You Only Love Twice (30 page)

It took him a moment to take in her words, to understand
that he wasn’t being rejected. He was being pulled close. Her feminine body
offering protection and comfort to his masculine one. He’d fucked up and she
was promising to take care of him.

She was crying for him.

He let go, not of her, never of her. He let go of the idea
that it was wrong to cry. He wouldn’t do it in public or with his friends. But
he could with her. She was safety and affection and acceptance.

A shudder went through his body and he let himself cry
because he’d thought the nightmare was over, because it had never really gone
away until this moment when she began to take some of the burden from him.

He laid his head on her shoulders, finally safe in her arms.

Phoebe sighed as she stepped out of the room the next
morning. Ten was on her immediately, as though he’d waited all night for the
chance. He might have. He might have paced outside her bedroom door all night
long, waiting for the shot at taking a hunk out of her flesh. He’d probably
listened, trying to hear if they were fighting or fucking.

They’d done neither. She’d held him and then they’d gone to
bed, his head on her breast, his arms wound around her.

He’d needed intimacy the night before. He’d needed to know
she was there with him.

“Good morning.” The best way to deal with Ten was to brazen
through. If she gave him a moment’s weakness, he would pounce like the predator
he was. She nodded in his direction and then walked straight toward the coffee,
letting her nose lead the way.

Ten followed, hard on her heels. “Good morning? Are you
fucking kidding me?”

“Nope. I’m being an optimist this morning.” It wasn’t true.
She was sick to her stomach because she knew the op was almost over and so was
her time with Jesse.

Unless he meant what he’d said and he really could forgive
her. She wasn’t sure she could risk it. It might be better to know he still cared
about her than to risk everything and lose it all. Maybe they could still see
each other. She would have her work and he would have his and they could spend
their free time together.

Because a week or two a year was better than nothing, right?
Until he found the woman who wasn’t too damaged and he got married and had
kids. Yeah, it would be great.

“Damn it, Phoebe. Do you understand what happened last
night?” Ten followed her into the living area of the suite where a long table
had been set with a buffet overflowing with fruit and yogurt and eggs, small
pastries, and even a row of perfectly made crepes with whipped cream.

She just poured a cup of coffee. She didn’t really have much
of an appetite. “I understand that Jesse had to face something most of us can’t
even conceive.”

“He completely lost it.”

“Maybe, but I think in this case, it’s understandable. He
heard that voice again. It was the voice that did it.” They hadn’t talked about
it, just held on to each other, but it was the only thing that made sense.
Phoebe had been well aware of where the camera was, but any subtle attempts to
turn them had been rebuffed by the very elegant Mr. al Fareed.

Even when she hadn’t realized who he was, he’d scared her.
Not in a run and hide sense, but she’d known he was a predator. Her instincts
had flared the minute he stepped in her way.

It was in his face. He was actually an attractive man when
she considered his features on a separate basis. He had everything it took to
be quite handsome. Until she got to the eyes. His eyes were flat. Obsidian and
flat, like a reptile’s. She’d seen those eyes in a crocodile or a shark. They
held no hint of humanity or compassion. No humor.

Ten sighed and sank down into one of the chairs. It was easy
to see the toll the last few days had taken on him. “Yeah. At least I think so.
One minute I was watching you and the next he was taking off. Tell me it wasn’t
as bad as it looked on the monitors.”

She wished she could. “The good news is it was contained to
the back of the ballroom. He didn’t get very far in, but at least a third of
the people there were well aware something odd was happening.”

“Then everyone knows.”

The gossip would spread very quickly. “Probably.” There was
an upside to this particular clusterfuck. “It’s all right, Ten. Jesse needs to
stay up here now. We should keep him out of the line of sight. We know who our
target is. Now the rest of us gather intel on the al Fareed brothers.”

“Which one was it?”

Oh, he was so not going to love her answer. “I don’t know.
His badge simply said Mr. al Fareed. Do you have pictures?”

“They’re practically twins,” Ten said with a grimace as he
reached for his tablet. He slid his finger across the screen and passed it to
her.

