He couldn’t. Not when he couldn’t offer answers or any hope he could fix things.
“Can’t sleep,” he said, his voice rough with guilt. “You should go back to bed.” With a click of a button, he closed the file.
A lazy grin curled her lips. “Warmer with you there.” She held out a hand, palm up, fingers curling as if beckoning him toward her.
“Georgia . . .” He could be honest. Rip off the Band-Aid. Deal with the consequences. He could.
Reality began to dawn across her face, tension returning to her frame. “Is something wrong?” she asked, pushing away from the wall and coming to stand in front of him. “Is it Ethan?” Wakefulness seized her as she stared down at him. “Is Ethan . . . ?”
“No.” Relieved to have something positive to discuss, he filled her in. “Ortiz got in touch. Turns out, Ethan was wearing a vest.”
“You’re kidding,” Georgia said, pulling out one of the ancient chrome-and-vinyl chairs and joining him.
Parker shook his head, grateful for Ethan’s tendency to be vastly overprepared. “Shocked me, too. But I guess once he realized what was going on, he took every available precaution, and thank God for that. Even with the vest, he broke four ribs and punctured a lung. One of the bullets tore through his shoulder.”
“High-velocity rounds?”
“Probably,” Parker admitted. “He had to have emergency surgery, and he’ll have a long recovery ahead.”
“But he’s safe? Ortiz is with him?” Georgia reached for Parker’s hand, lacing their fingers together.
“Yeah. Ortiz put a call in to Somerton Security; Ethan’s got around-the-clock protection. As soon as possible, Ortiz will get him quietly transferred to a private facility under an assumed name.”
“I’m surprised Ethan isn’t fighting with the hospital staff as it is.”
Parker grinned. “Apparently, he’s heavily sedated.”
“Ah.” She pulled her chair closer, leaning into him, her body still warm and loose with the powerful combination of good sex and hard sleep.
He dropped a hand to her knee, toyed with the hem of the shirt she wore. Looking at her, touching her, his eyes burned and watered.
“Ethan’s going to be okay, Parker,” she said, misinterpreting the source of his emotions.
“I know.” She was right, of course. Assuming Parker could get them out of this mess, Ethan would recover. Things would get back to normal. Parker just couldn’t say the same for Georgia or himself.
Or Will.
Parker had no idea how, after just a few days, Georgia had managed to make it feel as if she’d always been there. Imagining his day without her snark, her scent, her touch . . . he hated the very idea of it.
“Can I ask you something?” She pressed her thigh against his, trailing her fingers along his arm.
“Sure.”
“You and Ethan seem . . . close, I guess.”
“We’ve worked together a long time.” He skimmed his fingers in a never-ending figure eight against the inside of her knee.
“It’s more than that, though. Ethan’s professionalism slips when he’s around you. For him, you’re personal. Why is that?” she asked.
“Why?” Parker said on a grin. “Jealous? Worried Ethan just can’t quit me?”
She shoved away his fingers. “I was thinking more bromance, less illicit love affair, but sure—”
Parker pulled her back, swinging her around until her legs draped over his lap, and his fingers had access to miles and miles of soft skin. “Ethan and I didn’t always get along. In fact, I’m pretty sure Ethan hated me on sight.”
“A lot’s changed.”
“Yeah, it has. But it didn’t come easy or cheap. When I was first assigned to the CWU, Ethan pitched a fit. I had next to no tactical experience, had never been in the field . . . Looking back on it, I get why Ethan was less than thrilled to be stuck with me.”
“Bet you didn’t feel that way at the time.”
“Nope.” Parker smiled. “I was pissed. I knew I could contribute on a technical level, knew I was one of the only people qualified to run point with my program. But Ethan saw me as a liability, plain and simple. Treated me that way, too.”
“What changed?” Georgia asked.
Parker slid a palm up her thigh, running his rough hand against smooth skin and enjoying the casual way she allowed him to touch and explore, as if she understood tactile distraction was an inherent part of the way he thought.
