Hard to Let Go (4 page)

And feeling how powerfully he shook and how much pleasure he’d received gave her a whole other kind of satisfaction.

“I’m gonna set you down,” he whispered a few moments later. Kat nodded. When her feet hit the floor, her legs nearly refused to hold her weight. But Beckett was right there, and he wrapped his arms around her, banding her to his chest. “Give it a second,” he said in a low voice full of gravel. His big hand stroked the hair back from her face.

Grasping at the corded muscles of his sides, Kat gave in. Really, her body didn’t give her any other choice—again. She rested all of her weight against him, and he supported her like it took no effort at all. She wasn’t the only one affected, though. Because his heart thundered against his breastbone.

But as her body relaxed and the force of their frenzied lust dissipated, the air between them turned less comfortable. Then downright awkward.

Because Kat had just had sex—hard, fast, up-against-a-wall sex—with one of her brother’s best friends. And though Beckett fucked like a
god
, she wasn’t the least bit sure she even liked him.

“I
’M OKAY NOW
,” Kat said, pushing off of his body.

The loss of her heat was a sucker punch to Beckett’s gut, particularly as it allowed the full reality of what he’d just done to wash over him.

As in . . . he’d just fucked his teammate’s younger sister. In his teammate’s house. In the middle of a friggin’ mission.

The fact that it’d started with him concerned that he’d hurt her? Made it feel about a thousand times worse.

Fuck.
Sometimes he was so much like his old man that it left him feeling hollow down to the bottom of his soul.

Beckett tossed the condom in a small trash can by the nightstand, then tugged up and fastened his jeans. Christ, he hadn’t even bothered to get undressed. Still wore his pants, shirt, boots. Five feet away sat a perfectly good bed. But had he given her that comfort? O’course not.

If he was Nick Rixey, he would kick his own damn ass. Twice.

Kat didn’t say a word—or make eye contact—as she stepped into her panties and pants. And that had . . . feelings rolling around in Beckett’s chest that he didn’t know what to do with.

Worry, for one. Had he been too rough? Had he hurt her even more? He thought the sex had been fucking spectacular, truth be told, but he was aggressive by nature and she was small as fuck. And that was a goddamned problematic combination.

Anxiety, for another. Now that they’d let all the sexual tension that’d been pinging between them off the leash, what would her expectations be? God,
this
kinda bullshit was why, no matter how fucking good being with her had felt, it had been an epic mistake. One he’d have to keep from making again.

Not to mention what the guys would say if and when they found out. Because not only was Kat Nick’s sister, which crossed all kinds of damn lines, but it hadn’t even been a week since Beckett had publicly dressed down Marz—his best friend in the world—for getting involved with Emilie Garza mid-mission.

No offense to the ladies in the room, but this is a mission with real shit at stake, not the dating game
.

“Jesus Christ,” Beckett bit out, grinding the heels of his hands into his eyes. As if that zinger hadn’t been bad enough, that night his anger and his mouth had run away with him, and he’d gone on to question Marz’s focus and commitment.

Now he’d gone and done this. Goddamned hypocrite. Just like his father had been.

“Well, I guess we weren’t that much better at fucking either, huh?” Kat asked.

Beckett heard the soft sound of footsteps as he dropped his hands from his eyes. He followed the sound in time to see Katherine open the door and walk out into the hall. For a moment he stood there, struck stupid by her words and her actions. Where the hell had she gotten
that
idea?

He replayed the last minute or two. Oh.
Oh
. He’d totally given it to her, hadn’t he?

Part of him yearned to rush after her and explain that he hadn’t exactly aimed his curse at
her
. The expletive and frustration had been more about the situation in general, and the hell he knew he was going to have to pay. But Beckett stayed right where he stood. Because it was probably better all the way around if Kat had one more really damn good reason to keep her distance from him, to dislike him, to push him away.

Because the two of them being together? Wasn’t good for the team, their mission, or Katherine herself.

