by Lexi Blake
“I can’t believe he left you with those files.” She was shaking her head as she walked into the room. “My brother is a freak about files, and especially about his team. I would have been surprised if he let Taggart look at them, much less anyone else.”
It was nice to know he could still surprise her. Too bad she was surprised that someone would trust him. “He did let Tag look at them. He also didn’t get far. He and Tag ran out to grab a late lunch. If it helps, he told me he would kill me if I used anything against him.”
“You would never do that.” She gave him a tentative smile. “He trusts you. It’s a good thing. It means you don’t have to worry about him watching you again, though he’s really fast to ask you for a favor. You’ll have to watch out for that. He’ll have you picking up packages for him in the weirdest places, and sometimes the packages end up trying to kill you. I should know.”
He knew what she was trying to do. She was trying to find their easy camaraderie again, but he just couldn’t do it. Even being friends with her would be too hard. He just had to survive until she could go back to Virginia and the house she shared with her perfect husband. He nodded and stared back at his file. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“I’m sorry.” He heard her move toward him. “You know I was married. I haven’t done that with anyone but him. Have sex, I mean. It hit me afterward. It really wasn’t about you.”
He looked up at her, surprised. “No one else?”
“No. I was a virgin when I married Jamie. Well, not when I married him, but I did end up marrying him, so I sort of lost my virginity to my husband. I certainly hadn’t slept with anyone since I lost him.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.” It had been the last thing on his mind. Pleasing her, making her want him—those had been the things going through his mind. He’d failed.
“It wasn’t like that. You didn’t do anything wrong. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. I had an emotional reaction.”
And he’d wanted to hold her. Even as he understood she was longing for another man, he’d wanted to comfort her. “It’s all right. We made a mistake. We won’t do it again.”
She flushed, her face going pink, but she nodded. “Yes. We won’t do it again. I just wanted you to know that I…I’m going to miss you when this is done.”
“Sure.” She would remember the dude she wished she hadn’t slept with and he would remember that he’d failed utterly. It was a great trade-off.
“Do you want to talk?”
“No.”
She frowned at him. “No?”
What did she want from him? “No. You said what you had to say, Phoebe. I get it. I won’t bug you again.”
“You don’t get anything. You don’t understand and that’s why I want to talk. You’re saying all the right things, but I can see you’re still blaming yourself. It’s not right. Let’s talk about it and maybe you’ll understand what’s going on.”
Tag was right. Chicks talked too much. Better to shove that shit deep and move on. He was going back to hookers. Hookers didn’t need to talk. They got the job done and went their own way. “We’re cool. I won’t hit on you again and then you don’t have to lock me out of the bathroom. It’s as simple as that.”
Her face flushed a nice shade of pink. “Is that all you’re upset about? That I locked you out of the bathroom?”
Maybe it would be better if he played this cool. He spent all his damn life being an earnest idiot. He wasn’t going to fall to her feet and beg her to let him in. It wouldn’t work. He’d played her fool more than enough. “My toothbrush was in there. Oral hygiene is very important to me.”
A long sigh came from her as she shook her head in obvious frustration. “Jesse, please talk to me. I know I hurt you and I want you to understand.”
He held a hand up. “It’s cool. Hey, it wasn’t that great for me anyway. We definitely don’t have to do it again. At least I don’t have any desire to do it again. I don’t think you do either.”
Now she went a pasty white and there was no way to miss the way tears clouded her eyes. “All right then. I’m going upstairs for a while. Let me know if you need something.”
Shit. He started to get up to go after her, but forced himself to sit back down. He wasn’t the bad guy here. He was trying to put some much-needed distance between them. Yeah, he’d been a douchebag, but that didn’t mean he should run after her and fall at her feet.
“That was rough.” Kai Ferguson leaned against the doorframe. He was dressed in khakis and a white button-down shirt with black loafers. It was what Jesse liked to think of as Kai’s shrink uniform. He wore the same clothes, though in different colors, almost every day. At night he wore leathers, but even then there was something soothing about the psychologist. Despite his neat clothing, his hair was long, brushing his shoulders, though he usually had it back in a queue. He reminded Jesse of a brainy surfer half the time.
It struck him that Kai Ferguson likely had secrets of his own. There was probably something nasty bubbling under his calm surface.
Damn but he wished Kai hadn’t been a witness to that scene. “Sorry. You didn’t need to see that.”
“To know you’re in trouble? No. All I had to do was read the file on Phoebe Ian sent me to know that.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be at some conference?” He’d started working at Sanctum a few months before, setting up an office in the previously unused second floor of the building.
“Came back because Tag said he could use some help. Apparently Alex and Eve’s baby arrived early. They weren’t expecting him for another week, but the birth mother went into labor yesterday morning. The baby’s perfectly healthy so they have leave to take him home. Cute little thing, but now Eve wants maternity leave, so I’m here to take her place. The downside is I was making time with a schizophrenia specialist. The upside, I got a private jet all to myself, complete with top secret files. Apparently you got the files, too. Any thoughts?”
He would do just about anything to not have to think about what had happened between him and Phoebe. “I think it’s one of the soldiers who went missing. I’ve pulled their files in particular.”
