Breach of Trust

by Jodie Bailey

He’d argue, but he was crashing fast. Fatigue, shock...they’d already taken a toll on his thought processes.

  “I’ll show you the way and you can tell me the rest of your story.” Meghan reached for her seat belt and pulled it across, clicking it into place. “It’s a bumpy ride. Might want to buckle up again.”

  Tate obliged, and the lock clicked solidly into place. Protecting himself and Meghan was going to make this ride a whole lot bumpier before this was over, and it would take more than a seat belt to save them.

  * * *

  After the glare of sunlight overhead, the interior of the old horse barn was dark. Meghan slid out of the truck and slammed the creaking door shut, breathing through her mouth to avoid the musty, earthy smell of old hay and long-moved horses.

  She examined the floor around her feet, making sure a snake wasn’t about to slither over her foot. As soon as her sight adjusted, she searched the walls and the exposed ceiling rafters. No slithery visitors appeared. Good. In no way did she want to turn into a screaming weakling in front of Tate Walker. It was bad enough she was demanding the truth from him when she’d hidden her past for years, first out of self-preservation, and now...? Now because she wasn’t sure who he was anymore.

  Tate killed the engine and sat for a minute before he got out, probably debating how much he wanted to tell her. Well, he could debate with himself all he wanted. She was getting the whole story.

  When he climbed out of the truck, his eyes caught hers across the hood, and the contact made it feel as though no time had passed. They were working an op together, prepping for the next step, well-honed partners in the fight to save the world.

  Meghan swallowed hard and kneaded the back of her neck, her mind unwilling to grasp that the man she’d once loved stood here now, still alive. In odd moments, her world tilted and her past reality twisted in Tate’s reappearance. Her stomach swirled again, a strange mix of joy and the feeling she didn’t know anything about the world. What else was a lie?

  “Where have you been hiding?” She sounded like a broken record, but really, how she sounded was the least of her worries. Maybe answers would erase some of the hurt and the anger over the sleepless nights she’d spent swimming in guilt for walking away from her partner before the op that had supposedly stolen his life.

  All because she cared too much to stay.

  “You really want to do this now?” The slight tinge of amused challenge was one she’d heard a thousand times before. It settled in and relaxed some of the tension, took the edge off her questions.

  The setting was too much like all those moments in countries too far-flung to mention, when they’d decompressed together, evaluated their missions and talked about their lives. She’d told him things she’d never confessed to another living soul. Everything except the blackmail and the hack that had come back to haunt her.

  Those were discussions when she’d felt closer to him than to any other person on earth. When she’d thought, more than a few times, there could be something more for them, something outside of battling the bad guys together. Something involving a house like this and...

  Not that it mattered. She’d left the service and Tate behind when she could no longer hold back the things she was starting to feel for him.

  And then he’d been killed.

  “Now is as good a time as any. We have no idea what’s coming next, and you have to prove to me I can trust you.” A sudden surge rushed into Meghan’s throat, and her spine stiffened. She crossed her arms over her chest and squared herself in the doorway, blocking his escape. She needed to know how he could lie to her, how he could spend four years with no contact of any kind. How he could simply stop existing.

  Now that she’d asked, the words refused to stop coming. “Ethan called and told me you were killed on an op gone bad. Nothing more. And then he all but vanished, too. I was shut out. Nobody would give me information and I missed...I missed your funeral. I spent months trying to reach contacts, trying to dig up what really happened. No one would tell me anything. You were more than my partner. And I spent a lot of nights staring at the ceiling thinking maybe if I’d been on the op with you, I could have had your back, done something to stop it.” The guilt choked harder, constricting her voice. She never cried. Never. But piling years’ worth of grief and guilt on top of a rapidly rising past had cracked her walls. She bit her lip. Hard.

