Sweet Recovery (Ex Ops Series Book 4) (13 page)

If they went that far to figure it out, well, fuck it.

My father had not done that to me yet, but he had not so politely told me he knew about my drinking choice when he had caught me taking a bottle to my room and told me snidely under his breath that I had become a disappointment.

I had never wanted to hit somebody so badly in my life, not even that time Lucas had inadvertently embarrassed me in front of the whole cafeteria. Instead, I had somehow managed to reign in my anger and walk back to my room without smashing the bottle against his head.

I was a disappointment to him? What a joke. He had managed to turn the rest of my life into a disappointment. What I wouldn’t give to be able to give him those words.

Draining the rest of my spiked lemonade, I heard steady footsteps approaching. Someone had entered my suite, and I hadn’t even noticed. Stupid, stupid, stupid Ginny!

Turning around, I didn’t bother to hide my bewilderment at the sight of Sanjay, dressed in his usual three-piece suit with a small smile on his face. Never before had he come to my private suite like this.

I set my glass down and watched him sit on the couch on the other side of the table I was using. It was a bit awkward to look at him from the side since I had pulled my chair over to the window, but I didn’t want to get up and move my chair to face him, either. If he was going to invade my space, then he could deal with me as I was: buzzed, no makeup, hair in messy bun, dressed in a tank top and yoga pants, and hands covered in dark marker smudges.

In my slightly intoxicated state, I couldn’t help admiring just how masculine and good-looking he was with a strong jaw, high cheekbones, warm brown eyes, and a five o’clock shadow over his lovely lightly bronzed skin. I imagined women probably fell all over themselves for a chance at him, and here I sat, trying to drink him away. I couldn’t decide if that was funny or pathetic.

Sitting forward to rest his elbows on his thighs, he clasped his hands by his knees and murmured, “I’ve never seen you look like this, Virginia.”

“You’ve never really seen me at all, Sanjay.”

He tilted his head to the side and studied me for a minute or so. “I suppose not.”

Feeling unusually bold, I asked, “What are you doing here?”

At this, his mouth spread into a full grin. “I thought, with the wedding only a couple of months away, we might spend some time together.”

The words felt like stones sinking into my gut. Just exactly what kind of time was he wanting to spend here? Was he expecting to be intimate with me before the wedding? I couldn’t do that. I wasn’t ready to let another man touch me. Part of me thought I would never be ready for that, but I was definitely not ready for it right at this moment.

Some of the panic must have shown on my face, because Sanjay held up his hands in a surrender pose and gently said, “I’m not the firing squad, I swear. I just thought perhaps we could go out on a date and get to know each other a bit better.” Nodding his head down to my paper, he continued, “I see you like art. Would you like to go to the Art Institute? You can show me what your favorite works are.”

He wanted to go on a date?

I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say. My silence must not have been the sort of response he was hoping for, because he dropped his hands to his lap and leaned forward to whisper, “I promise you, Virginia, that I mean you no harm. If you truly don’t want to go out with me, I will understand.” He paused then added, “Your father does not let you out of the tower much, so I just thought you would like to get away for a while.”

Those words seemed too good to be true. The part of me that had learned to be cautious wondered if he had another agenda for taking me out … but was I willing to risk the chance for a small, if temporary, moment of freedom?

Ultimately, the idea of getting out of these walls and going to the Art Institute where I would be surrounded by nothing but color and beauty was too much of a temptation to pass up.

Biting my bottom lip in uncertainty, I asked him softly, “Would you be willing to wait for me in the entertainment room while I get ready?” I didn’t exactly want to leave the man in my suite while I got undressed and in the shower. That was just asking for trouble.

He gave me another big grin, relief filling his features as he stood. “Of course. I’ll wait for you there. I have a few phone calls to make while you get ready, so please do not feel the need to rush.” Without saying another word, he walked out as quickly as he had walked in, leaving me somewhat stupefied at my sudden stroke of luck.

The man had not issued me an order, nor had he given me any sort of thinly veiled threat. He had simply come in here, offered me something I wanted more than anything, and walked out without giving me any edicts. In other words, he hadn’t done anything my father would have done.

