by Linda Howard
Taking a deep breath, she called headquarters and told MacNamara’s assistant she had to talk to him. She’d expected to have to wait a month or so—he was never accommodating—but instead she was told to get there immediately.
MacNamara’s normal expression was a blend of surliness, impatience, and downright hostility, but when Jina sat down in his office he regarded her seriously. “You went through some tough shit,” he commented, leaning back in his chair.
She shrugged, not wanting to talk about it. But for him to even acknowledge her situation was unusual, because normally his attitude ran along the lines of suck it up and do your job. She had, way past what she’d thought she could do, but now she couldn’t. “I want to transfer back to my old job,” she said.
Instantly MacNamara morphed back into his normal self. “Sorry. We’ve spent a lot of money on your training, and I’m not going to throw it away. Request denied.”
She’d expected that, accepted the course she would have to take. She gave him a level stare, then stood and said, “In that case, I quit.”
She’d never said those words before. She’d had to fight with herself to come to this point, because it was so alien to her. She could return to the team, she could force herself forward . . . but she didn’t want to. Hearing herself say the words broke a barrier inside, one she’d never let herself cross before. She was in unchartered territory, but abruptly she felt free and calm. This was her chosen path. She was done.
To her surprise, instead of instantly tossing her out the door, MacNamara leaned back and steepled his fingers, studying her over them. “Don’t be so hasty. Think this through.”
“I have. Through, over, under, around. I’d prefer doing one more mission—with someone else’s team, which isn’t going to happen—just to prove to myself that I have the guts to do it, but for the most part . . .” She shook her head. “I’m finished.”
“Ace made the right call, the only call he could have made with the information he had.”
“I know that. I’m still done.” Knowing and accepting were two different things. She couldn’t even argue that he’d made the wrong decision. He’d thought she was dead in the explosion. She got that. That didn’t alter what she still had to deal with, the emotions she’d felt when she stood alone in the desert and known he’d left her behind. She wasn’t a computer; she couldn’t reboot and start fresh. She couldn’t shove all that into a different compartment of her brain and ignore it as if it had never happened.
MacNamara shrugged. He wasn’t the type who kept beating at something, he had too much going on. “You still don’t get your old job back. I’m not wasting your training. I’ll switch you to drone training, you can be an instructor in that, but not communications. Your choice.”
Her mouth fell open. To say she was flabbergasted was putting it mildly. She loved working with Tweety, loved every bit of the nerdy software stuff and how absolutely cool the little drone was. The flabbergasting part was that no one who knew MacNamara ever expected him to be accommodating. “What? Are you sure? I mean—thank you.”
He scowled at her. “Get out before I change my mind.”
She did. She left in a daze, knowing she had just walked out of one part of her life and entered another. She had quit. And she had begun.
Twenty-Four
She cried a little bit as she drove to the training area, knowing that she had to tell the guys in person, she couldn’t just let them hear about it from someone else. Maybe they already knew, maybe MacNamara had immediately called Levi, but that didn’t matter: she’d quit, but she couldn’t let herself be a coward about it.
Her heartbeat hit double-time as she parked, looked around at a place that, for the past year, had been more familiar to her than her own condo. There was nothing glamorous about it: the dirt, the sand, the buildings for practicing shooting situations, the obstacles and pits and soul-destroying humidity, the coolers of bottled water placed at strategic points, the dust kicked up by pounding feet, the groups of sweating and swearing men working through different rotations. She spotted Kodak and his team, working with the new drone trainee whose name she didn’t know because she still couldn’t get past the ache that Donnelly was gone and this was his replacement, so she’d been ignoring the man’s existence. She wouldn’t be able to do that now, though; she’d be training him in the drone program.
What she didn’t see was her own team—correction, her former team. The thought made her heart ache, but she knew she’d made the right choice. She took out her phone and shot a text to Boom. Maybe she should have texted Levi, but today she was taking the easiest path she could—because she was now a quitter.
Quitter. The word jolted her down to her bones, knocked her world askew, and she had a feeling it would never be on quite the same plane again. She’d spent her life measuring herself against Jordan and Taz, pushing herself to keep up with her brothers, and when she’d been assigned to the teams she’d carried that compulsion to the point of insanity. She had even jumped out of freakin’ planes, and what sane person did that? Pride and stubbornness had kept her plugging away at something she didn’t want, until she’d become fond of the guys, of Terisa and Ailani, of the kids, and made a place for herself in their world—never mind that their world had never been anything she’d wanted.
Training the drone operators was so much more in her wheelhouse; she’d look forward to going to work every day, instead of dreading what she’d have to put herself through to prove that she wasn’t a quitter. There had been days she’d enjoyed; she’d learned to like being in good shape. She would never look at running the same way, not after the desert, but the truth was if she hadn’t done so much running here in training, she never would have been able to survive that brutal run. Being on the team had put her in a desperate situation, but it had also given her the ability to handle it.
With a sharp pang of surprise, she realized she wanted to keep up part of what she’d been doing. She wouldn’t have a team she could train with, but she could run, she could join a gym and lift weights, do some rope climbing, keep those skills sharp and her conditioning up.
