Her mind flashed to the exercise clothes he set at the end of the bed in a stack. They didn’t just look like hers. They were hers.
She turned, thinking to check the drawers in the bedroom for T-shirts and bras and anything else she may have left behind. Pivoting on her heel, she ran right into Jarrett’s broad chest. He caught her arms before she fell over and held her there.
“Jarrett?”
“You set off the alarm,” he said in a flat voice.
Seeing him there, so sudden and out of context to what she found made it even harder to understand what he was saying. “What?”
“If anyone enters my bedroom or office without typing in the proper code, an alarm goes off on my phone.”
The calm demeanor scared her. He should be yelling and talking about his rules and her failure to listen. Anything but the painful emotion-free affect.
She said the only thought she could hold in her head through the waves of confusion. “I’ve been in and out of your office since the first day. You didn’t come running then.”
“I disengaged that one. Left this one on.”
“Because you assumed I’d come in here.”
“Didn’t you?” There was no heat in his voice. No disappointment or excitement. Nothing.
“For a shirt.”
He rubbed the material over her shoulder between two fingers. “You’re wearing one.”
“I wanted a different one.” The excuse sounded ridiculous in her head and even sillier out loud. She tried to shake the haze out of her brain and search for the right words, but she couldn’t get there.
No matter what argument she tried to frame, her mind zoomed back to the fact her clothes were on hangers a few feet away. It was as if she never left. All by the man who hated her, vowed to destroy her and tried to break her will when he forced her to strip off her clothes in his office.
Liking her for sex or even the company was one thing. Keeping reminders of her near him was another. It struck her as some sort of strange self-punishment. The only thing that made sense was he kept it all as a reminder of how she lied to him so he’d never travel down that risky road again, but even that didn’t make much sense. Not to a man like Jarrett who demanded loyalty and thrived on control.
“Why do you need another shirt?” he asked.
She couldn’t exactly say she wanted to smell him while he was gone. At this point she wasn’t sure what she could and should tell him. “I liked the blue one you had on yesterday.”
“As far as subterfuge goes, you can do better than this.”
He thought she was on another operation. Plotting against him. God, they talked past each other and around each other and so rarely to each other.
“I wasn’t searching for anything in your bedroom.”
“Okay.”
From the drawl, she knew he didn’t believe her. Rather than debate, she focused on her question. “Why is all my stuff here?”
He never broke eye contact. “I never got around to throwing it out.”
“And you can do better with lies than that, Jarrett,” she said, parroting his words back to him.
His hands dropped to his sides. “I don’t actually owe you an explanation.”
She missed the warmth of his hands the second he broke contact. “Okay, I know this looks like—”
“What?” For the first time emotion seeped into his voice. He almost barked the word.
Forget her mistake. She wanted to focus on his choices. “It looks like you were waiting for me to come back to the condo.”
“No.” He turned and walked out of the closet.
“Then what is it? It looks like a weird shrine.” When he stopped, she hurried to stand in front of him again. With both arms on his forearms, she squeezed until he looked at her. “I mean, what did the other women you brought up here say about all of this? One of them had to notice.”
“No.”
“Did you use the guest bedroom?” Her stomach rolled at the thought. Bile rushed right up her throat and fought to get out. She concentrated all her energy on not throwing up on his shoes.
“I mean you are the only woman who’s been up here.”
Yeah, right. “You expect me to believe you haven’t had sex for eight months.”
“I didn’t say that.”
The words, so unexpected, hit her like a slap. Her head actually snapped back. The news shouldn’t matter or surprise her, but it did. “So then what?”
“You want a number?”
“God, no.” She really wanted him to stop looking at her with those dead eyes. Stop answering in short, clipped sentences. Never mention sex or other women again.
“None of them came up here.”
“None?” That made it sound like he had a damn list and ran through it one by one. “That sounds like there was a waiting line once I was gone.”
A spark of fire lit in his eyes as he pointed at her. “You don’t get to judge me or who I fuck. You gave that up when you had your team arrest me before I pulled up my zipper.”
Damn but he was right. His personal life, his sexual exploits, did not fall within her right to know. But the idea of it being so easy for him to move on sliced at her until she expected to see a thin line of blood welling across her stomach.
“I was making a statement about the other women in your life,” she said.
But he was already talking. “You left me.”
The words robbed her of breath for a second. “I don’t want to fight about this.”
“Then you should have obeyed my rule and stayed out of this one room.”
There it was. Finally he circled back around to his requirements for giving her shelter. For some reason, the consistency gave her comfort. She could handle this debate. It wasn’t as if she had an excuse for being in there anyway. Not one he’d believe.
With her chin up, she looked him straight in the eye. “You’re right.”
She expected a grunt of satisfaction. A smile. Something positive. He didn’t give her any of that.