“My work ethic, for one. I was the first one there, last one to leave. Never unprepared for briefings or late on reports. Ethan’s a lot of things, stubborn to a fault for sure, but he respects people who show up for the job.” He slid a sly look her way, dipping his fingers toward the inside of her thigh. “Something I think you know.”
“Yeah. He’s a workhorse and expects the same from those around him.” The skin beneath his fingertips pebbled.
“Yeah. So that helped. It took more than six months, but he went from openly hostile to grudgingly tolerant.”
Georgia rolled her eyes. “What a revolution.”
“Yeah.” Parker laughed. “He’s not the easiest to impress.”
“So what changed?”
“An op gone bad.” Parker lifted a hand, trailed a fingertip along the groove of Georgia’s collarbone. “We got intel about a tech bomb being sold on the black market—a device strong enough to take down every modern electrical appliance in Manhattan.”
Georgia shivered against him.
“Ethan and the team had orders to destroy the bomb and eliminate the buyer and seller, but things went to shit. Jones had to be medevaced out. Long story short, they destroyed the device, but all hell broke loose. Ethan got separated from the team, and ultimately the chopper had to leave without him.”
Georgia swore. “That must have been hell.”
“Mostly for Jones, I think. Ethan sort of took it all in stride. When he made the call, ordered the team to leave, he sounded stone-cold calm.”
“Think anything ever gets under Ethan’s skin?”
“A few things.” Family, for one. Loyalty. The need to protect those he cared about. Something he and Georgia shared.
“Someday, some woman is going to come along and turn him inside out. I can never decide if I want to be there to witness it or be well out of the blast radius.”
“That view might be best from a distance and through high-powered field lenses.” Georgia grinned. “I’ve known Ethan long enough to know there’s no wilting flower in his future.”
“I’ll bring the popcorn if you bring the Twizzlers,” Parker said, a shared future so real and vibrant and perfect it hurt.
“Deal.” Georgia brushed a strand of hair away from her face. “Finish your story.”
Parker sat back, letting his fingers trail over her bare calves, unwilling to let go even for a second. “By the time we could get additional air support, it was too late. While we’d neutralized the device, we hadn’t taken out either buyer or seller. Things went to shit pretty fast after they started turning on each other, calling in reinforcements. It was a tactical nightmare. A lot more ground support and high-tech weaponry in the region than we thought.”
“No way you were going to get a chopper back in without risking the crew.”
Parker nodded. “Yeah. It didn’t take us long to reach that conclusion. Orders were for Ethan to find cover and wait it out.”
“That didn’t happen?”
“No.” For a moment, helplessness surged, echoing through him and reminding him of the impotent fear that had swamped him at the time. Like now, he’d struggled with whether or not he was good enough, smart enough, to win. More than once the fear had gotten the better of him. “No, things got progressively worse. On entry we’d breached the compound’s security, left a gaping hole in the wall. It didn’t take long for locals to start warring over what was left, the violence attracting more and more attention. Ethan couldn’t stay there. Either they’d stumble across
him accidentally or he’d succumb to the elements trying to wait them out.”
“Must have been hell, watching it all play out on a monitor.”
“Thirty-six hours in, I’d had enough. I borrowed a satellite in the region—”
“B-borrowed?” Georgia sputtered. “From who?”
“Not important,” Parker said, waving her off. “Point is, I had eyes on Ethan, the region, and a way to get him out of there. Sixty-four hours and forty-three miles later, Ethan made it to the rendezvous point.”
Georgia let out a low whistle. “That’s a lot of ground in a very short time frame.”
“Yeah. Neither one of us slept much. But we got to know each other—kind of had to; it was as if we were the last two people on Earth.” Parker rubbed at the back of his neck. “Ethan was on fumes by the time he set out, so the only thing he asked was that I talk to him, keep him moving.” Parker barked out a laugh. “Chitchat died inside an hour.”
“Something that extreme . . . it pulls people together sometimes,” Georgia said, tugging the sleeves of his Henley down over her fingertips.
