“They took me ’round to the police station, where they questioned me for eight hours,” he added.
Questioned.Ha! A nice way of saying he had been interrogated and likely tortured. Visions of beatings, stabbings, and oxygen deprivation bloomed in Emily’s mind. It was enough to have her breakfast threatening to reversedirections.
“Is that what you were dreaming about this morning?” she asked. If the hoarse screams that had jolted her from a dead sleep were any indication, Christian’s eight hours in the hands of the Iraqis had been brutal.
The look he shot her was quick and definitive, the facial equivalent ofShut your trap. But it was too late. Ace glanced back and forth between them, a shit-eatinggrin spreading across his handsome face.
“How wouldyouknow what he was dreaming about this morning, hmm?” Ace widened his blue eyes. “Is there something the two of you would like to tell us? Like, maybe you’ve finally had enough foreplay and it’s time to get down to the main event?”
“Foreplay?” Emily scowled. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Oh, sure you do. Allthat one-upping? The verbal sparring? That’s foreplay, luv.”
She waved a hand through air still tinged with the smell of bacon and buttered toast. “Whatever. One-upmanship is nothing more than good, clean fun. And maybe some ego management on my part.” She gifted Christian with a squinty-eyed stare, indicating his length with her hand. “I mean, you’ve seen him, right? The clothes. The hair.The smile. Someone has to keep him grounded.”
“Rrrright.” Ace nodded.
She rolled her eyes and turned to Christian. “Tell him.”
Christian lifted an eyebrow that asked,Tell him what?
She thinned her lips and widened her eyes. Her expression said,Tell him I’m right.
Instead of siding with her, Christian said, “Can we please circle back ’round to the bloody subject? In case you’veforgotten, there arereportersoutside preventing us from catching our flight and getting off this sodding rock!”
Didhe think their bickering was foreplay? The idea had an unwelcome trill skipping up her spine. Muscles that had no business clenching—specifically those at the tips of her breasts and between her legs—did just that.
She didn’t delude herself when it came to Christian. Anddespite her protestations to the contrary, shedidwant him.I mean, who wouldn’t?But he’d given no indication he felt the same. In fact, he found heras vexing as a housefly. His words. Not hers.
Which was fine and dandy.
It was!
After all, there was that whole “no mixing of business and pleasure” edict she was determined to live by. And even if therewasn’t, the two of them wereoil and water.
He wore designer clothes and drove a Porsche. She preferred yoga pants and sweatshirts, usually from the discount rack at Target. There was an air of mystery surrounding him, depths she dared not plumb. And she? Well, she was pretty much an open book.
“In response to my capture,” Christian continued, “Ten members of the 22nd SAS Regiment along with a whole platoon of paratroopersfrom special forces flew in from Baghdad to retrieve me. They stormed the police station and got me out, killing three police officers on top of the two I’d taken out at the roadblock and leaving one SAS soldier…”
His voice trailed off, and the look that came over his face was one Emily hadn’t seen before.Sadness.Not surface-level sadness, but deep, abiding, fabric-of-his-being sadness.The episode in Iraq haunted him to this day.
Her heart clenched in sympathy.
“It caused a huge international outcry, if memory serves,” Ace said, picking up the thread Christian had dropped.
“The Iraqis wanted blood, revenge, recompense.” Christian’s voice was softer now. “Newspapers in the UK sided with them, calling the SAS trigger-happy.” There was disbelief and more than a hintof derision in his face. “It didn’t matter that had I been left in that police station, the Iraqis would have killed me. It didn’t matter that I was under bloody directordersto take any and all action necessary to avoid capture. And it didn’t matter that the policemen in question were as crooked as a country lane. For all intents and purposes, the war was over. It was meant to be peacetime.We were meant to be allies. The news agencies said that because of the SAS officer who had opened fire at the roadblock, five Iraqi policemen were dead and the tentative peace between our countries was put at risk.”
“They blamed you,” Angel said, his dark eyes intense. As always.
Besides the vocal-cord scouring, Angel had undergone extensive plastic surgery to change his appearance. Tosay his surgeon had been a genius was an understatement. Angel was…well…angelic. So beautiful he was hard to look at.
But the surgeon hadn’t been able to alter his eyes. There was a world of dark knowledge in Angel’s eyes. When Emily combined that with the fact that his records had been redacted out the wazoo and she had no idea what hellish catastrophe or fuckup had caused him to leave Israeland undergo all that surgery in the first place, she had to admit he creeped her out. Just a little.
Okay, maybe a lot.
“That they did.” Christian nodded. “Well, notmeprecisely. The press didn’t know my name. They only knew that one of Her Majesty’s Special Air Service members was the cause of the mess. And since the SAS prides itself on keeping the egg off its face, the brass were onlytoo pleased to jump on the bandwagon. They assured the press that I, the officer responsible, would be decommissioned.”
The muscle beneath his right eye was twitching again. “True to their word, two months after the incident, to throw any investigators off the trail of a man being let go so soon after, they pushed me out. I was told if I went quietly, if I didn’t make a fuss, my official recordswould show I’d left the Service in good standing and with all due honors. No one but those with access to my classified files would ever know I was the one involved in the police station fiasco.” He snorted. “I suppose it was the brass’s idea of offering me an olive branch for all the good work I’d done.”
