Kabul, Afghanistan August 2021
It had to be the altitude, right? That was why I couldn’t seem to get a deep breath, to take in enough air to relieve the burning sensation growing in my chest. It had nothing to do with him.
Liar.
Out of the billion scenarios I’d pictured over the years when it came to seeing Nate again, this wasn’t one of them. I’d imagined him showing up at my door on some rainy night, or even marching into my office in DC to tell me I couldn’t marry Jeremy. Fine, that scenario was far fetched, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t run through my brain a time or two.
I twisted the gaudy, heavy ring around my finger with my thumb and paced the length of my suite.
Nate was here. The man I used to consider my soulmate was in the same city—the same building. My pulse skyrocketed, and I clamped down on every instinct that told me to hunt him down and either scream at him for what he’d put me through or hug him so tight neither of us would be able to breathe. Maybe both.
“Are you even listening to me?”
Jeremy.
Shit, he was still on the phone.
“I’m here.” I shook my head and looked out the window, taking in the view of the embassy’s courtyard, hoping for a glimpse of Nate . . . if he was even out there.
He’d shown me to my suite with a brusque civility that suggested he wanted to get as far away from me as possible. Not surprising, given the last three years.
“Look, I said I was sorry—”
My thoughts muffled the rest of Jeremy’s excuses.
There were some things that even apologies couldn’t fix.
“I said I needed some time.” I sagged into the oversize armchair that flanked the seating arrangement in the living room.
“You didn’t say that you were going halfway around the world for Lauren! You and I both know that was supposed to be Newcastle on that flight,” he snapped. “Look, if you needed some time to . . .” There was an audible swallow on the other line. “Come to a decision, then you could have done that from DC or gone to Serena’s place—”
Serena. A whole new wave of nausea washed over me, so thick I could taste its bitter coating on my tongue. “Look, Jer, being here has nothing to do with you and your choices, just me and mine. If you’d even remotely paid attention to what I’d been telling you for the past six weeks
. . .” I rubbed the spot between my eyebrows and huffed out a self- deprecating laugh. “Then again, you’ve been juggling a few things, haven’t you?” I looked around for a clock. Eight sixteen p.m. here, and the jet lag was kicking my ass. My body didn’t care what time it really was as long as I let it sleep, but my brain knew I needed to adjust as quickly as possible, and an early bedtime wouldn’t help.
“Look, we’ve both been busy with work, Isa. Just . . . let’s talk this out like mature adults.” His condescending tone stiffened my spine.
“I’m not ready to talk it out.” Three knocks sounded at my door. “Someone’s here.” I stood and made my way toward the door.
“Let me guess? Ben Holt is there to soothe all your feelings?” Jeremy fired back. “We’re not done with this conversation.”
“We are absolutely done with this conversation.” My voice rose, and I threw open the door with about as much grace as a drunken llama. It slammed into the doorstop and bounced back. A broad hand flew out and caught it before it could smack me in the hip . . . a hand attached to a tattooed forearm I knew as well as my own.
Nathaniel stood in my doorway, dressed head to toe in black combat gear, to include a Kevlar vest and squiggly little earpiece that probably kept him connected to the other ninjas who’d escorted us from the embassy.
First a scruffy beard and unmarked uniform, and now this?
Apparently, Nate had been busy in the last three years.
“We need to talk.” He nodded toward the room behind me. “Inside.”
That burn in my chest transformed into a searing flame that threatened to incinerate me from the inside out. Those eyes would always be the death of me, so blue they deserved their own classification, but the warmth I’d always depended on had chilled, making the man in front of me seem more like a stranger than he had the morning we’d jumped into the Missouri River.
My anger stuttered in response to that glacial gaze.
Of course he looked like the next action star on the Hollywood screen, and I didn’t even have the armor of some decent mascara.
“. . . that’s not what a partnership means!” Jeremy barked in my ear, finishing some tirade I hadn’t really heard. “Let me come and get you. I’ll take the family jet. I can be there by morning.”
“Now,” Nate whispered, a muscle in his jaw flexing.
“I have to go,” I told Jeremy, hitting the end button before he had a chance to counter.
