Exposed (43 page)

Gage drank in the sight of her body, her lips, her skin. She’d gotten some sun recently. He remembered she’d been on a dig when they’d called her about Joe, but that was probably over by now and she was back to her job at the crime lab.

But what did he know? Maybe she’d been on her damn honeymoon.

“Uh, hello? Earth to Gage?”

He snapped his attention back to the woman beside him. Her friendly smile had dimmed.

Then he glanced over her shoulder at Kelsey, who was indeed still standing there, in the flesh, in the middle of O’Malley’s Pub. What was she doing here?

Kelsey spotted him and froze. She glanced at the woman beside him, and for an instant the startled look on her face made him feel good. He could tell she wanted to bolt, but instead she walked straight up to the bar and ordered a drink.

“Excuse me, would you?” Gage picked up his beer and walked over to Kelsey. She’d chosen a stool on the corner, which didn’t leave him a place to sit, so he rested his bottle on the counter and stood beside her.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” She avoided his gaze, but smiled at the bartender as he delivered her beer.

“What brings you to town?”

She glanced over her shoulder at the pool table, where Derek and Mike were finishing a game. Gage ignored their curious glances.

At last she looked up at him. “I came to visit my grandmother. We’re cleaning out Joe’s house.”

He’d figured as much. Joe had never married, and Kelsey was the closest thing he had to a kid. He’d helped raise her after her father died in a car wreck when she was young.

So now she was here to help go through his stuff, probably put his house on the market. It made sense. Gage hadn’t actually believed she’d flown all the way out from Texas just to see him.

She reached down and picked up her purse from the floor.

“I was hoping I’d run into you,” she said casually, unzipping the bag. “We came across something, and my grandmother thought you might want it.”

Her grandmother.

Kelsey handed him a white envelope. He hesitated a moment before taking it. Joe’s family had wanted him to have this, whatever it was. The very idea humbled him.

Gage opened the envelope and pulled out a photo that he recognized instantly. The picture was from Afghanistan. Half of his team stood on a mountaintop, lined up in full gear. They’d just flown out from Bagram for a six-month tour, most of which had been spent assaulting cave complexes. Just three years after the towers had fallen. They’d been full of energy and optimism, good and ready to kick some terrorist ass.

Gage studied the faces: Derek, Mike, Luke, a few others who’d left the teams. It was a snapshot in time, but he felt a surge of love for these guys who had had his back on so many different occasions. They’d taken bullets for one another. It was impossible to describe what that meant to anyone who hadn’t been there.

Gage couldn’t look at Joe’s face. He ran his thumb over the edge and focused on the rugged Afghan landscape. At times it was hell on earth. Other times it was beautiful.

He glanced up, and Kelsey was watching him with those bottomless brown eyes. He cleared his throat. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Gage unbuttoned the front pocket of his BDUs and tucked the envelope inside. He looked at Kelsey and felt a sharp stab of regret. After their breakup, she’d done a damn good job of keeping her distance. He didn’t really blame her. The breakup had been his choice, not hers. The last time she’d flown out to visit him, she’d told him she couldn’t handle the long distance anymore, the constant stress of his deployments. She’d given him an ultimatum—her or the teams. Torn between Kelsey and the SEALs, he’d done the only thing he could do—he’d chosen the SEALs. But it wasn’t the end of him wanting her. And it wasn’t the end of his bitterness. Even now—
especially
now, with her sitting there beside him—he still harbored a deep resentment toward Kelsey for making him choose between her and his job. And toward the man who’d come along in his absence and put a ring on her finger.

But along with his bitterness was something else, something he tried not to think about but couldn’t ignore with Kelsey sitting so close. Truth was, he missed her. He missed talking to her, hanging out with her. He missed that little
line she got on her forehead whenever he ticked her off. Hell, he even missed her freckles.

And, yes, he missed the sex. He itched to touch her right now and had to rest his hand on the bar to keep from running it through her hair.