Or tears them apart, Parker thought, his fingers pausing in their never-ending loop against her legs. He pushed away the thought. What he and Georgia had, it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t born of desperation and fear and survival. Not at first anyway. Their chemistry had surged from the moment Parker had enough caffeine in his system to take a good, hard look at her. What they had was more than the sum of their circumstances, and he refused to believe otherwise.
Which would make the hurt that much worse when she discovered everything he wasn’t saying. When she turned her fury, her hatred, her grief, on him.
“By the time Ethan got home, things were just . . . different,” Parker said, pulling his thoughts away from things he couldn’t change and instead remembering the immense wave of pride that had flowed through him when the elevator doors had slid open and Ethan had stepped out. He’d expected a handshake, maybe a clap on the shoulder. Instead, Ethan had stepped up to him and, in the middle of the clapping and congratulations, pulled Parker into a hug and whispered thanks against his ear. That moment was seared in Parker’s memory forever. To know without doubt or question that for once he’d been everything someone needed him to be . . . Even now it was a powerful feeling.
“After that, I expected things to settle, to go back to the way they’d been before.”
“They didn’t?” Georgia asked, sliding her leg back when he ran a finger up her arch—a reaction he stored away for later.
“At work, yeah, more or less. Ethan trusted me in ways he hadn’t, was more inclined to listen if I had any input beyond program analysis. And because he wore his faith in me so openly, everyone else started to pay closer attention to me as well.” It had been overwhelming, the sudden attention, the immediate rise in responsibility. It wasn’t that Parker had been slacking or that he hadn’t understood the consequences of his job. In theory, he’d always known what was at stake, and in practice the point had been driven home in the days he’d spent helping Ethan navigate a potentially deadly situation. But the pressure of knowing that men and women were now looking to Parker to pull off the impossible, to keep them safe . . . It had been overwhelming—and Ethan had noticed. “He got . . . protective, for lack of a better word. All of a sudden he was keeping an eye on the hours I put in, making sure I ate, slept, took time off.”
“Does it bug you that Ethan thinks you need taking care of?” Georgia asked quietly.
For a long moment, Parker distracted himself by sliding his fingers along her legs, eliciting shivers and trembles, watching as Georgia responded to him on the most basic level.
When he didn’t answer, Georgia said, “You’re different around Ethan. Deferential. Kind of . . .”
“Intimidated?”
“Sort of, yeah.”
“I think I’m just comfortable with our dynamic. Did you know Ethan had a brother?”
Georgia withdrew her legs, sat up, and leaned forward. “No, I didn’t.”
“Yeah. Younger. Ethan told me a little about him. They were as competitive as they were close. Always outdoing each other, always watching out for each other. I think when Ethan’s brother died, he lost that sense of closeness. That feeling that someone out there had his back, no questions asked.”
“Until you stepped in, commandeered a satellite, and helped him walk out of hell.”
“Yeah.” He studied her reaction, hoping the turn in their conversation wouldn’t throw her into thoughts of Will. He didn’t want to watch painful memories grip her face, steal her focus. He didn’t want her to hurt at all.
If only it were as simple as hijacking another satellite.
“You know how you look back on your life, and there’s a handful of moments you can point at and say, ‘That changed everything’?” he asked, steering the conversation forward.
“You know I do,” Georgia whispered, pulling her legs to her chest.
“Those few days, holed up in the office, chugging Red Bull so I could stay on the line with Ethan—they changed the course of my life. Ethan changed the course of my life. Because while he needed someone he could both protect and rely on, I needed someone in my corner. Someone who, at the end of the day, was on my side. No questions asked. I was so lonely, Georgia,” he croaked. “You have no idea.”
“Yeah,” she said reluctantly. “I think I do.” She leaned forward, placed a hand against his shoulder, and rubbed her thumb against the base of his throat. Just like that, he could breathe again. Every touch, every gesture she bestowed on him, made it that much more impossible to tell her the truth. To throw a chasm between them he’d never be able to bridge.
