Chapter Sixty-Eight

Safiya

H e took the deepest inhale I had ever heard him take when he was not lost to sleep, and I knew he was about to speak—same as I knew that whatever he was about to say, I did not want to hear.

I was not finished. "I am not finished."

"Understood."

Did he? "I do not think you do."

"Then explain it."

"You bathe me, then you refuse me. You say you are not hiding from me, then you walk me into a room full of stolen women. You make me feel as if I am straddling a chasm. Like you are both a soothing breeze and the center of the storm. Sometimes you are fluttering leaves with a tender caress. Other times, you crush my soul with hurricane-force winds. It is like I am simultaneously nothing and everything. You sometimes look at me as if I could capture your very next heartbeat and hold it in my hands. Then in the next breath, you look through me as if I am nothing more than a whisper of air. You come. You go. You give orders, but you never give yourself."

For a mere hint of a second, his muscles tightened as if he could not hold back the reaction before he forced his body into tensionless submission. "I've never lied to you about what we are, Safiya."

"Your arms, your thighs, all your muscles surrounding me, they constricted at my comment. Do you think I did not feel that? Do you think your words that followed were not a lie?" They were. "You do not share one single personal thought, but you expect all of mine."

Careful, controlled, he breathed in and he breathed out.

His heart beat against my back.

His breath fanned across my hair.

The sun fell on our shoulders.

Then he spoke. "I chose the Navy. Eighteen years ago, I walked into an NRS."

"NRS?" I had not wanted to interrupt him, but I also did not want to miss any nuance of what he was going to say.

"Navy Recruiting Station. I enlisted. Making the decision to join the military, knowing I was giving away some freedoms, gaining others—that was a choice I made, willingly. I was proud to serve. I would've died for my brothers, for my country." Tension stiffened his body, and the tone of his voice became lower and more lethally quiet than I had ever heard it. "But I didn't sign up to be a test subject for one of the CIA's newly minted profilers with zero field experience and everything to prove."

"I do not understand."

"The CIA recruited a female officer from the Army, trained her to be a profiler, then set her loose. Her assignment was to sift through Tier Ones and profile candidates for a new Black Ops unit. Then read in, recruit, train and unleash us on international terrorist threats—specifically ones that our government and Military didn't want any direct action reports on that tied back to them. I was her first choice. Except I wasn't recruited or read in. Sending me on a mission designed to fail as some sort of fucked- up initiation test, the profiler not only sabotaged my infil and exfil, she leaked my identity and location to insurgents."

"That was how you wound up in Turkey alone." I had never fully understood why he had been in my village, but I had never asked either. I had always assumed he had been separated from his unit. My mother had told me about the war to the east. We had heard rumors of American soldiers being close by.

"Yes."

"You survived, but you were angry." I thought I was beginning to understand.

"Anger would've been an appropriate response if it had ended there." Without warning, he stood, taking me with him. Cradling me against his bare chest, his skin warm from the sun, his jeans soaked and hanging low, his natural musk mixed with the saltwater scent of the pool. Looking down at me, he gave me his fathomless blue-eyed gaze. "Do you trust me?"

"With my life." He had come for me. Twice. It did not get any more profound or simple than that.

"And your body?"

As if I had been struck by lightning, shock rippled through every cell of my being. Then chill bumps followed, and it was a chain reaction. The swarming heat low in my belly, the suddenly frantic beat of my heart, the feathering vines of awareness tangling as they surged against my nerves—all of it pulsed into that storm of everything and nothing. How did I tell him it was not my body I was worried about when it was betraying me worse than my heart?

Standing perfectly still as he held me, the defined muscles of his shoulders and arms looking as if they were cut from granite, he stared down at me with the regal poise and perfection of a Grecian statue. "No answer is an answer, Safiya."

How come he had never called me by anything other than my name? "You had terms of endearment for all of the others, but not for me."

His expression did not change, but the shift was seismic. The same wall he put up every time he left fell into place as he carried me to the outdoor shower.

Silently, stoically, he set me on my feet, then turned on the water before he grabbed the soap I kept out here. Lathering the guava-and-jasmine bar between his large hands, he dropped to one knee.

Belatedly registering his intention and the wound that still looked angry and fresh on his left side, I stepped back. "What are you doing?"

Looking up and locking me in his gaze, he moved with calculated slowness as he grasped the back of my thigh and gently urged me toward him, but he did not speak.

My legs trembling, I took the step, but then my nerves double-crossed me. "You did not answer."

"I'm washing you, Safiya." My name spilling from his lips like a balm and a taunt, the first stroke of his hand was a leveraged caress up my shin and around my leg until his fingers grazed the sensitive skin behind my knee.

I bit back a gasp.

His palm coasted down my calf. "Do you not trust me with your body because I refused you on the Solace?"

My toes pointed, my heel lifted off the sun-warmed stone, and my mind told my body to push into his touch. I had to fight to concentrate. "I already told you how I felt." Saying anything more now with his hands on me, with the cool water sprinkling down my back, it would feel too much like the tide had irrevocably shifted in his direction.

"You said you trusted me with your life." His hands continued up my thigh. His eyes met mine. "That doesn't answer my question."

"I said more than that, and you are injured and kneeling at my feet, tending to me when I should be tending to you. I do not know what else you want me to say." Maybe I did. "My life is worth more than my body." I could not trust him with the former and not the latter. Could I?

"I'm fine, and you will never tend to me. That's not how this dynamic works." With a firm touch, he ran his strong hands back down my leg before he moved to my right ankle. "We'll need to have a conversation about that, but not until you're able to speak openly with me." He massaged up my calf.

I shifted my weight, and same as I had with my left leg, I pointed my toes on my right foot and lifted my heel. "You have stitches in your side. That is not fine, and I am speaking openly."

He caressed the arch of my foot and rubbed soap into my skin. Then he ran his hands up both my legs, rose to his full height, and called my bluff.

"You were suffering shock and trauma before I walked you into that break room. Then you saw the other women, you saw me with them, and it hurt you. I hurt you. So much so that you left the room. Then you walked away from me on the roof. You left AES, and you didn't answer my texts." His arms at his sides, lethally still as the shower rained down on us, he did not touch me. "You're angry with me, Safiya. Understandably so. I've traumatized you enough for two lifetimes." His intense gaze darkened like an incoming storm. "Which is why I need you to hear me now."