Page 56 of Baby One Last Time
“Spare me the bullshit.”
I had to admit, it didn’t sound as smart coming out of my mouth as it had earlier, coming out of Mai’s. “Roger that,” I mumbled.
He extricated himself from me and bent over the duffel bag. I envied—well, if I’m being honest, resented—his ability to shift his focus so fast. But when he pulled out climbing ropes and grappling hooks, I was right back in the moment.
“We’ll get in position on top of the wall and get a visual first,” he said. “Assuming Jensen can block the electrical feed to the security sensor.”
I took the harness Derek handed me and glanced toward the front of the van. “He’s working on that? When did he say that?”
Derek shook his head as he snapped on his own harness. “He didn’t. He texted me.”
“When?”
“When I was driving here.”
I hooked my harness and held out my hand for my rope. “Let me get this straight. You were cursing at me, texting with Jensen, and driving at what, seventy miles an hour?”
“Cursing, reading texts, not sending them, and eighty miles an hour. But basically, yes.” He handed me my rope, then ran his through his harness and tied off the end.
“Still sounds dangerous.” I looped my rope and looked up to see him staring at me with raised eyebrows. I scowled. “Yeah, I heard it. But... I worry.”
I wouldn’t have believed his eyebrows could go higher unless I’d seen it myself. “You call me at four in the morning—a few hours after swearing to me I could trust you—to report a harebrained scheme you and your partners in crime have tanked, and you worry about my driving?”
I shrugged.
He grinned, then pointed to the tranq gun on my holster. “Did you use any darts?”
“No. And don’t look so amused.” I bit my lip, struggling to find the right words. “I’m sorry.” Sometimes simplest is best. “I never should have brought up the trust thing, and I never should have gotten Mai into this.”
“Right on both counts. But while I hold you accountable as the ringleader, Lee and Jensen are adults who willingly came with you.” He holstered his own tranq gun. “Jensen’s even a little giddy. He rarely gets this close to the action.”
“Is he?” I glanced toward the front of the van again.
“And Mai was more reckless than she should have been, getting in that SUV without an extraction plan.” He pulled out a mini-backpack, which contained a climbing kit for Mai, and shouldered it.
“Still, this has shades of Henderson written all over it.”
“To be fair to Mai, I hardly think she’s as a big a problem as Henderson.” He retrieved a long-barreled pistol, shorter than a rifle but with similar sights, from the bag. “I told X when she picked him as your partner that one day he’d get himself shot.” He loaded a magazine into the pistol. “I’ll admit it happened sooner than I expected, though.”
I stood rooted to the spot, trying to wrap my brain around that. Sex chemicals seemed to still be gumming up my synapses because his words didn’t make any sense. “He didn’t get himself shot.Igot him shot.”
But even as I said the words, the niggling doubt that had crept in while I’d read the hot washes from the Aussie job ricocheted to the front of my brain.
Derek frowned at me. “That’s how you see it?” He out the pistol to me and I took it. “You were lead on that job.” He bent and retrieved his own pistol. “You told him to stand down until he got your signal.” Loaded a magazine into his gun. “He ignored you like an idiotic fucking macho man and went through that door too early, before you shot the first tranq.” Snapped the gun into his holster. “And took a bullet for not trusting a woman to make the call.”
I nodded, the entire picture snapping into focus. “You never would have done that. You never would have barged through the door two minutes early because I got startled.”
“That’s because I know how fucking competent you are.”
“But even if you’d told me to go after the second guy, I wouldn’t have. The Aussie asshole’s sidekick would have gotten away.”
“Every situation is unique, and you make the best call you can in the field.” Derek laid his hand, warm and solid, on my shoulder. “You know that, but you lost track of it. X knows it, which is why she gave you time off to process what happened. Making you think you were fired was the only way she could force you to stop working.”
“She... You...” Thoughts and emotions were hitting too fast for me to process them. Fear and guilt and understanding and, on some visceral level, acceptance. Henderson had screwed up. X had protected me from myself. Derek had watched over me our entire time apart. He’d kept my back. But I couldn’t unpack the deeper meaning of any of it right now. There was a mission at hand, and a partner who also needed us to haveherback. “Why pistols, not rifles?”
Derek didn’t miss a beat. “Harder to climb with rifles. We’d have to use an extra sling. Why does that big brain of yours question everything?”
I put my hands on my hips. “You should be grateful for my big brain, because I figured out where Beecher is hiding the weapons.”
