You Only Love Twice (Masters and Mercenaries #8)(91)

Two men stared back. The two brothers looked very much alike. Both handsome and lean. In the pictures they had, both men sported dark beards, but the man she’d met the night before had cropped his close. “I think it’s this one. Ibrahim. But I’ll be honest, it wasn’t until he started talking about war and business that I really looked at him. I was trying to play down my aggressive American side, so I tried not to look him in the eyes.”

“Probably a good play given what part of the world we’re in. I know it’s hard on female operatives, but we have to be sure here. I need you to take another look,” Ten said as though he found the request distasteful.

“I’ll make sure this afternoon. I’m going to sit in with Kamdar on a couple of the sessions. The al Fareeds are expected to attend. I’ll get you what you need and then we can build a case against him.” A case that would hopefully forever get the stain off Jesse Murdoch’s reputation. It might be the only gift she could give him.

“All right. I hate sending you back in. I take it everyone saw you walking out with him?”

It was a problem, but she wasn’t willing to scrap the mission because of it. “I’ll be fine. I’ll take someone with me. Hey, if he flees the conference, we know we’ve got him on the run. Once we’re sure of the name, we don’t need to stay here. We set up long-term observation and we get Chelsea digging into his past. We’ll find something.”

“You are not to go anywhere in this hotel without a bodyguard. I know you can handle yourself, but I’m not taking any chances.” He sighed and sat back. “When the hell did I lose control of everything?”

She’d wondered when they were going to have this talk. There hadn’t been time before they’d had to come to Dubai. She sat down across from him. Ten could hold things in for a very long time, but it seemed he’d always been willing to open up eventually with her or Jamie. “Ace wasn’t your fault, Tennessee.”

“Hell yes, he was.” He looked straight on, his eyes stubborn.

She simply moved to where he was staring so he had to look at her. “You couldn’t have known. You did everything you could with the information you had. He came highly recommended. He passed every single test the Agency gave him. This isn’t your fault.”

“I’ve trained all my life to see things that aren’t there. From the time I was a kid, I knew I would do this job, and that f*cker got past me.”

“He got past everyone.” She knew she was talking to a brick wall at this point, but she couldn’t help but speak the truth. Eventually it would get to him. “What happened at Sanctum wasn’t your fault and last night wasn’t really Jesse’s. He saw a threat, and not only that, he saw me standing next to the man who killed his entire team.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think about it that way. Jesus, Phoebe, now that I do think about it, I kind of want to run around until I find the f*cker, too.” He leaned forward. “That man killed my brother. He tortured and killed my brother and I was thinking about the f*cking op.”

“Which is what you were trained to do,” she pointed out gently. “It does Jamie no good for you to blow everyone’s cover. You have to be rational about this because Jesse can’t be.”

“How about you?” Ten asked, his voice softening. A somber smile slightly curled up his mouth. “You were standing right next to the man who killed Jamie and what were you thinking about?”

She set the coffee down and guilt swamped her as she admitted the truth. “I was thinking about Jesse.” She’d thought about Jesse all night long. How could she do that? “Ten, I’m so sorry. I thought about Jesse.”

Ten sat up, his hands on the table between them. “As you damn well should have. I wasn’t blaming you. I was pointing something out. You’re a fool if you think you can leave that boy behind.”

It took her a moment because she’d been so wrapped up in the drama with Jesse that she hadn’t given Jamie more than a passing thought. It had been right and good to offer Jesse comfort. It had felt like her right to hold him. “But I stood right in front of the man who killed my husband and all I could think about afterward was protecting my boyfriend from him.”

“Because Jamie’s gone, honey, and life is for the living. Hell, I won’t kick the boy’s ass for that fact alone.” He sat back, crossing his legs. “I knew Jamie better than you did.”

“I was his wife.” She was the one looking away now, but Ten wouldn’t allow her that comfort any more than she’d allowed him. He caught her eye.

“Yeah, well, you didn’t grow up with him and you weren’t his best friend. I think if he’d lived, you would have been, but you were both so young you never got past the mad in love stage. You didn’t have to really live together the way couples with mortgages and kids and crappy jobs have to. He put you on a pedestal and you’re doing the same with him. He wanted that mission. Do you know why he wanted that mission?”

“No.” And maybe she didn’t want to know.

“Because he wanted to best me. He wanted to head a team of his own.”

Phoebe shook her head. It went against everything they’d talked about. “No. We were getting out. We agreed that if we were going to have kids, we couldn’t put ourselves on the line like that.”