Teague (The Family Simon 4)

“It’s hard to put into words.”

She attempted a smile but it fell flat. “I need you to try, Teague. I need you to make me understand how you can just up and leave us.”

He tried to speak but she rushed on.

“I’m not naïve. I know that this,” she waved her hands wildly, “whatever this is, had about a five percent chance of lasting more than a few weeks. And up until last night, I thought that maybe I was just some sort of summer fling. A fuck-buddy.”

“A what?” he interjected, not enjoying her version of events.

Sabrina made a face. “A fling. Someone to screw.”

“You’re not that at all.” Suddenly filled with shame, Teague moved closer to her. “If I’ve made you feel that way, then I’m sorry. That was never where my head was at.”

“That’s nice to hear, Teague. It really is. But no matter what you feel or what I feel, you’re still leaving us and I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again.”

“Hey,” he said, but she shrugged him off.

“It’s okay, Teague. Whatever drives you can’t be silenced. I think I get that. But last night was….” Her voice caught and he felt like an absolute shit. “I wanted last night to be more than a memory.”

Damned if her eyes weren’t filling with tears. “Bree?” he asked. She tried to tug her hands from his, but he wouldn’t let her. He couldn’t break the tenuous connection they had. Not yet anyway.

What the hell did he say to that? Teague swore under his breath, searching for the rig

ht words.

“This…Sabrina you came out of nowhere. You and Harry and Morgan. I wasn’t expecting to meet anyone and maybe I should have backed off and kept my distance but I didn’t.”

He took a moment, looked for a place of calm, and then the words just sort of tumbled out of him.

“These last few weeks have been incredible. Bree, I’ve never felt a connection to a woman the way I do when I’m with you. I just never have. And your kids, they’re the coolest little people I’ve ever met. But…”

Her eyes were shiny, huge and so goddamn sad that it made him furious to know he was responsible for it.

“But you’re not the happy-ever-after guy.”

Teague swore under her breath, hating the pain he’d caused. Wondering what the hell was wrong with him. Wondering how to explain.

“I’ve never been good at staying in one place for long. This is going to sound weird, but it’s like there’s a part of me that is constantly moving. Spinning out of control. Like it’s a piece that’s searching for the right slot to fit into and the only time it stops spinning is when I’m on assignment.”

“Like you’re missing something.”

She was getting it. Relief flooded him. “Exactly. When I joined the Navy, I thought I found that missing piece but it took me less than two years to realize that I was still searching for that thing. So I left the Navy when my last tour was up and got a gig photographing the slaughter of Rhinos in Africa. I’d found a purpose again. Every assignment I got was a shot of adrenaline and for a while, that need for danger replaced this missing piece inside me.

“But this thing that I can’t even label can be so loud in my head sometimes. It would keep me up at night and the only way to silence it was to go out on anther gig. By then I needed something more dangerous, more intense to keep me going. So I went to Mexico and did stories on missing women and on the drug cartel. I went to Nigeria and covered the political unrest. I photographed stories on human trafficking in the Ivory Coast, and the corruption in Russia. The last story I did with Bowen before Syria was about an international child porn ring and that nearly did me in.”

Her hands crept up over his and she squeezed his palms tightly.

He stopped then, gazing down at her small hands and pain lashed across his chest. It was a pain that was buried so deep he grunted from the pressure.

“Why did you go to Syria?”

How much of this should he share? He looked up at Sabrina, at eyes that were so full of concern and empathy and tenderness, and he knew nothing but the absolute truth would do.

“I was over there with a group of men, some of them Seals and some of them former black ops now working on a contract basis for the government. I wasn’t there as a journalist. I was there as a soldier. A hired gun so to speak. Our team leader, Dallas, was a guy I knew from my Seal days. Our purpose was to gather intel on several militant groups in the area and report back with our findings. Sure it was dangerous as hell, but it should have been a quick in and out.

“It was cold the night everything went down. We were camped out in the hills and had received intel the day before that two British journalists who’d been taken prisoner a few days before we’d arrived, were being held in a town not far from where we were. We were told they were going to be executed that night and got permission to go in and to see if a rescue was possible. It went south pretty fast.”

He blinked hard as the memories washed over him. The gunfire. The flashes of light. The screams of terror.