Breach of Trust by Jodie Bailey Page B

sake of the mission, he’d let her into the personal, even though he’d never fully talked it out with anyone else. Sure, he’d parceled out information to Ethan and to Sean Turner, even to Ethan’s wife when she’d shown up at his house with Ethan needing refuge from a killer. But he’d never laid everything out for someone else to inspect.
    The setting here was too much like the old days. Like those easy times when they’d sat in the dark outside a tent or a makeshift plywood office, too restless after a mission to move out to their own bunks and catch some sleep. During those times, he’d told her everything.
    Almost everything. He’d never told her the one fledgling dream he’d begun to entertain when she vanished.
    â€œTate?” Her shoe toed his again. “Did you fall asleep on your feet, old man?”
    Old man. He was two years ahead of her on the calendar. Hardly old. “Just thinking what you might want to hear.”
    â€œEverything.” The word was barely a whisper.
    He had no doubt she meant it, so he’d tell her. Even the parts that made him appear to be the most horrible man in the world.
    He pressed his spine into the rough wooden post of an old horse stall. The mission had made the news once it was over, so it was hardly classified, since she knew he was alive. “We were tracking a group of smugglers who paid off workers in Afghanistan. They were loading heroin into equipment being sent to New Cumberland Army Depot in Pennsylvania. Millions of dollars’ worth of drugs being shipped on Uncle Sam’s dime.”
    Tate ran his tongue along the back of his teeth, his mouth dry. He’d long ago settled it in his heart and in his mind, handed it over to the God who could carry the load better than he could. But there were still nights when he saw the dark eyes of the man who’d come close to stealing his life, the man who’d taken pleasure in Tate’s pain.
    He stared at the hood of the pickup Meghan leaned against. The faded red truck was a far cry from the Jeep he’d passed on to Ethan on an op over a year ago. A Jeep he’d had to retire after it was riddled with bullet holes in the ensuing shoot-out.
    â€œI was under cover, ferreting out who was running things on this end. Craig Mitchum was a new recruit, and he was sneaky, greedy. He was selling the bad guys all the info he could scrounge up, including who I really was.” Tate leaned against the post, the scene playing out like a movie. “I was to meet my contact in the maze of containers at the depot. I suspected something was going on, had my weapon, but I didn’t call for backup.”
    It had been crazy hot between those huge stacks of shipping containers, where the sun could beat down but the breeze couldn’t reach. The light was glaring, even with his sunglasses on, the June day pavement-melting. He’d rounded the last aisle of containers and come face-to-face with a small, muscular man he’d never met before. Tate had drawn his gun, but they were too close, and he wasn’t fast enough to beat the other man’s knife.
    A pressure rested on his foot, gently pressing his toes. Meghan had shifted, her running shoe making contact, as though she knew this was the hard part of the story.
    He cleared his throat, still feeling the midsummer Pennsylvania sun on his skin. “I took a knife to the chest. Multiple times.”
    The guy had driven the blade in again and again. It felt like a fist, blow after blow, and it wasn’t until the man backed off and Tate looked down that he knew it was much more. There was blood. His blood. And so much of it. His heart had pounded as his vision blurred and the world dimmed.
    â€œI can’t... Wow.” Meghan’s low voice drew him out of the memory, calmed his still-racing heart and pressed away the need to dig for air, a need he sometimes woke with in the night, the space in his chest a