She’d denied it, of course, but she’d never said they were related. No, he was just supposed to take her word for it that they weren’t sleeping together, when she had to have known how it looked.
So that’s why Colt was here. Three years too late maybe, but he deserved a fucking answer. It was the “fucking answer” part, however, that made him hesitate. It never went well when he was angry like this. He tended to say things he didn’t mean. Things that couldn’t be taken back. All that SEAL discipline couldn’t control his caustic tongue.
He turned around to leave. He’d talk to her when he got back from Alaska. Maybe by then he would have cooled down and the betrayal eating away in his gut wouldn’t taste like battery acid.
The door opened behind him. “Running away again, Colt? You are good at that.”
Her voice stopped him in his tracks. He turned around, seeing his ex-wife—his sexy-as-hell ex-wife—standing in the doorway in her running clothes. What there were of them. He’d obviously caught her on her way out for her morning run.
Kate was a beautiful woman whether in her usual suit and pearls or in spandex and a ponytail. She had that patrician Grace Kelly WASPy look going that screamed old money and privilege. He’d assumed she was a bitch the first time he met her—which admittedly hadn’t been in the best of circumstances, when she’d overheard him call her “CIA Barbie” to the rest of the guys on a mission briefing.
For a poor kid born on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks, Colt could admit that the rich-girl thing might have been part of her appeal initially. But he’d quickly learned that the woman who looked like an ice princess on the outside had a heart of gold. Worse, she’d seen through his belligerent-asshole schtick—which admittedly wasn’t always a schtick—with alarming speed.
Having grown up in foster homes of incrementally varying degrees of bleak and horrible, no one had ever given a shit about him, and Colt couldn’t believe that someone like Kate wanted him for anything more than a good fuck.
Although “good” was putting it mildly. It had never been just good between them; it had been hot, wild, and off-the-charts incredible. She might look prim and proper on the outside, but in bed she liked it rough and a little dirty. Which was definitely in his wheelhouse. But the fierce, almost primitive attraction between them had never been the problem. It was sorting out all the emotions that had come along with it.
Initially he’d thought it was the “slumming it” novelty of fucking the bad boy that she wanted. That was why rich women like her wanted men like him. But she’d convinced him otherwise. At one time, she’d loved him with every inch of her soul. He just hadn’t known what to do with it.
He’d been so sure that something would fuck it up like it always did that he’d pushed her away and ensured it. He’d started hanging out with the guys longer on the base after work. Instead of one beer after a long day, he’d have three or four. He’d find himself at a bar flirting with some woman he didn’t give a shit about. He’d stopped talking to her—really talking to her. When he came home angry or upset after a bad mission or difficult deployment, and she asked him what was wrong, he shut down—and her out.
He knew he was doing it, but he just couldn’t seem to stop himself. Maybe in his perverse mind it had been some kind of fucked-up test. Some kind of way of proving that she really loved him. But the test had backfired big-time when he thought she’d cheated on him with the man who was like a brother to him. Colt had been destroyed. Shattered. He’d lashed out cruelly—unforgivably—and then sunk into a hole so deep he still hadn’t pulled himself out.
For three years he’d been living half a life. His job in CAD—the nickname (aka Control-Alt-Delete) for Task Force Tier One, the secret unit where he was an operative—was all that mattered. He’d lost everything else that mattered to him. His marriage. His team. His fucking soul.
It was hard to stand here and not blame her when with one word she could have stopped it. Yeah, definitely not a good idea to be here.
He let the “running away” comment slide, although he was sure she knew how much that pissed him off. He’d never run away from a fight in his life. “We need to talk, but not right now.”
She lifted one perfectly arched and waxed brow in that haughty, “I care so little about you that just this tiny part of my body is affected” way that drove him nuts. This woman who used to love him with every part of her body and soul now looked at him with as much interest as a bug under her heel. “You and I don’t have anything to say to one another.”
So much for his good intentions. You could almost hear him snap. He moved so quickly up the stairs, she gasped when he pushed her back into the hall and closed the door behind him. He resisted the urge to back her up against the wall, but his body was definitely leaning in. He could feel the heat of anger radiating from her lean body, drawing him in like a magnet.
“Is that right?” he asked. “I think you have a hell of a lot to say. How about a goddamned explanation for why you never told me Scott was your brother? Or for how you not only let me think that all my former teammates were dead, but how you lied to me and led me on a fucking goose chase the past month to keep me from finding out the truth?”
It had stung when he’d figured out that the only reason she’d been spending time with him was to keep him busy and prevent him from learning that some of the guys had survived. She’d known how much they meant to him, and she’d let him think they were all dead.
And here he’d been thinking how much he liked working with her again. How much it felt like old times. The worst part was that he’d known she was lying to him about something. But he’d followed her to a hotel, saw her with a man, and assumed . . .
Shit. “It was Scott, wasn’t it? He was the man you met at the hotel that night?”
“You mean the man you accused me of cheating on my fiancé with?”