Who knew? Someday she might have to run for her life again. If that kind of situation ever arose—maybe running from a mugger—then she wanted to be able to do it. She wanted to leave any mugger in the dust.
Her phone buzzed with an incoming text. She glanced at the screen to see Boom’s short reply that they were on the way.
She would have gone to them. Did they think she wasn’t able to make it that far under her own steam? Or did they already know she’d quit, and she was no longer allowed on the training site?
Tears burned her eyes again, because likely she wouldn’t be back on this site unless something came up with one of the drone trainees. Making this change was tough, and not just because she’d had to turn her back on how she’d always defined herself, though perhaps it was equally true that she’d let the challenges of others define her. Regardless of that, the guys on her team meant a lot to her, and not having them in her everyday life from now on would leave a huge hole.
Her world had changed drastically the day she’d been assigned to the GO-Team, and now it had changed drastically again because she’d left them. Before, she’d had friends with whom she shopped, went to movies; she’d dated, though not seriously. She had gone to museums and plays, to ball games. She’d had a life. Now she hadn’t touched base with any of those friends since she’d been assigned to the team, because she’d barely had time to do her laundry and every other minute of her day had been taken up with training, eating, and sleeping.
If the guys didn’t want to associate with her anymore—what then?
She’d handle it, that was what. She hadn’t had any friends when she’d moved to D.C., but she’d made them. She was friendly, and social. She could start over.
She could, but she didn’t want to. She wanted the best of both worlds. She wanted to stay friends with them, but she didn’t want to go out on missions;
she wanted to train Tweety operators.
Likely she wanted more than she could have.
Through her dusty windshield she watched Boom, Snake, Trapper, and Jelly approaching. Levi wasn’t in sight. Either he didn’t want to talk to her because he was furious she’d quit the team, or he wasn’t here. She marked the odds at fifty/fifty.
She climbed out of the car and went to lean against the hood, waiting for them. The scorching August sun beat down on her bare head, sent waves of heat against her sunglasses and forming sweat where the frames touched her face. Maybe if she sweated enough they wouldn’t notice any stray tears.
As they got closer she could see the tension in their expressions, and her stomach twisted. But as they neared, Boom tossed a bottle of water at her and said, “Crutch?”
Automatically she caught the bottle and twisted the cap off, another internal organ affected by the one-word question. “Not Crutch,” she said hurriedly. “Me.”
They formed an arc around her, four big men standing with their boots firmly planted, sweat dripping off them, guzzling from their own water bottles. “You?” Snake asked, sending a quick look down at her feet. “What’s up? You having problems?”
She could just say that she’d been reassigned, which was true as far as that went, but definitely not the whole story. She took a deep breath and sagged against the hood. “I . . . I quit,” she said, almost strangling on the word. Then she looked down at the ground, because she couldn’t bear looking at them and seeing the disappointment on their faces.
Trapper was the first one who spoke. “Quit? Babe, you never quit anything. A couple of times I thought you’d kill yourself rather than back down.”
“I quit this,” she said in a small voice. “I’m sorry. I can’t do it anymore.”
Boom moved to her side, leaning his bulk on the hood. His deep voice rumbled as he asked, “Is it because of what happened in Syria? You don’t trust us now to take care of you?”
“I could hear,” she said hurriedly, sidestepping the issue of trust because she hadn’t worked through that yet. “My comm was damaged and I couldn’t transmit, but I could hear y’all. I knew Crutch and Voodoo were hurt, I knew you had to get them out. It was on me to get myself to the extraction point. And I did. But I don’t want to do it again.”
They were silent, shuffling their feet a little. She swallowed hard, fought back the impulse to bury her face in her hands and sob. “The thing is . . . I loved being a part of the team, being with y’all, but the rest of it was something I had to force myself to do. I’m a nerd. I want to do nerdy things, like working with Tweety. I don’t want to be in situations like Syria. I don’t want to be a moron who jumps out of planes, no offense to you morons who think doing that’s normal. I’ll always be a liability to y’all, because deep down my heart isn’t in it.” She sucked in a shuddering breath. “So I quit. Mac reassigned me to training the drone operators.”
More silence. Then Jelly said, “So . . . now that you aren’t on the team, does that mean I can ask you out?”
Jina’s head snapped up, and her mouth fell open. Her expression must have been one of shock and horror, because the other three men started laughing. Jelly wiggled his eyebrows at her, then Snake gave him a quick slap on the back of his head. “Dumb ass,” he said.
“What?” Jelly rubbed the back of his head. “Ace said no fraternizing when she joined the team, but she isn’t on the team now, right? So—fraternizing.”
Aghast, Jina pointed an accusing finger at him. “You made me get a tattoo,” she said. She liked her tattoo, but still. “No. Way.”
He assumed an innocent expression. “You could have said no to the tattoo.”
“I know that. Doesn’t matter.”
Boom straightened away from the car, heaved a sigh. “I wish you would still be with us,” he said. “Damn.”
“I know.” And she did. “Being a part of the team was great; it was doing what the team does that wasn’t great.”
