You_Only_Love_Twice_ARE

by Lexi Blake

  She’d given herself to another man and then thought about how much better the sex was. How could she do that? How could she even think it?

  She looked at herself in the mirror and didn’t recognize the woman staring back. She wasn’t the controlled and contained woman she’d become under Franklin Grant’s tutelage. She wasn’t Jamie’s wife. This was Jesse’s lover, his sub.

  She wasn’t ready. She couldn’t let go.

  Tears rolled and she let herself slide to the floor, feeling further from both of them than she could have imagined.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jesse couldn’t even look at her. It hurt too much. He knew the minute she walked in the conference room. It was like his body had an active radar where she was concerned. How long would it take before he couldn’t feel her under him? Before he couldn’t taste her on his tongue? He feared he might die remembering what it felt like to make love to Phoebe Grant.

  And he remembered what it felt like to hear her crying in the bathroom, a locked door between them.

  Despite his promise to Ian, he’d slept in Kai’s room the night before, ceding the guest room to Phoebe so she wouldn’t spend all night in the bathroom.

  He hadn’t seen her all morning. She hadn’t come to the kitchen for coffee or breakfast. He’d knocked on her door when Tag texted him to come to the conference room and he’d been told she’d meet him there.

  It was like nothing had happened between them at all.

  “Tell me you have something.” He was careful not to look her way. If she was crying again, he wouldn’t be able to take it. Listening to her cry the night before and not being able to do anything about it had made him feel like a criminal, like he’d stolen something from her when all he’d wanted to do was give.

  She was still in love with her husband. Last night had proven there was no place in her heart for him.

  Big Tag sat back, his eyes going between them like he was trying to figure something out. Ten watched him, too. He had the sudden urge to walk out before they both knew just how much he’d fucked up. “We don’t have as much as we wish we did, but I think we’re getting closer.”

  “We need to get this thing done. I can’t keep the team here in Dallas for much longer,” Ten admitted. “I don’t want to take this team out into the field unless I’m sure we’re solid. We’re supposed to be in Dubai in a week for some energy conference. We’re gathering intel on some of the new players.”

  Tag nodded. “Yeah, we’re running security for one of the smaller countries attending. Jesse’s supposed to go, but I think I’ll have to send Alex instead.”

  They were working for the king of a small country named Loa Mali. Big Tag had met Kashmir Kamdar when he’d worked an op in India. The country was putting an enormous amount of their money and workforce into sustainable energy. Though they were small, the king still required a security detail, and he’d offered McKay-Taggart the job fully knowing they would also have their own mission while there.

  “You can’t do that,” Jesse argued. “He just had a kid.”

  Tag’s eyes flared. “Well, they’ve all just had kids. I swear this team breeds faster than horny rabbits. I promised Kash I would send at least four of us. Erin and Simon and Li are going. I need one more. I can’t send Adam. I need him here solving this problem. So I’m down to Alex or Jake. Jake is a whiny bitch about out of country assignments since Princess Serena gifted the world with his son. Alex just met his little poop machine. How attached could he be?”

  “God, I love you, Tag. You make me look sensitive,” Ten shot back.

  Tag and Ten started in on each other and Jesse wondered how much more he could seriously fuck up. He was supposed to be on that detail. He’d been prepping for the assignment for a month. He’d been looking over the profiles Adam sent him and memorizing the power players. Though he was mainly there as muscle, Tag wanted the team to investigate some of the CEOs of the energy corporations for possible Collective ties. The shadowy group had been quiet since losing their head bad dude a couple of months back, but Jesse had no doubt they would come back with guns blazing at some point.

  “So what exactly have you found out?” Phoebe asked and he finally looked at her. She was clean, neat as a pin. Her hair had been pulled back in a severe bun. She looked nothing like the woman who had screamed in his arms the night before. Contrary to his fears, she didn’t look vulnerable at all. She looked hard, focused. This was the CIA operative.

