Hidden Impact (Safeguard #1)(38)

Maylin shrank in on herself. She shouldn’t compare. The rational part of her mind was checking out, though, and what was left switched between raging jealousy and trembling embarrassment.

She’d come face-to-face with a former lover of his, a woman who’d worked with him as a mercenary with the skills to do all the things Maylin couldn’t. This woman would’ve been able to go after her family without the help Maylin had come to the Centurions for in the first place. And she knew something about An-mei.

Jewel had a lot of things Maylin didn’t and right now, it meant everything.

“Hey.” Gabe’s hand reached out, palm up, an invitation. She hesitated and then placed her own in his. His fingers closed around hers, engulfing hers. “What we have between us is a completely different chemistry.”

“It is?” And wow did she hate how vulnerable her voice sounded.

“I’m not sure what it is yet, but you’ve got me unhinged in ways I’ve never experienced before.” He squeezed her hand gently. “In a good way. And we have a promise.”

Yes. Once they found An-mei. But in the meantime, Maylin needed to ask one more question before she could settle and process it all.

“Why did you two end it?” It shouldn’t matter. There were more important topics. But trust seemed to be in short supply and this did matter on so many levels.

“She shot me in the back.”

Well, okay then. Maylin couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

“I told you before about my last mission, the husband whose wife was cheating on him. We were overseas, contracted to extract a military scientist and get him out safely. I’d gone in first, had the man with me, when our fire team encountered hostile fire. He’d picked up an M16, was firing to either side of me, scared out of his damned mind.” Gabe delivered the story in a monotone. He was sitting right next to her, but she had the sense he was far away. “When I took a bullet in the back, we all thought he’d been the one to shoot me. When I went down, he took two to the chest. My team got me out, and him too, but I was the one to survive.”

It took a minute for Maylin to connect what he was telling her to the reason he hated getting tangled up in emotional missions. “But it wasn’t him. It was Jewel.”

And there was some messy emotion there having nothing to do with the dead client or his wife and everything to do with Gabe’s lover shooting him in the back.

Maylin wanted to say something, anything. But she couldn’t undo any of those things. Instead, she listened. Because this wasn’t the kind of thing that was shared easily. She should absorb it, remember it with respect. And not hurt him by asking him to repeat it someday down the road.

“Jewel shouldn’t have been anywhere near that engagement. Her fire team was assigned to a different position guarding the secondary escape route. After the mission, she and her fire team left the Centurions before I even woke up from surgery. They’d come to the end of their contract, and no one would’ve thought anything of it. But our medical team managed to retrieve the bullet from me and ran forensics on it. It was a five fifty-six all right, the right kind of bullet, but it hadn’t come from an M16. It’d come from an AK, and none of the hostiles we encountered were armed with those. Hell, none of the other Centurions on that contract had been either. Just Jewel and her AK one-zero-one with an ACOG magnification mount, custom modified. And she’d checked in after the mission with her weapon in hand. She’d put the bullet in my back and only my Kevlar body armor saved me from worse damage when it hit. Otherwise, I’d be in a wheelchair.” Gabe shifted in the driver’s seat. It still hurt him, even if it was mostly healed. Maylin bit back concerned remarks because she didn’t think it’d help to point out the continued weakness. “By the time the results came back, she was in the wind. This is the first time I’ve seen her since.”

Hell of a way to break up with a lover. And no way was Maylin going to say it out loud. But she had to wonder what kind of unresolved issues it’d left behind. Could be an awful time to ask, but if not now then things could move too fast. There may not be a later.

“You’re very quiet over there.”

She jumped. It hadn’t seemed like a lot of thinking, but maybe she’d chewed on it a lot longer than she’d meant to. “I don’t know what to say. And...to be honest I don’t know if I have a right to say anything.”

“You can ask and I can do my best to answer.” Gabe made the offer.

Hesitantly, Maylin went out on a limb. “Do you miss her?”

Hard to ask a question when you weren’t sure you wanted to know the answer. But it was important to know. She wasn’t good at communicating when it came to relationships, even if it was about a memory of good times gone by. Everything came out awkward and not quite the way she intended.

Gabe gave her question serious thought, his brows drawn together. “Yes and no. We had good times and we were good together back then. But it wasn’t something I craved after it was over. I think what I miss is the way we worked together. She was a good squad mate, excellent at her work. It’s hard to find people you can work with out there. There’s a sort of...easygoing confidence when you have good people at your back, and she is no longer one of them. Leaves an exposed spot. Does that make sense?”

“I’m sorry.” This time she wasn’t sure exactly why she had to apologize, but she wanted to.