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

On near reflex, his hand shot out and caught Adam by the forearm and jerked him backward. Adam tried to pull away, but Ian’s grip tightened, hard enough to hurt as he crowded closer to him. Impasse reached, each waited for the other to make a move. At long last, Adam sighed, breaking the stillness.


“Tell me not to go,” Adam pleaded, far too young for the lifetime of pain in his eyes. “All you have to do is ask, and I’ll stay.”


Ian held him tighter. Close enough to see the cluster of freckles spread over the bridge of his nose. The tiny beads of sweat gathered over his full upper lip. One bottom tooth’s crooked angle, standing out from a row of near symmetrical whiteness, for once, Ian wanting to observe and claim those minute details, wanting him in every conceivable way. His entire body burning turned inside and out, yet how to tell him what he meant to him. Not only something but everything


Chapter 59