You Only Love Twice (Masters and Mercenaries #8)(7)

“What?” He’d gotten his Jeep back about a week after they’d returned from Italy. “My Jeep didn’t have a tag on it. If it does now, it was probably put there after the motel fight.”

They’d been forced to leave it in the motel parking lot. It would have been easy for someone to place a tracking device on it then.

“You also have bugs all over your apartment.” Simon’s voice was tight. “How many people have you let in? Alex installed your security system himself. Chelsea and I spend a bit of time there. Who else?”

He couldn’t quite meet Simon’s eyes because there was only one answer to that question. Jesse didn’t have parties. He didn’t have friends outside of work. His whole life was spent at that sad little apartment or at work or on the occasional date with Phoebe that sometimes ended with them watching TV at his place.

He remembered the first night they’d gone back to his apartment. He’d been surprised because she didn’t seem to want to be alone with him. He’d gotten a little excited, his cock hardening at the thought of getting her into bed. He’d planned the whole seduction out in his head as they’d driven to his building. Thankfully his years in the military had forced a routine cleanliness into his life so he hadn’t had to worry about his place being a mess. Not that there was much to mess up. He had a TV and a sofa and Grace and Avery had taken him out to buy him all the things he needed for a rudimentary kitchen. Serena had given him a couple of sets of sheets. She’d been excited about the thread count or something, but he could have told her that anything felt like paradise after sleeping in a rat-infested hellhole for months.

He’d been happy about that damn thread count though when he’d thought Phoebe would be sleeping on it. But the minute they’d gotten to his place, she’d pulled out the Harry Potter DVDs.

I want to share this with you. Please, Jesse.

Yep, he’d fallen asleep halfway through the first one.

It would have been so easy for her to slip off the couch and plant her bugs. Easy for her to have gone through his pathetic things so she could get a better perspective on how to handle him.

Had she been listening to him for months? Did she hear the way he cried at night when the nightmares got to be too much? Did she hear the way he paced the floor and told himself over and over again that it was all a dream and he was here and he was Jesse Murdoch. He was Jesse. He wasn’t the man they tried to turn him into.

“I told you we should have brought Kai into this,” Alex whispered furiously Tag’s way.

“Kai isn’t a member of this team,” Tag pointed out. “And he’s also out of town. He’s in DC for the week.”

Kai Ferguson was his therapist. He was a psychiatrist specializing in extreme PTSD. Ian had said he’d brought Kai in to help with Sanctum because Eve didn’t have time to go through all the applicants and keep up evaluations on members, but Jesse knew the truth. Tag had basically bought Kai in an attempt to see if he could fix Jesse.

“I don’t need Kai.” He spent hours and hours with Kai and he didn’t seem any closer to being normal. He still had the dreams and he still felt the beast deep in his gut always, always waiting to come up.

He still heard that voice. Dark and rich. Foreign.

You are my creature. You belong to me and you do my bidding. You’re my dog.

He slapped at the side of his head, trying to get that voice out.

“Damn it.” Tag was on his feet. “Get Eve in here.”

“Don’t. He’s fine.” Simon sat down in the chair beside him. “You’re hearing it again, but you’re not there, Jesse. It’s all right. I was thinking about seeing that new comic book movie this weekend. What was it? I think the lead is called Thorp or something.”

“He’s Thor.” Jesse breathed a sigh of relief as the voice faded and he was solidly back in the now where Simon often purposefully screwed up the names of comic book characters so Jesse would correct him. Shortly after they’d been paired up, his very staid and British partner had professed a deep and utterly false love of all things comic book and they’d started going to the movies or to comic book stores. Simon looked so out of place, but it had gone a long way to build trust between them. Simon Weston had been the first person since Iraq to sacrifice for Jesse Murdoch.

“And it isn’t a Thor movie this week. It’s a new Avengers. Thor’s just in it.” Somehow talking about something normal always seemed to bring him back.

“Well, Chelsea’s very excited,” Simon allowed.

Chelsea was an out-and-out dweeb, and Jesse loved her like a sister. He turned to Simon. “Chelsea thinks Phoebe’s bad?”

God, he sounded like a kid begging someone to tell him the world wasn’t so evil.

“Chelsea thinks she’s certainly not what she says she is,” Simon explained. “But then she also made me promise to remind you that because something isn’t what it seems, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad. Please tell her I followed instructions. She was very specific.”

He couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t true. He took a deep breath. There came a time when a man had to choose. He chose her. He loved this group, but he was falling in love with her. Maybe Chelsea was trying to tell him something. Maybe she was trying to tell him that the time had come to trust his instincts and his instinct was to protect and love Phoebe Graham.