Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(28)
Trust and a relationship on the other hand…that was a whole other question.
A relationship you could count on, he meant, because even marriage, another thing guys on the teams managed to talk women into with amazing frequency, usually turned out to be a betrayal of trust within a few years. The divorce rate was phenomenal. Also the death rate, but at least in that case you were dead when the woman you loved moved on without you.
The worst was when you lost your career and your body and your wife at the same time. As a twenty-year-old newbie, Jake, like many newbies on the teams, had been assigned to escort wounded SEAL warriors at Bethesda. He’d seen the wives who took one look at their hot hero, now that he had lost a limb or had his face half blown off or been burned all over his body, and dropped the divorce papers on the bandages wrapping his belly and fled. Sometimes wives met their husbands with those papers. Like, before they even tried to deal with the wounds; it was the very first thing they did when they saw him. Some wives started getting the papers drawn up as soon as they got the call from Iraq or Afghanistan or Germany that the man they had promised to love forever was badly wounded.
It had been a cold, hard dose of reality, that time as a wounded warrior escort. Just before his own first tour.
“Speaking of hot sex,” Ian said as he finished slipping his side plates in. “This shy, geeky guy thing.”
Jake tightened his belly hard, putting his instinct to stiffen down in his abs, where no one could see it.
Ian, oblivious, sent him a glance full of mirth, deliberately poking a lion to make life more interesting. “I figured I’d wear these.” He reached into his gear and pulled out a pair of black-framed glasses, settling them on his nose.
“You keep a pair of fake glasses in your gear just in case you want to flirt with women who like nerds?” Jake said, irritated. Damn it, why hadn’t he thought of that? He slid his knife into place at his back.
“I figured I’d sit in a corner wearing them and catch up on our book club book. Camus. Can’t get much more nerdy than that.” Ian rolled his eyes at Mark.
Mark sighed and didn’t bother to respond.
“It’s actually pretty interesting,” Jake said, trying to turn this subject of conversation to the safe one their book club was supposed to provide them. “I got most of it done earlier this afternoon.”
Ian gave a slow, indignant whistle. “You dog. You already pulled the reading trick?”
“Some of us read for other reasons than to trick women, Ian.”
“Not Camus, they don’t.” Ian prodded Mark. “Right, Mark? That was the whole reason you picked Camus this month, so we could impress French women?”
“Next month it’s Sartre,” Mark said blandly, well aware that sometimes it was better not to even fight it, when the team started talking shit at each other.
“Damn it,” Jake said. “Chase is in a hospital bed, you know. You could at least let him pick this one.”
“Yeah, I bet she’d find it cute as anything if I were reading Harry Potter.” A dreamy look grew in Ian’s eyes as he considered this image. “Oh, yeah, that could work.”
Jake elbowed him extra hard. “We’re up.”
Infill here was in black SUVs. They rode with Elias and more of his RAID team, their gear black like the RAID team but without the black panther patch on the left shoulder. After the series of attacks in France, SOCEUR (U.S. Special Operations Europe) had ramped up training sessions with RAID. The rise of terrorist cells in France, a major ally, had been a chief concern for some time, and the order from the top was for greater cooperation between allies in intelligence and operations.
Working together here, not in training but in actual raids, was a chance to consolidate—to better understand each force’s methods and issues. Their element was small—at least the part of it the French president knew about—but that didn’t mean it was politically advisable for photos of U.S. forces to show up in the media as participating in raids in Paris suburbs. So, not for the first time in his career, Jake was sheep-dipped and out of uniform. At least the raid was in an allied nation this time and not an enemy one where he’d be totally screwed if he was caught.
“And you can put those damn glasses away,” Jake said. Or loan them to him. “I’m the one keeping an eye on her. She’s been through a lot of shit. It’s better for her to relax with a familiar face.”
“I can relax women.” Ian grinned.
A vision of a back under his hand, that heart face against black marble, her lashes falling, her body lost in dreamy bliss, and Jake lost all possibility of dealing with Ian with a sense of humor. His head lifted. His eyes locked. “Stay the f*ck away.” The words fell sharp and dangerous, like weapons.
Ian stared at him. His eyebrows shot up.
Fuck.
“Like that, is it?” Ian said softly. “You think you have first dibs?”
I’ll find someone else, she had said. Jake knew what that was like. He’d done it himself, sought oblivion in sex, and he sure as hell hadn’t limited himself to one encounter with one woman when he was doing it.
Meanwhile, even among the teams, Ian’s success with women was legendary.
“She’s off limits,” Jake said flatly. “Mine.”
“Putain, it’s like working with f*cking cavemen,” Elias muttered, dropping his head to the wall of the van behind him.