She listens to a war for a living. He's the only one who can tell her what it's saying.

Corporal Dani Suarez can find a man by his voice alone ? fix his phone to a hundred meters off a single careless sentence. What she can't do is let anyone close. She loves the whole world from behind a wire, at a safe distance, where no one can see her and decide to leave.

Then the Marine Corps sends her Sergeant Omar Haddad: the best linguist in the sector, and a man who has spent his whole life being asked to prove he belongs to the country he bleeds for. He's the one person alive who can crack the cell she's been hunting ? a cell planning to turn a crowded road into a graveyard on a coming Friday.

Together, they're frighteningly good. Together, they hear the attack coming. And together they discover that the machine above them has stopped listening ? to her warnings, and to him.

As the clock runs down on a road full of people, two people built for distance have to decide whether to cross the eighteen inches between them ? before the war takes the choice away.

Crosstalk is a standalone, emotionally charged military romance: a slow burn set inside the cold signals rooms of the Iraq war, where the most dangerous thing two guarded people can do is let themselves be heard. Book 2 in the Need to Know series.