He turned to her and raised an eyebrow. “Are you? Okay?”
He didn’t say it in the bantering tone he’d been using before they’d walked into the shipyard. His tone was somber, serious.
Her gut tightened and she responded cautiously. “It’s easier when I can take action in a situation.”
Jason nodded. “It’s tough, having to hold position and wait for the outcome of what someone else is doing. Being near an IED and keeping your shit together is not for the weak of heart. You were solid and you kept those people calm, too.”
She looked away as heat rushed over her face. Compliments made her feel awkward. She took pride in doing her job and doing it well, but he was implying an impact on people. She didn’t consider herself particularly strong when it came to people skills. Normally, she’d have left the conversation there. She wasn’t big on sharing. But tension ran through the set of his shoulders and the upright way he was sitting. His hands were splayed over the tops of his thighs like he was trying not to let them ball into fists.
“I’m not satisfied.” There. She wasn’t sure why she said it, but it was giving voice to a feeling she’d thought would go away when she’d completed this mission.
“No.” Everything she felt was echoed in Jason’s voice. “I thought I would be when this was done. Case closed, time to move on. But the look on those people’s faces…”
She nodded slowly. “It wasn’t enough to free them now.”
“I wish I’d gotten to them sooner.” There was regret in his tone. “I wish I could wrap my hands around the neck of the person responsible for all this.”
His words resonated deep inside her chest with the insistent hum she felt beneath her sternum. It was a need to take action. “I want this new boss.”
“Get in line.” His voice had darkened, turned grim.
It was an admirable sentiment, but she considered his chances alone. If she got in line behind him, she’d be stepping over his body to get to the man they both wanted.
“I’m about to start driving.” She wasn’t sure what she expected. Honestly, she was curious as to what he’d do. If he got out of the car, he was likely going to go his own way and there was no knowing if they’d cross paths again. She didn’t really want that, but she couldn’t think of a reason to ask him to come with her.
He froze for a long moment, even his breathing stopped as he stared out the window at the people they’d helped make safe. “So drive.”
He was coming with her. Okay, then. The team didn’t need her for the rest of the night or until it was time to debrief back at headquarters. There was time to investigate this pebble of an idea knocking around between them. She put the vehicle into drive and pulled out of the parking lot.
It was more than an hour before he said anything again.
“So what’s next?”
Arin stilled behind the steering wheel. She pulled into the parking lot of her destination as she considered the answer. Maybe his question was more about their new location than the status of him being with her and King. She didn’t have much of a sample size of conversation to go on to justify her hunch but he’d been tense the whole way. The scowl he’d been wearing on his face didn’t seem to be a natural expression for him. She, on the other hand, could have a seriously nasty resting bitch face.
“Talk to me about why you’re still here.” A lot depended on his answer. She needed to determine how his intentions might align with the goals of either her team or the Hawaiian task force. Otherwise, there wasn’t a real way to include him in their activities officially.
He didn’t answer right away. When he did, there was reluctance in his voice. “I’m still figuring it out as I go. I’m not generally inclined to think hard about why I do what I do.”
She waited. He could share or he could go on his way in the morning. She thought he was astute enough to know it.
“I know what it’s like.” He stared straight ahead as he spoke. “Not as bad as these people, but enough to have more of an understanding than most would of why they took the risk to find a better life for themselves. My world turned upside-down in my early teens and financial stability? Hah. My parents were scrambling to manage any kind of food and shelter. I had to leave if I wanted to make a life for myself because I was never going to get back the childhood I remembered.”
“A lot of people leave home that way.” She winced when she thought about the words. Too late. It’d come out sounding brusque, and she didn’t want to make less of the courage it took to strike out on his own.
He only shrugged and gave her a half grin. “True. That might be what’s bothering me right now. I left. They left. What happened to them could’ve happened to me. I went out into the world and I lucked out. I either found and earned opportunities or someone gave me a chance. A lot more doors opened to me because I spoke with a level of education and because of the color of my skin, but some of those doors could’ve been traps and I was fortunate they weren’t. Those people, someone preyed on them. It goes beyond pissing me off.”
His voice had dropped to a low growl with his last statement.
She nodded. The feeling was familiar. His motives for wanting to go after this new boss were clear. She was certain he could be helpful to the team, too. But they were both short on rest and she needed to get back to Oahu in the morning to debrief.
“For tonight, we’re going to check in to this bed-and-breakfast.” Best to share the most immediate next steps with him for now and not what she hoped would work out once she talked to Zu and Raul. Honestly, she was taking things one step at a time from here on out anyway. She needed time to process his actions back at the harbor. He’d made good on his word, but now she had a whole new set of questions.
Yes, they wanted this new player, the man who’d taken over the human trafficking ring, but they knew next to nothing about this new target. A new boss meant new plans and some reorganization, with reset business goals. She wanted to find out who this man was and delve deeper into what Jason might know about him.