Chapter 4

“W
hat the hell took you so long?” Marz yelled as Beckett returned to the gym. “You offered to grab the ibuprofen almost a half hour ago.”

Pretty much the whole team turned to look at Beckett. Marz sat at his computer. Charlie sat beside him in what had become his usual chair—since Merritt’s son was every bit as brilliant as Marz with computers, the two of them had been teaming up. Jeremy stood behind Charlie’s chair, near Charlie as always. Nick and Shane sat backward on a pair of folding chairs, close enough to Marz to see what he was working on. Becca and the redheaded Dean sisters, Sara and Jenna, sat at the new tables of computers, probably reviewing documents off the microchip.

Now, all eight pairs of eyes were looking at him. For fuck’s sake.

Beckett bit back his irritation and held up the bottle, making it clear he hadn’t forgotten. “Phone call. Sorry,” he said gruffly.

Christ, he could still smell the warm sweetness of Kat’s skin on his clothes.

When he closed in on Marz’s desk, Beckett tossed him the bottle.

“Come to Papa,” Marz said as he popped the lid and dumped four little red pills into his hand.

“Where’s Easy?” Beckett asked, referring to the fifth of the five surviving members of their SF team. He waited while Marz chugged back a gulp of water with the meds.

“With Emilie,” Shane said, raking his hand through his carefully messy dark-blond hair.

Beckett nodded, glad to hear that his teammate was keeping up with the therapy. Emilie brought an important skill set to Hard Ink—she was a psychotherapist. And given that Sara, Jenna, and Charlie had all survived abduction and assault, and that Easy had admitted a little over a week ago to being depressed and having suicidal thoughts, it turned out that Emilie was a real asset.

Because they all carried more than a little dose of fucked-up around with them. Beckett sure knew that he did.

“Everything okay?” Nick asked, looking over his shoulder. Beckett met the guy’s odd, pale-green eyes, and all he could think about was what he’d just done with Nick’s sister—who, unlike her two brothers, had brilliant jade-green eyes that pierced him and challenged him and taunted him. “Beckett?”

“What?” he said, snapping out of the totally fucking useless train of thought.

“Dude,”
Marz said, arching an eyebrow. “What’s up with you?”

Beckett crossed his arms. “Why the hell would anything be up?”

Nick and Shane exchanged a look.

And
this . . .
all of this . . . was exactly why Beckett had
always
kept his eyes on the fucking prize during a mission.
And
why Katherine Rixey pissed him off so damn bad. Because she had him tangled up inside in a goddamned knot. And he didn’t understand it. Or like it. Not one bit.

Beckett scrubbed his hands over his face. “Sorry. Just had, uh, a bit of a situation. Under control now.” Lying to these guys sat like a rock in his gut. As did calling what happened with Kat a “situation.”

“No worries, man,” Nick said, unknowingly pouring more salt in the wound with his understanding.

Enough
.
Pull your head out of your ass, Murda
.

“What are you working on?” Beckett asked, gesturing to the desk. He came up behind Nick and Shane to look at Marz’s computer monitor, but not too close—because he could still smell Kat all over him. The log of evidence from the documents on the microchip filled the screen.

“Well,” Marz said, leaning back in his chair and stretching out his legs. “We were brainstorming ways to definitively prove whether Seneka and this WCE were one and the same entity.”

“And?” Beckett said, already more comfortable now that the focus was off him and on the job.

“Unless there’s a smoking gun in these documents,” Nick said, peering over his shoulder, “the ideal way of proving it is probably the hardest of all.”

Beckett frowned. “The ideal way being . . .”

“If we had access to their files via their servers,” Marz said. “You know, if wishes fell from the sky . . . Problem being—”

“They’re probably more secure than the government itself?” Beckett said.

Marz nodded, and Charlie mirrored the movement behind him. Though the younger Merritt’s blond hair was long enough that he sometimes pulled it into a knot on the back of his head, the family resemblance with Beckett’s commander was clear.

