Out of Time Read online

  She’d denied it, of course, but she’d never said they were related. 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 she really loved 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 everything else that mattered to him. His marriage. His team. His fucking soul.

  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.”

  She lifted one perfectly arched and waxed brow in that haughty, “I care so little about you that just this tiny part of my body is affected” way that drove him nuts. This woman who used to love him with every part of her body and soul now looked at him with as much interest as a bug under her heel. “You and I don’t have anything to say to one another.”

  So much for his good intentions. You could almost hear him snap. He moved so quickly up the stairs, she gasped when he pushed her back into the hall and closed the door behind him. He resisted the urge to back her up against the wall, but his body was definitely leaning in. He could feel the heat of anger radiating from her lean body, drawing him in like a magnet.

  “Is that right?” he asked. “I think you have a hell of a lot to say. How about a goddamned explanation for why you never told me Scott was your brother? Or for how you not only let me think that all my former teammates were dead, but how you lied to me and led me on a fucking goose chase the past month to keep me from finding out the truth?”

  It had stung when he’d figured out that the only reason she’d been spending time with him was to keep him busy and prevent him from learning that some of the guys had survived. She’d known how much they meant to him, and she’d let him think they were all dead.

  And here he’d been thinking how much he liked working with her again. How much it felt like old times. The worst part was that he’d known she was lying to him about something. But he’d followed her to a hotel, saw her with a man, and assumed . . .

  Shit. “It was Scott, wasn’t it? He was the man you met at the hotel that night?”

  “You mean the man you accused me of cheating on my fiancé with?”

  He’d done more than accuse. Colt had been so out of his mind with jealousy that he’d cornered her in an elevator and kissed her. They’d been a few seconds away from doing a lot more before she’d pushed him away, apparently coming to her senses. But was there more to it? Had she kissed him back just to keep him off the trail?

  His gut wasn’t the only part of his body twisting as she took a step toward him and met his anger full force. She’d never backed down from him. Never. He’d always loved that about her. The bigger problem now was that she was wearing a tight tank top and her breasts were one deep breath from brushing his chest. Heat pooled in his groin. Not the time to get a hard-on. But his body wasn’t exactly listening to him.

  “I don’t owe you a damned thing, Colt. Get the hell out of here. Go back to whatever dive bar you’ve probably been hiding in the past week.”

  He wanted to deny it, but she knew him too well. He drank and played pool when he was angry. It made him feel better. Usually. There was something else that always made him feel better, but he hadn’t taken any of the offers thrown in his direction the past week. Month. And that pissed him off even more. Kate didn’t care whom he fucked; why should he?

  Because the only woman he wanted to fuck was her. It had been like that since the first time he’d met her. Sex before he’d met her had always been satisfying. But after . . . he knew what he was missing.

  Damn her to hell.

  He wanted to touch her but he didn’t dare. Not when she was so close to him, and not the way he was feeling like this. He was likely to explode. In more ways than one.

  He stepped back and took a deep breath, trying to ratchet down the anger—and the heat. “You knew how much I cared about those guys, and you let me think they were all dead. How could you do that? Do you hate me that much?”

  Her cheeks were still flushed, but when she looked away, he knew he’d gotten to her. “Scott didn’t want anyone else to know. He thought it was too dangerous.”

  “You should have trusted me.”

&n