She turned off the engine and pulled the keys, hopping out the driver side. He followed her example and exited the vehicle, meeting her at the back of the car and watching as she let King out.
“So did you already have a reservation here?” He seemed to change gears in conversation easily. Maybe he was happy to leave the personal discussion behind. She would be.
She shrugged. When she was on a mission, especially solo, she tended to set up multiple bolt-holes. When she was on her home island of Oahu, she didn’t stay at her own home if a mission was going to take more than a day. There were limited choices on any island, even here on the largest in Hawaii, so she tried not to stay at the same places too often. Since she had joined Search and Protect, she hadn’t had that many missions directly in the Hawaiian Islands until the team had begun working with the Hawaiian task force going after human trafficking.
Zu had chosen Hawaii as a base of operations for Search and Protect to take on both domestic missions on the mainland and missions overseas, particularly in East Asia or Australia and New Zealand.
The current initiative was really spearheaded by Raul in his role as liaison to the Hawaiian task force. This time she’d been brought on as a supporting resource. Her caution in setting up multiple locales might have been born of old practices, but Zu hadn’t ever asked her to change her habits. Her flexibility in being able to operate as part of the team or go solo—and in being able to change gears from one moment to the next depending on the circumstances—was one of her strengths.
Jason didn’t press her for more information on where they were. Instead, he fell in next to her as she and King walked toward the main entrance. He hadn’t visibly wrestled with any reactions or shown any signs of added irritation, but he wasn’t relaxing either.
Fine. She missed the joking and teasing earlier. No way was she going to admit it out loud, but it’d been an odd kind of fun.
He continued to play a follower as she check
ed in and headed up to the room. It was almost dawn but they’d both need rest before they caught a flight later in the day to get back to Oahu. It’d been almost twenty-four hours since she’d found him and it felt like days. She put the key in the door lock and glanced up at him, serious expression still in place, and caught him wiggling his eyebrows at her.
She couldn’t help it. She chuckled.
She opened the door and sent King ahead to clear the room with a murmured command. Jason remained just inside the door as she and King completed their sweep.
“Clear.”
“Do I not have a room of my own because you didn’t have time to make reservations for two separate rooms?” He leaned back against the door frame, crossing his arms over his chest. Muscles in his biceps and forearms flexed, and her mind blanked for a moment out of sheer admiration.
She lifted one corner of her mouth. “I’m not footing the bill for your accommodations.”
Most of the reservations she’d made would go on for another few days, simulating a stay for a different length of time than she’d be on the island. It was her standard practice on travel. If it was longer than her actual stay, it was an expensive precaution, but one she’d found worth the investment several times over. Initial information searches would try to locate where she’d been based on when they thought she’d arrived and left. Nowadays, it was easy to check in or out remotely.
He huffed out a short laugh. “I’m not going to assume this is an invitation. What patch of floor do you want me to take?”
She gave him a full smile this time. Too many people in their business did make a large number of unwise assumptions, or they didn’t care to wait for invitations. “You don’t want to stay up and watch the sun rise?”
He shrugged. “Since you didn’t blindfold me on this ride—and I appreciate that—I can say for certain that we’re still on the west side of the island. There’s not going to be a great place to watch the sunrise over any of the nearby beaches. I’m also going to take a shot in the dark and say you wouldn’t bother with checking in to any kind of room for the night if all you planned to do was watch the sunrise. This is Hawaii. Plenty of people just park their car at some beach and doze until the sun comes up.”
“True.” Ah, hell. She wasn’t going to sleep until she understood more about why he’d gotten back into her car. He was an experienced professional in the private security field. If he’d wanted to go after this new boss on Oahu, Jason could’ve tried to do it solo. He might have contacts in the industry who owed him favors and would come to the islands to help him if he made it a personal quest. But he hadn’t. He’d stayed with her and she wanted to know why. She was also tired of standing, so she sat on the edge of the bed. Unfortunately, this new room didn’t have a convenient armchair for him to sit in while they continued their back and forth commentary. “Look. I’m good at light conversation and detailed debriefs. I’m not good at real conversation where I just blurt out what I’m thinking because it invariably comes out sounding wrong either in phrasing or tone. And yes, I’ve thought about the way it happens a lot. I’m short on sleep and I never had many filters in the first place. I’ve got more questions for you.”
He stared at her across the few feet from where he still leaned against the door frame and she sat on the bed. The distance closed without him moving an inch. He just dropped his arms and hooked his thumbs into his pants pockets. “Ask. I won’t lie, but I won’t promise I’ll answer you either.”
King looked at each of them, big ears swiveling in minute adjustments as the dog considered them both. After another moment, her partner settled for lying down on the floor at her feet with his black and tan body placed definitively between her and Jason. Obviously, King was in for the conversation but didn’t have the energy to remain at attention without a command either. But the dog was relaxed. He sensed no tension or immediate action from Jason.
