She sits a little straighter, a smile slowly spreading across her face. “Yeah. Midnight is good.”
After climbing into the Jeep, I pull my phone from my bag and find a barrage of missed calls and texts waiting for me.
DAMON
Where are you?
GUNNAR
Jagg, you better not be?—
SWIPE.
HAWK
If you fuck this job up?—
SWIPE.
No point in getting those lectures twice.
I contemplate texting back. Maybe something charming and evasive will give the guys the false notion that I have this under control. Realizing it’s futile, I toss the phone on the passenger seat and start the engine. I’ll face the firing squad in person.
The safe house door barely closes behind me before I meet the consequences of my actions. Gunnar doesn’t bother looking up from his cup of coffee on the table before him. “Recon, Jagg. Not fucking the girl you’re surveilling.”
After dropping my bag to the floor, I roll my shoulders. “Who said I was fucking her?” Gunnar glances up at me and stares with a disapproving fatherly look that he hasmastered too well. I sigh with an eyeroll. “Fine. I slept with her.”
Hawk’s jaw tightens, like he is purposefully trying to grind his teeth down to the root, as Gunnar and Damon groan their disapproval in tandem. When their slew of admonishments finally start to die down, I hold up my hands.
“She knows more about Maryam than she’s letting on,” I share flatly. “We missed it somehow, but she bought a baby toy at the market yesterday.”
Gunnar’s scowl deepens. “Did you learn that before or after you slept with her?”
“Before,” I gruff. “But what of it? Hawk can fuck the job, but I can’t?”
Hawk shoots me a glare that causes me to suddenly doubt all my life choices.
“Sorry,” I exhale my apology, because I’m not actually suicidal. “That might have been too far.”
The three of them argue and share their aversion to how I spent my evening. But my mind isn’t here. Their words are mere background noise as I think about the sunlit bedroom with a freckled face on my chest and dark hair draped across my arm.
The sinking realization sets in that this—whateverthisis—is complicated as hell with or without the job.
I’m in Exam Room Four when my phone starts buzzing like I accidentally tucked my vibrator in there accidentally.
Not the politebuzz-buzzof a single notification. No. This is a relentless, angry hum against my thigh, trying to tunnel through my scrub pocket. I keep my expression neutral because the patient on the exam bed is seven years old, clutching his left arm, and in a lot of pain.
“Does it hurt more when I press here, or here?” I ask gently, fingers light along his forearm as the translator repeats my words.
“Here,” he says, brave but wavering.
I nod. “Okay. You’re doing great, bud.”
My phone buzzes again. And again.
I ignore it. Kids first.Always.
By the time I finish checking his fingers for blood flow, put in an order for some pain meds stat, and finish my exam—definitely a fracture—my thigh feels like it’s been through a massage gun session. I smile at him and his mom.“Looks like he might have broken his arm,” I inform her. “We’re going to get some X-rays to be sure, okay?”
