Hard Beat(25)

I think Omid is just as caught off guard as me because when I tear my eyes from Beaux to look at him, I see the confusion and immediate wariness. He just stares at her, eyes flickering back and forth to me repeatedly. I put my hands up in an it’s okay gesture – palms facing him at my chest level – and just when I think he is starting to believe me, I hear the click of a shutter and see his eyes widen to epic proportions.

I turn around to see Beaux clicking the shutter, lens angled directly at Omid. Her disobedience of my rules causes rage to erupt inside me because I know how skittish this contact is and she’s now documented his face on record.

“What the f*ck are you doing?” My voice is a quiet but harsh scold as the excitement over the information that was just promised me turns to disbelief. “Did you not hear a thing I said to you?” I don’t want to draw attention to us by yelling, but it’s pretty f*cking hard not to when she just played every single one of her stupidity cards in a single hand.

Beaux’s eyes are wide and her face must look similar to the way mine did when I heard her fluency, but I can’t worry about her right now – I have to salvage Omid’s trust in me. The problem is when I turn around, Omid is gone.

My hands are fisted and my temper is raging. I’d love to turn around and throttle Beaux for her lack of judgment, for her disregard to the situation, for not following my set of rules.

And because she’s not Stella.

I take deep breaths, trying to calm the tumult inside me. It’s no use even trying to find Omid – the man is a ghost in the wind right now – so I do the only thing I can. I leave. Without saying a word to Beaux, I walk right past her and head toward the end of the alley, not wanting to be in this dangerous part of the city any longer than I need to be.

As we emerge from the alley, I slow my pace and cautiously survey my surroundings before I walk into the flow of foot traffic and back toward our cab. I know Beaux is behind me. Only a deaf and blind man would not be able to sense her presence… or maybe I’m just a lesser man who has fallen under her goddamn spell even though I swore that I wouldn’t.

Despite being completely irate with her, I can still smell her perfume over the stagnant scent of destitution that blankets things here and hear the shuffle of her shoes against the dirt-covered cobblestone sidewalks. Beaux tries to strike up a conversation by apologizing disjointedly while she follows me at a quickened pace through the crowded streets, but I refuse to acknowledge her.

I’m more pissed than I think she even realizes. I’m angry over so many things that it’s better if I don’t speak to her right now; otherwise I know I’ll say a lot of things I’ll regret regardless of how f*cking truthful they are. With each step we take, my displeasure intensifies over the many reasons I have to be angry with her.

When we reach the cab that is surprisingly still waiting for us, I open the door for her to get in and say only one thing. “Get us home.”

She scoots in and looks up at me, a thousand things running through her eyes, and the minute she speaks, I just slam the door shut, not wanting to hear her explanations. By the time I take my seat in the front passenger side, she’s just finishing telling the driver where to go.

First of all, there’s no way I’m attempting to communicate with the driver while she’s sitting back there laughing her ass off while I make a fool of myself. Secondly, who the f*ck is this woman? She comes on to me, we sleep together, and now we’re in this predicament together and she just screwed me over with one of my biggest sources? I mean what kind of power play is she going for?

I’m all for dating smart women. Shit, intelligence is a major turn-on for me. But time and again I keep feeling like I’m being duped here even though her actions are not really one hundred percent her fault.

Or they are and she’s just smart enough to make me think they aren’t.

Fuck! This woman is driving me crazy. What the hell? I never doubt myself, always trust that gut instinct of mine, and yet right now she’s making me question so many damn things, it’s not even funny.

And then there’s her little show with Omid. First, shocking the shit out of both of us when she piped into the conversation in his native language so that even if he was trying to be quiet and only share information with me in the little bit of Dari that I know, she understood every single thing he said. Add to that she takes a f*cking picture of him. A picture! My trust quotient with her just went down a whole helluva lot. She was freelance. Her stunt begs me to question if she still is, or maybe she’s trying to chase the story too and will break it first, steal it right out from under me, and get the notoriety herself.

The more I think about this scenario, the more each bump along the uneven pavement lodges the idea firmly into my psyche. Pauly said she was freelance for a few weeks before I got here. Was she freelance as just a photog or as a reporter too? Was she just biding time to find some sorry f*cking sap she could mooch off and steal what she didn’t earn?

“Tanner.” Her voice calls softly from the seat behind me, my name an apology and a question all mixed into one.

“Don’t talk,” I growl, my head spinning a mile a minute. The man who never gets rattled is f*cking rattled, and not because of a goddamn mortar strike or IED but rather because of this woman. The only thing she has going for her at the moment is that at least she listens and shuts up.

This time.