“Until Ethan, I didn’t know what it meant to have a friend like that. A brother who would take me out for a beer after a long day. Someone who had my back no matter what I needed. I didn’t grow up like that, never had it. And for a long time, I didn’t even really know enough to want it. To miss it. Not until Ethan forced his way into my life.”
“You mentioned once that your mother . . .” He watched as Georgia searched for the right words, as if any such thing existed. “That she maybe didn’t protect you as she should have.”
“My mom . . . She did the best she could.” Everything in him wanted to withdraw, to change the subject. He wasn’t even sure how the conversation had taken this turn.
“You don’t have to tell me, Parker.”
Didn’t he? After everything she’d told him and everything he already wasn’t telling her? Didn’t he owe her the same vulnerability, the same honesty?
As if reading his mind, she said, “I told you about my childhood because, well—” She ran a shaky hand through her hair. “I told you because I didn’t want to carry it alone anymore, and because I trusted that you wouldn’t use it against me, that you wouldn’t think less of me.” She leaned forward, gripping his forearms. “It was the right decision for me, and I’m glad I told you. That doesn’t mean it’s the right call for you, and you definitely don’t owe me anything, okay?”
She was right, of course. He didn’t have to tell her anything. Didn’t owe her the sordid personal details he’d never willingly shared with anyone—even Ethan only knew because he’d bulldozed his way into Parker’s personal life. But as Georgia sat next to him, bathed in the gray shadows his computer screen created in the dark, everything about her read warm, and soft, and intimate. And intimacy, Parker had come to realize, was something to be shared.
“My mom, she wasn’t a bad parent,” he said, starting with the truth he so often had to remind himself. “She wanted so desperately to be good for me, to make my life something incredible. But it almost felt like that quest, that desire, ate her alive. Tormented her until she’d swing wildly between emotions. She was so determined to be the best at everything that every failure, no matter how small, was cataclysmic.” He wrapped his fingers around Georgia’s forearm and pulled until she rose and came to him. “I wouldn’t understand until
years later that she had schizoaffective disorder—a main course of schizophrenia and a second helping of bipolar depression. I couldn’t know she would devolve to the point I barely even recognized her. Or that she self-medicated with drugs through the majority of my childhood.”
Hands cupped the side of his face, lifting his chin as Georgia settled over his lap, one leg on either side of his chair, and placed a light kiss against his lips.
“I can see how that would be incredibly lonely for a child.”
“It didn’t help that my IQ separated me from most of my peer group. Or that I never knew my father. But I lucked out—a counselor at school got me tested, had me placed in advanced programs. By fifteen I was applying to universities and so desperate to be away from home it hurt. At that point I’d seen two different dealers beat my mother unconscious.” He grasped Georgia’s hand, placed her fingers against the crescent-shaped scar an inch into his hairline. “One hit me with a beer bottle when I tried to intervene.”
She brushed a kiss against the ridged flesh, a simple, gentle gesture that nearly undid him.
He didn’t deserve the comfort she freely gave him. Not when he knew her brother suffered alone.
“I hated her so much,” he croaked, burying his face against her chest. “Hated her for something she didn’t understand and couldn’t control.”
Strong arms pulled him close, holding him as he confessed to hating his mother. Who did that? Who hated someone sick? Someone desperate and just as lonely as he’d been?
“You were a kid, Parker. No one could blame you for feeling that way.”
“Things got better when I went to school,” he said, pulling away so he could look at her. “I was still lonely—a fifteen-year-old, no matter how smart, does not belong on a college campus, let alone in the dorms. But for the first time, things were stable. For a while, my mom even saw a doctor and was properly medicated. We got to know each other a little bit. I know she wanted more, wanted us to be closer, but I . . .”
“Couldn’t risk it,” Georgia said. “It’s not a hard lesson to learn. People will disappoint you. Betray you. Hurt you.” She looked down at him, her eyes dilated in the darkness until only the blacks of her irises were visible. “Expecting the worst of people, wondering when, not if, they’ll leave . . . it’s a hard habit to break.”
Defenseless (Somerton Security #1) Page 20