Boom blew out a breath. “Does Ace know yet?”
“Not unless Mac has contacted him. I thought he’d be here. I was going to tell everyone at once.” But he wasn’t here, which meant she’d have to go through all of this again, but with someone who wouldn’t be as accepting.
Boom looked at her, studied the misery in her expression. “I’ll tell him for you, if you want me to.”
Relief flooded her and she said, “Yes, please,” the two words tumbling on top of each other in their hurry to get out of her mouth. Quitting was hard enough as it was. Dealing with Levi was still more than she could handle.
The doorbell ringing at night signaled nothing good. Jina glared at the door. She knew who it was, because no way could she end this day without another confrontation. Boom had to have told him hours ago, but her phone had stayed silent and she’d begun to hope that he either wouldn’t contact her or he’d put it off until tomorrow, or even that the team, depleted as it was, would be tasked with something easy like a pattern of life mission and they’d already left the country. She wanted time before she had to deal with Levi, time to settle into her new job, time to get squared away with herself.
No such luck, though. Just for form she checked the peephole, and as seemed to be the norm in their interactions she considered not opening the door. She was in her pajamas; she could stuff cotton in her ears and go on to bed, leave him out there leaning against the door frame. But he’d want to know why she’d quit his team and the showdown had to happen sooner or later, so it might as well be now.
She jerked open the door and barked, “What?” at him. He wasn’t her team leader now; she didn’t have to do what he said. She wasn’t just prepared to fight with him, she wanted a fight, wanted some outlet for her resentment and emotional turmoil.
What she wasn’t prepared for was the glitter in his eyes, or the duffel bag at his feet.
Taken aback, she looked down at the bag. “Another mission so soon?” She’d hoped, but she was still surprised.
“No.” He kicked the duffel across the threshold, and followed it inside, forcing her to step back.
From day one he’d been forcing her back. He was good at that, she thought, annoyed. Being annoyed felt good, it felt normal. “Then what’s with the duffel?”
“I figured I’d be here a while.” He wasn’t smiling; his expression was as hard as she’d ever seen it.
What? His dark gaze was so intensely focused she backed up some more to get away from him, then went still, the way a rabbit froze hoping the predator wouldn’t notice it. He was a blast force of energy; her skin prickled all over in reaction, overwhelmed by his size and heat. Just like that her condo felt too small, too crowded, and she had nowhere to run to.
He kicked the door shut, reached behind him, and locked it. “You aren’t on my team anymore,” he said, looming over her.
She stared up at him, so full of boiling emotion she didn’t know what to do first. She resented him, she wanted to slap him, she wanted to scream at him until she emptied herself of all the pain and anger she felt. She wanted to throw herself at him and take everything he could give her, because he was more than any man she’d ever been attracted to before and the competitive part of her needed to know that she could match him. She wanted him; she wanted what he’d come there to do.
But she hadn’t quit the team so they could be together, she’d quit because she didn’t trust him anymore.
Logic, emotion; she hated them both. Why couldn’t the two match, instead of being opposites?
Quitting had been so hard she didn’t feel as if she had anything left over, but here he was, pushing and demanding, not giving her time to think about anything. What she felt about Levi was very like how she’d felt about quitting the team, her feelings for him all tangled with her stubbornness and competitiveness and resentment.
“You left me to die.” The words were low and hard, full of everything she’d been feeling for the past few weeks.
“I thought you were alread
y dead,” he shot back, moving forward, forcing her to fall back. She realized she’d once again stepped back from him and jerked to a halt, glaring up at him. “When the truck blew up and burned, from our distance it looked as if the entire ruin had gone up. Nasser had started shooting at us and we took him down, turned toward the ruin, and that’s when the fuckheads hit us from behind and—shit, meet fan. Voodoo was hit first. By the time we got that handled, Crutch was down too, and they were both bad. I tried to raise you on the comm and there was no answer. What the fuck was I supposed to do? I had to get Crutch and Voodoo to the helicopter, then I was coming back to search for your body.”
The last two words were raw and vicious, powered by a year of want and denial, by the gut-wrenching grief that had almost destroyed him when he thought he’d lost her. He reached out and gripped her upper arms, shook her a little. “I. Was. Coming. Back.”
“I know that!” She knew that he’d thought she was dead, anyway. She knew, and she still wanted to hit him. Some feelings were too big to contain, too painful to calmly examine. She saw the violence in his expression and it lit something violent in her. He might have wanted for a year, but for a year she’d not only wanted, she’d put up with so much crap from him she could barely hold herself back. She’d been a yo-yo that he’d jerked up and down, hurting her feelings, kissing her, enraging her, tempting her, and by God it didn’t matter whether or not he’d had good reason or she’d agreed with him, or any shit like that, because more than anything now she wanted him to be as miserable as she’d been. Love? She couldn’t love him because there was no way he could make her so angry if she “loved” him.
She wanted him to feel as unimportant as he’d made her feel.
There. That was it, the core of what had been eating at her for weeks, since the horrible night in the desert. She’d staggered and limped and fought her way through agony, exhaustion, terror, feeling the knowledge burning in her heart that she was the least important to him.