Falling for the Enemy (Private Pleasures 3)

“Why? They’re just words, Shaun. They can’t hurt me…unless…” She lowered her voice to a dramatic whisper. “If you tell me, are you going to have to kill me?”

This time his laugh came closer to real amusement, and his eyes found hers. “If I said yes, would you drop the subject?”

“No. I’d take my chances. Where was your last mission?”

His eyes drifted away. “The Sudan. Counterterrorism mission involving a high-value target within Al-Qaeda. Go in. Extract him from the compound where he was living in plain sight under a false identity. Bring him to justice.”

Jesus. She styled hair for a living. It suddenly seemed so ridiculous. “Sounds cut-and-dried,” she deadpanned.

“It should have been. We got our intel from a reliable local informant. Satellite pictures confirmed everything he told us. Our target lived like a king in a fancy enclave on the outskirts of Khartoum, in a spacious home with a panoramic view of the Nile. Approximately seventy-five members of his family, staff, and aides lived there, too.”

“Sounds like a lot of…variables.”

“The SEALs are trained for variables. Part of the deal is to get the job done with precision. A good team can nab a feral rat from a Tokyo subway at rush hour without a single witness—if nothing goes wrong.”

“But, in your case, something went wrong.” Her stomach clenched at the thought, but she told herself to toughen up. This had been his reality. All she had to do was listen.

“The thing about informants in a place like the Sudan is they’re poor. Poor at a level people in the U.S. can’t fathom. They have poor parents, siblings, spouses and children, and they’re all trying to survive any way they can. A family member learned what was going on and took the information to our target.”

“Oh, no.” The clench in her stomach evolved to a cramp.

“The ni

ght of the mission, we came in slightly off our timetable. High winds delayed our chopper about ten minutes. We’d barely breached the outer walls when the whole compound blew sky high. Our target was a firm believer in the scorched earth policy.”

“God. Shaun.” She couldn’t stop herself from reaching for him, or stop the immediate sense of relief when his hand closed over hers and his warmth seeped into her skin. “Were you hurt?”

“Not a scratch. Not on me, or anybody else on the team. But there were casualties. Lots of them. Inside…” He trailed off and rubbed a hand over his forehead, as if to erase images lingering in his mind.

“I don’t understand. If the guy blew up his own home, who would have been inside?”

“All of his wives, all of the daughters, and most of the domestic staff. The final body count came to forty-three.”

“Good lord.” A sick taste polluted the back of her throat. She rested her free hand on his shoulder and held on. “Why?”

He raised and lowered his shoulders in a matter-of-fact gesture. “You can disappear with a handful of sons and a few aides, but you can’t empty an entire household without somebody noticing all the activity. So he cut his losses, left the rest of them there as unsuspecting bait, and hoped to take out a SEAL team at the same time. Even feral rats know a few tricks.”

Her next question came from a hard, vengeful place inside her she never knew existed, and she couldn’t ask it in a voice above a whisper. “Did you get the rat?”

He squeezed her hand. “Affirmative. We waded into that blown-out, burning shell of a building, over bodies of women and children in unimaginable condition, until we found a woman—one woman—crying her kids’ names. She was in terrible shape…she was just…” He stopped, drew in a breath, and let it out slowly. “She wasn’t going to make it. But she was alive, and conscious enough to understand her children weren’t. And she gave our rat up. Told us exactly where to find him. We went. We found him. We completed our mission.”

“And after?”

“After? I decided my rat hunting days were over. Continuing meant learning to accept the risk, if not responsibility, for extreme collateral damage. I worried getting comfortable with the risk might eventually make it difficult to separate the rats from, say, my own reflection.”

“Shaun, you own no part of the responsibility for what some crazy extremist decided to do to evade justice.”

“We set events in motion. The hindsight view provides an interesting landscape of what-ifs.”

“What if your team never acted on the informant’s tip? What if the next building the rat blew up was an office tower where thousands of innocent people worked, or a school, or—?”

“All good questions. I don’t have the answers. I only have the what-ifs.”

Hoping he’d keep talking, she stayed silent, but started massaging the bunched-up muscles in his shoulders.

He let out a low sigh, and leaned back into her touch. “For a long time afterwards, every time I closed my eyes I went straight back to that night. Sometimes half the team is inside when the building blows. Sometimes just me. Sometimes I’m rushing to get there because I know it’s going to blow. I’m running balls out, using all my energy, but I’m not moving fast—I can’t make any progress. Ever had a dream like that?”

“Yes.” She offered the soft reassurance and kept soothing his shoulders. “It’s common.”