Hard to Hold Read online

  “You’re not ready. It’s okay.”

  Again, she closed her eyes, let her hands drop to her sides.

  “I’m bringing you up to bed. You need to rest,” he murmured.

  “No.”

  “No? You want to sleep standing in the hallway?”

  She shook her head and took hold of a strong forearm and led him back inside his own bedroom. “This way, you can run away from me in the middle of the night and I’ll still be close to you.”

  She’d wanted the same thing the night of the rescue, had cried in protest when Jake had moved away after he’d carried her to the car and gently placed her in the backseat. She remembered stretching out to hold him as the car bumped, feeling his eyes on her in the darkness.

  Now he laid her on the bed, and just like the first night she’d spent here, she first inhaled his scent on the sheets and then tugged at him to move closer. As she stroked his back, her fingers noted raised scar tissue through the thin cotton of his T-shirt in several places. He watched her carefully as she did so, let her hands trail lower and didn’t jerk away. He just held a steady gaze until she wished she could bear his full weight on hers without panicking.

  Soon, it would happen. Her body knew it—her mind was bucking at the thought.

  Isabelle rolled so she was on top of him, his hard length pressing between her thighs, against her still-throbbing sex. Her hands were under his shirt, running up his sides, mindful of the stitches.

  “Jake, I want this off.” She tugged at his shirt.

  “I want this off,” he echoed as he did the same with hers. Within seconds she skimmed hers over her head and he did the same. She lay back on top of him, skin on skin, her cheek to his chest.

  “This is nice,” she whispered as his hands stroked her back lightly, then began to knead some of the still unreleased tension out of her shoulders. “Can we sleep just like this?”

  “You can sleep here, but you’ve got to cut me a break,” he said, shifted underneath her. “I’ll never make it, sleeping like this.”

  She lifted her head to look at him.

  “It’s just that … I mean, I can wait, but I haven’t … since Africa.”

  She finally understood what he was saying. “Oh.” She actually smiled as she rolled off him. Curled on her side, she pulled him closer, and that he could handle without needing a freezing cold shower. Yet.

  One arm remained under her head. With the other, she ran a finger along his healing scar, along the stiff black stitches she’d used.

  “Did you have a tough day at work … or were you just pissed at me?” he asked finally.

  “A little of both,” she admitted. “I’m still getting these weird phone calls. Not even hang-ups, really—it’s like the person keeps calling to hear my voice. It creeps me out.”

  “How long has this been happening?”

  “Ever since I started.” She shrugged. “I try not to dwell on it … I don’t need to be any more freaked out than I already am.”

  He made a mental note to check incoming numbers for her line, forced himself not to jump up and do it now. He’d promised himself one more night with her like this—just a few more hours before he spilled everything. They both deserved that.

  “I also cleared a sailor today for BUD/S. He’d been pulled at the end of Hell Week for a medical leave—stress fractures in his shin.”

  “He’ll roll back in with a different class—and he won’t have to repeat Hell Week.”

  “Well, that’s good, at least, right?”

  “It just gets harder from there.”

  “You might not want to admit that you find anything hard to the young men who seem to think you guys are made of steel,” she teased.

  Jake snorted. “Half those stories are made up to get the guys through all of it. It’s not that big a deal.”

  “Is anything a big deal to you?”

  “Yeah, there is something that’s a pretty big deal to me.” He played with her hair—it had fallen across his bare chest like a fan, tickling him.

  BUD/S was something he didn’t revisit willingly, although truth be told he didn’t remember a whole hell of a lot of it.

  When the JAG lawyers who’d questioned him told him that he’d been tied up for over twenty-four hours, he’d argued with them about the timing. He’d also refused to say anything against Master Chief Johnson, known none-too-affectionately by his men as Chief Blood. The man was old school, long since retired from combat having been deemed too tough for this new man’s Navy—mostly the chief was doing what was best for the men. The part of him that had wanted to break Jake went way back to Jake’s early days of Hell Week, when Blood had argued with Captain Lopez about his place in the class.

  Isabelle’s gaze held his. “Would you tell me about it …if I asked?”

  “Are you asking?”

  She nodded, but there was hesitance there. Better BUD/S than about his stepfather, he guessed, although it was all going to come out eventually.

  In a couple of hours, it would be the anniversary of the day it happened, the night he’d killed Steve in self-defense, and he’d been shoving that into the back of his mind. Some years, it could send him into a mild tailspin … others, when he was away on a mission, it was barely a blip on his radar. But here, with Isabelle, it threatened to hit him harder than ever. And that was something he couldn’t afford to let happen.

  He shifted against her, unable to hide how much she turned him on, and Christ, he’d wanted to take her against the wall earlier, drive into her until she completely lost control. But talking about SERE would be a definite buzzkill.

  “SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. It’s meant to show you what can happen if you’re captured. What it really does is instill into you the importance of never being captured.” He checked her expression. “You sure you want to hear about this?”

  “Don’t stop now,” she said, and he resisted the urge to call her stubborn.