“That about sums it up,” Marz said.

“And, if Seneka is the same thing as WCE,” Charlie said in a quiet voice, “they’re gonna know we’re coming before we even knock on their virtual door. Pretty sure that’s how they found me a few weeks ago.” Charlie had been kidnapped by the Church Gang after trying to learn who WCE was and why they’d deposited twelve million dollars into a Singapore bank account with his father’s name on it and Charlie’s address. “Since I already tried and failed to hack in then, no doubt they’ve doubled their defenses.”

Across the room, the gym door opened and closed. Beckett didn’t even need to look to know it was Katherine. As if his body recognized the presence of hers, all the tension he’d managed to let go came flooding back.

Just stay focused on the work.

So Beckett didn’t let himself look her way as she crossed the room to join them, even though a part of him desperately wanted to make eye contact. Because all the other bullshit aside, he’d never been more sincere in his life than when he’d told her he hadn’t meant to hurt her, and would never want to, either.

Being on the receiving end of abuse had made Beckett hyperfearful of becoming an abuser himself. That’s why he got the hash-mark tattoos. If he was gonna take a life, even in the line of duty, he was going to bleed for it. Every damn time.

Right now, Beckett was four marks shy of what he deserved—he’d taken the lives of four thugs during the mission to rescue Emilie from a carjacker. He’d have to rectify that soon. Maybe Jeremy would do it for him when they had a few free minutes.

“Hey,” Kat said as she came up on the other side of Marz’s desk, putting herself right in Beckett’s line of sight. A round of greetings rose up.

“Hey,” Nick said. “We’re trying to brainstorm something here. Maybe you can help.”

“Uh, sure,” she said, crossing her arms and hugging herself. She’d changed since Beckett had last seen her, and now wore a pair of jeans and a soft-looking black sweater. Her hair had nearly air-dried, and loose curls spilled over her shoulders.

“What if we turned this around?” Charlie asked. “Instead of thinking about how to break into Seneka’s files, what if we thought about what kinds of information we think would be useful, and see if there isn’t another way to go about getting it?”

Katherine pressed her fingers to her temples, and Beckett frowned. As a lawyer, no doubt conversations about how to accomplish less-than-legal objectives pushed her way outside her comfort zone.

Marz nodded. “Okay. Phone records and phone taps, for one.”

Nick held out his hands. “Vance. He might be able to finagle those like he did the container logs from the marine terminal.” Kyler Vance was a Baltimore police detective who declared himself an ally to their group after his godfather, Miguel Olivero, had been gunned down on the street outside Hard Ink. Beckett hadn’t known Olivero well, but everything he did know said they’d lost a damn fine man in addition to an important ally. Vance was already making good on his word to stand by them. And thank God for that.

“Bank account information,” Charlie said. “Right? We know WCE put money into my, uh, father’s bank account. But if we could find the other side of those transactions—the payments—that might nail it down.”

Beckett thought that might be the first time he’d heard Charlie refer to his father as, well, his father. For the entire time he’d known the younger Merritt, Charlie had called him the “Colonel.” There’d apparently been some bad blood between father and son over Charlie’s sexuality, at least in part. Beckett glanced between Charlie and Jeremy and frowned, despite the comical T-shirts both of them wore courtesy of Jeremy’s infamous collection. Jeremy’s read,
Make Awkward Sexual Advances, Not War
, while Charlie’s read,
I’m a Ninja
in black text on a black shirt.

All these people had become a sort of family to him, maybe because he didn’t have much of his own—none that he wanted to claim, anyway. So he felt protective about every damn person in the room, and couldn’t deny that it rankled him to know that Merritt probably wouldn’t have approved of the guys’ relationship.

“Charlie, this is a good fucking idea.” Nick grabbed a pen and yellow legal pad off the mess on Marz’s desk and began a list. “Finding the depositor accounts is genius.”

