She was frowning over something Toby had said.
She hadn’t braided her hair this morning. She hadn’t worked on one of the cars this morning. She’d worked in the office, done the filing, made Toby crazy as she butted in and did his job.
“I don’t appear to be busy,” he drawled, twirled the wrench and stared at the waves of dark hair framing Sabella’s face as she turned her frown to the papers on the desk.
“How did you screw up?” Nik asked then.
The wrench paused then moved deliberately through his fingers.
“Who says I screwed up?”
His wife had said it. His wife, and she’d thrown him out of his truck. Even worse, she’d thrown him out of their bed. Threatened to call the sheriff if he didn’t leave. Son of a bitch, could anybody be more tangled than he was right now?
She was right. He was slime. A bastard. A no-commitment son of a bitch who didn’t deserve to be anywhere close to her.
He threw the wrench in the toolbox at his side, hearing the clank and clatter as he jerked a greasy rag from the fender and wiped his hands quickly.
“What kind of help do you need?”
Nik scratched his jaw and looked at where Noah had thrown the wrench.
“I need to go see a friend,” Nik stated, the code smooth, rueful.
A meeting had obviously been called at the bunker.
“Hell!” Noah plowed his fingers through his hair and grimaced.
He’d have to tag Rory, put him with Sabella. After the attempt on Toby, Noah was terrified to leave her alone.
“Sorry, dude. You promised.” Nik slapped him on the shoulder. “But you know, it’s not like you can’t have your cake and eat it too. She’s a fine woman. She’d make any man an even finer wife. I’d consider that if I were you. Walk away, and someone else will step in eventually. Is that what you want?”
Noah felt his lip twitch as fury began to burn inside him. He shot the big Russian a hard look and only got a cold smile in return.
Yeah. He’d promised. It had been his fucking hand that signed the papers, giving his soul to the Elite Ops rather than returning to his wife. He’d been warned then, he could never return to his old life. There was no resignation, there was no opting out unless he was dead.
And there was no revealing who and what he was, but there was no clause that hadn’t said Noah Blake couldn’t marry or fall in love. But could he keep his Bella and remain here, in his hometown, and maintain the illusion of who he was forever?
The Elite Ops wasn’t a prison, but the consequences of breaking contract weren’t pretty. Gitmo wasn’t a place Noah wanted to be. If he revealed who he w
as, what he was, and it was learned, he could be shipped out as an enemy combatant and never be seen again.
The question was, could he remain with Sabella and never tell her he was the husband she had lost? Could he live with hating one part of himself because his wife still longed for something she thought could never return?
The jealousy was like an acrid burn in his soul, and despite his determination to keep her, Noah wondered how long he could actually stay and have that life with her while maintaining his secrets.
The wife who wasn’t a damn thing like the pretty little thing he’d left six years ago. The Sabella who had stared back at him, dry-eyed and furious, two nights before was nothing like the tender, softhearted young woman he had left when he went on that last, fateful mission.
The woman he remembered shedding tears when she saw new wounds on his body after a mission. He’d seen the horror in her eyes over a shallow knife cut. He’d seen the nightmares in her eyes when he returned, exhausted, from six to eight weeks, sometimes longer, deployed into areas he could barely pronounce the name of.
The Sabella he had known would have broken at the sight of his face, destroyed from so many beatings. His back, chest, and thighs lashed to ribbons from a whip. Starved down and so desperate to fuck he was like an animal.
He’d been like an animal for three years. Jacking off until his dick felt raw, and on the retraining missions, he’d been the demon of death. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t pull punches. He didn’t give anyone the chance to strike at him, capture him.
He’d thought his life with Sabella was over. The woman he had thought he had known couldn’t accept the man he had become.
And he’d learned he’d never known the woman he had loved. Not all the way to the bone. He’d only known what he’d wanted to see. The helpless little blonde Southern baby. Sexy and vulnerable. And so young.
It was what he had wanted to see, because seeing the strength in the core of her would have given him a clue into the future, into a woman who would have stood by him no matter how broken he had been. And his damned pride, that was it, his pride, hadn’t been able to consider the thought of Sabella ever seeing him as less than what he wanted to be in her eyes.