  “Chelsea found that someone used several of the Agency assigned cells to call a number in Turkey. It’s never a long conversation. Not really a conversation at all. It’s more like ten to twenty seconds and then the call is disconnected, but Chelsea assures me there was a connection,” Ten explained.

  “Why not use a burner?” Jesse couldn’t understand why this person would risk getting caught when he could easily use a burner phone.

  “When we’re on assignment, they’re not allowed to have anything non-Agency assigned with them. No ID, no equipment, and definitely no personal cell phones. Their packs are checked before they get on the plane. These calls occurred while they were on one particular mission.”

  “Whose phone was used? That’s simple.” Phoebe set down her coffee mug.

  Ten shook his head. “No, it’s not. It’s four different phones. They belonged to Malone, Boomer, Deke, and Ace. None of them have relations in Turkey. The operation in question wasn’t in Turkey and had no ties to Turkey. We were in Southeast Asia.”

  Turkey was considered to be the gateway to the Middle East and the jumping off point for radicalized Muslims joining the jihad from the west.

  “The calls all happened in a two-day period. Nothing suspicious before or after,” Ten explained.

  “Someone’s desperate,” Tag said under his breath.

  “Then we’re looking for an inciting incident. This person has been careful up until now. Something spooked him,” Phoebe pointed out.

  “Or his employer.” Ten sat back in his chair, his eyes serious.

  Li’s words played around in Jesse’s head. He’d said he thought that this was about him.

  You’re the answer. You’re the one who leads us to the sleeper. This is about you. We have to figure out why they want you dead.

  He had to find the answer. He needed to stop thinking about his nonexistent love life and concentrate on getting them out of this situation. He had to think about what the real question was, and he had two men in front of him who might give him the answer.

  “Why me? Like what are logical reasons someone would want to take me out?” Jesse mused out loud.

  “It could be personal,” Tag replied. “But it doesn’t feel that way to me. Instinct tells me it’s bigger than that. Besides, why would someone on Ten’s team have something personal against you?”

  He could only think of one incident. “I clocked Boomer after he and Malone shoved Si and me in that shed.”

  Ten shook his head. “Everyone’s clocked Boomer at one point in time. That boy’s had more concussions than a quarterback. He’s not the type to get pissed about something like that. Now you take his Cheetos and he turns into the Hulk. That boy is all about his gut.”

  “I don’t think this is personal,” Phoebe said, sounding deeply professional. “If this guy really is a sleeper, then he wouldn’t risk his position on a personal grudge. This was expertly set up. I was the one who screwed everything up. If I hadn’t been made, no one would have been the wiser.”

  “So if this is a professional hit, it’s got to be about stopping you from doing something.” Tag tapped his pen against the desk. “The only op you’re scheduled for right now is the one in Dubai, but you’re one of four agents. So why you?”

  “It could have been a message to you, Tag,” Ten offered. “We just never got the message because he didn’t actually die.”

  They started arguing, but Jesse tuned them out. This wasn’t about Tag. It wasn’t about the team. It was about him.

  “What are y
ou thinking?” Phoebe asked, leaning toward him.

  “That this is about me. I just can’t figure out why.”

  “Taggart’s right. If this is about you then it’s about stopping you from doing something.” She frowned as Ten and Tag continued to argue. “Or it’s about something you know that you shouldn’t.”

  A bitter laugh came from his mouth. “Yeah, well, we all know I don’t know much.”

  “Jesse…” She turned again, facing him, and her face had flushed. “You didn’t do anything wrong last night. That was all about me.”

  God, he’d heard this speech before and he didn’t want to hear it from her. He nodded when he thought he should, but he didn’t really hear her as she started to explain how she wasn’t ready and it wasn’t a good time. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

  It all came back to I don’t want you, Jesse.