Perhaps Sanjay Kahn wasn’t exactly like Richard Wellington, but only time would tell.

One thing was for sure: he would never, ever be to me what Lucas was.

~~~

We were quietly walking through the halls of the Art Institute, our steps echoing on the hardwood floors as we moved slowly along. Between the silence around us and the exquisite works on the walls, I was in awe.

Upon our arrival, the doors had been opened for us, and a brisk man with glasses informed Sanjay that the museum had been cleared out as requested, so we were here alone. The whole place to ourselves. Free to do as we liked as long as we abided by one important rule: don’t touch the artwork.

The taste of liberty, surrounded by something that meant so much to me, was almost the best present I had ever been given. The gesture itself was unmeasurable. But my left hand was wrapped around the one present that would always mean more.

As we stopped here and there to stare at paintings depicting scenes of witches and fairies from Shakespeare’s Bard created by the renowned Gothic artist Henri Fuseli, rich crimson red and black caught my eye. I turned to stare at a painting of an unconscious woman sprawled across a piece of furniture with some sort of gremlin looking creature sitting on her abdomen. It was dark and menacing. Beautiful and terrifying. A warning and a gift. It was titled
The Nightmare,
and as I stared at the sleeping woman being haunted by such a hideous villain, I couldn’t help feeling as though that were me. Passed out and practically helpless as my life was taken over by the worst sort of monster. The sort that hurt you in the name of love, or at least, whatever my father thought love was. It wasn’t even love for me, but love for my mother, really.

What a horrid sort of love it was.

A strong hand wrapped around my elbow and urged me forward. “Look at this one, Virginia.” Sanjay pulled me from the dark painting toward another that depicted a lighter, dreamy message.
The Dream of Queen Katherine
interpreted a scene from William Shakespeare’s
Henry VIII
.

A troop of angelic looking fairies were dancing in the air, holding crowns of green leaves out to someone unseen. They were rejoicing in their subject, inviting them to their world of romance and mysticism. If only I could go with them …

Lost in my inspection of every delicate brush stroke, I utterly forgot Sanjay was there with me until I heard his voice speak next to me.

“What do you like most about this piece?”

“They’re happy, at peace. I envy their carefree nature, Sanjay.”

“Jay,” he suddenly said.

Looking over at him, a bit confused, I asked, “Excuse me?”

Turning his scrutiny on me, he simply answered, “Please, call me Jay. Sanjay is what my business associate’s call me. Those close to me call me Jay.”

Cocking my head, I asked him bluntly, “And we’re close, you and I?”

Reaching out, he enveloped my hand with his and urged me forward again. “Not yet, but I think we could be.”

Oh, no. No, no, no. There was no way this man was trying to win me over.

Stopping, I pulled my hand out of his, which caused him to stop and study me. “Sanja—”

“Jay,” he quickly interrupted.

Taking a deep breath, I tried again. “Jay, I’m not sure what you’re looking for out of this marriage, but you have to know love will never be part of the equation.”

He cocked his eyebrow at me, and my courage faded fast.

Stuttering, I continued, “You just seem to be creating something here between us, and I don’t want you to think that would ever be a possibility. I think it’s better for the two of us to be honest with each other about what we’re doing than lie needlessly.”

He studied me, and although his features were blank, there seemed to be a look of regret in his eyes.

In a low voice, he said smoothly, “I understand.” At my look of disbelief, he shook his head. “Believe it or not, Virginia, I do understand. I also commend you for your honesty. You have no idea how refreshing it is.”

“Okay …” I found myself saying without thinking.

This time, he asked, “Excuse me?”

Clasping my shaking hands in front of me, I took an irrational leap of faith. “Okay, I’ll call you Jay.”

Maybe I was making a mistake by letting this man get close to me in any capacity, but I was so damn lonely. Besides, if he meant what he’d said, that he understood it would never be love between us, perhaps having a civil life with Jay was better than having no happiness at all. It was all about looking at life with the glass half-full, right?

Or maybe I was throwing gasoline on the flaming mess that my life had become, but the hell with it. I would rather be a big burning mess right now than completely burnt out.

Jay was going to be my future, but my heart would always be stuck in the past.

