Elite Ops Complete Series

by Lora Leigh

  And hell no, she wasn’t crying. Her chin was lifted stubbornly, her gaze defiant, but he could see the regret shadowing the green depths of her eyes.

  “I would say it slipped out, but that would imply I was trying to hold it back, wouldn’t it?” Her lips quirked with a strangely amused self-mockery.

  “I can always trust you to be amazingly blunt,” he sighed. “And it’s not the first time it’s slipped out.”

  Damned near every time he had taken her the words had slipped past her lips and dug sharp talons into his soul. Each time, he had tried to muffle the words with his lips; but still, the sound of them had slipped free enough to allow him to make them out.

  A shrug lifted her shoulders as she tucked a heavy swath of hair behind a delicate ear.

  Red-gold curls tumbled around her face and shoulders. The disarray caused by his hands, by the tossing of her head as she orgasmed beneath him, had given her a wanton, decidedly lush appearance. But her expression, the vulnerability in her gaze, made her appear too innocent, too easily hurt.

  He knew Tehya. He knew her compassion, he knew the woman she pretended to be as well as the woman she truly was.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Tey, but if you allow yourself to believe you love me, if you give in to that illusion, then that’s exactly what I’ll end up doing.”

  There was that strange little smile again. Part teasing, part mocking. It was one of those looks that never failed to put him off balance. He’d be damned if he could tell what she was thinking when she had that look on her face.

  “Don’t worry about hurting me, Jordan.” She brushed back her hair again as she turned from him and headed for the bedroom. “It was too late for that a long time ago.”

  She almost made the bedroom before he was on her. His fingers curled around her upper arm, dragging her to a stop as she jerked around, unable to hide the anger in her eyes before he saw it.

  Jordan paused, surprised, watching as her chin tilted in determination and stubbornness and her cat’s green eyes narrowed back at him suspiciously.

  “I’ve heard the lecture,” she informed him as she glared back at him. “I’ve heard you tell your men how love is an illusion, and how they need to watch their backs before that illusion bites them on the ass, so many times it sickens me. Unless you have something original to add to it, then I don’t want to hear it again, if you don’t mind.”

  Yes, it was a lecture he had given his men often. Hell, they were his men, his team. They were his family. He felt it was his responsibility to warn them at the very least. Not that he didn’t like their wives. Hell, they were damned good women. But when a man allowed himself to live a lie …

  “You’re fooling yourself.” He had to force the words past his lips. “You’re letting lust and pleasure betray you, Tehya. It tricks you. When it fades, all you have left is either friendship or enmity. It’s the enmity that worries me, the knowledge of all the little ways you can destroy one another with the knowledge you’ve gained. I don’t want us to go that route. I don’t want you to hate me.”

  The thought of losing her had his guts clenching in dread. The thought of her hatred, of never seeing the hunger in her eyes and feeling the need in her kiss, had his jaw clenching in imminent fury.

  “Who destroyed you, Jordan?” Her arms crossed over her breasts as her lips set mutinously. “Who ruined you before I ever had a chance at your heart?”

  The question wasn’t asked in regret or in pain. Hell no, not with Tehya. She was too damned confrontational, as though it were somehow his fault that he’d had a life before he met her.

  It took a second to process the question as well as the anger in her expression now. How was he supposed to answer her?

  “You’re making me pay for what another woman has done.” Her lips tightened, her gaze glittered furiously as she made the statement.

  “This has nothing to do with another woman, Tehya,” he growled.

  He wished it had something to do with a single woman, with a broken heart, with a young man’s disillusion. How much easier it would then be to give in to the dark hunger he could feel brewing in his soul.

  Kira had always accused him of giving up on love because he couldn’t save Killian Reece’s wife, Catherine, and their unborn child. That he had blamed Catherine, and Killian’s love for her for the change Killian had undergone after her death.

  That had been a deciding point. It wasn’t the whole reason.

  “What does it have to do with, then?” Her eyes sparked furiously as he almost gave into the lust beginning to rise inside him once again.

  Damn her, he’d no more had her than he wanted her again.

  “It has to do with reality,” he snapped. “It has to do with watching friends betray friends, countries betray their own soldiers, and lovers turning their backs on the very love they’ve pledged themselves to because the battle has become too difficult or because their own pride was more important. That is where it comes from.”

  She shook her head, her gaze filled with pity. “You’ve watched your men love, Jordan. You’ve watched their wives give all they have to them. You’ve seen loyalty, Jordan, and love, and you deny it.”

  He reached out and touched her cheek, her silken flesh heated and warm, beckoning him. “And sometimes,” he said, “the illusion is stronger than the truth. For a while.”

  Tehya shook her head, mocking anger enveloping her as she read the belief in what he was saying in his eyes. He truly believed love didn’t last forever.

  “I’ve met your father,” she finally said softly.

  A dark frown drew his brows together. “What does Dad have to do with anything?”

  “He still mourns your mother’s death. He goes to her grave daily, and he still weeps for the woman he lost.”

  She knew Riordan Malone, the father who looked over the Malone sons and grandsons that his union with his Irish bride had produced.