  “Nothing could have saved that op, and if you’d been there, you’d probably be dead the way I nearly was.” Tate’s voice was low, reassuring, the way it had always been. He slammed the door of the truck. When it failed to stay closed, he pulled it open and shut it again before facing her, features shadowed in the dim light, making him appear to be the biggest mystery of all. He rapped his knuckles on the peeling hood of the truck. “We had a mole in the system.”

  “Who?” He had to be kidding. Their unit was small. Everybody knew everybody. Someone selling them out to the bad guys from within was akin to betraying family.

  “Craig Mitchum.”

  The name didn’t ring any bells, but it didn’t matter. White-hot rage burned her skin. If she ever found the man who’d betrayed Tate and her fellow team members—the only real family she’d ever known—he’d never forget the encounter.

  “He came in on a secondary team around the time you left, assigned to a different op. He partnered with Ethan Kincaid on—”

  Wait. No. Meghan held up her hands. “Ethan’s partner is Jacob Reynolds.” Jacob and Ethan had worked side by side with them on multiple ops, but he’d gone deep undercover on an op she wasn’t privy to. She’d always assumed his continued silence meant he was still dug in. “What happened to Reynolds?” Asking the question brought a knowing feeling, a sick sensation that the answer was about to tilt her world yet again.

  Tate stared out the door toward daylight and the pasture beyond, but it was clear he saw something else. “Reynolds was overseas, gathering intel on a terrorist posing as a contractor. He was outed by Craig Mitchum and killed by a group of insurgents working for the terrorist.”

  Meghan took a step back, the news a blow to the chest. She steadied herself on the truck’s frame, trying not to sway on her feet. Jacob Reynolds was one of those guys who was always smiling, who had your back whether the situation was a shoot-out in a foreign country or not enough change in your pocket at the fast-food counter. He didn’t deserve to be cut down by a traitor. “How?”

  Tate didn’t say anything, didn’t even look at her.

  “No. You don’t get to hold out on me now.” Their team was a family, a family she’d been cut out of, obviously, and one losing members without giving her a chance to grieve.

  Tate pulled in a deep breath and released it slowly, his green eyes dark with barely sheathed anger. “He was taken off an outpost during the night. Tortured before he was killed.”

  No. Meghan fought against the horrors trying to clog her vision. She’d seen torture victims. Never, ever was it pretty. “When?”

  “About a year after you left.”

  “After you were supposedly killed.” Wait. Maybe... One dying ember of hope flared. Meghan rounded the front of the truck, stepping between Tate and the vehicle, brushing his hand from the hood. “Is he dead the way you were dead or—”

  Tate shook his head, meeting her gaze. “No.”

  After all the news she’d been smacked with in the past twenty-four hours, this might’ve been the lethal blow. It was too much. Too much death, life, pain. It laid over her like a blanket soaked in cold water, frigid, heavy and suffocating.

  She swallowed twice, trying to shove the lump down, but it stuck hard. No. She could grieve Sergeant Reynolds later, when she was alone. She lowered her voice, trying to squeeze it out without letting him hear her pain. “Where have you been?”

  “You wouldn’t believe the story.”

  “Try me.”<
br />
  He shifted away and leaned against the door of the nearest stall, bracing on the rough wood behind him. There was a tinge of a smile on his face, but the amusement was twisted, rueful. “Running a bed-and-breakfast in Sackets Harbor, New York.”

  Meghan’s laugh barked loud, bounced off the rough wood of the barn and hit her ears with a grating harshness. “You?” She dropped her fists against the truck with a dull thud. “A bed-and-breakfast? Get real. You’d never go for something so mundane. You’re too active, too in charge of everything. What’s the truth?”

  There was a long silence. Tate shifted, dragged his hands along the edge of the door, then stuffed them into his pockets, staring at the toes of his old hiking boots. Finally, he looked up with a sadness she hadn’t known lurked inside him. “That is the truth. But the whole story is bigger than you can imagine.”

