“We’ll talk in the morning.” Her voice was thicker. She was so close to crying it was humiliating. In that moment she hated the emotions that raged through her. She wished she could be hard, cold, that she could feel only that twinge of regret that she didn’t have the emotional capacity to care for anyone outside friendship as he did.
She watched as his head turned, his jaw tightened. Then he gave a brief, hard nod before striding to the door.
“We will discuss this in the morning,” he informed her, then opened the door and left the suite.
And then the tears fell.
The sob that tore from her shocked her. She’d been certain she could hold it in. Her knees weakened to the point that she nearly fell to the floor as her hands pressed tight and hard into the clenching muscles of her stomach.
The emotional pain hurt worse than a bullet.
She could feel the ragged, gaping hole in her chest where her heart had once been, and the agony of it was a horrible realization. She felt as though she were dying inside. As though a part of her soul were being ripped away from her.
She hadn’t thought it would hurt this bad.
She hadn’t imagined it would be this hard to face.
Returning to the bedroom, she quickly dressed in jeans, T-shirt, boots. A leather jacket was thrown over the duffel bag she had packed in the closet. A smaller backpack sat next to it.
The moving team had the address and instructions for handling her belongings. They would be stored for the time being, because she had no place to go.
All she knew was that there was no way she could face Jordan when morning came. That the ragged pain in her chest would only turn to anger, and she didn’t want the love to turn to hatred.
There was nothing left to do but to leave before she was forced to face him again. Before she could push him again, before she could plead with him to love her, beg him to tell her why he didn’t.
Before she broke down completely and a lifetime of pain and grief overwhelmed her.
How silly of her to believe he could love her when no one else ever had.
* * *
Jordan knew Tehya was gone the second he entered her suite. There was such a sense of emptiness, of abandonment, that it was unmistakable. The effect it had on him was undeniable.
She was gone.
His chest tightened with a ragged pain that had his teeth clenching, his fingers fisting. The need to hit something tore through him, nearly overwhelming his self-control.
A violent, bitter curse escaped his lips before he could cut off the sound.
Breathing out a weary sigh, he shoved his hands in his pockets and moved through the large set of rooms anyway. Just to be certain.
If she had taken anything with her, it wasn’t much. Perhaps a few changes of clothes, he thought as he checked the closet, only to see stacked boxes within them marked “Clothes.” He found the same thing throughout the rest of the suite. Boxes neatly packed, closed and taped. Tehya’s life reduced to less than a quarter of the capacity of the moving van arriving to relocate her.
He found himself swallowing tightly, his throat oddly blocked at the realization of how little Tehya had amassed over the years. Unlike the other agents, she had no secondary home, no family to go back to, no other house in which to store her belongings. She’d had nothing but the Elite Ops.
And now, she had no one.
A hard grimace contorted his face before he could control it, a result of the hard ache that clenched his chest. Fuck, he missed her already. Her laughter, her shy smiles, her almost innocent sensuality and affection for him.
He should have never taken her. Or perhaps, after taking her he should have taken her again, and again. until she was too tired to run
Turning, he strode from the suite and headed for the garage area, wondering which vehicle she had taken.
Standing in front of the empty slot where his favorite had sat, he almost grinned. She had chosen the black Viper over the many more expensive performance vehicles available. His favorite. The one he had driven more often and had claimed over the years.
Had she taken the Viper because it was the only part of him she could leave with?
She had taken much more with her than she guessed. Already he could feel the empty ache, the dark, brutal core of unrequited need throbbing in his soul.