Page 34 of Welker

“Moira?”

She faced him, looking…nervous this time.

“Yeah, Welk?” she returned, clearing her throat.

“We’ll be revisiting this thing, once we’re alone.”

She didn’t pretend she was clueless. She simply nodded before her stoic mask slipped down over her face.

Welker would take that as a win.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Damn.

What had Welker meant, they’d be revisiting this? What had she agreed to? Moira’s brain felt like it was going haywire in her head.

And…had he really, before catching himself, said that she meant a lot to him? It had to have been a slip of the tongue. But still, the rock-of-a-man hadn’t hesitated to comfort her when she’d been close to breaking down.

The tears she hadn’t let fall still clouded her eyes, so she turned her back and wiped them away with her sleeve. It was too late for Welker not to see the moisture, but she certainly didn’t want any of her teammates to catch her being emotional.

“Why do you do that?” Welker asked quietly.

After telling Mike and Sin who had just entered the room, that “everything goes out the windows”, he’d taken Moira’s arm and steered her out into the hallway.

“Do what?” she asked.

“Shut down your real emotions in front of your friends?”

“Teammates,” she corrected, then thought about what she’d say next. She could give Welker an earful of why she was so fucked up, or a truncated version of her childhood that was PG.

She went with the lessor of two evils.

“I wasn’t encouraged, as a youngster, to have feelings. Nor did I want to with my…situation.”

Moira knew that was cryptic, and that Welker would silently chew on it for a few hours or days until he came up with just the right question to draw more out of her.

But…maybe when he asked, she’d give him what he was looking for. Perhaps it was time she started sharing why she was so fucked up. Maybe, once she gave him an earful, Welker would also share, then would stop engaging with her, and haunting her freaking dreams. Once he found out the kind of abnormal shit she was made of, he’d put her firmly back in the “teammate zone”, and she could get the hell over him.

“Moira?” Mason called up the stairs.

She looked down to see that he was on the phone. Her chief, thankfully, was giving her a needed reprieve from Welker’s probing.

“Yeah, boss?”

“Do you remember Dean Christopherson?”

“Crash?’ Moira answered, slowly coming down the stairs with Welker at her back. “Sure. He and Adeline left Hilly’s camp a few weeks ago.”

Where was the boss going with this?

“Then you probably know that he’s part of a group of folks in San Antonio who go above and beyond.”

She did. Several of Crash’s friends had come to the team’s rescue in other times of need; Cruz Livingston who was FBI, Conor Paxton, a Parks and Wildlife officer, and Quint Axton with the SAPD had all helped save the day when some of her teammates’ women had been in jeopardy.

“Uh, huh.” Her curiosity was peaked as she came to the bottom of the steps and stopped.

“Well, one of theirs, Hayden Yates, is with the Sheriff’s Department there.”

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