He’d done more than accuse. Colt had been so out of his mind with jealousy that he’d cornered her in an elevator and kissed her. They’d been a few seconds away from doing a lot more before she’d pushed him away, apparently coming to her senses. But was there more to it? Had she kissed him back just to keep him off the trail?
His gut wasn’t the only part of his body twisting as she took a step toward him and met his anger full force. She’d never backed down from him. Never. He’d always loved that about her. The bigger problem now was that she was wearing a tight tank top and her breasts were one deep breath from brushing his chest. Heat pooled in his groin. Not the time to get a hard-on. But his body wasn’t exactly listening to him.
“I don’t owe you a damned thing, Colt. Get the hell out of here. Go back to whatever dive bar you’ve probably been hiding in the past week.”
He wanted to deny it, but she knew him too well. He drank and played pool when he was angry. It made him feel better. Usually. There was something else that always made him feel better, but he hadn’t taken any of the offers thrown in his direction the past week. Month. And that pissed him off even more. Kate didn’t care whom he fucked; why should he?
Because the only woman he wanted to fuck was her. It had been like that since the first time he’d met her. Sex before he’d met her had always been satisfying. But after . . . he knew what he was missing.
Damn her to hell.
He wanted to touch her but he didn’t dare. Not when she was so close to him, and not the way he was feeling like this. He was likely to explode. In more ways than one.
He stepped back and took a deep breath, trying to ratchet down the anger—and the heat. “You knew how much I cared about those guys, and you let me think they were all dead. How could you do that? Do you hate me that much?”
Her cheeks were still flushed, but when she looked away, he knew he’d gotten to her. “Scott didn’t want anyone else to know. He thought it was too dangerous.”
“You should have trusted me.”
&n
bsp; Her gaze lifted back to his, but there was nothing in her expression to give her thoughts away. He used to be able to read her. But she’d changed. Hardened.
God, had he done that to her?
“My trust and loyalty belong to my brother. You lost them a long time ago, Colt.”
“Is that why you didn’t tell me you were related? Did he ask you to keep it secret so there wouldn’t be any problems with the team?”
“Scott wanted to say something. It was me who asked him to keep it a secret. I didn’t want to hurt my mother. I don’t think she knew my father cheated on her.”
He’d heard that Kate’s mother had died last year.
Despite the explanation, he felt his temper firing again. “Didn’t you think I deserved to know that my wife wasn’t sleeping with my best friend?”
“I told you that I wasn’t. More than once. You just didn’t want to hear it.”
“I would have listened if you’d said he was your goddamned brother!”
Her cheeks flushed with bright pink spots of anger high on her cheekbones. “When was I supposed to voice my suspicions—suspicions that were only confirmed right before my accident, by the way? When I came to see you in Honolulu at the bar and you had another woman on your lap or when you told me that you wished the drunk driver had killed me along with our baby?”
She might as well have slapped him. The truth of the accusation brought him harshly back to reality. The reality where all his anger and resentment were just a front, an excuse to prevent him from having to think about his own actions. About the accusations he’d made and the cruel things he’d said. Words that he hadn’t meant but that could never be taken back. About how he’d left his injured wife in a hospital to mourn the death of their unborn child alone because he’d been half-crazed with jealousy and hurt.
Kate had always been good at forcing him to confront what he didn’t want to acknowledge, and just like that, his anger disintegrated. He wanted to be ill. Could someone throw up from shame?
The destruction of their marriage was his fault. He was the one responsible, not her.
Hurricane Colt. That was what she called him. Destroying everything in his wake.
She was right.
He didn’t know what to say. Everything was going to sound like excuses—which they were—but he tried anyway. “I’ve never been so scared in my life as I was on that airplane. The message I’d received was that you had been in a bad car accident, and I thought I’d lost you. When I arrived, the nurse at the desk told me you’d been pregnant and had lost the baby, and that the father was in there with you now. I looked in the room and saw Scott lying next to you in bed, holding you, and something inside me just snapped. I knew I’d lost you to him, and I was so jealous and angry I couldn’t see straight.”
He couldn’t see what was right before his eyes. That his wife loved him—had always loved him—and only him. As little sense as that made to him even now. What the fuck had she seen in him?
“He was comforting me. Scott was my friend. I’d just been told I’d lost our baby, which I know you didn’t want, but I did. I was devastated. You weren’t there, and I didn’t know if you’d bother to show up.” Her gaze held his unrelentingly, not letting him off the hook. “You hadn’t been there for me in years.”
He didn’t know what to say. What could he say? It was the damned truth.
“I don’t know what the hell was wrong with me. I was just so fucking scared of losing you.”
Their eyes held for a moment longer, but then she released them—him. “Well, you did.”
Her tone was matter-of-fact and left no room for argument. Did he want to argue? Fucking hell, he did. “I’m so sorry, Kate. I’m so damned sorry. I’d give anything if I could go back and change what I did.”
