Only the flexed jaw and small white lines around his mouth were vaguely familiar. But this wasn’t the unyielding, tough-as-nails, but always controlled SEAL commander that she’d seen once or twice in a meeting. This was the dangerous special ops commando who looked as if he could take down anything in his way. His fierce expression and scruffy appearance coupled with eyes that were bloodshot from lack of sleep gave him a feral, menacing edge that she’d never seen before.
“You work fast, Natalya. I see you found another poor sucker to get information out of. What state secrets does the county sheriff have?”
She barely heard the last two sentences. She was too stuck on the first.Natalya.Dread fell through her like a rock. He’d used her birth name.
He knew.
Five
Colt Wesson stood outside his ex-wife’s front door and experienced a rare moment of indecision. He probably should turn around, get back in his car, and head straight to the airport like he’d originally planned. But he’d been driving by her exit and decided impulsively to make a detour.
He’d stayed away from Kate for ten days. After having the rug pulled out from under him twice on the same day—not only learning that some of the guys that he’d thought were dead for months, guys who were like brothers to him, were alive, but also that his now ex-wife hadn’t had an affair with one of his best friends when they were married, they were actually brother and sister—he hadn’t trusted himself to talk to her. How could she have kept that kind of information from him? How could she have let him think the worst?
But after returning Scott’s message last night—two days after it had been left—and agreeing to go to Alaska to track down Travis Hart, Colt had broached the subject with his former friend, teammate, and unknown ex-brother-in-law.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he’d asked Taylor before they’d hung up.
There had been a long moment of silence on the other end. Colt didn’t need to explain. Taylor knew what he was asking: if Colt had known Kate and Taylor were related, he never would have...
Shit. Colt wasn’t sure he wanted to go down that path. Everything would have been different. His marriage. His job. His stomach knifed. The miscarriage and baby he’d thought wasn’t his. A baby he hadn’t wanted then but now couldn’t stop thinking about. He’d had adaughter.
Why the fuck hadn’t they told him the truth?
“If you have questions, you should ask Kate.” Scott paused before adding, “Better yet, you should have done that three years ago.”
Colt didn’t miss the censure in Taylor’s voice and it pissed him off. Colt had tried, damn it. But what the hell was he supposed to think? He and Kate had been having problems in their four-year-long marriage. Big problems. He knew he’d been pushing her away. But he’d never expected her to turn to Taylor.
It seemed as if every time Colt turned around, his wife was talking to his friend. There were texts. E-mails. Obviously private conversations that Colt felt as if he was interrupting when she came to see him in Honolulu. Taylor sat on Colt’s living room couch more than he did. At first he’d attributed it to rich people bonding. Their parents had known one another, which didn’t surprise him in the close-knit circles of the East Coast elite. But when he discovered that Taylor had been in DC for weeks where Kate lived and worked while Colt had been training with the team in Arizona, he’d finally confronted her.
She’d denied it, of course, but she’d never said they wererelated. No, he was just supposed to take her word for it that they weren’t sleeping together, when she had to have known how it looked.
So that’s why Colt was here. Three years too late maybe, but he deserved a fucking answer. It was the “fucking answer” part, however, that made him hesitate. It never went well when he was angry like this. He tended to say things he didn’t mean. Things that couldn’t be taken back. All that SEAL discipline couldn’t control his caustic tongue.
He turned around to leave. He’d talk to her when he got back from Alaska. Maybe by then he would have cooled down and the betrayal eating away in his gut wouldn’t taste like battery acid.
The door opened behind him. “Running away again, Colt? You are good at that.”
Her voice stopped him in his tracks. He turned around, seeing his ex-wife—his sexy-as-hell ex-wife—standing in the doorway in her running clothes. What there were of them. He’d obviously caught her on her way out for her morning run.
Kate was a beautiful woman whether in her usual suit and pearls or in spandex and a ponytail. She had that patrician Grace Kelly WASPy look going that screamed old money and privilege. He’d assumed she was a bitch the first time he met her—which admittedly hadn’t been in the best of circumstances, when she’d overheard him call her “CIA Barbie” to the rest of the guys on a mission briefing.
For a poor kid born on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks, Colt could admit that the rich-girl thing might have been part of her appeal initially. But he’d quickly learned that the woman who looked like an ice princess on the outside had a heart of gold. Worse, she’d seen through his belligerent-asshole schtick—which admittedly wasn’t always a schtick—with alarming speed.
Having grown up in foster homes of incrementally varying degrees of bleak and horrible, no one had ever given a shit about him, and Colt couldn’t believe that someone like Kate wanted him for anything more than a good fuck.
Although “good” was putting it mildly. It had never been just good between them; it had been hot, wild, and off-the-charts incredible. She might look prim and proper on the outside, but in bed she liked it rough and a little dirty. Which was definitely in his wheelhouse. But the fierce, almost primitive attraction between them had never been the problem. It was sorting out all the emotions that had come along with it.
Initially he’d thought it was the “slumming it” novelty of fucking the bad boy that she wanted. That was why rich women like her wanted men like him. But she’d convinced him otherwise. At one time, she’d loved him with every inch of her soul. He just hadn’t known what to do with it.
He’d been so sure that something would fuck it up like it always did that he’d pushed her away and ensured it. He’d started hanging out with the guys longer on the base after work. Instead of one beer after a long day, he’d have three or four. He’d find himself at a bar flirting with some woman he didn’t give a shit about. He’d stopped talking to her—really talking to her. When he came home angry or upset after a bad mission or difficult deployment, and she asked him what was wrong, he shut down—and her out.
He knew he was doing it, but he just couldn’t seem to stop himself. Maybe in his perverse mind it had been some kind of fucked-up test. Some kind of way of proving that shereallyloved him. But the test had backfired big-time when he thought she’d cheated on him with the man who was like a brother to him. Colt had been destroyed. Shattered. He’d lashed out cruelly—unforgivably—and then sunk into a hole so deep he still hadn’t pulled himself out.
For three years he’d been living half a life. His job in CAD—the nickname (aka Control-Alt-Delete) for Task Force Tier One, the secret unit where he was an operative—was all that mattered. He’d lost everythingelse that mattered to him. His marriage. His team. His fuckingsoul.
It was hard to stand here and not blame her when with one word she could have stopped it. Yeah, definitely not a good idea to be here.
He let the “running away” comment slide, although he was sure she knew how much that pissed him off. He’d never run away from a fight in his life. “We need to talk, but not right now.”
