Heatseeker (Atrati) (24 page)

Jayne uncrossed her legs and pulled a tablet PC out of the bag at her feet. “Are you up to going over the case with me?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Rachel asked, confused. Did she look tired, or something?

She was actually feeling pretty good.

Instead of answering, Jayne gave Kadin a look of censure. “She hasn’t been debriefed, has she?”

That again?
Rachel was ready to scream, but she held back just because it would probably feed into everyone’s idea that she was on some sort of emotional edge.

“We’re going a little bit at a time.” Kadin pulled Rachel closer in a sweetly telling gesture.

She might not like his assumption that she was vulnerable and weak, but she did like the feeling that he was protective of her. Even if she didn’t need it.

“
You’re
debriefing her?”

“Yes.”

Jayne just shook her head. “Okay, let’s go over what you learned in Egypt. Then we’ll move on to the intel you’ve gained since coming to Morocco.”

Jayne was really good at interrogation, and she pulled information out of Rachel that she had no idea she’d stored in her memory banks. But by the time the other TGP agent pronounced herself satisfied with the information Rachel had provided and left to organize her notes, Rachel was full-on exhausted.

Chapter Sixteen

“A
ngel, you look like you could use a nap,” Kadin said as he offered her another glass of juice.

She took it, needing the wetness in her throat after all that talking. “I’ll go if you go with me.”

“If I come, you won’t be napping.”

“There’s more than one way to recharge a woman’s batteries,” Rachel informed him.

Kadin shook his head. “You are one dangerous woman—do you know that?”

“Not like Jayne. She’s the real deal.”

“And what are you? A pretend agent?”

“No, but Jayne . . . she’s something. I’d pity Chuma and Massri if I didn’t despise them so much.”

“Then it sounds like Whit sent exactly the right agent for the job.”

They were back in their room before Rachel answered. “I thought he’d sent the right agent when he sent me.”

Kadin turned her to face him, his gorgeous features set in stern lines. “He sent the best, but you got caught. It happens. Why do you think we get paid so much to do what we do?”

“No one should have been back there. I’d been watching for days, and they never varied their routine.”

“Maybe there was an alarm you triggered that you didn’t know about.”

“Maybe. And maybe I just had really bad luck.”

“Yeah, luck isn’t always on the side of the angels.”

“Why do you still call me that?” she asked, needing to understand that, at least.

“You’re still the angel I knew ten years ago, under that tough secret-agent exterior that can stand up to hours of torture without breaking your cover. You’re still sweet, kind, and gentle.”

“I’m not.” With understanding came the realization that he was living in some kind of time warp about her. “I’m not
her
anymore, Kadin.”

“Oh, angel . . .” He shook his head. “I can’t help the way I see you any more than you can help wanting to save the world.”

“Sometimes, I think the world can go hang.”

“Yeah, but then you get up and go to work the next day.”

“You’re not hearing me.”

“I hear you just fine. You’ve never seen yourself the way I see you; why, after all this time, should that change?”

She reached up to touch his lips, wondering how all the right words could fall from them so easily. And still not make her feel like they were on the same plane.

“You called my name, when they were hurting you.” The expression in his sherry brown gaze said he wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

“I went back to the place I last felt safe.”

“Tell me.”

“Now? I thought you wanted me to sleep.” And she’d wanted something entirely different.

“You will, after. Now, tell me.”

She did, sitting cross-legged on the bed, her back to the wall and Kadin sitting across from her. She told him how frightening it had been to wake up tied to the chair; how her mind had latched on to her training the first time they shocked her. How it had felt to piss herself, to know her vocal cords had been damaged, because the pain in her throat rivaled the hurt in the rest of her body.

How, finally, all her training hadn’t been for shit, and she’d had to go inside herself and find a place where she could protect Jamila and the assignment.

That place had been Kadin and their past together. A place where Rachel had last been truly safe, believing that, despite the pain of losing her parents and living with a grandmother who wanted anything but responsibility for her granddaughters, her future was golden.