“You originally indicated you were here on the Big Island because you wanted to help in some way before you left. You did. Why are you still with me?” Well, that was question number one out of the way.
“That’s a complicated answer.” Jason drew the statement out, probably to buy himself more time to think.
“Fine.” Maybe her tone was getting sharper but she pushed forward and asked her second question. Giving someone time to think was giving them room to lie, or at least give you the answer they thought you wanted to hear. “What was your problem on the car ride here?”
His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open briefly before he shut it again, his jaw tightening. “My problem?”
She almost crossed her arms over her own chest but resisted the impulse. If he was going to stay open to conversation, so was she. Maintaining body language was easy, trying not to be defensive at all was harder. “I recognize the silent treatment when I get it. What are we, twelve?”
He laughed in her face.
She hated when people laughed at her. It was one of the things that got under her skin in ways she couldn’t manage to ignore.
“Okay, you said no filters. Same here. I’m too damned tired to think through my response so let’s at least agree not to come to blows if what’s about to come out of my mouth insults you. Agreed?”
She was already fighting down the urge to close the physical distance and throw a punch at him, but she wanted to know what he had to say. “Fine.”
“Answer to both questions is you.”
Nope. No matter how surprised she was, she was not going to show it. He could be baiting her to see if he could win her over by flattery. If his motivation was revenge for her part in the takedown of the plantation months ago, he’d have done something earlier in the day. It didn’t make sense for him to have waited until now. So it had to be something else. She was going to wait for him to clarify.
He didn’t keep her waiting long. “Yeah. I came here because I wanted to do some good to even out the awful. I contributed to the hell these people are living and I don’t like it. But I wouldn’t have known about it without meeting you, or at least I didn’t know about it until I met you. I’ve spent months looking for more information about the business they were running, the high-level players, and you.”
She wasn’t a high-stakes player in this game. If he thought she was, he sucked at gathering intel. But his tone didn’t indicate he was making that assumption. Instead, he was here, looking at her and the intensity in his gaze was…hungry. Heat rushed across the surface of her skin, everywhere, in response.
He lifted a hand and dragged his fingers through his hair. “I remembered your face. I didn’t dig too deep in my research because I wanted to meet you and find out about you directly from you. Once I found intel on you, I looked for every image I could get my hands on to be sure I’d found the right person. Last thing I wanted to do was introduce myself to the wrong woman. Pictures don’t do you justice. There’s nothing I found that could stand up to my memory of you in motion. Yeah, I came here to help those people, but I was also hoping I’d find you again.”
There it was, out in the open. If they’d worked in any other career, his actions could’ve been considered stalking. Who was he kidding? No matter how professional the approach, running background searches and pulling up intelligence on any person was a type of stalking. She could kick him out immediately, or she could beat him to within an inch of his life, then eject him from her presence. He’d gotten a read on her—seen her in action—even back at the hospital, and she didn’t shoot to kill if she had a choice. She was very effective at incapacitating her targets, so he didn’t think she would kill him for looking for her.
Of course, if she decided to, he might not hold it against her.
She stared at him, her dark brown eyes serious. “Me.”
“I’m sorry.” He wouldn’t insult her with anything less than a sincere apology. “Meeting you the one time stuck in my head. I got more than curious about you. I wanted to meet you again.”
Now he had, and he’d seen her
take the lead in a combat situation at the hospital, then again searching for those captives at the harbor. In each situation, he’d been drawn to her confidence. He liked intelligent, capable people in general. Pack those qualities into an amazing body like hers, and he was hooked.
Her lashes came down and then she opened her eyes again, her gaze somehow softened an infinitesimal amount. “I ran queries on you, too.”
The statement coming from anyone else might not have meant what he hoped. It could’ve been an acknowledgment between two professionals of precautions any of them took when they came in contact with a new player. The more you knew about possible threats, the longer you stayed alive. But this was Arin and her tone—her body posture, the heat in the way she was looking at him—said more.
“We’re not on opposite sides.” He made the statement quietly. She was a smart operative and trust didn’t come easily with any of them.
After a long moment, she spoke, “Tomorrow, we’ll head back to Oahu. There’ll be a debrief at my headquarters and I’ll propose going after this new boss. You want to come with me?”
“Yes.” Definitely. A thrill ran through him at the thought of going after bigger quarry. It had taken something out of him to see those captives traumatized and afraid. “Rescuing those people, it was a good thing. I’m glad I was there. But I’m still pissed as hell and I want the person responsible for so much suffering.”
“Ditto.” She cracked a smile then, a fierce one.
He stared.
“What?” Suspicion crept into her gaze.
He didn’t want that, so he blurted out what he was thinking. “You’re beautiful.”
“You’re kidding.” Now there was a spark of temper, too.
Oh no. He was going to be clear here. “I’m not. No mind games. I just sincerely looked at you at that second and I wasn’t thinking anything else. Just that you are beautiful. True story.”
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