The members of the Durango team had all officially resigned their commissions with the SEALs over the past three years, though none of them were actually free of their covert status. They were the Elite Ops backup team, though Elite Ops was using backup less and less for the smaller operations.
“Maybe she didn’t tell anyone,” Micah stated. “Maybe I was testing your home security and saw you sleeping on the couch. I could have sliced your throat in your sleep.”
“Dream on, ass**le.” Noah grinned. “Admit it. Sabella told Kira and she blabbed like the little minx she is. You didn’t pass my security and we both know it.” Wasn’t possible, he had made certain of it.
Micah didn’t so much as smile.
“Look, I’m serious,” Noah sighed. “You go into that club looking like you’re ready to kill and that kid is going to go running for the hills.”
“She isn’t a child.”
Noah paused at Micah’s statement and flashed the other man a curious look.
“She’s not exactly an experienced, worldly woman, either,” Noah assured him. “She’s twenty-six years old, Micah, and all but a virgin.”
“She is a virgin still.” Micah’s tone never changed.
“She was raped.” Noah felt as though he were talking to a brick wall. “She’s wounded, man. You can’t show her the killer face and expect her to trust you.”
Micah turned to look at him now. “The killer face?” he asked evenly.
“Yeah, that icy Mossad façade you’re wearing right now,” he growled. “Ease up, man. Practice smiling or something.”
He flashed Micah a glare as the other man turned his head once again.
“I’ll worry about her reaction to me; you worry about getting us to the club in one piece.”
Noah almost gritted his teeth in frustration. Hell, he still remembered the night he had helped rescue Risa Clay from Diego Fuentes’s cell. She had been like a broken little doll. Vacant-eyed, shuddering from the drugs pumped into her, and fighting the reaction from them with every breath in her body.
She had been such a damned tiny thing. Na Ctinth ked and bruised, blood had marred her thighs, and pain had filled her eyes. Traumatized was a kind word for the state that kid had been in.
“Micah,” he began.
“Noah, you want to stop now.” Micah’s voice hardened, and Noah hadn’t thought that possible. “I know how to deal with Miss Clay. This is a meet and greet, nothing more. A chance to gauge her reaction to me, and therefore her reaction to the plan we intend to put before her tomorrow afternoon. Rest assured, I know how to treat a woman.”
He might know how to treat one, Noah thought, but he sure as hell might not know how to present an unthreatening demeanor.
“Hell, what was Jordan thinking giving this op to you?” Noah questioned his uncle’s decision roughly. “You’ll terrify her.”
“I demanded this op.”
Noah glanced back at him in surprise. “Why?”
Micah’s expression hadn’t changed. His face was still closed, set. His eyes were like black ice and his voice like frozen air. It was enough to give a person frostbite.
“Why is for me to know.” Micah shrugged. “It’s your place to accept. Now if you wouldn’t mind, your chattering is getting on my nerves. Perhaps Jordan could find a muzzle that would fit you.”
Noah grimaced and tightened his hands on the wheel of the car as he made a turn behind the cab and gauged the distance to the hotel where Risa was heading.
Hell, she deserved better than the operation that was going to be thrown at her tomorrow. She deserved more than to be used as he knew this operation would use her. She wasn’t mentally or emotionally capable of handling the stress it would lay on her fragile shoulders.
He’d mentioned his fears to his wife, Sabella. Worried that this operation would tax the girl’s ability to heal and to get on with her life. But they had no choice. This wasn’t just their best chance at capturing an assassin whom no one could seem to pin, but it was also their only chance to save her from a horrifying death. Risa was beginning to remember what everyone had believed she would never remember: the night of her kidnapping and rape and the man who had been in league with the father who had masterminded it.
Those memories could be the death of her.
“Risa Clay isn’t a broken woman.” Micah’s comment surprised Noah into glancing back at him.
“What makes you think that?” Noah asked.
“You know the same things I do,” Micah stated. “The trips to the spa, the shopping trip, and the clothes she’s bought. The intimate toys found in her bedside drawer. No, Noah, she is not a broken woman. She is a woman trying to heal.”
“And you think handing her over to you will complete that healing?” Noah snorted. “Hell, from what I’ve seen you can’t keep a woman past the time it takes to f**k one, Micah. You’re like a robot, man. That’s fine with a woman that’s not looking for anything more.”
“Noah, you are becoming C ars na mother hen,” Micah sighed. “You remind me much of one here of late. I need to discuss this with Sabella. She’s becoming a bad influence on you.”
Noah grinned. Damn, his Sabella was his lifesaver.
“She’ll just laugh at you,” he promised the other man.
“I have no doubt she will laugh, simply because she knows you’re a lost cause.”
Noah let the argument go. There was obviously no convincing Micah that charming a woman took more than an invitation to his bed. Especially a woman like Risa, one who had known the horror she barely remembered. She may think she had forgotten details and faces due to that f**king Whore’s Dust, but Noah knew her mind remembered, her body remembered.
He knew because he had been there. For nineteen hellish months he had been pumped full of that shit. He knew what it did to a body, to a mind. What it would do to the child she had been, and to experience the humiliation and pain of a rape on top of it wouldn’t be that damned easy to get over.
Risa hadn’t been as lucky as the other victims pumped full of the date rape drug. She hadn’t completely forgotten that night, nor had she forgotten the endless months she had been held in the asylum. She sure as hell hadn’t forgotten that it was her father who had consigned her to both hells.