Page 31 of Duty Preserved

“That was you?”

He didn’t answer, which was its own answer.

“You sent me room service, and you never said anything.”

“It wasn’t a big deal.”

“Donovan.” I was still staring at him. “That is—why wouldn’t you tell me?”

“Because it wasn’t a big deal,” he said again, and he meant it. He hadn’t done it for credit or for a story to tell. He’d seen someone who needed a light breakfast and headache medicine, he’d handled it, and he’d moved on.

The man I’d reduced to “the one I threw up on” had quietly taken care of me and never intended to let me know.

I turned back to the windshield. The grassland was giving way to rougher terrain, scattered rock, and thicker brush. My throat was tight, and suddenly, I didn’t trust my voice. So I sat with it caged in my mouth instead of sharing it.

After a while, I said, “I should apologize for the bar too.”

“The bar?”

“When I walked up to your table. You were clearly meeting someone, and I just—barged in. I’m not normally that person. Alyson had been pushing me all night and I’d had too much tequila and I just—” I shook my head. “You were polite about it, but I know I was bothering you.”

“You weren’t bothering me.”

“You told me you were meeting someone and touched your ear three times in thirty seconds. That’s a pretty clear signal.”

He was quiet. The truck climbed a low rise and leveled out, and the view opened up ahead of us, miles of open bush running toward a ridge on the horizon.

“I was working,” he said.

“Working?”

“The nightclub. That was a job. Paris was a Citadel operation.” His voice stayed level, giving the information to me in pieces I could hold. “We were there because French intelligence asked for help with a surveillance sweep. There was a trafficking cell operating out of clubs in that district. My job was to sit and watch a man who’d been flagged as one of their abductors.”

My hands closed in my lap.

“When you came to the table, I couldn’t break surveillance. That’s why I was short with you. The earpiece, the hand to the ear—I was on comms.”

“The man outside the club,” I said. “The one who grabbed me.”

“He was one of them. He wasn’t a random creep. He was a bad criminal.”

The truck cab felt smaller. I sat with both hands in my lap and tried to reconcile the night I remembered with the night he was describing. I’d walked out of that club thinking the worst thing that happened was a handsy stranger. I’d told Alyson the story like it was a bad end to a bad night.

“How close was I?” I asked.

He didn’t look at me. “Close enough.”

“And I never felt it. I had no idea.”

“That’s how they work. You wouldn’t ever know until it was too late.”

The road roughened, and he slowed the truck. I watched his hands on the wheel, steady, and tried to make my breathing match.

“So when you walked me to the hotel⁠—”

“I wanted to make sure you got back safely.”

All of it. The calm after the punch. The distance he kept in the lobby. The gentleness that had felt so deliberate, so careful. He’d been coming down from an operation, and he’d still made sure I got to my door.