by Megan Crane
And worse, if he wasn’t mistaken, concerned. For him.
“After all,” she continued softly, “if you weren’t beating yourself up about something, holding yourself to the highest standard, and denying yourself anything that might bring you comfort, would you even be alive?”
He ignored the buzzing in his head, cutting through it the way he did all extraneous noise—with his very own personal windchill. “You don’t actually know anything about me, Bethan. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that.”
“I don’t have to have personally experienced a scary night of near-death and intimacy to know how determined you are to set yourself apart from everyone else, Jonas,” she replied, seeming notably unaffected by the arctic blast he was aiming her way. “We work together, in case you forgot. I see it with my very own eyes, right there in front of me, every single day.”
“The fact that we work together is another reason this was a mistake.”
She shrugged. “It didn’t feel like a mistake to me.”
“What do you want?” he demanded then. “What do you think is going to happen here? Because I can tell you right now, it won’t.”
“It isn’t about what I want.” And there was a bit more emotion in her voice then. Jonas couldn’t decide if that pleased him or if it made him loathe himself all the more. “When has what I want ever had anything to do with what you do?”
That shouldn’t have stung, but it did.
He remained, still and unassailable, because that was what he knew. That was what had saved him, more than once, long before he’d enlisted. “I know you think you have some ownership over me, or some insight, because you saved my life. But here’s a newsflash. I would have been perfectly happy if you hadn’t. If you’d left me there with the rest.”
And the look on her face almost killed him. Because Bethan looked as if she wanted to get up from where she sat, come over, and hold him the way she had that long, terrible night. Worse, her eyes were getting that glassy look again, and he didn’t think he could handle it.
“Do you really think that’s a newsflash?” she asked softly.
But he couldn’t take that on board. “Maybe this was always going to happen. Maybe you really don’t think it was a mistake. Either way, it’s still just sex. It’s not unusual for the pressures of a mission to get to people.”
“Really? Oddly, I’ve always been able to control myself in the past. Are you saying you haven’t?”
He knew the look he was giving her then was filthy. “This isn’t any run-of-the-mill operation. Your family is involved. It’s no wonder emotions are heightened.”
“Because I’m definitely the person in this room suffering from heightened emotions.”
“It’s not going to happen again,” he told her, all command and fury.
But it was Bethan, who still hadn’t seemed to notice that she was absolutely stark naked. She . . . stretched. She lifted one arm over her head, then the other, and arched a little bit, too. And when she was done, she rose to her feet in an easy manner that made his throat go dry.
“Okay,” she said.
“I mean it. We’re human.” Technically. “One mistake is allowed.”
“Human. Got it.”
When she sauntered toward him, he stiffened, sure that she was going to launch herself at him. Whether to kiss him or strike him, he couldn’t say.
Instead she only smiled, stepped around him, and swept her clothes up off the floor. He couldn’t even say it was a particularly seductive movement. She just did it, then carried on. Heading, he realized after a moment, for the master bedroom.
“I’m going to need you to acknowledge—”
But when she turned, gazing back at him over her shoulder, his words failed him.
“Acknowledge what?” she asked, lightly enough, though he didn’t mistake the edge in her voice. “That you’re freaking out?”
“I do not freak out.”
“Maybe you’re in character, then. And your character is having a panic attack. Whatever. I’m sure you’re right. I don’t know you at all.” And he could see that same edge in her gaze. “But do you?”
“That’s a stupid question.”
“If you say so.”
“Of course I know myself,” he gritted out.
“You know how to punish yourself,” Bethan replied, and what struck him most was that she didn’t sound as if she were trying to hurt him. Or even slap at him. Her voice was entirely too matter-of-fact for that, and it made his ribs hurt. “You know how to make yourself pay. It’s your life’s work, clearly. But whatever debt you think you have left, after all this time, don’t you think you’ve already paid it?”
She didn’t wait for him to answer. Instead, she walked away, back into the bedroom, taking all of her warmth, nakedness, and fire with her.
And worse, the hope he hadn’t known he’d had until it was gone.
Eleven
She wasn’t surprised at Jonas’s behavior. But that didn’t make it any easier to deal with.
Bethan took a very long shower, and when she emerged, her character was firmly in place. The character she was playing had not succumbed to a long-term attraction with a man she knew better than to touch. The character had certainly not let herself get emotional, because if anything, she was even more locked down and compartmentalized than usual.
That was the best way to survive pretty much anything. She knew that, no matter what character she was playing.
When she came back into the living room, Jonas’s dark gaze met hers with all the force of a sonic boom. Bethan wondered if she’d broken something, so determined was she to keep her expression bland. As if nothing had happened.
Because she had no idea how else to keep going.
“Ready to get back to work?” he asked, and she allowed a small part of her brain to process the fact that Jonas Crow was actually doing the provoking for a change, rather than standing about doing an impression of a granite slab of stoicism. But the rest of her flatly refused to be provoked.
