You Only Love Twice (Masters and Mercenaries #8)(65)

It struck him that Kai Ferguson likely had secrets of his own. There was probably something nasty bubbling under his calm surface.

Damn but he wished Kai hadn’t been a witness to that scene. “Sorry. You didn’t need to see that.”

“To know you’re in trouble? No. All I had to do was read the file on Phoebe Ian sent me to know that.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be at some conference?” He’d started working at Sanctum a few months before, setting up an office in the previously unused second floor of the building.

“Came back because Tag said he could use some help. Apparently Alex and Eve’s baby arrived early. They weren’t expecting him for another week, but the birth mother went into labor yesterday morning. The baby’s perfectly healthy so they have leave to take him home. Cute little thing, but now Eve wants maternity leave, so I’m here to take her place. The downside is I was making time with a schizophrenia specialist. The upside, I got a private jet all to myself, complete with top secret files. Apparently you got the files, too. Any thoughts?”

He would do just about anything to not have to think about what had happened between him and Phoebe. “I think it’s one of the soldiers who went missing. I’ve pulled their files in particular.”

“I agree. I talked to Tag when I hit the ground and he told me your theory. Very smart and I believe accurate. I’ve been going over the psych evaluations. Naturally there’s nothing that would cause alarm or they wouldn’t be on the team. I would really like to interview them. I think the real proof isn’t going to be in words on a page. I need to meet the men. There were two things that concerned me.”

Jesse sat up straighter. If Kai had something that bugged him, he wanted to hear it. “Yes?”

“First of all, Deke resisted when the team went in to save him. They actually had to knock him out to get him back to base. According to the reports from the squad leader, he even broke one of their noses and afterward he told them he didn’t want to go home.”

Odd, but it didn’t mean he’d turned. Jesse remembered how it had felt. He hadn’t actively fought the team who came for him, but he hadn’t cared much either. He’d been afraid to go back, afraid he didn’t belong there anymore. “You feel dirty. At least I did. I didn’t have a family to go back to, but if I had, I would have felt weird about it. I didn’t want to be around anyone I knew. I felt like the man I’d been was gone, and being around old friends would just remind me. Sometimes it got so bad, I wanted to die.”

It hadn’t helped that no one welcomed him back. He’d been met with suspicion and distrust, and people who wondered what he’d done to live when everyone else had died.

“I understand what you’re saying and that’s fairly normal, but I have to take into consideration that it could have been an emotional reaction to leaving a place he now thought of as home,” Kai mused. “Ace, on the other hand, was very calm. There’s nothing in his reports that even says he has nightmares. He could be stoic. He could be lying to preserve some sense of manliness, but I get suspicious when there’s no emotion at all present.”

“Maybe he’s not an emotional guy.” He’d met a lot of soldiers who knew how to hide what they were feeling. The battlefield wasn’t the place for a bunch of feelings.

Kai adjusted his glasses as he spoke. “We’re all emotional, Jesse. It comes out in different ways, but the smart person can read it for what it really means. Take the reaction you had to Ms. Grant. You intended to get her to believe that you are no longer interested in her and that she’s bad in bed. Way to punch a chick in the gut by the way.”

His stomach dropped. Did they have to go back there? “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How did you mean it?”

Jesse looked down at the files again. “It doesn’t matter now.”

Naturally Kai wouldn’t leave it be. The man never let up. “If I had to guess, you two finally had sex and then she realized she wasn’t ready, but couldn’t talk to you about it until this morning. You realized you love her and think you can never have her. It’s one more thing you want in life that you don’t get, one more thing you managed to taste before it was taken away from you. So you tried to throw up a wall between the two of you.”

He was getting a little irritated. “Do you have a point, smarty pants?”

“I do and it’s about the problem with Ace Monroe. Even when we know we should stay calm, we lash out. My point is one way or another, there should have been some kind of reaction, whether it’s relief or anger or anxiety. The other two who were taken were treated for depression briefly. There was nothing in their records that drew my attention, but I would need access to them personally to really understand them. I can’t do that right now so I’ve got time for a session with you. How about it, neighbor? I could go and get Phoebe and have a little couples counseling. After all, I kind of have to live with you two. It would be nice to not be in a war zone.”

Jesse had zero illusions about why Kai had been brought in. Eve had felt Jesse needed more specialized treatment and Tag had found Kai, a former Army Ranger who now specialized in treating PTSD in returning soldiers. A whole crew of sad sacks now came in and out of Sanctum via stairs that led directly to Kai’s office. Unfortunately, Kai’s office was also his home. He’d set up a whole suite of rooms where he worked and lived. Jesse and Phoebe were staying in his guest suite. And Jesse had stayed in Kai’s room the night before. Where the hell would he go now? “Sorry about this. I’ll try to convince Tag to let us use a couple of the privacy rooms now that you’re back.”