  He knew that. He knew what it felt like to be rejected. If this was about what he knew, rejection was high on the list. Other things he knew—how to be tortured and nearly turned into a mindless slave. He knew the sound of pure evil. Yeah, that was a good one. He knew what the devil looked like.

  In the end, there was really only one thing vitally important that he knew and no one else did. Him. The man in his nightmares.

  “I know him.” The truth hit him square in the chest. “I know him.”

  Phoebe stopped her obviously prepared speech. “Who?”

  Even Ten and Tag were now paying attention.

  “The Caliph. That’s what he called himself. I’ve seen him, heard him. I’m about to go back to the Middle East. One of the things you had to do for the conference was send in the names of all security personnel. We’re required to go through checks, too. Kamdar had to submit our names in order to bring us as his security detail. What date would he have done that on?”

  “Grace did it.” Tag was suddenly on his laptop, his hands working the keys in a staccato rhythm. After a few seconds he reached for one of Ten’s notes and groaned. “Shit. She did it the day before the phone calls. She submitted those names and that is what led to the phone calls. He couldn’t be careful anymore. It was too important.”

  “He has to have taken or borrowed those phones. I can’t believe I’ve got four traitors.” Ten had gone a little pale.

  “Why would this man care if you were at a conference?” Phoebe asked. “Obviously I understand that he wouldn’t want to be recognized, but why would he be there in the first place? Shouldn’t he be running his little army somewhere?”

  “He was an educated man. Highly educated. In that part of the world, it means he’s wealthy. He spoke English with a British accent.” He wracked his brain for everything he could think of about the Caliph. It was hard because a lot of the time he’d spent with the man had been in a drug-induced haze. “He talked about Oxford.”

  “So he’s very wealthy.” Ten sighed and restacked his papers. “And that means oil in the Middle East.”

  “Shit. The last thing he wants is to be outed as a jihadist at this thing. This conference is for moderates only,” Tag explained. “One of the things they’re supposed to discuss is how to deal with resources falling into the hands of radicals and how to protect their companies from it happening. Jesse, I think you’re on to something.”

  He shrugged. “It was really Li’s idea. He thought it was about something I knew.”

  “Dude, take a compliment. You sound like a girl who doesn’t want to be told she’s pretty more than a thousand times. You were smart. Not going to say it again.” Tag’s words came out of his mouth with the efficiency of a machine gun.

  “I didn’t know you said it the first time,” Jesse muttered under his breath. Somehow, in telling him he was smart, Jesse still managed to feel dumb. But Tag was right. He was on to something. And he had another theory. “What if I wasn’t the Caliph’s first? Deke told me you have a couple of people on your team who were captives at one time or another. Who was gone the longest?”

  Ten opened his laptop. “Ace and Deke were both gone for a couple of months, Ace slightly longer. Boomer was held for a week before he managed to escape. He made a sling shot, if you can believe it. Fucker took down three men with rocks, escaped, and then almost got his ass caught again because he got lost in the center of Kabul. Some friendlies took him in and hid him until his unit managed to pick him up. I don’t think this is Boomer.”

  “No,” Jesse agreed. Boomer was too open, but the other two were candidates. “It makes sense if we run with the idea that the Caliph doesn’t want me to potentially identify him, it would be his man who would make a move to take me out. What if I was a failed experiment? That doesn’t mean others didn’t succeed.”

  Ten ran a hand through his hair and his jaw tightened. “I can’t believe it.”

  Jesse shouldn’t have expected different. He wasn’t intelligence. He was just a dude with a gun and protective instincts. “All right. What do you think?”

  Ten glared his way. “I think you’re right and I don’t want to believe it. Are you always so literal?” He slammed the top of his laptop into place. “I’m sorry. I’m struggling with the fact that I have a traitor in my midst and I haven’t seen it. He could have hurt my men. I take them seriously. That team is my responsibility and I fucked up because I’m missing something. I didn’t see something.”