“There’s actually no wedding event tonight,” she said in reply. “That means it’s an excellent time to rendezvous with the rest of the team.”
“Terrific.”
And with that brisk exchange, they both settled down with their tablets to compile all the information they had so far.
“There’s still no sign of the Sowandes in Montreal,” Bethan said at one point, after a long phone call with Oz back in Alaska. “Blue is on the ground there, trying to shake some trees, but there’s no love.”
“The only reasonable conclusion is that someone got their hands on him, took him and his sister to a laboratory somewhere, and are currently making him put his research into practice.” Jonas’s tone was dark, but it was hard to tell if that was just him or if he was deliberately directing all that darkness her way. She told herself she didn’t care. “It follows that it’s the kind of laboratory that was built deliberately to be hard to find.”
“We should meet our final candidate tomorrow.” Bethan frowned at the schematics of the Montreal safe house she’d been studying, as if what had happened there would simply pop up on her screen like those old videos, if she stared long enough. “But maybe we should take a moment to think about what we’re going to do if he doesn’t fit.”
“Oz hasn’t been able to dig up anything on him,” Jonas said, sitting back. He almost looked relaxed, which Bethan found . . . surprisingly infuriating.
Because it was one thing to understand, on whatever level, that this man simply could not deal with her unless it was about work. Or sex, apparently. But after actually having sex with him—something she’d never thought would happen and which had actually been far, far more spectacular than she’d imagined it could be all these years—it turned out that she felt a whole lot less forgiving of his issues than before.
<
br /> Still, she would rather die than crack where he could see it.
“Nothing outside the available résumé,” she agreed. “Dominic Carter, which is almost certainly not his real name according to Oz, has every second of every day thoroughly alibied. Almost as if he expects he might be called to account for it at any time.”
“Suspicious in itself.”
“Sure. Then again, he’s the CEO of one of the slickest private military companies in the world. His people regularly trick governments into giving them lucrative defense contracts and are rumored to like a little regime change of an afternoon. Keeping his hands clean is probably just everyday best practices.”
Jonas studied her for a moment, and she did not react to that dark gaze of his. Externally.
“Why doesn’t Oz think Dominic Carter is his real name?” he asked.
Her shrug felt as if someone else were doing it with her body. “He said he had a feeling.”
“Oz’s feelings usually turn out to be facts.”
“That they do,” she agreed, maybe too brightly, then cursed herself. But there was nothing to do but immerse herself in her reading until Jonas finally went to take his own shower.
It wasn’t until she heard the water running that Bethan let out a long, hard breath.
She thought she’d acquitted herself as well as could be expected, after her long shower, of entirely too much raw reaction, which she’d decided to keep to herself. But Bethan had never slept with a man she worked with before. She couldn’t think of a single time she’d even been tempted. She’d always been far too focused on the job. On what she wanted to prove, maybe. And she was far too aware of the ways sex could bring a woman down in her chosen profession. Not the man she slept with, of course. Just the woman.
She’d laughed at the idea that she could ever be so dumb.
And yet she hadn’t simply let this happen with Jonas. She’d enthusiastically participated. She’d practically done it herself.
The crazy part was that she didn’t regret it.
There was no shame. No self-recrimination. She found he was increasingly more on her nerves, but maybe that was only to be expected. She certainly wasn’t beating herself up about it.
Her entire body was still buzzing. She felt raw and deeply sated, as if she’d just had an intense, deep-tissue massage. She wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep, blissfully. If she were a cat, she would’ve been purring.
And the grumpier and grimmer he got, the giddier she felt inside.
Try as he might, he wasn’t going to get her to think it was meaningless. Or anything but a natural progression that would have occurred a whole lot earlier if he hadn’t first ordered her away from the hospital in Germany, or second, literally gone out of his way to avoid ever being alone with her like this since she’d turned up in Alaska.
She was turning that over in her head when he came out of the shower, dressed as Fake Jonas and looking as shut down as she’d ever seen him.
Which was to say, typical Jonas.
“Why did you volunteer for this?” she asked him.
Without really meaning to. Oh well.
That dark, unreadable gaze burned where it touched now. “It was obvious that you were going to need a date. It was obviously the best and most effective way to have two team members infiltrate this situation.”
“Agreed. But why did you volunteer?”
She thought she saw something flicker on that beautifully cold face. “Volunteering to put myself in the line of fire is my life’s work, Bethan.”
“In the line of fire, sure. But this?” She lifted her chin to indicate the two of them. “You’ve been avoiding being alone with me in any significant way since you woke up in Germany and refused to see me. So what changed?”
“I thought we agreed we were back to work,” he retorted darkly. “Or let me rephrase that. I don’t have any interest in further personal conversations.”
“Tough.”
He sighed, then settled his hands on his hips. Both of those things were so unlike him that Bethan almost laughed. Because Jonas didn’t fidget unless he was in character or trying to throw someone off their game. He was very, very still. Preternaturally still, in fact. It was one of his defining characteristics.