  FIVE

  Meghan McGuire hadn’t changed a bit. She was still outspoken, every thought in her mind a word on her tongue. He’d always marveled at the fact that she’d survived in their unit. But somehow, when an op was on, Meghan became a whole other person, focused and able to become anyone her cover demanded she become. A chameleon the likes of which he’d never worked with since.

  When it came to who she really was, there was no filter. Her candor was something he admired equally as much. This woman had never played games.

  He bit back a frown. Unlike others.

  Meghan leaned against the truck, stretching her legs until her paint-splashed running shoes came into view beside his boots, her posture a little more relaxed than it had been a few minutes before. Maybe she was starting to trust him. Finally.

  She kicked her toe against his. “I saw you frown.”

  She could read him. Always had been able to. It made them partners that worked. In the middle of any fight, even with their lives in the balance, all he’d had to do was look at her and she knew exactly what to do.

  Of course, she’d bucked his seniority more than once, but never in the trenches.

  It had never made sense, the way she’d abandoned the job. Simply walked away one day without an explanation. Even Ethan—who’d seemed to be the most in the know—had been mute about her reasons.

  Still, time hadn’t dulled her ability to tell exactly what was going on in his brain. Right now, her intuition might be a liability. He had to be selective with what he revealed, to keep reminding himself she’d landed smack in the middle of the most pivotal undercover op of his life.

  For the sake of the mission, he’d let her into the personal, even though he’d never fully talked it out with anyone else. Sure, he’d parceled out information to Ethan and to Sean Turner, even to Ethan’s wife when she’d shown up at his house with Ethan needing refuge from a killer. But he’d never laid everything out for someone else to inspect.

  The setting here was too much like the old days. Like those easy times when they’d sat in the dark outside a tent or a makeshift plywood office, too restless after a mission to move out to their own bunks and catch some sleep. During those times, he’d told her everything.

  Almost everything. He’d never told her the one fledgling dream he’d begun to entertain when she vanished.

  “Tate?” Her shoe toed his again. “Did you fall asleep on your feet, old man?”

  Old man. He was two years ahead of her on the calendar. Hardly old. “Just thinking what you might want to hear.”

  “Everything.” The word was barely a whisper.

  He had no doubt she meant it, so he’d tell her. Even the parts that made him appear to be the most horrible man in the world.

  He pressed his spine into the rough wooden post of an old horse stall. The mission had made the news once it was over, so it was hardly classified, since she knew he was alive. “We were tracking a group of smugglers who paid off workers in Afghanistan. They were loading heroin into equipment being sent to New Cumberland Army Depot in Pennsylvania. Millions of dollars’ worth of drugs being shipped on Uncle Sam’s dime.”

  Tate ran his tongue along the back of his teeth, his mouth dry. He’d long ago settled it in his heart and in his mind, handed it over to the God who could carry the load better than he could. But there were still nights when he saw the dark eyes of the man who’d come close to stealing his life, the man who’d taken pleasure in Tate’s pain.

  He stared at the hood of the pickup Meghan leaned against. The faded red truck was a far cry from the Jeep he’d passed on to Ethan on an op over a year ago. A Jeep he’d had to retire after it was riddled with bullet holes in the ensuing shoot-out.

  “I was under cover, ferreting out who was running things on this end. Craig Mitchum was a new recruit, and he was sneaky, greedy. He was selling the bad guys all the info he could scrounge up, including who I really was.” Tate leaned against the post, the scene playing out like a movie. “I was to meet my contact in the maze of containers at the depot. I suspected something was going on, had my weapon, but I didn’t call for backup.”

  It had been crazy hot between those huge stacks of shipping containers, where the sun could beat down but the breeze couldn’t reach. The light was glaring, even with his sunglasses on, the June day pavement-melting. He’d rounded the last aisle of containers and come face-to-face with a small, muscular man he’d never met before. Tate had drawn his gun, but they were too close, and he wasn’t fast enough to beat the other man’s knife.

