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Six years. God, it had been so long. It had been t
oo damned long. Suddenly, she felt far older than she actually was, and far too tired to fight with herself any longer.
“Tehya?” Jordan followed, standing in the bedroom doorway as she moved to the stack of empty boxes and protective paper stacked next to the shelves she hadn’t yet packed.
Each of the trinkets had been collected over the years. The pocket dragons. There were fairies, there were expensive little keepsake boxes. And there were pictures. Pictures of the team she had worked with, their wives. In a few there were children of those men. In a few, there was an unsmiling Jordan. In one, he stood next to Tehya, one arm around her shoulders as they stared back at the camera.
This was the past six years of her life.
She picked up the picture of her and Jordan first, wrapped it, packed it.
“Why do you think I haven’t taken you to my bed before now?” he asked from the bedroom doorway.
“Why don’t you leave, Jordan?” She didn’t look at him, she couldn’t.
She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream, and she wasn’t about to do it while he was standing there watching her as though waiting for her to break apart.
Before she knew he had moved he was next to her, his hands gripping her upper arms as he jerked her around.
She saw the anger then. His eyes were bright with it, the blue snapping down at her as his expression tightened with it.
“I didn’t want to hurt you!”
“And you haven’t.” She wasn’t backing down from him but she would be damned if she would cry for him.
He hadn’t done this to her, he hadn’t asked her for what she felt and how many times had he pushed her away, done everything but told her that it couldn’t happen?
It had been her own stubbornness, her own stupidity that had led her here. She had known better. At least she should have known better.
Sex wasn’t love, and she could see now what he had tried to save her from.
Yet the anger was there inside her as well. A feminine fury she couldn’t escape.
“Tehya, we’re friends,” he ground out furiously. “If you ever need me…”
“I didn’t need you before I came here, and I won’t need you after I leave.” Jerking away from him, she stalked to the far side of the room and faced him where the sheer power of his presence would hopefully be diluted.
“God, Tehya!” He raked his fingers through his hair, the long, silken strands falling around his face with such male, sensual disarray that she had to clench her fingers at the overwhelming need to run them through it again.
“Don’t do this, Jordan.” She had to get away from him, she had to hold back the tears. “Don’t make this harder for me than it already is. Just leave.”
Over the years, that was all she had done, held back her emotions, held back her dreams, hell, she had held back her life on the hope, the dream, that something more than blood could fill her future.
But her time here was over. The Elite Ops was shutting down and the new team coming in didn’t need her. They had their own people, their own specialties. No one needed the daughter of a white slaver, a daughter that had been specially bred for the depraved sexual hungers of the man he had envisioned her going to.
She had no special training. She had no true education. She was an outcast, plain and simple. Unlike the other members of the team, there wasn’t a happily ever after waiting for her when she walked out the doors of the base.
There would be no family waiting on her. There were no friends she could find. She would have a new identity, but she had no idea what the hell to do with it.
She watched as he shrugged his shirt on and buttoned it with quick, angry movements. She couldn’t miss the anger, it glowed in his eyes, tightened in his body.
“I don’t want to lose contact with you.” He seemed to be forcing the words out.
He was placating her and she hated that.
She nodded slowly. “I’m sure we won’t. We have friends in common. Hell, you can always call, right?”
She doubted he would, despite the fact that he had approved the members of the team keeping the satellite phones they had been assigned, as well as the numbers.