I backed up a step, and Nate brushed by as he walked into my suite, the scent of earth and spearmint tingling my nose. He still smelled the same. Did that come-screw-me fragrance just emanate from his pores, or was it bottled somewhere?
He didn’t pause or speak as he swept through my room, checking behind the curtains before marching into my bedroom like he owned it.
Not this one, at least.
“I’m not hiding someone in my shower, Nathaniel,” I called after him, perching my butt on the edge of the desk and abandoning my cell phone to its surface. Jeremy could wait. I didn’t have the answers he wanted. Not yet, maybe not ever.
“Very funny,” Nate called out from the bedroom.
My muscles tensed, ready for battle with this you-shouldn’t-be-here version of Nate, but there was a part of my soul that seemed to settle and calm just because the asshat was in the same room.
“Just making sure there aren’t any assassins hiding behind your curtains.” He walked back in with that confident, efficient stride and moved to the window, nodded at whatever he saw in the courtyard below, and turned to face me.
“No one wants to assassinate me.” My boss was a different story, but she wouldn’t be here until next week, and her upcoming visit wasn’t public knowledge anyway.
“Yeah,” he said, his face deadpan as he stared me down from the other side of the room, “they do. What the hell are you doing here, Izzy?”
Izzy. So few people called me that anymore. The second I’d walked into Senator Lauren’s office, I’d become Isa, plain and simple.
“I could ask you the same thing,” I fired back, crossing my arms over my chest. Heat sang through my cheeks as I felt the bulk of my Georgetown hoodie behind my arms. I was dressed for bed, barefoot in pajama pants, not outfitted to confront Nate.
Nate. After three years, this is how it happened? Not because he’d come back, or apologized for disappearing off the face of the earth, but because once again, we’d proved to be the magnets that fate could never quit playing with?
This was bullshit.
“Nice earpiece, by the way,” I continued. “At least someone here knows how to get ahold of you.” I fought the knot in my throat. There were too many emotions fighting for supremacy, each choking the other out until the hurt of it all won out, turning my words sharp and acrid.
“I’m being serious.” “So am I.”
His jaw flexed once. Twice. “Say it. Whatever it is you’ve been holding back all evening, just say it.” He folded his arms across his chest, mirroring my stance, but he pulled it off way better. He had the whole “dark mercenary thing” going for him, though I knew if he was on our security detail, then he was still on the government’s payroll.
“You abandoned me.” The words slipped out.
He arched his brow. “Really. I abandoned you? Is that how you remember it? Twisting facts. Guess you really are a politician now, just like Daddy wanted.”
“You disappeared!” I came off the desk in a flurry of years-old anger. “Not one letter! Email! Your social media? Erased. Your phone? Disconnected!” My fury carried me across the room until I was bare foot to boot with him, glaring up at the face that had haunted my dreams and a few of my nightmares. “You vanished!” The years of not knowing, of wondering if he was safe, or hurt—or worse—erupted in every word. “Do
you have any idea how hard I looked for you? I went to Peru as we planned. Borneo too. By the next year, I got the point.”
A flash of something—regret?—flickered across his features, but it was gone a heartbeat later. “This is getting us nowhere.” He sidestepped and walked away from me, headed for the front door. “You didn’t even lock the damned thing.” He threw the dead bolt and turned, leaning back against the door. “You’re supposed to be in some glitzy office at that law firm in New York, so I’ll ask again. What are you doing here?”
“Making a difference. I believe that’s what someone suggested.” I padded across the soft carpet to the kitchenette and pulled out two bottles of water. “Want one?” Even as pissed as I was, my first instinct was to care about him. God, I was pathetic.
“Sure. Thank you,” he answered, his voice softening. “And this”—he gestured to the suite—“was not what I had in mind when I made that suggestion.” He caught the bottle I hurled his way. “But it’s definitely what your parents had in mind, isn’t it?”
I shrugged and opened the water. “It’s where I landed.” I took a drink, hoping it might dislodge the boulder in my throat. “What are you more pissed at, Nate? The fact that I’m not where you left me? Or the fact that I’m meeting the version of you that you never wanted me to see?”
