Jake rested his head on his forearm. “O-kay. Theater to political science. So where does the CIA come into the picture?”
Jes took a few moments to collect her thoughts, gliding the fingers of her free hand back and forth across Jake’s muscular chest. He really had spectacular pecs, even with a hole currently in the middle of them. In fact, she could have happily sat here all night touching him like this. She could have done without the nasty wound and forceps part of the equation, of course, but as far as excuses went, it was certainly good justification to keep her hands on him.
Jake didn’t seem to mind. If anything, the more she touched him, the more he seemed to relax on the bed.
“During one of his many deployments to Iraq, my dad worked at the U.S. Embassy in the Green Zone, where he met and ended up becoming good friends with a guy named Ken Alexander. Ken was supposedly working there as a liaison with the Iraqi government, but in reality, he was CIA.”
“Ah, the plot thickens,” Jake murmured. “So Ken Alexander’s friendship with your dad was instead a thinly veiled plot to recruit you?”
“How’d you know?” She grinned. “Ken and the CIA tracked down my dad in Iraq and became friends with him while I was still in middle school because they knew they’d want to recruit me like fifteen years later.”
His mouth quirked. “I wouldn’t put it past them. Those spooks you used to work for are known to be tricky.”
“True,” she admitted, still working the forceps. “But in this case, it was merely random chance. Ken was visiting my mom and dad when I came home during spring break my senior year in college. During dinner, we started talking world politics, and he gave me insight into the stuff really going on in the world, a perspective I couldn’t get in the classroom. Once he told me stories about some of the places he’d seen and the work he’d done, I was hooked, and after I graduated, the CIA was the one and only place I went looking for work. Ken helped me get an interview, and everything else is history.”
Jake was silent as she continued pulling crud out of the wound in his chest. As she worked, those warm, dark eyes studied her so intently, Jes could almost feel the heat of his gaze against her skin.
The moment she got the last piece of tree bark out of the wound, the bleeding stopped completely, and the edges of the opening immediately began to close up. Even though Jes knew she was done, she found herself continuing to touch him after she placed the forceps on the nightstand, carefully gliding a moist towel across his skin, cleaning away every trace of blood and patting the edges of the slowly closing injury as if her fingers were the thing making it happen.
Jes didn’t understand this crazy need to touch him. She’d been in relationships with men she thought might have long-term potential and had never felt this way. Right now, she had an almost uncontrollable urge to lean forward and press her lips to every single one of his cuts, scrapes, and bruises, and kiss it all better. Hell, she was already leaning over his chest a little, so bending to trace her lips over his skin wouldn’t have taken much effort.
She resisted the urge—barely.
“It’s not all history,” he said suddenly, his hand coming up to cover one of hers where it rested on his chest. “You still haven’t told me why you joined STAT.”
No one knew the reason she’d joined STAT except McKay. She hadn’t ever wanted to share the story. Until now.
“Two years ago, I was in Rome with a counterintelligence team doing a sting operation against a small group of former East German Stasi operatives who’d stolen a hard drive full of missile designs from the Department of Defense. Everything we had on these guys implied they were amateurs and that it should have been an easy recovery mission.”
“But?” he prompted when she’d fallen silent, lost in her memories.
She sighed. “But everything went sideways when we discovered the group had somehow gained possession of a supernatural. I didn’t know what the creature was back then, of course, because none of us knew about crap like that back then.”
“What was it?” he asked.
Jes settled over onto one hip, leaning forward until she was resting her forearms on his chest, watching in awe as the wound on his chest continued to seal itself. She glanced at the lacerations on his arms and was stunned to see that they looked days old.Incredible.
She met his gaze again. “To this day I still don’t know. When the thing showed up in the midst of the shoot-out, I thought it was a baboon or mandrill. It was nighttime and the warehouse where the exchange had been set up was dark, so it was hard to see anything.”
Jake’s hand moved up her forearm, then back down, causing little goose bumps to chase their way here and there.
“But it wasn’t any animal like that,” she added, amazed at how relaxing his touch was, especially in the midst of such a painful memory. “It was about three feet tall, though that was difficult to judge because it tended to stay hunched over as it moved, sometimes using its hands to help propel it, like a monkey.”
Her breathing came quicker, and her heart began to race as she thought about the creature she’d fought in that warehouse. She’d spent a lot of sleepless nights battling the images that sometimes plagued her mind, and here she was recalling them on purpose.
“The thing was almost completely hairless except for a few wisps along its chest and belly and was very muscular, with fangs and claws that were longer even than yours.” She reached up with her free hand to push her long hair behind her ear. “Before the creature got there, my team and I had nearly gained control of the situation, but that all changed when it attacked. It was so fast and vicious. I’ve never seen anything like it. One second, my teammates were there, and the next second, they were dead, torn apart by that thing right in front of me.”
Jake slid both hands up to her shoulders, massaging lightly and relaxing the tense muscles there. “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to make you have to relive something like that.”
Jes crossed her arms over her chest and cupped his hands with hers, keeping them exactly where they were. She’d never experienced anything close to the warmth and comfort they gave her.
“It’s okay,” she said softly. “I still don’t know how I survived. I was beat up, but I injured the thing badly enough for it to run away. The former Stasi operatives were all dead, and I somehow remembered to retrieve the hard drive. When my CIA backup arrived, they took one look at me and quarantined the entire site. They put me on a jet without a debrief and took me to a private hospital near Langley. I was put on total lockdown to give me time to recover.”
“Is that when McKay came to talk to you?”
She nodded. “Yeah. He showed up one morning in my room and said he was putting together a special team to handle the kinds of things I’d just fought. He told me that if I worked for him, I might get a chance to find out what killed my teammates. I agreed on the spot and never regretted the decision, though I’ve never come close to finding the damn thing.”
Jake’s fingers caressed her shoulders through her blouse. “I think I understand now why you were so worried about working with us. After what happened in Rome, then here in London with Jaime and Neal, I don’t blame you for not knowing whether to trust a pack of werewolves.”
