The Protector’s Mark by Janet Oppedisano

Six years ago, I failed to protect the woman I loved. Now she’s back in my life—and I’ll die before I let it happen again.

I took four bullets trying to shield Brooke from a chemical weapon on a classified mission. When I woke up weeks later, she was gone—scarred, recovering, and unreachable. So I did what any broken soldier would do. I let her go.
Now the brilliant biochemist has arrived with evidence that the smugglers my team has been chasing have gotten their hands on something far more dangerous than stolen artifacts.
Working together is the only way to stop them. That means sharing a villa in Naples. Sharing intel. Sharing the same air while pretending I don’t still want her.
The mission has to come first, but six years of silence stand between us—and she’s still all I can think about. The last time I got distracted on a mission, people got hurt. And this time, thousands more could pay for my mistakes.

If you love the ache of a second-chance romance, a scarred scientist heroine as brilliant as she is guarded, a wounded protector who never stopped loving her, and the high-stakes tension of a race to stop a bioweapon, you won’t be able to put this book down.
The Protector’s Mark is the sixth and final installment in the Reynolds Recoveries romantic suspense series. Each romance is a standalone, but the series is designed to be read in order.