Page 52 of The Woman Left Behind

He didn’t like that. She saw it in the way his eyes narrowed. But he didn’t lie. “No.”

“Then you aren’t taking me home.”

He dug in his pocket, came out with a candy bar. “Then take this.”

It was a Baby Ruth, chocolate and peanuts, a triple whammy of sugar, protein, and a little bit of caffeine. Oh, thank God. She grabbed it from him, not caring at all that he was the one to provide it, and tore it open as enthusiastically as a tiger on a fresh kill. From now on she’d carry her own supply of candy bars; she learned something new on every mission. “Thanks.”

Without acknowledging her thanks he turned back to his truck and climbed in. Jina trudged through the snow to her car, still gnawing on the Baby Ruth. As she passed a couple of the guys she saw that they were chewing on something, too, so evidently this was something they did to give them a last burst of needed energy.

She wondered if she’d taken Levi’s only bar of candy.

If so... tough.

Because they’d just come home from such a long, convoluted job, they didn’t have to show up at the training site again until Wednesday, and she needed every hour of the recovery time. When she got home she fell facedown on the couch and slept four hours, then woke befuddled and annoyed. Not knowing what else to do, she changed to sweats and went for a run. Then she ate some peanut butter crackers, showered, and went back to bed. The fitful, out-of-sync sleep continued. She was awake at midnight, doing laundry. After another nap, she forced herself to stay awake all day Monday, going for a couple of short runs, cleaning out the refrigerator, buying groceries. Her brain felt as if it was made of fog. But she stayed awake until a reasonable hour, then slept twelve hours and woke feeling much better, except for the memory of a vivid dream about Levi.

She didn’t want to relive those moments in the field when he’d been kissing her as if he could inhale her, but her subconscious decreed otherwise. He’d given her his candy bar—the bastard. Just when she got a mental wall against him somewhat built, he’d do something like that, or like going to the tattoo parlor to protect her, and BAM! all her carefully placed mind-blocks came crashing down. Her dream wasn’t exactly like what had actually happened; in her dream, the entire team stood around watching, and making angry comments.

She woke feeling depressed; how else could the guys be expected to react? Even her subconscious agreed, and hammered the lesson home.

She remained depressed all day Tuesday; even a long run that exhausted her didn’t produce enough endorphins to counteract her angry longing. She wanted Levi, not just physically—though that was intense—but the everyday things that cemented life. She wanted to eat breakfast with him, argue with him, bitch at him about leaving the lid up, snuggle against his back at night. Never before had she cared about a man enough to think about a life together, but with Levi... yes. She wanted that.

Why couldn’t she have felt this way about Donnelly? He was a nice guy. Going through life with him would be easy, and comfortable, with shared laughter. On the other hand, nothing about Levi struck her as easy. He was hard, somewhat grim, uncompromising. He lived a dangerous life, regularly risking injury and death, and he did it without hesitation.

Hard on that thought came the realization that she shared that life, that her part in the missions was mostly in the background but not without risk. She was that extra layer of protection for him and the other guys. What if something happened to him, to any of them, on her watch? A chill ran through her. She should have realized this before, and on a superficial level she had, but until this moment she hadn’tfeltthe weight of responsibility for their lives. The heavy mantle of it settled on her shoulders, sank into her pores, and forever changed how she regarded her job.

Levi could die if she screwed up.

No matter how angry she got at him, no matter how much the situation frustrated her, that home truth drove her hard when Wednesday rolled around and they returned to their training routine. After such a long mission they were slated to be home for a healthy stretch, but they never slacked up with the training. For her part she ran harder, longer, pushing herself more than she ever had before, and she’d pushed herself plenty. She put in long hours with Tweety’s program, practicing and then practicing some more, honing her skills.

Whoever’s ass Levi had crawled up about her malfunctioning throat mic came through with a replacement that was guaranteed to work. The problem had evidently been a bad laryngeal sensor. She put the new throat mic through the mill, making the guys participate despite their bellyaching, on the grounds that it was their butts on the line. The new mic performed the way it was supposed to, with clear and reliable audio into their headsets. Finally satisfied, she gave it a thumbs-up.

“About time,” Levi said drily, when he found out. “Now we can go active again.”

She was startled enough to look directly at him, something she tried not to do because the impact of his intense gaze was enough to make her falter. He was standing closer than she liked, close enough that she was caught in his gravitational pull; she had to fight to keep from leaning closer to him. “What?”

“All the equipment has to be okayed before we go.”

Her mouth fell open. “You mean—we were waiting onme?”

“Yep.” One side of his mouth quirked. “Not that we minded the down time, but I was beginning to think you were going to design and manufacture your own.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“You’re in charge of Tweety. Until you say it’s ready to go, it doesn’t go. If there had been an emergency we’d have gone without you, but things worked out.”

“Gowithoutme?” she repeated, horrified by the idea, though logically she knew that if a team member got hurt the rest of the team would deploy without him if necessary.

“We got along without you before,” he pointed out, his tone even and a little cool, the way it always got when he wanted to put some distance between her and the rest of the team. It stung, and she tried never to let him see that it stung. Did he think that if he managed to push her out, she’d still want to get involved with him? She’d be mad as hell, because she didn’t like to fail at anything. She wouldn’t let herself quit, and she’d fought like hell to be good enough, so the only way to get her off the team would be to somehow force her to fail.

The only other option she could see was if she asked to be transferred to another team, and she thought that idea would go over like a lead balloon. Teamwork was essential, and the drone operators had been assigned to the team MacNamara had thought each one would work best with. Moreover, after the long months she’d spent withherteam, she didn’t want to go through it all again with another bunch. She’d tested out at the top of the trainees, start to finish; no one else could protect her guys as well as she could. Damn if she’d transfer. Damn if she’d quit.

No matter how she looked at it, that left them with nowhere to go. One of them would have to bend, and it didn’t look as if that was going to happen.

“That was before,” she said just as coolly, and left it at that.

Their next mission put them back in Colombia. Her work cell phone went off in the middle of the night, and the shot of adrenaline woke her up as thoroughly as if someone had poured ice water on her. She bolted out of bed, hit the brew button on the coffee maker she’d installed in the bathroom, and threw on her clothes before even checking instructions. She swished some mouthwash, gave her hair a quick brush and secured it in a ponytail, then got her checklist to make sure she didn’t forget anything important. Her go-bag was in the trunk of her car, better packed now than it had been on that first trip.

There had been a big powwow over whether or not the drones and the laptops, with their highly classified software, should stay with the operators or be safely stowed in some secure place and checked out only as needed. When a GO-Team was activated it usually had togo, top speed, and wading through protocol to get the drone and laptop would slow things down. On the other hand, Jina hadn’t been wild about the idea of having something that valuable in her safekeeping, and neither had any of the other operators. Places were broken into all the time, and laptops stolen. In the immortal words of Forrest Gump, shit happened.

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