  “Doesn’t matter how physically tough you are. A lot of guys ring out that first day without even realizing they’re doing it. They break. It’s easy enough to see how it happens. You’re hurt, you’re tired and you’re scared shitless. But if you can stay in the game mentally, you’ll make it through.”

  He’d never been big on authority figures. Chief Blood knew that and rode Jake hard. But no matter what Blood did to him, no matter how much he pushed, Jake didn’t break. He was so accustomed to punishment that the torture didn’t faze him. But Blood had wanted Jake to show something, some emotion, wasn’t going to be happy unless he saw a tear in the fabric. And Jake just couldn’t give him the satisfaction. It wasn’t in him to break down—he wasn’t doing it to drive Blood nuts, but the chief didn’t see it like that.

  Jake took a deep breath as Isabelle looked at him with rapt attention. “My team was captured after twelve hours. We’d managed to E&E—evade and escape—for a damned long time on that island. Nearly impossible to do. But it’s all a big trap, and after a while it’s better to just get it over with.”

  Usually it was the team leader who got the worst of it. But the instructors decided to use him to break apart the team. He was really well liked, well respected by his BUD/S mates, especially after the rumors about how old he really was began to surface.

  “The instructors are torturing our team, trying to get us to spill our intel. And nobody’s giving in. So the instructors tried the box first.”

  “The box?” Isabelle asked.

  “It’s sensory dep stuff. Usually it’s built mostly underground, pretty tight space. You crush up into it and they leave you there for extended periods of time,” he explained.

  “For how long?”

  “After a while it doesn’t matter.”

  She nodded, chewed her bottom lip, because she got that.

  “After twenty-four hours it was obvious that they weren’t getting anywhere. We’d started singing to keep ourselves sane.”

  The singing had driven the i
nstructors crazy, but had distracted his team from the physical pain. It also covered up the screams coming from the interrogation huts.

  “After the box didn’t work, they tried a little drowning torture.” Then they’d beat him for a while in front of the other men. Jake told the other team members he’d personally take them down himself if they let themselves get suckered. And when the instructors realized that nothing was going to work, Chief Blood decided to show his sadistic side.

  “Master Chief decided that humiliation was the best tack to take with me,” he said finally. “They stripped me, strapped me facedown to a table and they threatened to rape me for the next twelve hours. And that was in front of two entire platoons, SEALs and instructors.”

  Isabelle sucked in a hard breath—Jake heard it clearly and realized his fists were clenched into tight balls and that he hadn’t taken a full breath in a while.

  “What … I mean, what did you do?” Isabelle asked softly.

  “I did nothing.” The boy-toy routine had been done before. It always worked. Always. A two-hundred-pound man could be reduced to tears by that threat alone. “I think if I’d broken, they would have let me go sooner. But I didn’t.” He hadn’t screamed, yelled or cursed, had just disappeared into himself. And he’d stayed like that the entire time.

  At first, Jake thought the JAG lawyers who’d come down to talk to him after the incident had their facts wrong. He would’ve remembered twelve hours of that crap … would’ve remembered every detail in living color. But even now, it was like it happened to someone else. The rescue with Isabelle might’ve been the first time he’d actually felt something on a mission—either in training or real life.

  He still hadn’t figured out if that was good or bad.

  “When they saw they were getting nowhere, they had no choice but to pass both platoons. And they let the men out before they let me up, just one final dig.” His swim buddy, Trey, got to him first, untied him, helped him stand.

  When Chief Blood had approached, Jake had snapped to attention.

  “Had enough, Hansen?” Chief Blood was shorter than Jake, twice as broad and his fists were meat hooks that had pounded into him mercilessly over seventy-two long hours before Jake had gone into his semi-fugue state.

  After a long minute, Jake saluted. “I’ll take whatever you’ve got, Master Chief, sir. Thank you for making me a stronger SEAL, sir.”

  “It’s brutal,” Isabelle sputtered. “It’s inhumane. How could they?”

  Jake ran a hand across her lower back reassuringly, letting her know that he was all right—whatever the hell that meant. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. If they didn’t do that, we’d never become the men they need us to be.”

  “No one should ever be held against their will,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, I signed up for that. You didn’t.” God, he was such a fucking hypocrite. That was going to end now, the way it should have before things had gotten out of control in the hallway.

  “Did you tell me that story to let me know that I might never break through to you?” she asked finally.

  He stared into her serious eyes, green flecked with gold and brown, eyes that watched him with nearly the same expression they had that first night in Africa. “I told you so you’d know that you already have.”

  He watched her eyes mist and wondered if there was some other way around telling her, some other plan he could come up with beyond Let’s run away somewhere together and never look back, and yeah, that wasn’t going to go over well.

  No, he couldn’t lie to someone he was in lo—Fuck. He sat up quickly, pulled his knees into his chest.

  “Jake, what’s wrong?”

  “There’s something else I’ve got to tell you,” he heard himself say.

  She watched him carefully—she thought he was going to tell her about Steve now, about that night, and if that was all it took to make things right, he would. But there was so much more that needed to happen first, and she was already here—in his bed, in his life and more than partway into his heart.

  Dammit.