“It isn’t safe for you to be here.” He rolled the bottle between his hands, clearly ignoring the question. “The country is unstable as hell.”
I cocked my head at him. “But that’s why you’re here, right? To keep people like me safe? Is that what you do now? Where you’ve been for the past three years?”
His jaw ticked. “I can’t tell you where I’ve been for the last three years. Rules of the game haven’t changed—they’ve just gotten more restrictive.” He twisted the bottle open and drank half of it down.
All these years and he still wouldn’t open up. Guess his world hadn’t changed that much, but mine had. “Fine, if you’re not here to explain what happened in New York, and I’m not going to take your suggestion and leave, then why exactly are you in my room?”
“I’m not supposed to be here.”
“No shit. I highly doubt Holt’s security detail is in his room drinking from his minibar.”
“That’s not what I mean.” The corners of Nate’s mouth turned up, but it wasn’t quite a smile, so at least I didn’t have to deal with that dimple of
his making an appearance.
Nothing knocked off a few IQ points like the sight of that dimple. “Please, do stop speaking in army-guy codes.” My gaze narrowed
slightly. “Assuming that you’re still army?” They’d told us we’d have Special Forces as our security, but there was a black-and-white name tape on the left side of his chest that read Green, not Phelan.
No matter what name he was using, he still looked so damned good.
Someone hadn’t been skipping the gym.
Stop it.
What was it about being in the same room with Nathaniel Phelan that made me revert back to eighteen years old?
“Yeah, I’m still in the army. Just the part that no one talks about,” he answered slowly, raising his eyebrows. “And as for my phone, my email, my social media . . . it was all sanitized.”
“Okay then.” A tiny kernel of something like hope took root in my stomach at the small but openly offered truth. “And that’s why you don’t
. . . exist anymore.” The days and months following his disappearance had been maddening, but part of me had always known why he’d fallen off the face of the earth. This had always been his dream.
Making his obsolete had become mine. He nodded.
“And Green?” I motioned to his name tag. “Is that your call sign or whatever?”
“No. These”—he pointed to the name tag—“are for you guys, not us. It’s what you need to call me—if I stay. I told you I’m not supposed to be here.” He glanced toward the window and then back, as if meeting my eyes was something . . . painful.
“Where are you supposed to be?” Was there someone else in his life now? Someone who had the right to know if he made it home? Someone waiting? A nauseating twist of jealousy struck deep inside me, souring my stomach.
“On leave in the Maldives.” He had the decency to look a little guilty.
I blinked. “You were going to the Maldives?” Indignation heated my blood. “Funny, but I thought that was an October thing.” Did our pact mean absolutely nothing to him? Of course it didn’t. He’d blatantly shown me that for the last three years.
“Yeah.” He flinched. “But Sergeant Brown came down with something, so I filled in for him.”
“Let me guess. Sergeant Brown isn’t his real name either?”
“Just roll with it.” He finished off his water and twisted the top back on. “Point is, you walked off that plane.”
“And?” I shrugged and forced a fake smile. “You can still go to the Maldives. Just assign me to someone else.” It sounded empty and fake because it was. It didn’t matter how pissed I was at Nate, how wrong things had gone the last time we’d been in the same room; I couldn’t bear the thought of him walking away. Not again. Not like this.
“Yeah, okay.” He gave a self-deprecating laugh and sent me a pointed stare. “Because it’s that easy.”
My heart stumbled through its next few beats. The air thickened and charged as we stood there, our eyes locked on each other across the small, mine-laden distance between us. One wrong step and we’d both bleed out.
“I know,” I admitted softly. “It’s not easy. Never has been.” He nodded curtly and looked away, breaking the spell.
I sucked in a breath.
“I don’t get it. You’re about to spend two weeks in some of the most inhospitable areas known to man, hopping province to province, all so you can what? Feel better about how not stable this country is and label it fact- finding?”
My spine jerked ramrod stiff. “We’re here to write down our observations about how the drawdown is going, and you know it.”
“And you won’t go home?” His eyes met mine, the plea blatant.
