by Lora Leigh
“Momma?” Tehya had whispered, the sight of her mother’s tears so rare, they were a frightening thing.
“You’ll have a house,” her mother had promised her, her gaze suddenly stronger, determined, as Tehya had always remembered it. “One day, Tehya, you’ll have a home.” That memory, all but forgotten, was almost shocking. A little house with the perfect garden in the back. A place of serenity and security.
She looked around, saw the dream she hadn’t truly realized she’d accomplished until now. Until she discovered that her past was attempting to steal it from her. Until she had realized she would rather face the demons of her past than to allow them to take her home.
Jordan watched as she surveyed the rooms of her house and he saw the weary somberness that came over her expression, the sheen of tears she was fighting back. In the haunted depths of her eyes he saw the realization that she could lose everything she had ever dreamed of having. It was breaking her heart, possibly even more than he had broken it that last night at the Elite Ops base. And watching it enraged him.
Son of a bitch, he couldn’t ask her to walk away from this. He couldn’t allow her to walk away, which she may try once she realized the truth of the situation. He’d been determined to force her to relocate, to accept a new identity, a new life. But it would never be the same for her. Tehya would never be able to trust in her ability to belong again, deeply enough to lay down even the most fragile roots, if she lost this dream to a past that refused to die. A past that had taken every other dream she had ever dared to allow herself.
He had to find a way to save it for her. A way to neutralize those demons once and for all.
“When are John and Bailey arriving?” she finally sighed as he watched her closely.
“Half an hour.” He checked his watch absently.
When his head lifted again her expression had cleared, chilled, and her eyes were all but emotionless. Calm, serene. But he knew she was a volcano seething with anger and pain on the inside.
“Why are you doing this, Jordan? Why are you here? Why do you care new when you didn’t care before?”
“Do you really fucking believe I didn’t care?” he snapped furiously, not bothering to hide his anger. “Dammit Tehya, that team is a fucking family and you know it. All of us. We’d do the same for anyone of them and you know it.”
That shocked her. She shook her head. “You don’t allow yourself to get close to anyone, Jordan, except Noah.”
“I’ve spent up to twelve years with some of these men and six with you, do you really think I managed to remain that distant? Was I distant when I was fucking us both to orgasm?”
He hid so much, she’d always been aware of that. It was another facet she had learned about the man she couldn’t help but love. But she was learning these things too late. He should have given her this chance years ago. At the latest, nine months ago.
Perhaps he would be as protective with the others, she thought, but it didn’t change the fact that she hated seeing her friends, the men and women she had protected from base for six years, now risking themselves for her.
“I need to change.” She indicated the revealing clothes with a slight wave of her hand along the front of her body as she tried to adjust to too many changes in her life, too fast. “Order pizza or something. I don’t have the supplies on hand to cook for more than one, and honestly, I’m really not in the mood for it.”
She turned away and strode to her bedroom as Jordan stared at her back in surprise. Hell, he had no idea Tehya knew how to cook. She’d sure as hell never offered to cook for him.
Taking the satellite phone from the clip at his side, he pulled up the local pizza places that delivered before calling and giving the order.
He hadn’t told her exactly why Travis and Lilly were arriving. He had hoped Lilly would talk Tehya into leaving, but he knew that the moment the other woman comprehended the depth of pain Tehya would feel at leaving, she would pull back. Just as Jordan was now pulling back as well.
That was the problem with having women on the team, he reflected with a sigh. They thought of more than simple safety. Security had a far different meaning to them than it did to the men whose only thought was protecting them.
At least Tehya had been trained to understand, and to help in the areas required to protect her. And having her involved had the benefit of her knowledge of Sorrel’s organization.
He’d envisioned a far different outcome to this meeting with her. He’d assumed that after nine months she would have had a lover at the very least. That possibly she had begun a new life that included dating in her agenda.
He hadn’t expected her to have bought a home and a business. To have begun putting down roots, since she had never taken that risk when she was younger or while she had been in Texas.
It made the operation more complicated, but perhaps it was for the best. Hiding her didn’t ensure revealing whoever was determined to find her, and it didn’t ensure her safety in the future.
At least this way, when he walked out of her life, one of two things would be a certainty. She would be safe, or they’d both be dead. He was opting for safe.
* * *
It was actually closer to an hour before John, Bailey, Travis, and Lilly arrived at the house. Slipping in through the patio doors, the four made their entrances at different stages.
Dressed now in jeans, T-shirt, sneakers, and a bra that did little to hide her still-hard nipples, Tehya prepared another pot of coffee.
She remembered the amounts of hot, rich caffeine the men went through while preparing for an operation while they were all at base. Those planning sessions could take days. Determined to hammer out the first stages and acquire all possible information, they rarely slept until it began affecting their ability to reason. And then they only napped for a few hours before awakening and heading first to the coffee, then back to the meeting room.