“I agree. I talked to Tag when I hit the ground and he told me your theory. Very smart and I believe accurate. I’ve been going over the psych evaluations. Naturally there’s nothing that would cause alarm or they wouldn’t be on the team. I would really like to interview them. I think the real proof isn’t going to be in words on a page. I need to meet the men. There were two things that concerned me.”
Jesse sat up straighter. If Kai had something that bugged him, he wanted to hear it. “Yes?”
“First of all, Deke resisted when the team went in to save him. They actually had to knock him out to get him back to base. According to the reports from the squad leader, he even broke one of their noses and afterward he told them he didn’t want to go home.”
Odd, but it didn’t mean he’d turned. Jesse remembered how it had felt. He hadn’t actively fought the team who came for him, but he hadn’t cared much either. He’d been afraid to go back, afraid he didn’t belong there anymore. “You feel dirty. At least I did. I didn’t have a family to go back to, but if I had, I would have felt weird about it. I didn’t want to be around anyone I knew. I felt like the man I’d been was gone, and being around old friends would just remind me. Sometimes it got so bad, I wanted to die.”
It hadn’t helped that no one welcomed him back. He’d been met with suspicion and distrust, and people who wondered what he’d done to live when everyone else had died.
“I understand what you’re saying and that’s fairly normal, but I have to take into consideration that it could have been an emotional reaction to leaving a place he now thought of as home,” Kai mused. “Ace, on the other hand, was very calm. There’s nothing in his reports that even says he has nightmares. He could be stoic. He could be lying to preserve some sense of manliness, but I get suspicious when there’s no emotion at all pres
ent.”
“Maybe he’s not an emotional guy.” He’d met a lot of soldiers who knew how to hide what they were feeling. The battlefield wasn’t the place for a bunch of feelings.
Kai adjusted his glasses as he spoke. “We’re all emotional, Jesse. It comes out in different ways, but the smart person can read it for what it really means. Take the reaction you had to Ms. Grant. You intended to get her to believe that you are no longer interested in her and that she’s bad in bed. Way to punch a chick in the gut by the way.”
His stomach dropped. Did they have to go back there? “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“How did you mean it?”
Jesse looked down at the files again. “It doesn’t matter now.”
Naturally Kai wouldn’t leave it be. The man never let up. “If I had to guess, you two finally had sex and then she realized she wasn’t ready, but couldn’t talk to you about it until this morning. You realized you love her and think you can never have her. It’s one more thing you want in life that you don’t get, one more thing you managed to taste before it was taken away from you. So you tried to throw up a wall between the two of you.”
He was getting a little irritated. “Do you have a point, smarty pants?”
“I do and it’s about the problem with Ace Monroe. Even when we know we should stay calm, we lash out. My point is one way or another, there should have been some kind of reaction, whether it’s relief or anger or anxiety. The other two who were taken were treated for depression briefly. There was nothing in their records that drew my attention, but I would need access to them personally to really understand them. I can’t do that right now so I’ve got time for a session with you. How about it, neighbor? I could go and get Phoebe and have a little couples counseling. After all, I kind of have to live with you two. It would be nice to not be in a war zone.”
Jesse had zero illusions about why Kai had been brought in. Eve had felt Jesse needed more specialized treatment and Tag had found Kai, a former Army Ranger who now specialized in treating PTSD in returning soldiers. A whole crew of sad sacks now came in and out of Sanctum via stairs that led directly to Kai’s office. Unfortunately, Kai’s office was also his home. He’d set up a whole suite of rooms where he worked and lived. Jesse and Phoebe were staying in his guest suite. And Jesse had stayed in Kai’s room the night before. Where the hell would he go now? “Sorry about this. I’ll try to convince Tag to let us use a couple of the privacy rooms now that you’re back.”
Kai’s lips ticked up. “I don’t think you’ll convince Tag of anything. That is one man who could use some time on my couch. I dream about it at night, you know. Ian Taggart is one large mass of previously undiagnosed personality disorders. He’s like a walking, talking Nobel Prize. Well, if they gave them out to psychologists.”
“You know what I’m saying.” In his own way, Kai was as sarcastic as Ian.
“I’m happy to have some company, man. I’ve started to feel like the Phantom of the Club some days. No, really. It’s lonely during the day. I found myself playing the keyboards and laughing maniacally. Scared the crap out of the cleaning staff.” Kai settled himself in a chair across from Jesse. “I was mostly joking about the couples therapy, though from what I understand, you could probably use it. You’ve been through a lot in the last few days. You want to talk about it?”
“Nothing to talk about.” The last thing he needed was a therapy session. He had to talk about the crap with the Caliph. It was kind of required so he didn’t go nutso again, but he didn’t need to drag his nonstarter of a relationship with Phoebe into it.
“Spoken like a true stoic. There is always something to talk about. Especially when your week started with an attempted assassination by the woman you love.”
“I don’t love her.” He sure as hell wasn’t going there.
“Okay. By the woman you’ve spent the last several months with. Every free second of the last several months with.”
“Yeah, well, she followed me around a lot. It was all part of her plan.”