Two men stared back. The two brothers looked very much
alike. Both handsome and lean. In the pictures they had, both men sported dark
beards, but the man she’d met the night before had cropped his close. “I think
it’s this one. Ibrahim. But I’ll be honest, it wasn’t until he started talking
about war and business that I really looked at him. I was trying to play down
my aggressive American side, so I tried not to look him in the eyes.”

“Probably a good play given what part of the world we’re in.
I know it’s hard on female operatives, but we have to be sure here. I need you
to take another look,” Ten said as though he found the request distasteful.

“I’ll make sure this afternoon. I’m going to sit in with
Kamdar on a couple of the sessions. The al Fareeds are expected to attend. I’ll
get you what you need and then we can build a case against him.” A case that
would hopefully forever get the stain off Jesse Murdoch’s reputation. It might
be the only gift she could give him.

“All right. I hate sending you back in. I take it everyone
saw you walking out with him?”

It was a problem, but she wasn’t willing to scrap the
mission because of it. “I’ll be fine. I’ll take someone with me. Hey, if he
flees the conference, we know we’ve got him on the run. Once we’re sure of the
name, we don’t need to stay here. We set up long-term observation and we get
Chelsea digging into his past. We’ll find something.”

“You are not to go anywhere in this hotel without a
bodyguard. I know you can handle yourself, but I’m not taking any chances.” He
sighed and sat back. “When the hell did I lose control of everything?”

She’d wondered when they were going to have this talk. There
hadn’t been time before they’d had to come to Dubai. She sat down across from
him. Ten could hold things in for a very long time, but it seemed he’d always
been willing to open up eventually with her or Jamie. “Ace wasn’t your fault,
Tennessee.”

“Hell yes, he was.” He looked straight on, his eyes
stubborn.

She simply moved to where he was staring so he had to look
at her. “You couldn’t have known. You did everything you could with the
information you had. He came highly recommended. He passed every single test
the Agency gave him. This isn’t your fault.”

“I’ve trained all my life to see things that aren’t there.
From the time I was a kid, I knew I would do this job, and that fucker got past
me.”

“He got past everyone.” She knew she was talking to a brick
wall at this point, but she couldn’t help but speak the truth. Eventually it
would get to him. “What happened at Sanctum wasn’t your fault and last night
wasn’t really Jesse’s. He saw a threat, and not only that, he saw me standing
next to the man who killed his entire team.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think about it that way. Jesus, Phoebe, now
that I do think about it, I kind of want to run around until I find the fucker,
too.” He leaned forward. “That man killed my brother. He tortured and killed my
brother and I was thinking about the fucking op.”

“Which is what you were trained to do,” she pointed out
gently. “It does Jamie no good for you to blow everyone’s cover. You have to be
rational about this because Jesse can’t be.”

“How about you?” Ten asked, his voice softening. A somber
smile slightly curled up his mouth. “You were standing right next to the man
who killed Jamie and what were you thinking about?”

She set the coffee down and guilt swamped her as she
admitted the truth. “I was thinking about Jesse.” She’d thought about Jesse all
night long. How could she do that? “Ten, I’m so sorry. I thought about Jesse.”

Ten sat up, his hands on the table between them. “As you
damn well should have. I wasn’t blaming you. I was pointing something out.
You’re a fool if you think you can leave that boy behind.”

It took her a moment because she’d been so wrapped up in the
drama with Jesse that she hadn’t given Jamie more than a passing thought. It
had been right and good to offer Jesse comfort. It had felt like her right to
hold him. “But I stood right in front of the man who killed my husband and all
I could think about afterward was protecting my boyfriend from him.”

“Because Jamie’s gone, honey, and life is for the living.
Hell, I won’t kick the boy’s ass for that fact alone.” He sat back, crossing
his legs. “I knew Jamie better than you did.”

“I was his wife.” She was the one looking away now, but Ten
wouldn’t allow her that comfort any more than she’d allowed him. He caught her
eye.