How she’d made an exit plan when she felt her grasp on reality wavering.

He made a sound like a wounded animal then.

“I had to protect the assignment. I had to protect Jamila as my unwitting informant.”

“Never again.”

She didn’t have an answer for that. She couldn’t promise she’d never be in that situation again, no matter how unlikely. Because that was the nature of her job. And her job was all she had left after losing everything else.

“Our future wasn’t golden, though, was it?” She might play mind games with herself and go back to the time she’d thought it would be, but that’s all they were. Games. “Why, Kadin? Why did you dump me? We were forever, and then . . . we weren’t.”

Rachel finally voiced the question she’d wanted so desperately to ask ten years ago but had been afraid she already knew the answer to.

She hadn’t been enough for him anymore, not after he joined the Marines and saw some of the world, leaving their Sacramento lives behind.

“I walked away to protect you,” Kadin said.

There was no doubting the sincerity in his tone, but it made no sense.

“From what? You abandoned me!” And unlike her parents, he’d had a choice.

But then, so had Linny.

“From what I’d become.”

“A killer?” she asked bluntly, no desire to soften it.

“A trained assassin. For the Marines. I killed for my country.”

“So does every other soldier who stands on the front line in war.”

“I killed men and women who would never have a chance to look into my eyes. I killed without knowing why they had to die, but I wasn’t stupid. I knew not every target was a military threat.”

“So? Do you think I expected you to join the Marines while our country was at war and you weren’t going to kill anyone?”

“Surely you don’t believe the ends justify the means.”

“Sometimes.” She really wasn’t that girl he still remembered.

Wasn’t sure she ever had been.

“Sometimes, I was pretty sure they
didn’t,
but I pulled the trigger, anyway.”

“And that made you walk away from me.”

“Can you honestly say you would have wanted me to stay if I’d told you the truth?”

“Yes, back then, yes.” And now? She was an agency-trained sniper, too. She’d never had to assassinate a target, but she’d surely at least maimed or incapacitated her share of human beings while she’d covered her fellow agents on raids. “You were an idiot, but then, maybe it was just an excuse. You didn’t want the encumbrance of your high school sweetheart hanging around your neck.”

“Are you kidding me? I never let you
go,
Rachel. There’s never been another woman for me. Not in that way. In ten years, I haven’t had a single woman in my life who would call herself my girlfriend, much less get me to call her that. I’ve never told another woman I love her. I never will.”

Right.
That was so easy to say, but he’d been gone ten years. He claimed he’d never let her go, but he hadn’t given her that luxury. “You left me.”

“No. Maybe . . . physically, but damn it, what’s left of my belief in the good of humanity is still wrapped up in dreams of an innocent girl who wanted to spend her adulthood raising babies and teaching other people’s kids. You’ve gotten me through the worst that war has to rain down on a man.”

Not her. The girl she’d been. The woman she’d given up to prove something to him, something he didn’t want to know. She couldn’t stop the gallows laugh that came out of her.

“What?” he asked, his brow furrowed.

“I became this.” She swept her hand down, indicating her twenty-eight-year-old, agency-trained body. “To prove to you that you didn’t have to leave me behind. That I could fit into the bigger world you’d discovered in the Marines.”

“What are you saying?”

“I thought I had become too boring for you, and that’s why you left. You said we didn’t fit anymore—do you remember?”

He nodded, a dawning look of horror coming over his features.

“I made a plan; I was going to become someone interesting, someone you would want again. I went to college with the intention of getting into federal law enforcement. What could be sexier than a secret agent?” she asked self-deprecatingly.

Oh, man, had she been naïve back then. There wasn’t any glamour in doing what she did.

“You joined the DEA to . . .”

“Get you back? Yes. I couldn’t give up. I believed our love was too big to let go of. I was an idiot.”

“But I didn’t want
you
to change.”