When she went to the grocery store, she would have to buy enough to keep them going. She’d better stock up on food as well, she thought in resignation. And there was no way in hell she was cooking from scratch for this crew. She would be cooking night and day. Sandwiches and canned soup would have to work for them. She was making that list of supplies as Bailey and Lilly slipped into the house ahead of Travis and John.
“No wonder we couldn’t get a hold of you. I’m sorry, Tehya, I never thought Killian could be such a bastard,” Bailey said as she moved around the counter and gave Tehya a quick hug. Lilly followed behind her, both women frowning at her. “He needs his ass kicked.”
“At the very least,” Tehya murmured, though in all fairness, she didn’t think she could blame him. What wouldn’t she herself have done to protect her friends, the people she thought of as her family? Killian had done no more than she would have done herself.
“Well, no fears, dearest,” Lilly stated with an arch of her brows and a quick smile. “I’m certain it will be taken care of at the earliest convenience.” She glanced at Jordan as he, John, and Travis spoke in low tones on the other side of the room.
The two women were as different as night and day in both mannerisms and temperament, but they were dead ice when it came to a mission, and when it came to protecting friends. She had seen that over the years. Along with Kira Richards, they had kept the base running smoothly, and the men centered, in ways Tehya knew they wouldn’t have been without that feminine presence. They had claimed the women being there kept them human.
“Jordan said it was your and John’s sources that reported the discovery,” Tehya said, turning to Bailey. “What happened?”
Bailey’s pretty face tightened into a grimace. “We have several contacts in Afghanistan who knew to listen for any inquiries into the death of Tehya Talimosi Fitzhugh. Several weeks ago two of them contacted us along a secured channel. Ira Arthur and Mark Tenneyson had been sifting through the wreckage of the warehouse we had blown up to retire your identity. Arthur and Tenneyson were overheard discussing the information that yo
u hadn’t died as well as your new name and possible location. We still haven’t learned who contacted them, but we have people working on it.”
“Your contacts have no idea who employed the two men?” she asked as she felt a warning shiver chase up her back.
“None.” Bailey shook her head. “But when we arrived in D.C. last night, we learned that Stephen Taite and several of his associates had arrived in the States last week to oversee the purchase of a chemical production plant in Pittsburgh. Arthur and Tenneyson were reported to be watching him as well.”
Stephen Taite.
Tehya turned from the two women to drag mugs from the cabinet and hide her response to this information.
He was her great-uncle. Her grandfather’s younger brother. When Bernard Taite and his wife had died, Stephen had taken over the Taite estate and business holdings. From what she had learned, he had barely managed to save it after stockholders began pulling out following the deaths of his brother and sister-in-law.
It hadn’t been an easy time for the family, and Tehya had been dealing with her mother’s death then, as well as the death of the former marine whom her mother had persuaded to protect Tehya.
How long ago had it been?
So long. The same month her mother had been killed in Nicaragua. Francine had called her parents out of desperation at that time, begging them to help her to send someone for her and her daughter. Sorrel had been so close, Tehya had learned, to both their locations.
Less than twenty-four hours later Bernard Taite had been killed in a hit-and-run on a Paris street. The next day his wife had been found in their bedroom, dead from an apparent overdose.
And her mother had died at the hands of a madman determined to find Tehya for reasons she still didn’t completely understand.
Sorrel claimed she was the child he had promised to his son, her half-brother. That all she had to do was return to him and he’d ensure she didn’t suffer her mother’s fate.
For months, Tehya had contemplated simply giving up and taking her own life. So many people had died trying to protect her that she hadn’t dared contact Stephen Taite, her grandfather’s brother. She had been terrified Sorrel would kill him and the rest of her family as well.
“After all these years do they actually believe I would contact my family?” she asked softly, keeping her back to the others as she laid the mugs out and pulled sugar and powdered creamer from another cabinet.
“When you aided the authorities in France in bypassing Sorrel’s computer security and locating the underground rooms in which he kept the young girls and women he kidnapped, your identity as his and Francine Taite’s daughter was revealed to the authorities,” Lilly continued. “I know for a few years Stephen tried to contact you, to learn if you were indeed the Taite heir, but you never answered the messages he sent to you through the French authorities.”
Tehya shook her head as she turned back to them, hoping she now had her emotions in check.
“I replied and I told him that I wasn’t related to him,” she said. “That he needed to search elsewhere for his niece and her daughter. He never tried to contact me after that but I had to leave days later when an assassin attempted to get to me while I was still at the estate.”
She hoped he had accepted her denial of their kinship. Her grandparents had been murdered because of their determination to help her and her mother. She had no desire to have more of her family killed, or to put them at more risk than when her mother contacted her own father.
“Evidently someone is aware of the connection, though, and believes you will make contact,” Lilly said. “I suspect thats why Arthur and Tenneyson are watching him while I suspect others have been keeping tabs on you.”
“The report our contact received states that there seems to be a rumor that you’ve been working as an agent for the goverment since leaving France until you were dismissed just before you staged your death.” Amusement gleamed in Bailey’s eyes. “Quite the industrious little thing, aren’t you?”