She took a deep breath and shook her head. “It wasn’t just your fault. I expected too much. I knew you didn’t want a wife—or a child. I just thought I could change your mind.” The wry smile she gave him tore through his black, shriveled, and scarred heart. It was the smile of someone who had gotten over a painful event and put it in the past. Her words confirmed that. “It doesn’t matter anymore. We’ve been divorced for three years, and we have both moved on.” She looked up at him and said the words that cut him to the quick. “You need to let it go, Colt.”
He knew what she really meant. You need to let me go.
She was right, but only now as the magnitude of what he’d done—and what he’d lost—became clear, he wasn’t sure that he could.
Six
Scott had experienced a number of devastating shocks in his life. The first was when he’d learned the man he’d idolized wasn’t his biological father. The second was when he’d read about Natalie’s death in a car crash. The third was a week and a half ago when he’d learned that the woman he’d thought had been killed for warning him had also been betraying him. And the most recent was a few hours ago when he sat at the stoplight and happened to glance over at the woman coming out of the city’s municipal building. It had brought him up with all the subtlety of a two-by-four slammed against his forehead.
At first he thought the woman was Jennifer Wilson—the person he was on his way to see at the rented farm he’d spent the last couple of days tracking her to. He’d known he was on to something as soon as he learned that Jennifer had broken a lease for a new apartment in New York and never showed up for the job that went along with it.
Jennifer Wilson was running. And the three towns he’d tracked her credit card receipts to since only made him more certain of it.
But then he felt a buzz up his spine. The woman was wearing glasses, her hair was slightly darker, and she was a little curvier, but that buzz exploded with recognition.
Was it . . . ?
Could it be . . . ?
For one unthinking moment his chest filled with relief and joy, before he caught himself. When the car behind him honked, and she turned to look at him he knew the truth. It was her.
Natalya had fooled them all. She wasn’t dead. She was alive and posing as her friend.
He’d turned away quickly before she could recognize him and drove to her farm to wait for her. It had taken her so long to get here that he’d begun to wonder if she’d made him and ran, when the sheriff’s car turned down the driveway.
Now that she was standing right in front of him, it was hard to rank all those shocks, but after three hours of festering, he was putting this one right up there.
For the first time in his life, Scott didn’t trust himself. His grip tightened as rage boiled inside him. When he thought of the men—his friends—who’d lost their lives, he could kill her.
He was holding her so close, so tight, the temptation should be strong. But that wasn’t the temptation he was feeling. The familiar sensations of overwhelming heat and fierce, almost animalistic attraction had taken hold. He caught the scent of her shampoo and the urge to bury his nose in the silky strands and inhale was so strong he hated himself for it—which only intensified that feeling of uncontrollable anger.
His muscles tightened, and he drew her in infinitesimally closer. But only for an instant. Seething and with a harsh curse, he pushed her away and forced himself to take a step back.
She looked up at him pleadingly, her green eyes round and huge behind horn-rimmed glasses that were giving him all kinds of sexy librarian fantasies—
He stopped. You have to be fucking kidding me. Is anything about her real? “Your eyes are brown! Or is that another disguise?”
He didn’t bother hiding the disgust in his voice; he wanted her to know what he thought of her.
If she thought it was strange that after all that had happened, the first thing he’d asked her about was her eye color, she didn’t show it. “It isn’t a disguise. My eyes are brown. You have to understand it wasn’t my idea—none of it was my idea. I never wanted to de
ceive you. But thank God, my warning reached you in time.”
“It didn’t.”
“But you are alive.”
“But over half my men aren’t.”
Just saying the words was like a stab in the gut—or maybe he should say back. She’d completely blindsided him.
Her face crumpled. She looked horrified—or rather he should say she was doing a damned fine job of acting horrified. “Oh God, Scott, I’m so sorry. I never meant any of this to happen.”
“What—spying or getting caught?” She slunk down, avoiding his gaze, which was so unlike her it made him angrier. Where was the denial? The outrage? The lies? He reached out and grabbed her by the arm to force her to look at him. “What the fuck did you think would happen when you passed on information to Russia about secret operations—about my secret operations?”
He’d never sworn at her—at any woman—before, and she seemed to realize it, flinching at the word. He might have felt bad if he hadn’t just had his nose almost flattened. The wounded doe-eyed crap was another act. She’d had training and knew how to defend herself. She was an operative—an operative, damn it. And the probably reopened wound on his shoulder proved it.
“It wasn’t like that,” she pleaded, tears filling her eyes. “Please, you have to understand. I didn’t have a choice. Not about any of it. And I didn’t know that what I was doing had anything to do with you or Team Nine.”
Scott pushed her away from him, so filled with hatred and disgust he didn’t want to look at her. He didn’t know what he’d expected. Some kind of excuse? Some kind of denial? Even if it was a lie shouldn’t she try to say something to give him a reason not to hate her? He sure as hell hadn’t expected this instant capitulation. This “I’m sorry,” “I didn’t know,” fall-on-his-mercy crap. He didn’t have any mercy. Not where she was concerned.
“Well, it did—it had everything to do with me. And you did have a choice, Natalya. You just chose fucking wrong. Now get your shit together. We’re getting out of here before your new boyfriend gets back.”
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