The Woman Left Behind: A Novel Read online

  “I’m not analyzing, I don’t have to. I’m just saying I get how tough it was for you.”

  Did he? Could he grasp how bone-deep wrenching it had been for her to come to that place where she knew she had to quit, that she couldn’t keep on?

  “It wasn’t so I could have you.” She glared at him, though he hadn’t suggested anything like that.

  “I know.”

  “It broke me.” The words were wrenched out of her. “The desert broke me.”

  “You don’t look broke. You look pissed.”

  Her scowl intensified, which she guessed verified his assessment. “I didn’t want to be on the teams,” she snapped. “I liked what I was doing, but I was assigned to the teams and once I was there, damned if I’d let you make me quit.”

  “Yeah, I wanted you to quit, from the minute I saw you. You know why.” His face was impassive but his eyes glittered with heat, going over her from head to toe and making her feel as if he’d be on top of her if she made the slightest move.

  She took the chance and gestured anyway, a wide wave that took in everything: her, the bedroom, for heaven’s sake even the TV and the beer, because of the cozy intimacy.

  “I didn’t undermine you.”

  “I know,” she grumbled. “I’d have hated you if you had. I wish you had.”

  “So you could hate me?”

  “Would have worked out better that way.”

  Her statement worked in another way. He moved like lightning striking, snagging her with one arm and dragging her onto his lap. “I like the way things are working out now,” he drawled, one eyebrow lifting.

  “They aren’t working out. We’re having sex. That’s all.”

  “For now.” He paused. “Because I have trouble giving up, too.”

  After that threat—promise?—and not giving her time to mull it over, he dragged her along to the training site. She didn’t want to go, because she couldn’t work out with the team and that loss still ached. “I thought I’d be banned from there, now that I’m not on a team,” she grumbled as she vaulted into his Vadermobile. Vaulted. Unbidden came the memory of the first time she’d ridden in his truck, and how much difficulty she’d had getting in, and despite herself she grinned.

  “Nope. There are rules, but we aren’t military. If anyone doesn’t like it they can take it up with me.”

  That wasn’t going to happen. Not many team members, tough as they were, wanted to take on Levi. They would, each and every one of them, but they wouldn’t want to.

  “Why are we going there?”

  “I’ve been away for two days. I need to work out.”

  Annoyed, incredulous, she demanded, “What am I supposed to do, bounce up and down on the sidelines and cheer?”

  He laughed. “I’d like to see that.”

  “Well, you aren’t going to. Just give me the keys so I can leave when I get bored, which will be, oh, about three seconds after we get there.”

  “You won’t be bored. The guys want to see you.”

  She wanted to see them, too. They’d been a huge part of her life for a year, to the point that she hadn’t gone more than twenty-four hours without seeing them except for the two times she’d gone home to visit.

  On the way, Levi tossed his phone into her lap. She gave it a questioning look, then turned the same look on him. It was his personal phone, not his work phone. “What?”

  “Link our phones, so I can find you and you can find me.”

  “What the hell. That’s kind of intimate, don’t you think?”

  He snorted out a laugh. “We’re just getting started, babe. And that’s babe with a little ‘b,” not a capital one.” He paused. “I’ve always had a hard time thinking of you as Babe, instead of Jina.”

  And she’d thought of him as Levi, rather than Ace. She stared straight ahead, more struck by that than she wanted to be, undermined by the uneasy sensation that this thing between them was more than she’d anticipated. After a minute she silently linked their phones, then gave his back to him.

  “What does this mean?” She shouldn’t have asked. As soon as the words were out of her mouth she screwed up her face at her inability to keep her mouth shut.

  He didn’t let her off the hook. “Exactly what you’re afraid it means.”

  Afraid? He thought she was afraid? She started to argue, then subsided into disgruntled silence, because he was right. He meant they were a couple, and couplehood implied all sorts of things she didn’t know that she was emotionally ready for, because it was such an abrupt change from what they’d been before. On the other hand, if she unlinked her phone from his, he’d get the message.

  She didn’t unlink them.

  She was still dealing with the idea that they were a couple, when they reached the training site. She started to open the door and jump down, and he said, “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t open the door.”

  She could see the other four guys walking toward them, and Levi’s order made no sense. Even better—there was Voodoo! He was very thin, he was on crutches, but he was there. “Why? There’s Voodoo! I want to—”

  “Just wait a minute,” he said impatiently. “I have my reasons.”

  “It had better be a damn good one, because I—”

  He got out of the truck and slammed the door, cutting off her irate comment. He crossed in front of the truck, came around to her side . . . and opened the door for her.

  Her mouth fell open. “What’re you doing?” she whispered furiously.

  “Making a statement.”

  When she showed no inclination to get out of the truck he reached inside, grasped her waist with both hands, and lifted her out. Then he closed the door and draped his heavy, muscled arm around her shoulders.

  The five men approaching the truck skidded to a halt, three of them with their mouths open.

  “What the hell?” Trapper said, and scrubbed his hand across his eyes as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “She’s not on the team now,” Levi said bluntly. “And she’s mine.”

  Silence.

  Then Voodoo, leaning on his crutches, shrugged and grinned. “You’re a braver man than I am.”

  Jelly found his voice and said indignantly, “You’re not braver than me! I asked first—”

  Levi shot a rigid forefinger at him. “Don’t make me kill you.”

  Boom shoved a big shoulder into Jelly, nudging him a couple of feet. “You never had a chance, kid. Snake and I knew how it was from the beginning.”

  What? What? Jina gaped at them. “You did not! How could you?”

  “We’re both married,” Snake said. “We have experience with insanity. You two couldn’t even look at each other. Anyway—sorry you’re not on the team, Babe, but welcome to the family, Jina.”

  Twenty-Five

  The plan had failed. Ace Butcher’s team had been hit, but there were no fatalities. Drawing MacNamara in with the loss of one of his precious teams would have been so satisfying—destroying something important to him, the way he’d destroyed Dexter—but Joan Kingsley was, above all, a realist. She had to jettison that part of the plan, and move on to the most important part, baiting MacNamara into a trap and killing him.

  Almost idly she wondered what her own odds of survival were, and estimated them as not very high. For one thing, Devan, who was working his own agenda, wasn’t the most trust-worthy of allies. She suspected that as soon as MacNamara was dead, she herself would be expendable to Devan. Fine. She felt the same way about him. Let the more skilled—or the most lucky—traitor win. He had skill sets she didn’t, but she didn’t much care.

  Life was so bleak. She’d thought she could survive, for her son, for the possibility of a life afterward, but as time had ticked on she had become less and less interested. She wanted it over. One way or another, win or lose—just over.

  To up the ante, she rather thought Graeme Burger would have to be sacrificed. Nothing else than the banker�€