection far more profound than either imagined. Shocked by the discovery, Ian makes the hasty decision to kidnap him. Overnight Adam is torn from his promising career and a family who believes him dead. Things go from bad to worse when he finds himself reunited with a mother he never knew who is now head of a covert and shadowy group of killers for hire. Forced into joining their ranks, with Ian as his reluctant trainer and handler, Adam is given a series of impossible tasks to complete. To survive, he must fight with everything he has to keep his life, his sanity, and his very soul from being swept up in a violent and chaotic world even as he battles his unwanted and complicated feelings for Ian. For his part Ian, a man with dark secrets of his own, has a past he isn't ready to share with Adam even as the other man worms into his life in more ways than one. The two grow closer and lines blur -- between good and evil, friend or foe, enemy or lover. But something, or someone, plots against them, determined to do everything in their power to keep them apart. Even if it means destroying them both.

The Dead Don't Lie

Before him, Adam, his smile brilliant, nose sunburned and peeling, his beauty stole the breath from Ian’s lungs. Ian swept him into his arms, kissing his smile, marveling at how warm and real he appeared. Salt and sea intertwined with the taste of each other. Ian took Adam’s face in both hands and kissed him until nothing else mattered.


“You’re starting to give up,” dream Adam warned, pulling away. No longer smiling, his expression urgent, pensive. Adam’s hands covering his own, squeezed tight, Ian still cradling him close. “You can’t give up. Don’t you dare give up on me.”


“I don’t know how much more I can take.”


Adam refused to listen. “You’re strong. The strongest man I know. Stronger than him.”


“I can’t—Adam, please, I’m sorry but you have to let me go.”


“No,” Adam urged. “No, fight him. You fight with everything you have. Promise me, Ian. Do you hear me? Promise me.”


Chapter 38