  “You see the mask he wants you to see.” A chill went through Jesse’s system. How did he make them understand? “I know what he was trying to do with me. He was trying to break me down. To utterly strip me of everything that made me Jesse Murdoch. He would tell me that what I thought was me was really just a mask. The real me was underneath and must be hidden to everyone but my brothers. He was our father, the one who made us see the truth.”

  “Who were your brothers?” Tag asked, his voice deep.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t meet them. He promised me a family if I just gave over to him. If I could drop the false persona forced on me by the superficial Western devils, I could find my real family. It all sounded more reasonable when there was heroin in my system. Now it sounds like a load of bullshit, but with the heroin it really does make sense.”

  “Don’t joke about it,” Phoebe said, sounding emotional for the first time.

  “Why not? When you think about it, it’s kind of funny.” They’d tried to train him like a dog. Called him a dog.

  “Gallows humor,” Tag said with a faint smile. “Chicks don’t understand it. I could have told the fucker your skull’s too thick to shove that shit through. He knew how to get to you, though. He knew what buttons to push.”

  “Yeah, like you did.”

  If Tag was offended, he didn’t show it. “It was obvious you wanted a place to belong. I simply gave it to you.”

  And he would be forever grateful. “You gave me a family, Tag.”

  “Yeah, which is why no matter what happens, your ass is not going back to Wyoming. So what would we look for? You’re the expert here, Murdoch. We’re going to follow your lead.”

  Ten nodded in agreement. “I’ll open my files. See what you think. There are psych assessments in there. I’m using my authority to give you eyes only clearance. Do you understand?”

  “Don’t talk about anything I read in those files. Got it.” He was surprised that Ten would offer to let him look at the files. “The last thing I expected to get was top secret clearance.”

  Ten stared at him for a moment before speaking. “I was wrong about you. I was angry with you about…”

  Phoebe slapped her hand against the desk. “Tennessee!”

  “No. I’m telling him because you won’t. Damn it, Phoebe. This is not some secret to hoard. You think you can bring him back if you don’t tell anyone? You think you can make all this less real if we don’t talk about it? I’m your brother and I was his brother, and I am not going to keep quiet anymore. I’m not going to hide and pretend like it didn’t happen.”

  “I can’t believe you would do this.” She stood and after a second
, stalked out of the room.

  What the hell was that about? “Does this have something to do with her husband?”

  “It has to do with Jamie and you deserve to know the truth. You deserve to know why I hated you for so long.”

  “Do you hate me now?” He hadn’t liked the look on Phoebe’s face as she’d left the room. It had been a punch in the gut. Whatever Ten was going to tell him meant the world to her.

  Ten shook his head. “I was irrational. You’re not the man I thought you were.”

  He wanted to know. It was an ache in his gut. The truth was right there. He would know why the Agency had it in for him. And knowing would hurt her. She didn’t belong to him. She didn’t want to. It was all right to choose himself over her. It was logical. He couldn’t do it.

  “Don’t say another word, please. If me being in the dark brings her peace, then I don’t need to know.”

  “You have the right.”

  “Does it affect this operation? Will me not knowing potentially hurt someone?”

  Ten shook his head. “No.”

  “Then let it lie. It’s enough to know this bad blood between us can be over.” He looked at the door where Phoebe had disappeared. “You should go talk to her. Tell her I didn’t want to know. I don’t want her to feel bad.”

  “What happened between the two of you?” Ten asked, standing up. “I know it’s none of my business, but it’s obvious something went wrong. She wasn’t comfortable with you and she always is.”

  “It just didn’t work out.” God he ached, but he’d learned not to let it show.

  “She hurt you,” Ten said.

  “How do you know I didn’t hurt her?”

  “Because I’ve come to know you and you wouldn’t hurt her to save yourself. Damn it. She might not understand it, but you’re good for her. She needs you.”

  Jesse shook his head. “She doesn’t. She needs him. She loves him. There’s no place for me.”