He frowned as his hands went to his hips. “Now what game are we playing?”
“You lost me.”
“You’re not exactly one to abandon a fight. We once argued about Chinese food restaurants for ten minutes until you admitted you hadn’t tried either of the ones we were considering for takeout.”
Guilty. The character flaw rose up at the oddest times. But the bigger point was she could not win this battle. Laying out the specifics of her side meant opening herself up and telling him how broken she had been back then. How, after a lifetime of jumping to her feet and moving forward, losing him drove her to her knees. Days of blankness and those stupid bouts of crying. She’d never considered medication until her life tilted and nothing made sense.
She’d cried three times in her life—when her father took her, when she returned to Pennsylvania after all those years away and found out her mother had already died. And when she realized she’d fallen in love with the type of man she’d always despised and hunted down—a sick liar who endangered everyone he met.
Nothing in that definition matched the man in front of her or the one she lived with without seeing even a hint of drugs. Back then she couldn’t get out of the emotional tailspin enough to question all she’d been told and seen. If Jarrett hadn’t meant so much, she could have separated all the pieces out. When it came to him, she lost perspective and slipped back to the green newbie she was on the first day of training.
But she could question the extent of his real role in everything now. Can and did. The drugs, the way Spectrum imploded, how he got out of trouble so fast . . . and why he let her in the club and his bed without launching an attack of revenge.
When she investigated Spectrum’s demise, she planned to reopen the file on Jarrett and dig around like she should have when Todd ordered
the takedown. If Jarrett’s name should be cleared, she would figure out a way to get the job done.
Until she could fix everything else, she needed his help, which meant owning up to her mistake today and blocking out the rest. “I messed up.”
“Fine.”
He walked out of the bedroom, leaving her standing in the middle of the room. Whatever she thought would happen, this wasn’t it. She also never thought she’d be the type to go running after a man, but she was doing that as well.
Before she could say anything he tapped his finger on the stack of files sitting on the kitchen counter. “These are for you.”
She skidded to a halt on the floor. “What are you talking about?”
“Here is your password.” He held up a piece of paper that had been folded in half. “You can use the setup in the office. It will also give you access to watch the club’s security monitors, except for those on the second floor.”
The world kept spinning and she didn’t know how to catch up. “What’s happening?”
“I’m giving you access. Limited, but still more than I planned.” He flipped the edge of the files. “Wade’s place, storage, the conference room. Those are off the table. You stay on this floor and I’ll provide what you need.”
She’d been on the second floor a few times, mostly to watch movies on the big screen mounted to the conference room wall. But all but one time Jarrett accompanied her. On that occasion she’d poked around and seen the crash pad Jarrett said he kept up just in the rare case of a special member being unable to return home.
The storage room with the tapes and locked cabinets proved more interesting. She spied it for a second when Jarrett relocked the door. The thing had redundant security and she hadn’t figured out how to break it before the world came crashing down.
“You have a computer, articles on the fake deaths of the rest of your team and the attempts on you and Todd. All events were termed accidents or natural complications, so who knows how much of that info is real.” Jarrett shuffled the files as he talked. “I also have some information I collected.”
He moved a few files and picked up one from the center of the pack. When he held it up, she lunged for it and smacked it against the stack again. “Why are you doing this?”
“You asked for help.”
“We both know that’s not the full answer.”
He treated her to an uncharacteristic beat of hesitation. “You need to move on.”
At the words, her heart clunked. Actually made a screeching noise that reverberated through her. “You mean you want me to leave.”
“Isn’t that the end goal here? You get the evidence, you strike a bargain and you leave.”
She couldn’t tell from his tone if he liked that plan or not. “So, this is all about rushing me out the door as fast as possible.”
Her hands flexed as he clamped down hard, grinding his teeth together. “I’m doing everything I can not to lose my temper right now.”
She was pretty sure they had raced past that point minutes ago. “Can we go back for a second and talk about what happened in your bedroom?”
“Not necessary.”
“I know I overstepped when I went in there.”
“Damn right you did.”
“I won’t go in there again.”
“It’s a little late for that, unless the plan is to search for drugs.” Those sexy eyes narrowed into menacing slits. “Or plant them again.”
No matter where the conversation went, it always roamed back to this. A mutual distrust and sense of anxiety. A joint feeling that the other wasn’t telling the whole truth. The scary sense that she might have been used as someone else’s pawn and included Jarrett as her collateral damage.
“Tell me why Todd green-lighted the operation on the day he did,” Jarrett asked.
Another zig when she expected a zag. “What are you talking about now?”
“You’d been living with me. I gather you were collecting data and reporting back. So, why that Tuesday?” He sat on the barstool. “Why pick that exact day, that time?”