“So it would appear,” she murmured with a grimace as Jordan, John, and Travis came to the counter for the coffee.
“So, do we have a plan C,D, and E yet?” Bailey turned to the men, her tone patient and filled with amusement as she stared at them.
Jordan had always trained his men to have more than one plan. Tehya was aware she had shot his plans A and B to hell and back. Evidently the others were aware of it now as well.
“We’re getting there,” John said. The look he gave his wife was one filled with love, devotion.
Tehya had once dreamed of seeing Jordan gaze at her in such a way. It was a dream that had died the morning she left Texas.
It was the same look Travis Caine gave his wife, Lilly. She completed him, and it was more than apparent that he completed her as well. The two couples were the perfect examples of the relationship she had dreamed of having with Jordan.
“What about grabbing Arthur and Tenneyson and allowing Micah to interrogate them?” Tehya suggested, “Surely they would know who hired them?” She wondered if they could get that lucky? God, she just wanted this over this before Sorrel’s men had a chance to hurt her friends as Sorrel had once destroyed anyone who attempted to protect her and her mother.
Including the young nun who had taken her in at the convent just after Tehya had turned six, while her mother had tried to lead Sorrel and his men away from her.
Within months Francine had sent word that Sorrel possibly knew their location. Tehya remembered Sister Mary wakening her, the room so dark she had stumbled as the sister helped her dress, urging her to hurry.
They had left the convent by way of a small tunnel hidden behind the stone wall of the wine cellar in the basement. As they had exited the tunnel into the heavy forest, Tehya had heard gunfire in the distance and a woman’s screams. The remaining nuns had died horribly that night.
Within three years the nun had put Tehya under the protection of a former CIA agent she had known while in college. He had managed to keep Tehya safe for only a few years.
He had been killed mere days after putting her on a bus and sending her across the country to a friend who lived in the Washington mountains.
The same scenario had played out so many times. A short period of peace. Then as soon as she began learning how to sleep without fear, it had begun all over again.
Tehya had been fifteen when she had received word of her mother’s death. After that she had to run on her own. She couldn’t bear to be the cause of anyone else’s death. To see more bloodshed for a child who was no more than a curse to anyone who cared for her.
And now it seemed, the past was returning with a vengeance.
The thought of seeing these men and women risking their lives, the love they had found in each other, for her, was too much to face.
“We would try interrogation, but we have enough suspicion they’re unaware of his identity that at the moment it’s riskier than we’d like. We don’t want to tip them off that we’re aware of them at this point,” Lilly explained.
Tehya clenched her fingers into fists and tried to beat back the fear and the panic. “I can’t deal with this!” The exclamation shocked herself as much as it did the rest of them. “You should all leave. You shouldn’t be here, risking yourselves this way. For God’s sake, go home.”
She didn’t wait for a response from any of them. Walking past the two women, she strode quickly to her bedroom to escape. She couldn’t bear to see the love between the two couples and know what they were risking if they involved themselves in this fight. She’d tried. She’d fought this fear, but it was her only weakness besides Jordan. No one who had ever tried to help her had survived it.
Even more, she couldn’t allow Jordan to take this risk. Knowing she had been the cause of his death or any of his family’s would destroy her soul in a way she knew she would never survive.
The Elite Ops had given her six years of peace, what more could she ask for? It wasn’t their fault that the te
am had disbanded, that their contracts had run out. It wasn’t their fault that she was haunted by a past her father had created.
“Tehya.” Lilly’s determined tone had her pausing at the bedroom door, her hand on the knob. “We’re friends. Wouldn’t you help Travis and me if we were in trouble?”
She turned back just enough to see them, her gaze flicking to Jordan. “But I don’t have anyone who would give a damn, Lilly, in the way you and Travis care for one another. So that really doesn’t apply, does it? Perhaps that’s something all of you should think about. You have families. The others have children. You have something to live for. Do you really want to risk that for someone who isn’t worth it?”
Yanking the door open, she walked into the bedroom, slamming and locking the door behind her before rushing to her dresser.
Her small emergency backpack was there on the side. A weapon, cash, credit cards, and an extra set of keys to the car were inside.
She doubted there was a chance in hell of getting to the car, but she had to leave the house. She had to get away from the acceptance and love she could feel between the two couples. She was so desperate to have it herself, and the knowledge that they were risking what they had to help her made her die a little inside.
Thinking straight, thinking logically, wasn’t going to happen here with Jordan demanding to protect her, and the other four backing him without a thought for their own safety.
She wasn’t at base any longer. There was little security, there was no safety, and Jordan wouldn’t always be there to protect her.
This was one battle she was going to have to decide whether or not to fight, on her own.
* * *
“She’s slipping into the garage,” John stated quietly as he watched the handheld monitor he carried. The wireless reception from the small cameras he’d installed before dawn came in clearly.
