She nodded. “You sure did. On my end, everybody else was friendly, but you weren’t.”
“I was friendly,” he protested.
“Barely,” she retorted. “You were civil. You were polite. You were all business.”
He nodded. “Because I couldn’t trust myself to be anything else.”
She twisted again to stare at the monitors.
He hated that. He wanted to see what was in her eyes; he wanted to read her facial features, which was exactly why she had turned around. “I’m sorry,” he said abruptly.
“For what?”
“For making you think I didn’t care.”
“Whatever.” Then she let out a heavy sigh, reached up to rub her temples. “Why are you telling me all this now?”
“Because it’s all about trust. It’s about making sure that, if somebody needs us to do something, we can do it without an awkward relationship hindering us.”
“I’m good if you are,” she said.
“That’s not exactly what I wanted to hear.”
“I don’t know what you want from me, Damon.” She stared down at her hands in her lap.
He’d always loved her profile. She didn’t look anything like the sharp-boned Mera. Tasha was young and soft looking, until you looked into her eyes, which were hard and seemed way too alive. When she’d first started back then, everybody had wondered what the hell they’d gotten as part of their team. But she had just sat down and gotten busy, taking control of all their electronics, and they’d been happy campers ever since.
“I’d like us to be friendly,” he said.
She nodded. “I can do that.”
“And maybe not quite so businesslike,” he muttered, frowning. “Honest, I really was going to call you when it was over.”
“I don’t know what to say to that because I don’t know if I would have answered.”
He stared at her, his gaze boring through hers, wondering if it was a front. He could have sworn something was there. He had his own senses, but everything was only operating halfway. “You know we’re all psychics on this team,” he murmured.
“Not me,” she snapped back, glaring at him.
“No, but you’ve got walls, walls that you have deliberately reinforced because you work with our team.”
“Yeah,” she said, with half a smirk. “Smart of me, huh?”
“So, maybe because you’ve been inside those walls, you can’t actually feel what’s happening outside.”
That surprised her and lit her deep dark chocolate-brown gaze.
He nodded. “Just think about it. If you didn’t have your walls up, maybe you would have been better at reading energy too.”
“That’s your domain, not mine.”
“You know what I mean. You might have seen my intentions.”
“Instead of it being the cold formality that you insisted on.”
“And yet you know why,” he stated.
“Nope, I don’t,” she murmured. “I definitely don’t.” But she wouldn’t look him in the eye.
He reached over, grabbed her chin, turned it toward him. “Like hell.” Then he leaned over and kissed her. A hard deep passionate kiss. Breaking it off, he stood and stepped away. “Coffee’s done.”
Chapter 8
As kisses went, it was just the tip of an iceberg. Yet Tasha felt the drugging power behind it. The passion, the need, all rolling in and yet forcibly contained. One thing about Damon that she had never misunderstood was the power within him. He walked with it. He was surrounded by it. He knew how to control it. The fact that he only had access to half of his abilities, which she knew included contacting others at a distance and finding them, meant he was more of a tracker than anything. She didn’t understand how that worked because she was a tracker too; only she used bytes, not energy.
He was fascinating; he was deep; he was dark; and he was everything she’d ever wanted. But he’d made it very clear early on that he wasn’t interested. So she’d thrown up walls to protect herself, hiding her feelings to make sure he never once found out how she felt. So his stunning statement now was something she simply didn’t know how to deal with. Hope lit within her, but, at the same time, did she dare trust it? What did he want from her? And why now, after all this time?
It made sense, and she was a logical person, and everything that he had said rang true, but the circumstances had changed. But had they changed enough that he would actually think a relationship would be a good idea now? Some of it felt off to her, and she wondered if he was just trying to lock her in so she would be part of the team again. She had to admit a part of her reacted with Oh, hell no! Part of her wanted to be long gone before this belated relationship went any further; yet she also wondered how she could walk away from Terk, who needed everybody on deck for this makeshift op, and Damon, whom she’d always been there for, keeping an eye on.
Whenever he was off on a mission, she kept tracking where he was, what he was doing, and how he was doing it, just to make sure he was safe. He’d had a few relationships, but she also knew they were more physical releases than anything. She’d done the same thing the first couple years after she joined the team but soon realized that absolutely nothing could come of it. She sought more than just the physical release, and the trouble was, these insignificant dates couldn’t give more because they weren’t the one person she wanted them to be, the one she couldn’t have.
And now here he was, offering her so much more than what she’d ever expected, and she was dumbfounded.
Silently, she focused on her work, trying to continue working on the searches she was pursuing.
He approached her from behind. “Here’s some coffee.” Then placed a cup down beside her.
She looked at it, nodded. “Thank you.”
“Think about what I said, okay? Going forward, the team will be whatever we make it,” he murmured.
“What team?” she asked. “None of us have jobs. None of us are employed. We’re on a vengeance trip. That’s it.” Of course what she wanted and what she would do were two different things because her whole life had flipped too. In a quiet tone, she added, “Let’s just focus on the work.”
“That’s fine for now, and I agree it’s what we need to do. But …”
At that, she ignored him because what else could she do? She watched out the corner of her eye, as he sat down with a list of things that needed to be done or ordered, and he started texting, she presumed to suppliers. She looked back over at him. “Is your phone secured?”
He nodded. “It is, and we’ll change phones every day,” he murmured. “Levi’s team will send over supplies for us.”
“That’ll take a while,” she warned.
“No, they’ll source it all from here in Paris.”
“So then it’s probably the same suppliers that we’ve used.”
“Maybe, but this way they won’t know we are the ones who will be using them. We have to completely cut all ties with everyone we’ve used.”
“Hence the shell company.” She nodded.