With everything raining down on them, she had no idea why this mattered. But his sharp breathing and stern face suggested it did.
“Todd was in charge of the operation,” she explained. “He made the decision.”
“Don’t fucking lie to me.”
The burst of anger stopped her from moving. “I’m not.”
“But you’re not answering the question. What did you do?”
“Why does this matter?”
“You’re evading, so I’m guessing it does.” Jarrett wiped a hand across his mouth and when he was done the blank stare had returned. “Why that day?”
“Because I told Todd there was no reason for my cover to continue.” Truth was she threatened to blow her cover and walk away from it all. But she didn’t add that. Jarrett wouldn’t be able to hear it right now as anything more than a ploy.
And admitting it would make her vulnerable in ways that made her bones shake. It was the only time in her life the temptation to walk away trumped the dedication to the job. Because of him.
If she told him that truth and he laughed, or worse, she didn’t know if she’d ever be able to put the shattered pieces together again. As it was, her legs barely held her and her heart thudded loud enough to pound in her temples.
“Why not wait and see what you could get out of me? That had to be headquarter’s preference,” Jarrett said.
Because I loved you, and setting you up pricked at me until I thought my head would explode. “Because I never saw you with drugs and thought our intel was bad.”
The frown came back. “Who gave you the intel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Becca.”
“That sort of thing was above my pay grade.” She forced energy into her legs and made her muscles move until she stood next to him at the breakfast bar. “We got the assignment because someone much higher up at the CIA had the tip. We were following up. Just a piece of the operation and we never knew how drug charges fit in with a CIA operation.”
“But at some point you believed I was innocent.”
“Not the word I’d use because I’d seen your file and knew your history.” She knew what she realized was likely a sanitized version. The series of strip clubs. The escort service. The loans that had to be repaid or he’d find another way to collect. “But I didn’t see the drugs.”
He swore under his breath. “You told Todd you were out because you didn’t find drugs and then the drugs appeared. How fucking convenient.”
The red flag waved high and proud now but she’d been so messed up and flailing eight months ago that she couldn’t see it. By the time she noticed the whole operation carried a stink, he was out of prison and she couldn’t understand how. And then her life blew apart—literally. “I know how it sounds.”
“Do you?”
She sighed as she struggled to bring together all the facts and the bits of everything that happened since she’d gotten here. At some point she should be able to turn the pieces and make it all fit. Had to. “Can we talk about—”
Before she could touch him, he stood up and shifted away. “I have a meeting.”
“Now?”
“I do run a business.”
And he spent most of his day downstairs doing just that. “This is important.”
“Is it?” He put his hand on the stack of files. “Funny, but I thought this information was all that mattered to you.”
For a smart man he sure as hell got that one wrong.
FOURTEEN
More out of habit than anything else, Jarrett stood up when he heard the knock at his downstairs office door less than an hour later. Bast stayed in the chair he’d been in since his arrival a few minutes before. But when Wade ushered Natalie inside, Bast jum
ped to his feet again. Looked like whatever manners prep school training instilled in him hadn’t disappeared. Jarrett had learned most of his manners through Bast’s shining example, though Jarrett would much prefer to sit this meeting out.
Before Jarrett could say anything, Wade took off without saying a word. The running part made Jarrett envious. He’d rather be anywhere but listening to whatever emergency Natalie wanted to unleash.
And his head was not in the game. Seeing Becca in his bedroom and opening up his choices to logical explanations had him floundering. He didn’t get rid of her clothes because he fucking couldn’t. Every time he tried to clear the possessions out he’d get tripped up in the idea of wiping her out of his life forever.
The woman had him by the balls and she just kept squeezing.
Natalie didn’t wait for an invitation. She walked across the room in her usual businesslike navy suit and sat down. “You kept me waiting almost fifteen minutes. I don’t appreciate the delay.”
As far as Jarrett was concerned, it was a miracle the woman got through the door. That only happened once Bast was in the building and ready to go, which was Jarrett’s requirement for the meeting. “I thought we had a rule about you stopping by.”
She nodded in Bast’s direction. “I went through your guard dog.”
“Now that’s not very nice.” Bast pushed away from the wall and took up the standing position next to Jarrett’s desk chair. “Of course, I wish I could say no one has ever called me that before.”
“This isn’t funny,” she said as she took out a small notebook.
Bast raised her one by dragging his phone out of his pocket and turning it on. “What it is, Natalie, is a waste of time.”
The bickering and verbal jabs, Jarrett wasn’t in the mood for any part of this pissing contest. He had enough trouble with the woman upstairs. He didn’t want to invite more from another woman in the building.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Becca Ford.”
Every damn thing came back to her. Jarrett had to fight to keep from showing any reaction.
Mercy Page 14
