You Only Love Twice (Masters and Mercenaries #8)(24)

He stopped, his eyebrows rising. “Baby, I’m not sure what you want me to give back.” A sexy smirk hit his face. “But I can get you to make more. It’s obvious you’re not ready to talk yet. Hop on the desk and I’ll get my mouth on you. Then we’ll see if you’re ready to talk. You should know I can do this all day.”

“I didn’t do this to you.” She had to stay calm. She couldn’t lose her shit. Not now. Psycho Phoebe, as Jamie and Ten had called her, was gone and she was never coming back. Reason. That was what Franklin Grant had taught her to use. “I didn’t treat you like this.”

His hands came down and his shoulders squared as though he was ready for battle. “You damn straight did. You played me. You played me hard and well. You had me panting after you and then you pointed a bullet straight at my f*cking heart. Do you see the irony, Phoebe? I was falling for you and you were here to kill me.”

“I was here to watch you. I was here to figure out if you had turned.” The one good thing that could come of this was she got to ask a couple of questions. “When you were discovered, you were hundreds of miles away from where they buried the bodies of your team. It took an Agency team another year to find the burial site. Why wouldn’t you tell them where the bodies were buried?”

He flushed slightly and his hands clenched. “I didn’t know. They didn’t give me a map. They drugged me and shoved me on the back of a donkey or some shit and sent me on my way to the next torture hole. Is that what you wanted to know? Really, you should have just f*cking asked or you could have read the Agency’s reports, but you already did that, didn’t you?”

She couldn’t give him any more than he already knew. Her stomach was churning where just moments before she’d been happy and relaxed. God, she wished he’d never opened his mouth. “You were on the tapes.”

His expression didn’t change at all, but she could see the way his skin flushed. God, she hated doing this to him, but he was making it impossible for her to go back to being Phoebe Graham. Jesse would never have treated her the way he just had if she’d been able to stay Phoebe Graham. “You mean the ones where my unit…my friends were executed? Are you talking about those tapes? Yes. I was on the tapes and I looked perfectly fine with the experience, didn’t I? I should be damn glad those tapes never made it out of the Agency’s vault or I would have been on every news station as the grinning idiot who watched his friends die and he wasn’t even tied up. Did you watch those tapes, Phoebe?”

Did she watch the tape where her husband had been executed? “No.”

Ten wouldn’t allow it. He’d threatened anyone who might have shown it to her with a painful death, and Ten’s people had believed him. She’d heard about the tapes. In every single one, Jesse Murdoch had been present with a smile on his peaceful face. At the time she’d been certain he’d done it to save himself, but she knew him now. She believed what he’d told the agent who had debriefed him in Germany. “How much heroin did they give you?”

It was the only explanation. Despite their “pure” Islamic beliefs, most jihadist groups made their money off heroin. Everyone with a brain knew terrorists had very little to do with real Muslims.

“Enough that I had to do some hard rehab afterward. Tell me who you’re working for, Phoebe. I don’t want to have to escalate this. I was tortured by the best. I don’t want to do that to you.”

The very fact that he would threaten it pissed her off. Especially when she knew damn well he wouldn’t do it. Months and months with the man had proven that he had looked into that abyss and turned from it. Jesse Murdoch would protect and defend, but he would never torture.

Well, except in the sweetest way.

“Really?” She took a step forward. “You’re going to torture me the way they tortured you? You’re going to dope me up and kill a few of my friends and try to make me believe I did it?”

It was what they’d done to him. She’d read his file. It read like a damn horror novel, though at first she’d thought he was just really good at crafting fiction.

Jesse stopped, his arms falling to his sides and his eyes narrowing. “No. I won’t do it and you know it. I don’t need to. I know an Agency operative when I see one. Well, when I stop thinking with my dick, I do. You bastards. You’re why we were taken. Do you think I don’t know that?”

“What?”

He huffed a little, like he didn’t believe her question. “Sure, you didn’t know.”

“What are you talking about?”

His lips curled just slightly. It was the cruelest look she’d ever seen on his sweet face, and her heart ached because she’d been the one to put it there. “They targeted my unit, Phoebe. It wasn’t random. They were looking for an operative code named ‘the spider.’ The Agency was embedding operatives into troops.”

Her stomach dropped. “No. That’s not true.”

No one could have known. No one would have told. Jamie had been caught in a random act of terrorism. It hadn’t been their fault. No way.

Ten would have told her.

She’d been the one to come up with the concept. Ten had argued against it. Violently. He’d told her it would put the soldiers in the unit in danger, but Jamie had liked the idea. He’d been the one to talk Ten in to trying it, and it had failed spectacularly.