  A pressure rested on his foot, gently pressing his toes. Meghan had shifted, her running shoe making contact, as though she knew this was the hard part of the story.

  He cleared his throat, still feeling the midsummer Pennsylvania sun on his skin. “I took a knife to the chest. Multiple times.”

  The guy had driven the blade in again and again. It felt like a fist, blow after blow, and it wasn’t until the man backed off and Tate looked down that he knew it was much more. There was blood. His blood. And so much of it. His heart had pounded as his vision blurred and the world dimmed.

  “I can’t... Wow.” Meghan’s low voice drew him out of the memory, calmed his still-racing heart and pressed away the need to dig for air, a need he sometimes woke with in the night, the space in his chest a black hole sucking him inside out.

  “A yard worker found me. It should have taken days for somebody to locate me, but he was in the right place at the right time, led right there by God. He called an ambulance.”

  “You survived.”

  Tate grinned, the fact he was still breathing a daily joy. He had. Barely. That the bad guys thought they’d beaten him was always amusing.

  It had taken him many months and many mistakes before he’d realized he really was still alive and he didn’t have to battle every moment for existence. “He barely missed my heart, but he nicked an artery and made minced meat of a lung. I lost the lung, which meant I lost my career.”

  Meghan exhaled and winced, the lines around her mouth tight. Her foot pressed harder, the pressure reassuring through the thick leather of his boot. “Why play dead? Why not let them know they didn’t win?”

  That would be her first thought. She hated being bested, even by him. “It was easier if I was dead. It protected me, let those guys think they’d finished the job. Fact is I was never supposed to go back into action. My place was a link in a complicated, old-school communications chain, passing messages through tech and sometimes in person when we felt as though hackers might be getting too close. I left the military, but I still worked from the outside, posing as a B&B owner. I got married, took—”

  Her foot stilled, then slipped away. She straightened. “Married?” The word choked out, as though it tripped getting across her tongue.

  He’d forgotten she wouldn’t know. In a desperate pursuit for stability, he’d started drinking, becoming a regular at a bar in Sackets. In a fit of needing something solid to hold on to, he’d married on
e of the bartenders, believing himself in love with the woman who smiled every time she saw him.

  But stability never came, and he kept spiraling. When one of the guests at the B&B got Tate talking over fishing rods on the river, the man told him real stability was found in Jesus. The truth had resonated deep inside Tate, bringing a peace like none he had ever experienced. Everything changed on that fall day in a moment of prayer with a man he’d never seen again. It took work, but accepting the Savior got Tate’s feet on solid ground.

  “Stephanie was a bartender. When I got saved and quit running wild with her, tried to talk her into the quiet life with me, she found herself another soldier to run with.” When Tate had confronted her, she’d packed her things and left, moving to Texas with the other guy.

  Believing himself a failure, he’d tried to talk her into reconciling, to see if they could fall in love for real and make the marriage work, but her answer came in the form of divorce papers. Tate had signed off, his biggest regret not in the way their marriage had tanked, but in his failure to make her see the truth, that he hadn’t been able to protect her from an inevitable ending.

  “Tate?”

  “We got divorced.” He dug his heel into the dirt floor, the ache dull in the face of the truth that he’d never really loved Stephanie, had been grasping for something to hold on to in a world gone mad. Now his love for her was in the prayers he said, begging God for her soul, for the same peace he’d found.

  Meghan winced. “I’m sorry. When?”

  “Three years ago. We were married less than six months.” He shrugged, although nonchalance definitely wasn’t what he was feeling. Even though Meghan had once been his partner and closest friend, it was still hard to tell her that part of the story. It felt awkward somehow, almost as though she should already know. “One night, a couple of years later, Ethan Kincaid busted into my life with an op blown wide-open and trashed my cover at the B&B. I’ve been on the go ever since, back in the game.” He shrugged. “I sort of miss the place.”