“You know, I have this newfangled list maker called a computer right here,” Marz said. Beckett smirked. He and Marz were the biggest techies in the group. One of the things they’d always bonded around.

Flipping him the finger with the hand steadying the pad, Nick grinned. “Writing it out long-hand helps me think.”

“Oookay,” Marz said.

“What about Seneka personnel files?” Shane said, a bit of a southern accent permeating his words. He tapped his finger on Nick’s legal pad. “I know this one’s not likely, given the secrecy around Seneka’s recruitment and the need to maintain in-country covers. But let’s just say we could get ahold of a list of their employees. What if one of them had the initials WCE? Long shot, I know, but . . .” He shrugged.

“Or the initials GW,” Nick said. “Remember Merritt listed GW for his contact?” With everyone agreeing, he scribbled down the idea.

Katherine paced around to the back of the table and came to a rest against her younger brother, who put his arm around her.

“You all right?” Jeremy asked.

She nodded and gave him a smile, but it appeared strained or reserved. Then again, maybe Beckett was reading too much into it. It wasn’t like she directed that many smiles his way, and when she did, they were usually in the midst of some snarky exchange.

“What else?” Nick asked, surveying the group.

“Private cell phone numbers with call histories and text exchanges,” Beckett said. “E-mail exchanges, for that matter.”

Nodding, Nick added it.

“How do you propose to get this kind of information?” Kat asked.

“We’re not there yet,” Nick said. “Just brainstorming the
kinds
of information that, should it fall in our laps, might be helpful to proving what we need proved. But, look, I know this whole conversation puts you in an awkward place, so maybe I shouldn’t have asked you to help . . .”

“There’s no way you can get any of this legally,” she said. Despite what she’d said, her tone hadn’t been critical. More musing, maybe?

“Really, you don’t have to be here,” Nick said, tapping his pencil against the pad.

“No, no. It’s just, you guys are taking a lot of risks in all this, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Can’t be helped,” Nick said, his tone shorter and his brow cranked down. Beckett had seen that expression often enough to know Nick was losing his patience.

Kat frowned and stepped out from under Jeremy’s arm. “I’m not trying to criticize—”

“Then what’s your point, Kat? Because we’re trying to keep anybody else from dying here,” Nick said, rising to his feet and crossing his arms. The folding chair screeched against the concrete floor.

Beckett’s protective instinct roared to life, and he grabbed Nick’s arm and hauled him back a step. Nick glared at him and pulled free, turning back toward his sister.

Kat didn’t look the least bit cowed. Instead, she marched up to her much-taller brother and braced her hands on her hips. “Wow. Stand down, soldier boy. What is it with you guys and barking at me today? Especially when all I wanted to say is that I think I can help you. I think I have access to some of what you need.”

K
AT FELT LIKE
she’d just jumped off a high cliff and hadn’t yet hit the bottom. Because she’d opened the door to sharing information and documents with her brother and his team, even if he was being an ass right now. Or maybe she was just overly sensitive. After all, she had to admit that she still felt a little off-kilter after her encounter with Beckett—both the mind-blowing sex and obvious regret immediately afterward.

Really, she shouldn’t have been surprised by the latter. And to the extent she was, she kinda wanted to smack herself. Given their usual M.O., why had she expected anything else from the guy? And why the hell did he look about a thousand times more attractive to her stupid eyes now that she knew what his face looked like when she sucked his cock and what he sounded like upon orgasm?

“What?” Nick asked. “What are you saying?”

Nick’s words pulled her out of her thoughts. “Exactly what it sounds like. I’m saying I can help you.” She sighed and tucked her hair behind her ears, and then let the words fly that would commit her to their mission, and to a whole new path. “My office at Justice has been investigating Seneka Worldwide Security for almost a year. I have access to some of the exact files you’re discussing.”

Nick’s pale green eyes went wide. The room went still and silent. And then all hell broke loose.