Fiona Brand - Gabriel West - Still The One

He knew what was happening—it had been creeping up on him for months. There was even a name for it: battle fatigue. He was tired, his commitment for the job gone. He was still sharp, but it was becoming more and more of an effort to maintain the level of focus and acuity required for active undercover operations. Whatever he chose to label it, the fact remained—he’d been in the military too long.

Two members of the team, McKee and Sawyer, melted out of the darkness, followed seconds later by the fifth and final member, Lambert. Lambert made brief, neutral eye contact with West. McKee and Sawyer both gave him a wide berth.

West didn’t bother with the mental shrug. He had a reputation for being cold and distant—a little scary. He never did anything to alter that impression because the solitude suited him. He’d never been anything but a loner, and at thirty-one years of age the pattern was ingrained. He had friends, some of them as close as he was ever likely to get to actually having family, but essentially he was alone.

He examined the tinge of gray lightening the grim canyon of the street, turned toward what passed for sunrise in this city of heat and humidity and jungle mists. In half an hour this place would be a steam bath, the sun dominating a hot, clear sky, the streets teeming with raucous life.

He’d come close to not seeing it.

Lambert handed him his knife. West took the blade, cleaned it on his T-shirt, then methodically slipped it back into its spine sheath. Carter tossed him a bottle of water, took his cell phone out and called in an ambulance. West tipped his head back and drank, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then tipped water over his naked torso to clean off the blood. He became aware that Lambert was surreptitiously watching him—read the repelled fascination in the man’s eyes. Lambert was a rookie, ten years younger and fresh-faced—a nice boy doing a dirty job. He hadn’t liked handling the knife, or the way Renwick and the woman had died.

There was blood everywhere, still smeared across West’s chest, streaking the backs of his hands. His hair was tangled around his face, sticking to his shoulders. He must look like a damn vampire…not someone Lambert, or the other two, would ever want to get comfortable with.

A hot blast of emotion threatened to burn through his icy calm. Not someone that the majority of the human race would ever be comfortable with, come to that.

Something of what he was feeling must have registered with the younger man. His gaze slid away, locked on the body of the woman lying on the ground. Abruptly, he wheeled and joined Sawyer and McKee in the back of the van.

West knew what was going through Lambert’s mind. Over the years he’d garnered a reputation for being lucky—of having some kind of magical immunity, so that when everything went to hell West walked away with barely a scratch. There were men who wouldn’t work with him because that fact spooked them. They figured they’d be the ones to die.

Not for the first time West worried at his own apparent good luck. The fact was he had a reckless streak—a bad, bad habit that kept him choosing risky assignments and walking the edge. In a numbers game, he’d long since played out the odds. Sometimes the way he was scared him. He’d gotten too cold, too fatalistic about dying.

He eyed the steadily increasing glow in the east, felt the first touch of heat burning through the early-morning mists.

He hadn’t felt cold or fatalistic when he’d thought it was Tyler on the street. Fear had lashed through him. Every cell in his body had reacted.

His jaw clenched against a replay of the panic that had shafted through him when he’d thought his wife was about to walk straight into the barrel of Renwick’s gun. In that moment a part of him had gone wild. He hadn’t cared if Renwick’s bullets had slammed into his chest; all he’d wanted to do was save Tyler.

He took another deep breath, easing the tension in his belly. Suddenly, he felt old and tired, sick of death and meanness. He wanted…home.

Oh, yeah, he thought grimly, that would undo him. He had no business even thinking about home, or about Tyler.

As he swung into the van and snapped the door closed, he wondered what Tyler was doing now—this very second. He hadn’t so much as glimpsed her for months.

An abrupt hunger to be with the woman he’d walked out on, but never succeeded in forgetting, ate at him, sharp and deep. Temper erupted and he swore beneath his breath.

Carter glared at him as he started the van and reversed, disengaging from the totaled rear of Renwick’s car with a squeal of torn metal. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

Carter changed gear and accelerated onto the street, barely missing clipping the mangled Maserati. “You’re crazy, that’s what’s wrong. I shouldn’t have let you walk down that street. You’ve got a damned death wish.”

“If anyone’s got a death wish, it’s the guy driving this clapped-out van.” West strapped on his seat belt. When Carter was behind the wheel, he was the safest guy on the planet.

“My driving saved your sorry ass.”

West couldn’t argue with that. Carter had driven the van into the center of the firefight, risking his own safety to provide West with cover. The van had taken the brunt of the fire and now resembled nothing so much as a colander. The rental firm would have a hernia, and Carter had bought himself a good day’s worth of paperwork and grief trying to justify the expenditure.

Carter braked at an intersection. Cars had begun to fill the streets—early morning commuters and taxis heading for the airport to catch passengers off the red-eye flights. A truck loaded with melons shifted down a gear and eased through the intersection, heading for the markets. Port Moresby was waking up.

An aging ambulance screamed past them, lights flashing. A cold chill chased across West’s skin, twitched deep in his belly, even though the ambient temperature was warm. He lifted a hand to his face, rubbed compulsively at his temples.

A fine tremor ran through his hands. He let out a breath. That was shaky, too.

He was going into shock.

Oh, jeez…damn. Tyler.

A hot pain burst to life in the center of his chest. That’s what had done it. He’d thought it was her, and now he was going to pieces.

He closed his eyes and let his head drop back onto the cracked vinyl of the seat. The breath sifted from between his teeth. Tyler.

He was going crazy. The psych team would chew him up, spit him out, and that was if he didn’t get himself committed first.

Lately—the last couple of months—as hard as he’d tried, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

One month later, Auckland, New Zealand.

Gabriel West was back in her life.

Dr. Tyler Laine’s fingers slipped on her laptop keyboard. The machine beeped, and a cartoon character popped onto the screen. A little balloon message sprang out of the side of its head, politely asking if she needed help.

For long seconds, Tyler stared blankly at the ridiculous creature with its cheerful face, her overtired mind abruptly incapable of grasping the simple actions required to close the help file.

She’d been making lists, staring at lists, for hours, trying to shed some light on the mystery of who had walked into her family’s vault and stolen a set of ancient jade artifacts that had been under her care for the past three months, before her reputation and her career were shredded beyond redemption. She needed to make sense of a burglary that didn’t make any kind of normal sense.

The jade pieces were unique, priceless, but it wasn’t so much the quality of the objects, but their age and the mystery shrouding them that had caught and held the attention of experts and collectors alike.