  Jordan’s jaw tightened as the battle to find an argument against her raged in his brilliant blue eyes.

  Tehya shook her head. “I’m going to bed, Jordan, but perhaps you should consider this. It’s not reality that destroys the dreams, it’s your lack of faith. And it’s your own fears of facing what you believe your father and Killian Reece faced. The loss of that dream and the only woman who could touch their hearts.”

  She turned, pulled her arm from his grip, and moved through the doorway to the bedroom.

  She wasn’t arguing with him, she wouldn’t fight with him. She would fight for him, she would fight over him, but never would she battle him over something she knew he had always refused to face.

  The loss of his mother had been hard enough, but for years Jordan had watched the aching loneliness and Riordan Malone’s inability to ever lose the bleak sadness that had filled him with his wife’s death. Catherine Reece had disobeyed Jordan’s order during an operation involving Sorrel and a young girl he had kidnapped. She had managed to get herself killed as Killian and Jordan watched in horror, unable to stop it.

  No, it hadn’t been a broken heart that had destroyed Jordan’s belief in love. It hadn’t been any single woman who had disillusioned him. The woman who had broken his father’s life, as well as his with her death, and the friend who hadn’t known how to survive, had given him the belief that no love could truly last forever.

  Moving through the darkened bedroom, Tehya shed the shirt he had given her and crawled between the chilled blankets. From where she lay, she could see the light from the door, and Jordan as he stood in the doorway, simply watching her.

  He was at his most dangerous when he was so still and silent. When he was plotting, planning, or worse yet, when he was thinking.

  He had a wicked, devious mind. He was a man who believed what he believed, and there would be no forcing his beliefs to change.

  “You’re wrong.” His voice reached across the room, so icy, so emotionless, that a chill raced over her soul.

  “Of course I am.” She swallowed
tightly and fought back the tears she would have shed if it would have done any good. If it would have won her the heart of the man she loved, she would have cried a river.

  “I care for you.” The sudden, fierce sound of his voice, the underlying fury in it, had her eyes closing in pain as she fought the hitch in her breath that would have been a sob. “I don’t want to lose you, Tehya. Not your friendship. Not … this.” The snarl in his voice assured her that he meant much more than whatever relationship they had had at the base.

  “Then keep me, Jordan.” She stayed, in the bed and refused to look directly at him. “But you can’t do that either, can you?”

  She couldn’t be weak. She had felt something earlier when he had taken her. She had felt something from him that she didn’t understand, something she didn’t know how to describe.

  She wouldn’t fight him, but that didn’t mean she was giving up. Sometimes, a person just had to give Jordan time to think, to find the truth himself.

  Even if it meant letting him walk away to find it.

  “Good night, Jordan,” she said softly when he said nothing more.

  He stood in the doorway, still watching her, the shadowed contours of his face appearing more savage, his eyes bluer as they gleamed in the low light reflecting behind him.

  Sometimes, there were some things that just weren’t meant to be, she told herself. She was prepared for that. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t hope, that she couldn’t pray that when this was over, when the past was finally defeated, buried, and destroyed once and for all, then just maybe, she would have a chance at holding his heart.

  A Malone man, he loves, not just with his heart, but with his soul. She remembered Riordan Malone’s words years before when she had met him in Alpine, Texas, the small town the Malone family had lived in for decades. Remember that, Tehya. It’s not their hearts that lead them, it’s their souls. And such a love is never easy. Such a love is never truly won but by the faith of a woman’s very spirit, and her ability to understand the battle she faces.

  At the time, she hadn’t understood why he had told her that. Now, though, she knew. Riordan had to have seen what she had already begun to feel. He had to have known exactly how stubborn, how completely bullheaded his son could be.

  Just as she had known how dominant, how powerful, and how incredibly gentle Jordan could be as well.

  Jordan was a man who had made his decisions and faced his understanding of the world years before. He’d created the defenses he needed and survived the only way he knew how. By not believing, by not loving. But the truth was, Jordan had loved far more than he would ever admit.

  She didn’t understand the battle she faced in claiming what her soul ached for. And she had no idea how to fight it.

  All she knew was that she was terribly afraid she couldn’t live without him.

  CHAPTER 14

  The bedroom door closed, stripping the light from the room and leaving Tehya to stare into the dark.

  She listened as he undressed and checked his weapon before laying it on the bedside table, then slid into the bed, all without the aid of the light.

  Once he settled in, a moment of tense silence filled the room before he spoke.

  “I was sixteen, she and her family were visiting from England, with a neighbor. She was blond, delicate, and beautiful, and I fell like a ton of bricks for her.

  “The affair lasted until the end of summer, when her parents found out. They had the neighbor’s ranch hands beat the hell out of me, and when that didn’t work, they locked her in her bedroom, refusing to let her out until arrangements could be made for her to return to England. And I thought I could rescue her.” The tone of his voice warned her that perhaps that young love hadn’t died, but had instead contributed to killing the belief in love Jordan had once possessed.

  “I slipped into the house, picked the lock to her bedroom door, and slipped in.”

  He paused and Tehya wondered what he was thinking, remembering. The silence wasn’t as heavy as before, but it still held the weight of the scars she knew he carried deep inside.