“No.” I swallowed back the truth on the tip of my tongue. If he knew why I was really here, would he help? Or throw me out faster? “I’ll do the tour Senator Lauren requested and then meet her when she arrives next week. And no one is supposed to know—”
“You’re here. Yeah, I get that a lot.” He raked his hand over his thick, dark hair and blew out a slow breath.
I felt his sigh in every bone of my body, until it became my own. “Fine. Then this is how it’s going to go.” He pushed off the door and
chucked the bottle into the trash with excellent aim. “I’m Sergeant Green to you. Not Nate. You can never call me Nate. Not out there. Not in here. Not anywhere. Got it?”
“If you insist.” I had to tilt my head back to keep eye contact as he came closer—whether it was the fact that I was barefoot and he was in boots, or just being apart for three years, the guy felt huge next to me.
“I insist. Anonymity is a requirement in this line of work. In here, you can be as belligerent and . . .” He struggled for a word. “Izzy as you want, but out there”—he pointed to the door—“out there you listen to what I say, and do what I ask when I ask it.”
“Nate—” I cringed. Shit, I was never going to get this right. He arched a single brow at me. “As. Soon. As. I. Say. It.”
“Have you always been a pain in the ass?” I fired back. “That’s pretty funny, coming from you.”
I rolled my eyes and folded my arms across my chest.
He glanced down and winced, jerking his focus to a spot over my head as he took another deep breath. “I’ll be at all your meetings, your meals, and the one who stands outside the door when you pee.”
“That’s graphic.”
“If you need me, I will be across the hall tonight and every other night that you’re in Afghanistan. If your life is at risk, press this button.” He pushed a remote the size of my thumb into my hand and let its black nylon necklace hang loose. “And I will appear.”
I looked down at the device and huffed a sarcastic laugh. “So this is what it takes to get your phone number? A girl has to haul herself into a war zone?”
“Izzy,” he whispered, stepping back and putting a few feet of distance between us.
“Oh no.” I pocketed the magic-button remote. “If I can’t call you Nate, then you don’t get to call me Izzy. Fair is fair.”
“Well, I’m not calling you Isa, that’s for damn sure,” he shot back. “I’m not your father.”
My father. Because he knew that had been Dad’s pet name for me. He knew all sorts of things he shouldn’t because he was Nate and I was Izzy, and as screwed up as this place was, facts were facts. History was history.
“Then Ms. Astor will be just fine.”
“Then have a great evening, Ms. Astor.” He gave me a mock salute and headed for the door. “I’ll be here bright and early to fetch you for our first destination.”
After all this time, this was where we were? Not quite strangers or enemies, but . . . bitter what? Acquaintances?
“So you’re staying on my detail?” My voice hitched, and he heard it, pausing midstep before turning to face me.
“You won’t leave, which means neither can I. Simple physics.” His gaze narrowed. “But you weren’t supposed to be here, either, were you? Greg Newcastle is supposed to be in this room.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. “You can assign me to someone else,” I offered again in a rush.
He ignored me. “So why did you get on the plane? Did Newcastle get sick too?”
I swallowed.
“Huh. Not sick, then. It was your choice.” He tilted his head. “Why did you add Kunduz and Samangan to the itinerary? Those weren’t on the list before you got on that plane.” He stalked forward.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
“All of your little friends are sticking to the east, and Newcastle was focused on Kandahar. Something about the girls’ chess team Senator Lauren has been working to get out.”
“Hey, that was actually my project. I’m the one who’s been coordinating everything. Newcastle just wanted the credit.”
He stopped right in front of me, staring down like he could see right through me if he tried hard enough. “And yet you added two provinces to the north.”
“Nate,” I whispered, already breaking the rules. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“I . . .” I shook my head and closed my eyes. I could have lied to anyone else, but not him.
“Don’t even think of lying to me.” His thumb and forefinger gently lifted my chin. “What’s going on?”
I opened my eyes and my heart clenched. Under all that armor, this was Nate. My Nate. He would help, I knew he would . . . as long as I wasn’t putting myself in danger. That was where he’d draw the line. And if he thought I was already in danger just being here, there was every chance he’d tie me to the seat of the next outbound aircraft once I told him the truth.
“What’s in the north, Isabeau?” My name was nothing more than a whisper.
“Serena.”