“You didn’t want me at all. Not the real me, the woman who could have handled being married to a MARSOC Marine. I’m not sure you ever saw the real me at all.” She shook her head. “And I lost Linny because I was still trying to be that sexy, intriguing woman. I thought . . .”

It was hard to go on, but she had to get this out. “I thought I’d see you again someday, when you were in town visiting your family or something, and you’d realize how perfect I was for you.”

“You were perfect the way you were.”

Oh, she’d been perfect, all right. A perfect fantasy, and she’d never even known. “I thought that, of all the people in my life, you knew me best, and now I realize, ten years too late, you barely knew me at all.”

He looked stricken. “That’s not true.”

“It is true. And
damn
it.” She scrambled off the bed, spinning away from the sight of him.

She slammed her hand against the wall, the pain pouring out of her heart bigger than anything physical could be. She stood there, panting, leaning against the wall. “I was so busy trying to become the woman I thought you wanted, I let Linny go. I let her down trying to save a relationship that was always doomed.”

If she’d only known that ten years ago. Would it have made a difference in her life?

In all honesty, Rachel could never regret going into law enforcement. Her one true regret was that in her effort to shine at her new job, she must have neglected signs of how troubled her little sister was becoming.

Even looking back had never revealed those signs, though. No matter how many times she replayed phone conversations and e-mails in her head. Rachel never saw the descent into dangerous depression her sister had taken.

Linny would have made a great undercover agent herself.

Amid the pain, that thought almost brought a smile to Rachel’s heart. If not her face.

She could hear Kadin moving and then felt his big hand on the center of her back. “Linny made the decision to hide what was going on from you. She loved Arthur Prescott, and that had horrible consequences for her, but she never told you any of it. She chose to take her own life. If anyone is responsible, it’s him.”

Kadin was right, but he was wrong, too. Just as he had been about Rachel. Yes, she’d wanted to raise their babies and had at one time wanted to be a teacher, but she wasn’t the pure innocent he believed her to be.

She never had been.

Overcoming the grief of her parents’ deaths had made her stronger than he would ever understand.

“I’m going to take that nap now.”

His other hand slid down her arm. “Rach . . .”

She threw his hands off, stepping away from him. “Don’t.”

“Rachel, damn it. I didn’t know.”

He hadn’t known anything. She whipped around to face him. “You knew leaving would hurt me. That it would hurt us both, but you chose to do it anyway.”

Because a fantasy wasn’t enough to hold on to for a man who lived with the reality of war.

“I’m sorry.” He reached toward her again but didn’t touch her, his hand hanging in the air between them. “I was a coward, and I walked away before you could reject me. There’s no good way to look at that, but I swear I didn’t mean to hurt you as much as I did.”

“If you had, you really would be the bastard I’ve called you so many times in my head.”

He winced in acknowledgment of that statement. “I should have stuck around, but I didn’t feel that I had the right. You deserved so much better.”

“I needed someone to
be
there. So did Linny. That was it. No Superman required.”

“You don’t think I understand that
now,
Rach? But ten years ago, I was a kid, too, and my pride was bigger than my brain. Or my heart, I guess.”

“Your pride.”

“Yes. There’s no way to make you understand how
disgusted
I believed you would be with me.”

Understanding came like a lightning bolt. “Maybe you were disgusted with yourself.”

“Maybe I was. Pulling the trigger was too damn easy, and I should have felt something more when I killed a man.”

“What? Pity? Remorse for killing the enemy?”

“Who never even got to face me!”

“You killed him so he wouldn’t have the chance to face and kill many others.”

“Ideally, that would be true. Was probably true most of the time.”

“How do you know it wasn’t?”

“Because I know how men in power use their militaries.”

He’d been living with the guilt of what he
might
have done for a decade? That was just so . . . so
Kadin
.

“And sometimes what they ask is right.”

“But not always.”

“So, what? You should hate yourself because you did your best to serve your country?”

“Of course not. And, damn it, when did this debriefing become about me?”