Lucas

“We should have put a bullet in that asshole’s body for every woman we found in his basement,” I growled to the unusually silent van.

The Ex Ops team might comprise a group of hardened soldiers, but that didn’t mean we liked finding the dead bodies of young women all over the world. First Spain then a mission in France, and now we were in Moscow where we had closed in on a Russian diplomat’s house, taking out his security team, and then infiltrated his residence, looking for a kidnapped woman supposedly sold to him as a sex slave.

What we had found as we’d descended into his expansive, custom-made dungeon was the stuff of nightmares. It was a literal playground for a twisted man who lived to inflict pain and suffering on others for his own satisfaction.

Metal chains and shackles hung from ceiling beams and were also bolted to the floor in a few places. A Saint Andrew’s cross sat in the corner, covered in blood splatters, the shades ranging from a fresh red to a dried dark brown. The amount of blood on the equipment had been sickening.

It had taken four months—four long months —to track down the women Sandoval had sold over the last couple of years. It had not been easy, but with this mission, we had finally ended our recovery of the women. One by one, we had located them, dead or alive.

To our dismay, most of the women had been found dead. Their bodies were buried or burned to ash by their tormentors and left somewhere in a place their owner thought would never be discovered. The only reason we had found their remains was because my teammate Arturo Chavez was creative with that knife of his. It hadn’t taken long after he had taken it out and the blood had started flowing before each of the men had started sobbing the needed information.

Almost a year’s worth of investigation had finally come to a close tonight, an investigation that had started with Baker’s woman in Texas when she had been working as an ATF agent on a black market weapons case before she had been taken. If not for Belle’s kidnapping by the Mexican Cartel leader Rivera, the Ex Ops team would have never stumbled on the sex slave ring.

From there, we had been led to Ice in Miami where Riley, Declan, and myself had gone undercover to pose as members of the Regulators MC. That leg of the mission had cost us the lives of two of our teammates and put Declan temporarily bedbound with a spinal injury. We had ended up leaving Miami and heading back to our headquarters in Virginia to bury our dead and regroup without catching the man responsible for both our losses and the missing women. As if losing two of our teammates wasn’t bad enough, I had also left Miami without Ginny, as well.

Ice and his boys had stepped in to figure out the rest. If not for them, we would have been delayed in getting the information on the kidnapped women who had needed to be rescued for far too long.

Now I sat here, seething over the traumatized and violated women we had rescued out of the Russian diplomat’s house. Besides the woman Baker’s half of the team had saved, there had been another nine. Nine malnourished women who seemed hollow inside and out. Dead eyes, dirty cells, and scars from the inside out that would last them a lifetime. How the fuck did someone move on after enduring something like that?

Baker’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “They’re safe now, man. We pulled them from certain death, and now they have a second chance at life. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to put this mission behind me. The faster we go back to taking out terrorists, the closer I get to leavin’ all of this behind.”

I nodded. “You’re right. I just can’t help thinking of my little sister every time we find these women. I won’t tell you how badly it fucked with my head when we didn’t find them alive.”

Baker rubbed the back of his neck in an uneasy gesture. “I know exactly what you mean. It made me relive pulling Belle’s half-dead body out of Mexico, and I see that shit enough in my sleep. It never leaves me.”

I was drained, and the word sleep just pissed me off. I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since I had come back from Miami. And dammit, I couldn’t think of Miami without thinking of Gin.

Leaning my head back against the interior of the van, I mumbled, “Fuck. I can’t imagine what I would have done if that had been my girl. You’re right; we need to go back to blowin’ up the bad guys.”

The sound of an irregular beep caught our attention, and Bobby and I turned our heads toward the sound to see our commander pulling a secured satellite phone from his pocket. Jaxon got a weird look on his face as he glanced at the ringing device and then answered the phone.