Fatal Pursuit (The Aegis Series) (32 page)

He glanced around the kitchen as if looking for the right words, and Marley’s stomach tightened as she watched, unsure if she wanted to know more, curious at the same time about a woman who’d clearly meant more to him than any other he’d dated in all the time she’d known him.

“Independent,” he finally said. “She didn’t need a guy in her life, and she didn’t have room for one to mess up her career. And though we had this thing, she was stubborn when it came to what she decided.”

Like me,
Marley realized, suddenly seeing a parallel between her and this mystery woman who’d obviously messed him up.

He rubbed a hand over his brow, and the guilt she saw in his face, it softened her. Way more than she ever would have expected. “What happened?”

“My team was in Northern Africa. Just hanging around the base, waiting for orders. She uncovered intel that the number-three ranking al-Qaeda leader was supposed to be in the Yemen area. She told me about it in confidence, said someone from her office needed to travel there to meet with a contact to confirm, but she was nervous about the meeting. Yemen wasn’t all that far from our base. I wanted to see her, and I talked her into making the trip herself. Our team was the closest one to the area; we would have been called to take the hit. I knew if she was the one to make contact, I’d get to see her. I knew she was hesitant about it, but it was just a contact. It wasn’t the cell itself. She finally agreed.”

Marley’s stomach sank. She knew instinctively that something bad had happened.

“It was an ambush,” he said quietly. “She and two others from her team were killed. The cell knew the CIA was onto them.”

Her heart hurt for him. Because he’d taken a chance on caring for someone after all the neglect and abandonment he’d lived through as a kid, and in the end, it had ended tragically.

“I’m sorry, Jake. That’s awful. But it was an accident. You didn’t know. It wasn’t your fault.”

“It was though. If it weren’t for me—”

“If it weren’t for you, someone else from the CIA would have died. They were going to that meeting regardless of what you said or did. You can’t blame yourself for something someone else—a terrorist of all people—does.”

“Yeah, but
she
would have been alive. That’s the difference.”

Marley looked down at her bare feet against the hardwood floor as understanding dawned. No wonder he’d freaked when she’d run off to Colombia. No wonder he’d tracked her down and stayed by her side the entire way. And no wonder he felt so bad about what had happened with Gray and the fact he’d given up trying to warn her.

“Marley.” He stepped toward her. “I’ve overreacted. I haven’t trusted you. I haven’t tried to see your point of view because I’ve been too afraid of what will happen if I opened myself up. But I don’t want to do that anymore. I love you. I love the way you make me feel when we’re together. I even love it when you’re arguing with me because it means you care.”

Marley’s heart squeezed tight, and all those emotions she’d tried not to think with came raging back. She pressed both hands over her face as she struggled to sift through them, and remembered what her father had said.

Yes, she believed Jake loved her. Yes, she believed everything he was saying, but at the end of the day, they were just too volatile to make this work. Their relationship was too much like her parents’. And she didn’t want to ruin him the way her mother had ruined her father. Didn’t want to ruin herself, either.

She dropped her hands and looked at him. Really looked at him. At the scratch his cheek from that fight with Gray, at the heartache and hope reflected in his dark eyes. And she knew in her heart that she was always going to love him, but that it wasn’t enough.

“I love you too, Jake.” He took a step toward her, but she held up a hand to keep him back, needing to get the words out before his touch distracted her. “But you were right the night of that party. We’re explosive together. It’s not healthy. If we let this go on, we’ll just make each other completely miserable. I don’t want that for you.”

“Marley—”

“No.” She stepped back, out of his reach, fighting back the rush of emotions begging her to give in. Knew she needed to leave fast before that happened. “You’re too much like my father and I’m too much like my mother for this to ever work. And that ended so badly, my father’s still reeling from it thirty years later. I won’t do that to you. I can’t.”

She moved around the opposite side of the counter so he couldn’t touch her and swallowed hard. “Stay here, enjoy the house.” She glanced over her shoulder toward the gorgeous view. “Do yourself a favor and don’t sell it. You need this kind of peace and quiet.”

“No,” he said softly, “I need you.”

Marley stared at him, wanting nothing more than to give him that and so much more, but her brain took over, pushing her feet out of the living room and down the hall toward the door.

Hands shaking, she pressed her fingers against the wall in the entry and slipped on her flip-flops. She was just about to reach for the front door when she spotted a contract on the entry table with her name typed across the top.

She stared at it. Picked it up. Read the front page, then read it a second time. Heat rushed to her cheeks. Heat and disbelief and bone-jarring shock.

She rushed back into the great room and lifted the contract in her hand. “What the hell is this?”

Jake turned from the fridge where he was putting away the rest of her groceries and folded the paper shopping bag, not showing any kind of surprise that she was back. “The proof you need.”

Her heart raced beneath her ribs. She looked down at the contract in her hand. “You’re giving me half of Aegis. Just giving it to me for no reason?”

“Not for no reason.” He moved around the counter to stand in front of her. “It’s partly because of you that it’s grown into what it has. The guys are all loyal to you, not me. They only put up with me because I sign their paychecks.”

Her hands grew sweaty. “But this is your business. This is what you love.”

“No, Marley.
You’re
what I love. Aegis doesn’t mean anything to me unless you’re part of it. And before you go jumping to conclusions, it’s not because I need you in the office. I don’t. I want you to be as involved in whatever part of Aegis you want. And if that means working in the field, then I’m okay with that, so long as you let me tag along.”

He smiled, a warm loving smile, but she was still too shocked to process. “I-I don’t even know if I want to work in the field anymore.”