“Is that why you came looking for me?” He held her gaze for a long moment, not sure what he wanted her to say. He knew what he wanted to say to
her
.

How could you get engaged to someone so soon after we broke up? Was it that easy to move on?

But he didn’t ask, because the answer was a resounding
yes
.

“Actually, there was something else, too.” She cut a glance at the pool table, and her businesslike voice told him the other reason wasn’t nearly as personal as he would have liked.

“Joe had some books and CDs in the office at his house.” She looked back at him, searching his face for something. “Apparently he was learning Tagalog. Was he headed to the Philippines?”

Gage didn’t say anything. He couldn’t talk about the when and where of what they did, and the fact that he couldn’t had been an ongoing source of friction between them. Kelsey had always accused him of being too closed off—not just about the job itself, but about how it affected him personally. Maybe so. But Gage had never been big on talking. Like most SEALs he knew, he was a doer, not a talker.

She sighed, obviously frustrated by his silence. “I was just on Basilan Island.”

“Why?” He frowned.

“We were excavating a mass grave there.”

Gage clenched his teeth at this news. Basilan Island was
home to some extremely dangerous people, and the military ops going on there were totally covert. Gage had been involved in a few, and he’d heard rumors. There was some serious shit happening in the Philippines right now, and he didn’t like the idea of Kelsey anywhere near there. He didn’t want her in the same hemisphere.

“Has the island become a haven for Al-Qaeda?” she asked, completely point-blank. Gage had often admired her straightforwardness, but it could be annoying, too.

“Was your team on its way there?” she persisted. “Is that why Joe wanted to learn the language?”

“That’s classified.”

Classified
. She hated that word, and Gage couldn’t count the number of arguments they’d had over it.

She shook her head and looked away. “I should have known I’d be wasting my time trying to talk to you.”

He bristled. “Hey, you came to me, babe. Don’t blame me for wasting your precious time. And what does it matter now, anyway?”

“It
matters
because I’m working on something that could be important.” She picked up her beer and took a sip. She looked flustered now, and he didn’t know whether it was because they were fighting again or because this was a touchy subject. She plunked the bottle down and looked up at him. “I was hoping you might give me a little information so I don’t make a fool of myself raising a stink about something that could be nothing.”

“I can’t talk about operations. You know that. You need information so bad, why don’t you ask Blake?”

Kelsey’s
fiancé
worked counterterrorism. And Gage could tell by the look on her face that she’d already asked him.

“What, 007 wouldn’t talk to you? So you decided to try
me? Maybe you thought I’d bend the rules just to do you a favor?” He leaned closer to her. “Sorry, babe, no can do. You want someone to bend the rules for you, go ask your boyfriend.”

She looked away and muttered something.

“What?”

“You know, I predicted you’d be this way.”

“That’s me. Mr. Predictable.”

“You know what’s really disappointing, Gage? I’d hoped we could be friends now.” She stood up and collected her purse. “After Joe and everything and all the crap that happened, I’d hoped we could at least have that.”

She pulled out her wallet and left some bills on the bar. Gage caught sight of her hand.

“Hey.” He grabbed her wrist as she turned to leave. “Where’s your ring?”

She jerked her hand back and glared up at him. “I left it at home.”

Kelsey moved for the door, and Gage’s shit luck continued as Callie picked that exact moment to slide onto the vacated stool. “Come on, Gage. We need you to come play.”

She rested a hand on his waist and gave him a coy smile. It was a smile that had worked on him before, and he could tell Kelsey knew that as she glanced back and then stalked out the door.

PHOTO BY ERIC VON LEHMDEN

New York Times
bestselling author Laura Griffin started her career in journalism before venturing into the world of romantic suspense. She is the author of eleven novels and has won numerous awards, including a RITA Award for
Whisper of Warning
. Laura lives in Austin, where she is working on her next book.

Find Laura on Facebook at
www.facebook.com/LauraGriffinAuthor
or visit
www.lauragriffin.com
.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.