“She makes a mean latte and can kill a man fifteen different ways. She’s a modern woman,” Owen explained. “But I would rather escort her. I’m not wanted by Interpol. I don’t have a record like the others. I can go home.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, but we’ll talk about it later. I think you should feed her and get back to bed.” Ezra nodded to Becca. “You need to stay in the house. The police are looking for you. There hasn’t been any media coverage yet, but the Huisman Foundation has blocked your access to the building and they spent the evening searching your lab and your apartment.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“I know because I have sources.” It was all Ezra would say.
Becca thought about that for a moment. “Did you have cameras on me? Did you put them in my apartment?”
Owen’s gut churned, but he wasn’t going to lie to her again. “Yes. We had to know where you were at all times since Tucker and Dante and Sasha came in and out.”
“I wouldn’t have known who the janitors were,” she admitted. “That’s shitty of me, but it’s true. I would have known the other guy. I’m going to the kitchen. I won’t like sneak out the back or anything. You can stay here and plan the rest of my life. I guess I should be happy you don’t turn me over to the police and be done with it.”
“We wouldn’t do that.” How did he make her believe?
She simply turned and walked to the small galley kitchen at the back of the cabin.
“It’s okay,” Ezra said quietly. “She can’t get out without us knowing. The most she can do is walk through the kitchen to the other part of the cabin and get back into bed without you. If she opens one of the outer doors or windows, the alarm will go off.”
So that’s what Dante and Sasha had been doing while they’d been debriefing Rebecca. “I’m sure she’s thrilled that she’s locked in.”
“Well, it appears she’s accepted that she’s staying. I’m glad she understands about Green and what he’ll do to her.” Ezra sat back and rubbed his thumb between his brows as though trying to stave off a headache. “He used us to do his dirty work. If we’d gotten that package, he would have found a way to take it, maybe even used the authorities. I’m a burned CIA agent and most of the crew are known and wanted criminals. He can fuck with us and no one will give a damn.”
“Then why change up the game? Why not let us get it and…” It came to him. “He found out someone was setting her up and he’s using it. He walked into a situation that was already going on and used it to his advantage. Someone was setting up Becca for a big fall. Do you think Green is working with MSS?”
He wouldn’t put it past the bastard to work with Chinese intelligence if it furthered his own agenda.
“Or MSS was already in place and he used that, too,” Ezra replied. “The fucker was always good at finding an advantage. I think this all fell into his lap and he shifted strategies. So we’re going to do the same thing. We can’t find that data. All right, we’ll take the brilliant neurologist, pair her with Walt, who can learn almost anything in rapid-fire time, and see what we come up with. While they’re working, we’ll keep searching for what we need.”
They would keep looking for a hint that anyone else had the drug and if they did, they would try to put a stop to it. They would look for leverage, for a way to save his brothers and get them any kind of normal life.
He would be away from her. He would have to work to get her back to her life, to a life that couldn’t include him.
Ezra looked up, his expression grim. “Owen, it’s obvious you want her. Maybe I was wrong about sending you with the others. Talk to her. You don’t have to be here. You don’t have to go with us. If you want, you can stay in London and try to find some normalcy.”
But he was the only one of them without a global warrant out for his arrest. He was the only one who could show his face in certain places. “She doesn’t want me. I’m needed here. I’ve spent the entire time I can remember trying to figure out my place in all of this, but now I know I’m supposed to be with this team. I’m supposed to make sure this group of men can live a life since I had a hand in taking their old one from them.”
“Guilt will eat you up if you let it,” Ezra said. “All that stuff you said about Tucker, you know it applies to you, too. You’re not the same man.”
“But he’s still there, deep down. That selfish bastard still lives inside me. Do you know there was a part of me that was happy when we found out she can’t go back?”
Ezra nodded as if he understood completely. “Because you want her in our world, and now none of us has a choice. I get that, but it’s not like you manipulated things to get her here. Would you have done that?”
He wouldn’t have taken her work from her. “No. Never. She’s worked too hard to do that to her.”
“Then you’re merely adapting like the rest of us.” Ezra sat back with a heavy sigh. “Do you know what my first thought was when I realized my ex-wife was working this case?”
“Was it something violent?”
“Maybe. She likes a bite of pain,” he said, the words almost too quiet to hear. “I thought thank god it doesn’t have to be over. How stupid is that? She was there to work against me and deep down I was okay with that because it meant I would see her again. I’m a stupid fucker. She cheated on me.”
He and Ezra had different definitions of that word. “I thought you weren’t married at the time.”
Ezra was quiet for a moment. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve always been married to her and yet I know there was a time before Solo. Kim. I call her Solo because it’s far easier to deal with the operative than the woman underneath. I wish I could separate them sometimes.”
“I think she still loves you, if that’s any comfort.”
“Sometimes love isn’t enough.”
And it wouldn’t be for him either. “Becca doesn’t know me. She knows who I’ve shown her. She fell for a lie.”
“Was it?” Ezra asked. “You didn’t step into that elevator with plans to seduce her, did you?”
“No.” But it hadn’t taken him long.
“It would have been simpler for you to have introduced yourself the way you were supposed to. You know we had an argument about why you changed up the plan. Some of the guys thought you might have done it because Big Tag took you off lead.”
“I didn’t.” He wasn’t surprised they thought that way though.
“Tucker bought the whole line about how you realized she needed to be played differently,” Ezra pointed out.
“I told you what happened. I wasn’t lying.”
Ezra chuckled and sounded a bit amused. “Oh, you were lying, but mostly to yourself. A couple of us knew why you’d done it. Me and Robert and Jax. We knew it had been about her. You see we all know what it’s like to meet a woman and know. We might not have known exactly what we knew, but it was there deep down. Like a memory of something beautiful, a hint of some life we used to lead. You saw her and something clicked into place.”
And he hadn’t been able to say the words he should have. He hadn’t been able to lie about his attraction to her. He hadn’t been able to stop himself from kissing her. “I love her, Ezra.”
“Yeah, I got that.” The boss gave him a sad sort of smile. “It’s okay. Stay with her. Stop punishing yourself. It’s time to let that go.”
“And how will she feel when she finds out who I was?” It was his greatest fear, that she would learn what he’d done and turn away in disgust.
“When she finds out you were so desperate to save your mom and sister that you made a poor choice? Somehow I think she’ll forgive you for that. Everyone else has. Even Erin. Oh, that woman won’t ever let you know it, but she disagreed with Big Tag about pulling you from the lead. And Big Tag didn’t pull you because he was still angry with you. He pulled you because you stay in the shadows and show no ambition to move out of them. He pulled you because you let your guilt rule your life, and that means you’re likely to do something stupid like sacrifice yourself at the earliest opportunity.”