“I’m going to go ahead and nip this in the bud,” he told her.
She shouldn’t have been smiling. “Is there a bud to nip? That’s news to me.”
“I have nothing to give,” he said, so calmly and with such precise chill that it made her stomach hurt.
Because she had no doubt that he meant that. Fully. From the very depths of his battered, dark soul.
And it made her want to cry. For him.
“I didn’t grow up like this,” he said, his voice cool. “Like you. I would hardly call what happened to me growing up at all, except I came out on the other side of it and I was no longer a child.”
“Jonas,” she began. “If this is about my parents’ house or my sister’s wedding, you should remember that I did basic training like any other—”
“It’s not that I come from a different social class,” he said, cutting her off—but again, without the slightest bit of heat or temper, as if all of this was a boring dictionary entry that he hadn’t bothered to read aloud before. “I’m talking about a different world. My father was an abusive drunk who had a soft spot for narcotics, and those were his good days. My mother was a junkie. My little sister was born addicted to heroin and OD’d when she was sixteen. There were rumors of an older brother they surrendered to the foster system, but they only talked about him when they were wasted. We lived in cars. Tents. Or we squatted in structures I wouldn’t bother to call houses.”
She found she was holding her breath.
“My sister was three years younger than me,” Jonas said. “I wouldn’t say my parents cared about us, but they fed us occasionally because we were useful. People are more likely to give their spare change to a couple of kids. I joined the navy the day I turned eighteen because I wanted to go to war. Not because I wanted to do good, Bethan. Not like the rest of you. I wanted to go to war because it felt safer.”
He said all of that in the same matter-of-fact way, but his gaze registered the bleakness of what he was telling her.
Bethan wanted to contradict him. To argue. But she knew that if she did, he would somehow twist it and take it as confirmation of everything he was saying. Because he could believe whatever he wished, but she did know him. Better than he thought.
Some years, better than she wanted.
“I doubt you’re the only one who feels that way,” she said after a moment. “We might have grown up in different worlds, but the army felt a lot more comfortable to me than this place ever did. I understand it’s not the same.”
“Do you?” His dark gaze seemed to intensify. “You’re not the only one who remembers that night, Bethan. The difference between us is that I might have saved you from a burning truck, but I never would have tried to soothe you. I never would have nurtured you in any way. I would have accomplished the task and then moved on to another fight. Because I don’t isolate myself for my own protection. I do it for everyone around me. None of you need to know how empty it is inside. None of you can handle it.”
“That’s an interesting take,” she said quietly, her eyes on his as if this were a challenge. When all she wanted to do was go to him. Touch him. Convince him, somehow, that his heart was right there inside his chest where she’d felt it pounding earlier. “Because the story going around Fool’s Cove is that you went off into the Alaskan interior to get up close and personal with how empty you are. Until Isaac and Templeton dragged you back.”
“You all want that to be meaningful.” Jonas actually laughed then. Not one of his fake laughs. But not because he thought anything was funny, either, clearly. Because the laugh sounded as bleak as he did. “Wh
at I’m trying to tell you is that it makes no difference to me. Dancing with my weapon in the cabin alone, or here with you after all these years. It’s all the same thing. I don’t have what you do inside. I don’t feel things the way you do. And no, before you ask, I never will.”
Bethan had to bite her tongue so hard she tasted copper to keep from arguing with him. She made herself stand. She smoothed out the front of yet another dress she was wearing—this one, happily, less flouncy than the last—and kept her smile polite. Engaged, but not sympathetic.
Anything but sympathetic.
“If that’s true, then what do you care if we have sex again?” she asked. Mildly. She could have been asking the time. “We could have sex all the time if you don’t feel anything. Because if you’re empty inside, why would it be a problem for you?”
Fidgety Jonas was gone then. And in his place was the one she knew best. So still, so deadly, that part of her thought that if he so much as blinked she would take it like a bullet to the chest.
Accordingly, she smiled more broadly. “It’s a reasonable question.”
“I’m not protecting me, Bethan.”
“Oh, right. Got it. You’re being noble on my behalf. Protecting me from all the girlie feelings that might have their way with me. Because, obviously, one taste of Jonas Crow and my world will never be the same.”
She watched, fascinated as ever, as that muscle in his cheek pulsed.
“In my experience,” he said in that deadly way of his, “you are almost certain to get emotional. I won’t.”
“How many Army Rangers have you slept with?”
“I’m telling you my experiences. With women. Regardless of their profession.”
“So, zero, then. And of the Army Rangers you know, how many of them are prone to outbursts of uncontrollable emotion?”
“The fact that you’re offended by this is proving my point, Bethan.”
“You’ve worked with me in two completely different roles, neither of which, as far as I’m aware, involved a whole lot of emotional breakdowns on my part. If anything, I would say you’re the one who’s having emotional difficulties here.”