  “I’m listening.” She’d propped her chin in her hands, elbows in the mattress, legs crossed behind her and in the air and he almost told her about Steve instead.

  Almost.

  Minutes after she’d left his room, he’d taken Clutch’s call. And then he’d gone to find her—to tell her that Rafe had been on U.S. soil two times during the past two months, that he was headed to the airport … that he could be headed anywhere right now but most likely in her direction. But when he’d seen her, half-panicked in the small hallway, he knew it wasn’t the time.

  It was time now.

  “They never caught the guy who hurt you, Isabelle.” He couldn’t bring himself to say Rafe’s name out loud.

  She stared at him in disbelief. “That’s not true. Uncle Cal, my mother … they swore that the FBI caught Rafe.”

  “They told you what they thought you needed to hear at the time.” He could barely get the words out. “I couldn’t keep it from you anymore. I couldn’t do this without you knowing the truth. About everything. About what I’m supposed to be doing for you.”

  That made her mouth drop. She stood hastily, backed away from the bed. “What exactly are you supposed to be doing for me?”

  “I’m supposed to be making sure you’re safe.”

  “Safe? Safe? I don’t know if it’s possible for me to ever feel safe again.”

  “I know.” He watched her carefully—her breathing was rapid, her eyes were slightly unfocused and she was either going to have a panic attack or she was going to lash out.

  “You know? What the hell do you know? What it’s like to have lived a lie for the past two months?” She put her hands to her throat briefly, then crossed her arms over her bare breasts. “I feel like such a fool.”

  “Isabelle, your mom, the admiral—they wanted you to feel safe.”

  “And you went along with it? You let them trick me?” She choked back a sob. “This—this whole I know you don’t want to be alone, let me heal you has all been one big ruse … to what? To protect me without me realizing it?”

  “No, it’s not like that.”

  “Then tell me what it’s like! Because nothing that happened between us over the past few days has been real. I’m a job.” She grabbed the night table for support.

  He moved to help her, but she yelled, “No,” held up a hand to block him from touching her.

  “It was all a lie, wasn’t it? Starting with the rescue. Then and now, you were just doing your job.”

  “No. It was more than that. It is more than that.”

  “I can’t believe anything you tell me right now. I’ve got to get out of here—I need to see my uncle.”

  “We can call him, but you can’t leave.”

  “There is no we, Jake. And I can do whatever I damn well please.”

  He took a step forward to stop her, but she shrank away from his touch and something inside him nearly curled up and fucking died. He took a step back and she ran downstairs. He was down the stairs in seconds, stopping her by the door, not letting himself care that she’d resisted his touch.

  It took nearly everything he had in him to not let her go as she struggled in his grasp.

  “Isabelle, listen to me.”

  “Let me go! I want to get out of here!” she was yelling, hitting him with her fists.

  “You can’t go. Not now. Especially not now.”

  “You knew,” she said. “You knew and you let me … Oh, God.”

  He felt the fight drain out of her suddenly and he let go of her.

  She covered her mouth with her hands, then dropped them at her sides. “I was never safe.” She spoke softly, to herself, and as the realization hit, she stumbled back a bit.

  “You were always safe with me,” he told her fiercely, his voice barely above a raw whisper. “You still are.”

  Clutch swung the car around the back of the tarmac and Sarah was out the do
or as he hit the brake hard.

  He grabbed her arm before she got very far, pulled her into him with the firm gentleness she’d come to expect. “You can’t do this.”

  But she was bent on taking her revenge—he saw that now. She didn’t want to be taken for a fool by Rafe, had to get her pride back, had to make things right. He got that, but still, he wasn’t going to let her do more damage to herself.

  “Killing Rafe isn’t going to help. I don’t want that on your head—you have to let me take care of this, Sarah. You have to trust me to do it.”

  “You’ll be careful?”

  “I’ve been up against worse than him.”

  “Did they follow us?” she asked.

  “GOST is always following me. I can’t worry about that now. Just stay in the car, keep your weapon ready and—”

  “Don’t tell me to leave if there’s trouble. I won’t leave without you.”

  She climbed back into the car, turned in the seat so she could watch him disappear into the shadows beyond the hangar where he’d parked them and she waited.

  The tension was unbearable, the heat equally so even with the window rolled halfway down. She had to keep wiping her hands on her pants so the gun wouldn’t slip from her grasp when she needed it.

  Clutch’s phone rang frantically, the third time in under five minutes and he was still nowhere to be seen. Tentatively, she flipped it open and held it to her ear.

  “Bobby Juniper, we wanted you back. You didn’t come back. Now we’re going to have to kill you.”

  Her body chilled and she closed and dropped the phone into the seat next to her before she let out a muffled gasp.

  It began to ring again, almost immediately at the same time she saw, in the side-view mirror, Clutch heading back toward the car.

  She saw the other man seconds later.

  He was coming up behind Clutch fast. Sarah had never seen him before, but she was sure he was some kind of former military, could tell by the predatory way he moved.

  The Masuka had been spoken of in more hushed tones by the Africans than they’d ever spoken of Rafe. And the man she loved had been one of them. And very well could become one of them again.