  “She had been playing with us all,” he finally sighed. “It was a ploy to force her parents to return her to England rather than have her attend the private school they were considering in America. She wanted to be with her Irish lover.” Mockery filled his voice. “She considered me an acceptable standin for the summer, though.”

  Sixteen. God, how that must have twisted his male pride, as well as his heart.

  She felt him shift in the bed until he turned to face her, the gleam of his eyes in the dark pulling her, giving her a connection to him that she desperately needed.

  “It was nearly ten years later before I saw her again. I was commanding a small team, working with the British in routing a terrorist cell in London. We managed to strike during a meeting being held by their Afghani commander. Their second in command was there as well, an Irish national who had led the cell for years. They were in interrogation when I had a visitor. At first, I couldn’t believe it was her. She didn’t just act older, she looked older, more coarse, less like the lady she had pretended to be when she was a teenager. And she needed a favor.” It wasn’t anger or pain in his voice, instead, there was a heavy vein of mockery overlying the amusement. “She thought she could give me a little fuck for old time’s sake and I would help her gain her lover’s release. The Irish second in command was the stable hand she’d played me and her parents to return to. I looked in her lying eyes as though they were windows into my own career. We knew there was a link from British Intelligence into the terrorist cell, and we hadn’t been able to find it. I was staring at it. She was the daughter of one of the highest ranking intelligence directors in MI-6 and she was the terrorists’ link. But I wanted proof. I wanted it, and I betrayed her to get it without a moment’s hesitation or guilt. At sixteen, I would have died for her. For years after that, I compared every woman I took to bed with her. But I betrayed her in less than a heartbeat and I didn’t feel a damned thing for her as they led her away in handcuffs two weeks later.”

  “Jordan, she betrayed you,” she whispered. “It’s not the same when two people love each other. When they’re together, when they’re working toward a future together.”

  “Isn’t it?” He reached up and touched her cheek again, as though that connection, as small as it was, was needed.

  “Mom and Dad were working toward a future. They had three sons, they had a life together, and they were committed to that ideal of love that they professed was so strong.” Now, there was anger, pain. “Dad loved her until nothing mattered to him as much as his wife. When one of the young families that worked for us on the ranch was targeted by racists, she fought back for them. She didn’t tell Dad what she was doing, and she didn’t tell her sons, who were nearly grown. She didn’t tell anyone she was driving out to rescue them and take them to a friend’s house in the next county. When her vehicle went over a cliff and exploded, the sheriff ruled it an accident. There was no investigation, no questions asked, despite the fact that there were three adult bodies and a child’s in that vehicle as well. We had no idea what the hell happened until her friends slipped into the house late one night and told us what she had been doing.” A shard of bitter laughter filled the room for a second. “She loved so deeply that she didn’t care about risking her own life, the life her husband and children depended upon.”

  What was she supposed to say? She stared back at him, her eyes burning with tears.

  “The same as you and your men are forced to risk your lives protecting and saving the world,” she finally pointed out huskily. “How is it any different, Jordan? She wasn’t just helping that small family, she was imagining her own family in the same danger, and had no choice but to react.”

  “You know, that’s the same bullshit excuse I gave Killian when his wife Catherine disobeyed orders and slipped into the warehouse where Sorrel’s men were holding a young girl they had kidnapped. We had to wait on orders to
go in and they were getting ready to move the kid, but we still had time. I was on the line with my director and we were getting the order to go in. It was coming,” he snarled. “We told her it would get there in time. But she went in. She went in, she got the girl, and she was running out of the warehouse with her.

  “They shot her before she made it to safety, before we could get to her. She protected that kid, covered her body with her own as she went down and kept her alive until we got there. But she died, Tehya, and she took Killian’s unborn son with her. A child she hadn’t even told him about. And they gave him the same useless argument. A mother’s instinct. The need to protect.”

  He came over her, pushed her back to the bed as she stared up at him, eyes wide, her breath catching.

  “If you ever, ever fucking endanger yourself like that, then I will walk away,” he snarled. “I won’t watch helplessly, Tehya, while you destroy yourself. I will not let you kill me inside because of your damned stubbornness.”

  “Then you’ll live by the same rules.” She was back in his face, teeth bared, furious, aching, hurting for him and yet drawn into the emotional vortex she could feel swirling out from him. “Wrap me in cotton, Jordan. See if I give a fuck. Because you’ll be right there with me or you can kiss my ass goodbye.”

  Jordan stared down at her. He could barely see the outline of her face, but he could see her eyes. Wicked, witchy cat’s eyes that glared back at him, that demanded, that refused to back down.

  She had an answer for everything.

  She made him want to believe in love. Made him want to believe in that unspoken emotion he couldn’t seem to get a handle on inside himself. That illusion he had always disdained in the past.

  She made him want to give her the world, and even when he’d been sixteen, when he’d been dick dumb, he hadn’t truly wanted to give any woman the world.

  What did she do to him? He wanted to walk away, because he knew she was a weakness. He wanted to keep her at a distance, remain aloof, but it was damned impossible. She was tying his guts up in knots and at the same time, finding a way to keep his attention focused squarely on her.