Kai grinned and slapped his hands together. “Good, we’ve reached the ‘rewriting history’ phase of the breakup. It’s my favorite part.”
“Screw you, Kai.” He needed a new therapist.
“Hey, I’m here to talk.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“Okay, how do you feel about listening?”
“I don’t want to listen either.” He wanted to forget he ever met her.
He actually didn’t like that thought. The idea that he wouldn’t think about her again, could really forget her, made him anxious. Why couldn’t she be like the other girls who had rejected him? Or the ones it just hadn’t worked out with? He could remember their names, but their faces were a little cloudy. Some were pleasant memories, others mild regrets, but not one of them had shaken him the way Phoebe did.
“Excellent. I knew you would make a spectacular houseguest.”
Jesse groaned. Months on the man’s couch had taught him that Kai wasn’t like other shrinks. Kai was way more obnoxious, and he was like a dog with a bone when he got going. “Say what you’re going to say, man.”
“All right. I’ll do just that because despite what you believe, you need to hear this.” Kai placed his hands on the table and regarded Jesse seriously. “This is not about you. That’s what I’m going to say. Phoebe’s issues are not about you. I talked to Ian earlier and he told me a little bit about her past and her relationship with Ten Smith. And Chelsea might have sent me all the files the Agency has on her. I don’t think Ten knows about that. Chelsea wanted me to see if I could commit her to an insane asylum. She sent me a list of the top three with the worst records in the US, though she said she’d found some nasty ones in South America, too. Chelsea is all Team Jesse if you didn’t know.”
He couldn’t help but smile. And then frown because Chelsea could actually be a little vindictive. “Phoebe’s not crazy. I wouldn’t mind reading those files though.”
“I don’t think that’s a great idea.”
“Why not? She did it to me.” He was feeling vengeful. It would go away. It always did and he would feel like crap about it. But he was curious about her husband. She wouldn’t talk about him except to say he’d been Agency and he’d died. He was curious about the man she did love. What kind of man could hold on to his wife after all these years? Probably a saint.
Kai shook his head. “So you want some revenge on her? You want to react in a way that runs counter to who you are as a person? Because the Jesse Murdoch I know isn’t interested in revenge. He’s a protector.”
That was a load of crap. “He’s an idiot.”
Kai’s eyes widened behind his glasses. “Have you wondered about why Ian Taggart took you in? By all accounts, he really should have had you arrested. Or killed. He’s that kind of guy. You shot his wife. Oh, from what I understand you were trying to get Alex, but you got Charlotte. You put everything about that operation in jeopardy, including the lives of two of his best friends and his wife. And yet, Ian took you in and gave you a job.”
He’d thought about it a lot lately. “I think maybe he was trying to make sure I didn’t turn. Maybe he was working with the Agency.”
Kai shook his head, his gold and brown hair moving against his shoulders. “That wasn’t his reason. He needed a man like you.”
“A grunt who would do anything he would say?”
“Dude, we need to work on your self-esteem. No. He was in a position where his men were getting married and having kids and he needed someone he trusted to watch their backs and to make the right decisions. Like backing up Simon even when you knew damn well it put Tag in a bad position. You could have lost your job over that, but you chose friendship and loyalty over yourself. You’re a selfless man, Jesse. It’s a unique trait, one that I believe you were born with. Oftentimes a certain goodness comes from nurture, from having a loving family around you. But I believe some people are simply born good, selfless. They’re the universe�
�s way of making sure there are always heroes among us.”
He wasn’t a hero. “Well, it sure wasn’t taught to me. My granddad was a bastard. Never hit me or anything, but he never let me know I was anything but a burden. My mom said I reminded her too much of my dad, and she couldn’t even look at me. She dumped me on the old man when I was just a kid. He made sure I went to school and had food, but that was about it. I was on my own for everything else.”
“And what did you do when he got cancer?”
He’d taken a leave and gone to see him, but his granddad had told him not to come back. He’d been so bitter, he’d turned away everyone. And still Jesse had felt a responsibility to do something. “I sent back everything I had so he could be comfortable. Like I said, I was stupid. Always have been.”
“No,” Kai insisted. “You’re the unique human being who can be kicked again and again and still maintain his peace, his love. It’s why they couldn’t break you in Iraq. He used advanced torture techniques meant to erase who you are so he could build a new you, one who he controlled. He apparently managed it with others, but not you. You are unbreakable because there is a core of deep strength inside you.”
“I never thought about it like that.” He’d kind of thought he was too stubborn for it to work.
“What happens to a dog who gets kicked too many times?”
That was easy. And it hurt a little because Kai knew what that meant to him. The Caliph had called him a dog over and over again. Jesse was the dog and the Caliph was the master. He told himself they were just words. “He gets mean.”
Kai leaned forward, his voice passionate. “Yes. You are not a dog, Jesse Murdoch. You are a man, and a remarkable one at that. I’ve studied hundreds who went through something like you and only a few maintain your light. So I’m going to give you some advice. You thought she could save you.”
He had. Deep down, he’d thought Phoebe was the woman who could heal him. He thought if he could get her to love him, he might feel worthy. He nodded, not wanting to speak.