“Yeah, well, you didn’t grow up with him and you weren’t his
best friend. I think if he’d lived, you would have been, but you were both so
young you never got past the mad in love stage. You didn’t have to really live
together the way couples with mortgages and kids and crappy jobs have to. He
put you on a pedestal and you’re doing the same with him. He wanted that
mission. Do you know why he wanted that mission?”

“No.” And maybe she didn’t want to know.

“Because he wanted to best me. He wanted to head a team of
his own.”

Phoebe shook her head. It went against everything they’d
talked about. “No. We were getting out. We agreed that if we were going to have
kids, we couldn’t put ourselves on the line like that.”

Ten reached for her hand, covering it with his own. “I know
that’s what he told you and he definitely wanted you out, but it was in his
blood. He tried to convince the director that he could run a black ops team
better than me. He wanted my job or one just like it, and he decided taking on
the truly dangerous operations were exactly what he needed to do to prove it.”

She wanted to pull away, but she couldn’t. All she could do
was protest even though something in Ten’s words rang true. “No. Jamie loved
you.”

“Hell, yeah, he loved me. We were brothers. You think
brothers aren’t competitive as hell? You think it doesn’t burn the big
brother’s ass when little brother becomes his boss? I’m not maligning Jamie.
I’m just saying that you take all this guilt on yourself when you didn’t force
him to go.”

Jamie wasn’t the only one she felt guilty about. Even if she
accepted that she hadn’t forced Jamie into anything, she couldn’t wish away her
other problem. “And Jesse? They were looking for Jamie. I’m the one who came up
with the plan to send Jamie in. I’m the one who led the Caliph right to Jesse.”

“And a fucking butterfly flapped its wings halfway across
the world and it rains in DC,” Ten argued back. “The butterfly had as much
intent as you had. The asshole in DC who forgot his umbrella doesn’t blame the
bug.”

He was throwing chaos theory at her? “That is a stupid
argument.”

“And it’s true. You had zero idea it would turn out this
way. You never intended to cause him harm and wouldn’t have proceeded had you
known the outcome.”

Not even if Jamie had survived. She would never have placed
a unit in that harm’s way. She hadn’t known the Caliph even existed. “No, I
wouldn’t have.”

“Jesse won’t blame you. He might be surprised, but he won’t
blame you and he won’t let you walk away from him. That’s the only hope I have
now that Jamie might rest in peace knowing he got what he wanted.”

“What’s that?”

“You happy. I was the best man at your wedding. I took Jamie
out for a bachelor party of two because the last thing he wanted was a bunch of
strippers when he had you. I say I took him out, but all we really did was pick
up a bucket of wings and go back to his place.”

She laughed, the memories coming back and somehow whisking
away the bad ones. “Mine wasn’t much better. I went to a club with some of the
girls from work and spent all night texting Jamie.”

Ten smiled, real tenderness in his expression. “Still better
than his. I bought a case of beer and we watched football and talked about you.
After the game was over, he flipped through channels and found a freaking
marathon of those wizard movies. He made me watch one. Couldn’t you two have
found something more masculine to bond over?”

Even though the thought brought tears to her eyes, they were
sweeter now. They weren’t sad. They reminded her of how nice it had been and
not simply of what she’d lost. When had that changed? When had thinking of
Jamie become something wistful and not an ache in her soul? “Nope. Those are
our books. He kissed me for the first time while we were reading on the patio. At
first I thought he only read them because I liked them, but Harry won him over
in the end.”

She’d started reading them when a librarian had suggested
the first book. She’d been at an inner-city school, one of the rougher foster
homes. She’d read that first book so many times the librarian swore she wore it
out. When Franklin Grant asked her what she wanted for her birthday, she’d
asked for her own copies. Jamie had started reading them even though Ten had
teased them that they were for kids. Jamie hadn’t cared. He’d wanted to have
something to talk to her about and they’d spent hours reading and talking and
watching the movies. They argued over whether Hermione should end up with Harry
or Ron. Silly things, but it had brought them closer.