“You don’t?”

“No, I mean, yes. I mean . . .” She threw her hands up. “I don’t know anymore. I obviously have trouble listening to directions.”

That sexy little smirk made her heart beat even faster. “That’s true, you do. We can work on that. And I can work on not taking unnecessary risks. I have to do better with that. I have something important to live for now.”

She stared down at the papers in her hands. Swallowed hard. He was giving her half of Aegis. He really
really
loved her. More than her father had ever loved her mother. Mason Addison
never
would have done something like this for his wife. For all his talk about how bad he felt regarding their failed relationship, he’d never sacrificed anything for her. And never, not in a million years, would he have ever sacrificed his precious company for her.

“I . . .” Her legs grew weak. He stomach swirled. She backed up until her butt hit the sofa behind her. “I-I didn’t expect this.”

“I did.” He moved closer, until the heat of his body swirled around her and made her lightheaded. “And I knew you’d be stubborn about it. I wanted you to be. Because I needed to prove that I love you. And that I’m not going anywhere. I can’t. You own half my damn company.”

Unable to find words, she watched as he tugged something slim from his pocket and held it up. “You took this off,” he said softly. “You weren’t supposed to do that, you know.”

Her gaze dropped to the leather band in his hand, then shot to his face. His smiling, warm, gorgeous face. And she watched as he stepped back and pulled up his pant leg so she could see the leather band around his ankle.

Oh . . .
“You put it back on?”

“I never took mine off.” He dropped to one knee and carefully tied the band around her ankle. Her skin tingled wherever he touched, and heat gathered in her belly. A heat only he could create. “I think you’re stuck with me, Addison. I mean, I know you tried to marry someone else, but I’m pretty sure it’d be damn near impossible to find that village again and get this thing annulled.” He looked up at her, and his voice turned so sweet and dreamy her heart felt like it was about to lurch out of her chest. “I know I don’t want to.”

Love and a future she’d been too afraid to hope for reflected in his eyes, and all the reasons she thought she’d needed to hold back from him drifted away.

“That was completely unfair,” she whispered, blinking through the tears.

“No, this is unfair.” He pushed to his feet and pulled a ring from his pocket. A ring with a large blue stone. The same color as his shirt. “Call me old-fashioned, but as much as I love the Amazon wedding bands, they’re just not very visible. And I want everyone to know you belong with me.”

Her eyes widened. “Is that a sapphire?”

“No. A very rare diamond. You said you liked the color blue.”

She had. During that op in DC he’d changed without telling her. He’d been listening. She blinked back tears. “Oh my God.”

He chuckled, took the papers from her hands and dropped them on the couch behind her, then he slid the ring on her finger. “Wilson did not give me a deal on this, just so you know. Wouldn’t even take back that sapphire I bought for you, so you’ll get that when we get home. I didn’t bring it with me.”

Her gaze darted from the ring to his face. “You bought me a sapphire? When?”

“That night, in DC. I wanted to give it to you when I got back, but, well, I was afraid you might read too much into it.”

She couldn’t stop the laugh that slipped from her lips as she looked down at the ring through watery vision. “As opposed to now.”

“This time I want you to read into it.” Closing his arms around her, he drew her into the warmth and safety of his embrace. “I know we’re going to fight. I’ll make you so crazy sometimes you’ll want to rip your hair out. And I fully expect you to put me in my place when I get out of line. But I also know I wouldn’t want it any other way. And I know I am never going to stop loving you. No matter what happens in our lives or where we go or how nuts our kids make us, this right here is the only thing that matters. Because you are everything to me.”

Kids. He’d just said kids. Ankle bracelets, rings, and kids. Tears blurred her vision as she pressed her face against his throat.

“All I want,” he whispered, “the only thing I need, is to make you as happy as you were that night in the jungle when you danced around the fire for me. If it takes my whole life, that’s exactly what I plan to do.”

“Jake.” She sniffled, pressing her hands against his solid chest. “I was higher than a kite that night. Are you sure that’s the measure you want to go by?”

“Absolutely.” He drew back and gazed down at her. “Because that’s the night I fell crazy in love with you, wife.”

Wife.
He’d called her that in the hut. The morning after their wild night. And just like it had then, her heart warmed and skipped, spreading heat throughout her entire body. Only this time, she knew that heat was love.

She lifted to her toes and kissed him with everything she had in her. And as his arms tightened around her and his body came to life against her own, she knew everything—finally—was different.

“Oh.” He drew back a breath. “One more thing. We’re not selling this house.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck and rolled her eyes. “Geez, already back to being bossy. I should have expected it. Fine. If you really want the house, I guess I could force myself to vacation here now and then. I’ll call the realtor in the morning.
After
, that is, you spend the next few hours proving just how sublimely happy you can make me.”

He grinned and lowered his lips to hers, then kissed her until she was breathless. “That I can do, wife. That I can most definitely do.”

about the author

Photo © 2010 Curtis Almquist

Before topping multiple bestseller lists—including those of the
New York Times
,
USA Today
, and the
Wall Street Journal
—Elisabeth Naughton taught middle school science. A voracious reader, she soon discovered she had a knack for creating stories with a chemistry of their own. The spark turned into a flame, and Naughton now writes full-time. Besides topping bestseller lists, her books have been nominated for some of the industry’s most prestigious awards, such as the RITA
^®
and Golden Heart Awards from Romance Writers of America, the Australian Romance Reader Awards, and the Golden Leaf Award. When not dreaming up new stories, Naughton can be found spending time with her husband and three children in their western Oregon home.