Not this one, at least.
“I’m not hiding someone in my shower, Nathaniel,” I called after him, perching my butt on the edge of the desk and abandoning my cell phone to its surface. Jeremy could wait. I didn’t have the answers he wanted. Not yet, maybe not ever.
“Very funny,” Nate called out from the bedroom.
My muscles tensed, ready for battle with this you-shouldn’t-be-here version of Nate, but there was a part of my soul that seemed to settle and calm just because the asshat was in the same room.
“Just making sure there aren’t any assassins hiding behind your curtains.” He walked back in with that confident, efficient stride and moved to the window, nodded at whatever he saw in the courtyard below, and turned to face me.
“No one wants to assassinate me.” My boss was a different story, but she wouldn’t be here until next week, and her upcoming visit wasn’t public knowledge anyway.
“Yeah,” he said, his face deadpan as he stared me down from the other side of the room, “they do. What the hell are you doing here, Izzy?”
Izzy. So few people called me that anymore. The second I’d walked into Senator Lauren’s office, I’d become Isa, plain and simple.
“I could ask you the same thing,” I fired back, crossing my arms over my chest. Heat sang through my cheeks as I felt the bulk of my Georgetown hoodie behind my arms. I was dressed for bed, barefoot in pajama pants, not outfitted to confront Nate.
Nate. After three years, this is how it happened? Not because he’d come back, or apologized for disappearing off the face of the earth, but because once again, we’d proved to be the magnets that fate could never quit playing with?
This was bullshit.
“Nice earpiece, by the way,” I continued. “At least someone here knows how to get ahold of you.” I fought the knot in my throat. There were too many emotions fighting for supremacy, each choking the other out until the hurt of it all won out, turning my words sharp and acrid.
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I.”
His jaw flexed once. Twice. “Say it. Whatever it is you’ve been holding back all evening, just say it.” He folded his arms across his chest, mirroring my stance, but he pulled it off way better. He had the whole “dark mercenary thing” going for him, though I knew if he was on our security detail, then he was still on the government’s payroll.
“You abandoned me.” The words slipped out.
He arched his brow. “Really. I abandoned you? Is that how you remember it? Twisting facts. Guess you really are a politician now, just like Daddy wanted.”
“You disappeared!” I came off the desk in a flurry of years-old anger. “Not one letter! Email! Your social media? Erased. Your phone? Disconnected!” My fury carried me across the room until I was bare foot to boot with him, glaring up at the face that had haunted my dreams and a few of my nightmares. “You vanished!” The years of not knowing, of wondering if he was safe, or hurt—or worse—erupted in every word. “Do you have any idea how hard I looked for you? I went to Peru as we planned. Borneo too. By the next year, I got the point.”
A flash of something—regret?—flickered across his features, but it was gone a heartbeat later. “This is getting us nowhere.” He sidestepped and walked away from me, headed for the front door. “You didn’t even lock the damned thing.” He threw the dead bolt and turned, leaning back against the door. “You’re supposed to be in some glitzy office at that law firm in New York, so I’ll ask again. What are you doing here?”
“Making a difference. I believe that’s what someone suggested.” I padded across the soft carpet to the kitchenette and pulled out two bottles of water. “Want one?” Even as pissed as I was, my first instinct was to care about him. God, I was pathetic.
“Sure. Thank you,” he answered, his voice softening. “And this”—he gestured to the suite—“was not what I had in mind when I made that suggestion.” He caught the bottle I hurled his way. “But it’s definitely what your parents had in mind, isn’t it?”
I shrugged and opened the water. “It’s where I landed.” I took a drink, hoping it might dislodge the boulder in my throat. “What are you more pissed at, Nate? The fact that I’m not where you left me? Or the fact that I’m meeting the version of you that you never wanted me to see?”
“It isn’t safe for you to be here.” He rolled the bottle between his hands, clearly ignoring the question. “The country is unstable as hell.”
I cocked my head at him. “But that’s why you’re here, right? To keep people like me safe? Is that what you do now? Where you’ve been for the past three years?”
His jaw ticked. “I can’t tell you where I’ve been for the last three years. Rules of the game haven’t changed—they’ve just gotten more restrictive.” He twisted the bottle open and drank half of it down.
All these years and he still wouldn’t open up. Guess his world hadn’t changed that much, but mine had. “Fine, if you’re not here to explain what happened in New York, and I’m not going to take your suggestion and leave, then why exactly are you in my room?”
“I’m not supposed to be here.”
“No shit. I highly doubt Holt’s security detail is in his room drinking from his minibar.”
“That’s not what I mean.” The corners of Nate’s mouth turned up, but it wasn’t quite a smile, so at least I didn’t have to deal with that dimple of his making an appearance.
Nothing knocked off a few IQ points like the sight of that dimple.
“Please, do stop speaking in army-guy codes.” My gaze narrowed slightly. “Assuming that you’re still army?” They’d told us we’d have Special Forces as our security, but there was a black-and-white name tape on the left side of his chest that read Green, not Phelan.
No matter what name he was using, he still looked so damned good. Someone hadn’t been skipping the gym.
Stop it.
What was it about being in the same room with Nathaniel Phelan that made me revert back to eighteen years old?
“Yeah, I’m still in the army. Just the part that no one talks about,” he answered slowly, raising his eyebrows. “And as for my phone, my email, my social media . . . it was all sanitized.”
“Okay then.” A tiny kernel of something like hope took root in my stomach at the small but openly offered truth. “And that’s why you don’t . . . exist anymore.” The days and months following his disappearance had been maddening, but part of me had always known why he’d fallen off the face of the earth. This had always been his dream.
Making his obsolete had become mine.
He nodded.
“And Green?” I motioned to his name tag. “Is that your call sign or whatever?”