Page 6 of Special Ops Seduction

He remembered her eyes wide and terrified. And worse, determined. He remembered her hands on him, checking him, coaxing him, then somehow, while he flickered in and out of nothingness, physically dragging him across rough ground.

He remembered those long hours of consciousness, too, and that was worse.

He remembered too much.

And he found it all as unforgivable as he always had.

She rose and crossed the room to him, which didn’t help.

“Are we good?” she asked.

Not for the first time, Jonas wondered why no one else seemed to hear the challenge in her voice. As if she were forever daring him to say the things he really thought. About her or anything else.

Because she, better than anyone, knew that he wasn’t the ghost he liked to pretend he was. She knew he bled. That he was flesh and bone, and both too fragile.

He didn’t think that would ever sit well with him.

“Everything’s fine,” he said shortly.

Griffin stood over by the door, that cold gaze of his out the window beside it, watching. Waiting. Rory was directing Dr. Tayo Sowande, their scientist, to pack his things. August had point at the far end of the apartment, where there was potential access through another window.

Jonas didn’t scowl at Bethan, because that was the same as broadcasting an emotion, and he’d stopped making mistakes like that when he was still a kid. But if he expected the blank look he trained on Bethan to get to her, he was disappointed.

He always was.

“Shouldn’t you be tending to the sister?” he asked in a low voice.

“She’s had enough tending,” Bethan replied.

She irritated him by not standing before him, searching his face for answers, as if she wanted something from him. He would have known what to do with that. Instead, she treated him the way she always did now that she was in Alaska Force. Now that she’d distinguished herself by being one of the few women in history who’d made it through Army Ranger School. Now that she was, indisputably, a superhero in her own right. Something he would have celebrated, had it been anyone else.

But it was Bethan. And she stood next to him, shoulder to shoulder, the way she always did. As if their history bothered only him.

Insult to injury, as far as he was concerned.

“I can’t help thinking that this was all a little too easy,” she said.

That was what he should have been thinking about. The mission. Not a murky, tangled little knot of personal history that he had no intention of discussing, anyway. With anyone.

“I would agree.”

One of her eyebrows lifted, but she only replied, in the same even voice she always used when speaking to him,“The mining town was packed with C-4. They could have taken us at any time. Instead, they let me walk right into that house.”

Jonas nodded. “The shed was a diversion.”

“Yes, but not necessarily for us.”

“None of it felt right,” he agreed. And then, accidentally, he glanced over at her. She glanced back.

It was that same somersaulting sensation again. The one that made it hard to remember if it was then or now, when either way it was clear that they could communicate without words.

He didn’t want to remember that, either.

That must have shown on his face, because she stiffened. Almost imperceptibly, but he saw it.

“My apologies,” she said, with excessive politeness behind that smooth, blank mask. “I know you prefer to discuss your missions with the men you trust.”

Emphasis on the wordmen.

---