Damn, she’d never seen him this pissed off at anyone, especially her so quickly. He was, but for that one night, always calm, cool, and fairly unemotional when dealing with her. No matter what she had done to prick at that wall of self-control he possessed.
“Maybe I just learned that one on my own.” Giving him a tight smile she turned on her heel and headed back to her bedroom. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to shower and go to bed. Just because it’s a weekend doesn’t mean I don’t have things to do tomorrow.”
Jordan watched as she stalked through the bedroom door, her head held high, those damned curls making his fingers tighten with the need to sink into them and hold her in place for a kiss that would rock them both to the soles of their feet. A kiss that would ensure she was too weak to fight him.
Son of a bitch.
His fingers plowed through his hair before he jerked his satellite phone from the holster at his hip and keyed in Killian’s number.
“I assume you found her,” Killian answered on the first ring. “The protocol on her phone has been disengaged. How did you know it was there?”
Jordan felt his jaw tighten to the point that he wondered if it would crack. Had Killian been standing before him, he might well have killed the fucker. “I didn’t, Killian. I tried to call her to give her advance warning of the danger that was already stalking her, only to learn she wasn’t getting my calls.”
How Killian could have done something so insane Jordan couldn’t imagine. He knew that Killian, possibly more so than anyone else, should have known better than to leave her so vulnerable.
“They’re already there? They moved faster than you expected then,” Killian mused as though he hadn’t heard even a hint of the anger in Jordan’s tone.
“Why did you fuck with her phone?” Even he heard the animalistic growl in his tone now, the unmistakable fury.
All he could see was Tehya lying in a pool of her own blood, destroyed before he could get to her because he’d had no way of warning her of what was coming.
And that was Killian’s fault. The bastard had dared to mess with her only means of communication with the team. Her only way of contacting him if she was in trouble.
Killian didn’t answer for long moments. “She’s a risk, Jordan,” he finally explained, his tone reserved, as though he were carefully choosing each word. “I was merely keeping tabs on her.”
Keeping tabs on her? He’d been spying on her calls, tracking her movements, blocking her ability to receive a call from her former unit operatives.
“And when I called requesting your help to protect her, you didn’t inform me of this, why?” It was all he could do to keep his tone low, the ice from disintegrating into full, fiery fury.
“I saw no reason to tell you,” Killian answered bluntly. “I was only tracking her, nothing more.”
“The team’s numbers were disengaged and blocked from receipt,” he snapped back. “She couldn’t have received our warning of the danger if her life depended it, and it just may well have.”
“That was unintended,” Killian answered carefully. “I didn’t deliberately change those features. Sometimes, the secured numbers already programmed in become disengaged for receipt after the tracking protocols are set. She could have called you, though, as you well know. I didn’t set those protocols and the default doesn’t disengage the ability to call out to any
of the programmed numbers. It does however sometimes block the incoming features as well as track them.”
He hadn’t thought Killian could be so fucking cold, so merciless. Jordan prided himself on being able to anticipate the moves of every man he worked with. It was one of his strengths as a commander, and one that had saved his and his men’s asses more than once.
He could count on one hand the number of times he had been wrong about an agent he had worked with and each time that failure had resulted in someone’s death.
Had his inability to anticipate Killian’s actions gotten Tehya killed, then Jordan knew he couldn’t have borne the guilt. Or his fury. He would have killed Killian. Hell he was ready to fly back to Texas now just to take his rage out on the other man. He hadn’t lost such control of his emotions since he was a fucking teenager.
He had known Killian didn’t trust Tehya, but he hadn’t expected him to have actively moved to do something so drastic as to have placed a tracking and security protocol on her phone. For nine months Killian had known where she was every minute of the day. He had listened in on her conversations, possibly known every detail of her life, and it was information he hadn’t volunteered to Jordan when she became endangered.
“When this is cleared up, and I have a minute to beat the fuck out of you, then I’ll be back to base,” Jordan said, the violence swirling just beneath the surface leaking into his voice.
It was a promise, and one Jordan intended to stand by. Even better, Killian knew he would stand by it. Killian would be lucky if he could walk for a week.
“Your emotions are involved here,” the other man told him coolly, and Jordan listened, just for the sheer pleasure of allowing the man to dig his own grave deeper. “Once this is over, I trust you’ll see things more clearly.”
Jordan breathed in slowly. “If she had been taken, Killian, if she had been harmed … How long do you think she could have held out before she broke and revealed the Ops? Think about that. Think about the danger you placed not only my men in, but also your own.”
Not that Jordan doubted Tehya’s ability to withstand things that would break most men. Even her mother had had a spine of steel, one that had kept her from revealing her daughter’s whereabouts despite being drugged and beaten, and her feet burned to the bone, her fingers broken.
“Look, I agreed to let her into my unit, didn’t I?” Killian snapped. “I wasn’t trying to get her killed or captured. I was simply trying to keep tabs on her. Look at it this way, if she had been taken, finding her would have been a hell of a lot easier because of the security protocols on her phone.”
“Why did you agree to protect her in the first place, Killian?” Jordan asked, suspicion suddenly slamming through his brain. “What was your intent once she got to the base?”