And now Thatcher was just fucking with him.
Thatcher lifted his fists from the wood and brushed them along the front of his jacket, leaving a bit of dust residue there.
“You really miss being in the Army? Working with a team? I didn’t see that coming. But fine. No more solo runs if you’re back with me. You can partner up. Fuck, you can have a ménage or a quadruple or a whatever. But I want you back.”
“No,” Jesse answered with zero hesitation.
“This,” Thatcher said while pointing to the tools hanging on the wall off to his left, “was only supposed to be a cover story. When I heard you’d turned furniture making into a full-time gig after leaving me, I gave you a year until you’d come back. You lasted longer, I’ll give you that. But not by much.”
Jesse looked to the wall of tools hanging in perfect order the way his father had taught him. God forbid he’d ever misplaced a tool or put one back in the wrong place growing up.
The hammers were lined up in a row. The screwdrivers all sorted and placed in order by size. And so on.
There was balance and symmetry. Harmony there, when on the inside he felt anything but.
Jesse swiped the pad of his thumb along the edge of the pine slab, his eyes slowly working over the wood, wondering what it’d been used for before it found its way to his workshop. A grandaddy’s rocking chair? A baby’s bookshelf? A coffee table to prop your feet up on after a long day at work?
He didn’t always know the “past life” of the wood he made into furniture, but he refused to use anything other than recycled material. He wanted to “save” the wood from being tossed. To reshape it. Carve it. Give something trashed or forgotten a new life. A second chance to be useful or beautiful again.
“I like doing this, by the way.” But I need more. I also need to be useful. In that regard, Thatcher was right. When his friend Savanna had been attacked in her home right in front of him in October, it reminded him he did have skills that could be, well, repurposed for a greater good. Maybe one day, he’d be able to look Ella in the eyes again without feeling like he deserved that bullet.
“We didn’t spend a fortune training you, far more than the Army ever did, by the way, just for you to go work with Carter and Gray.” Thatcher rounded the workbench and reached into his pocket, producing a business card. “If you’re back, you’re back with us. Your assignment is in there.” He tilted his head toward the 8x11 envelope and set the card on top of it.
Thatcher’s order caused the blood to drain from Jesse’s face, but only for a moment. That short-lived fear was quickly replaced with a white-hot rage that burned through his entire body. “You agreed to let me walk if I gave you one more year. And I actually gave you eighteen months.”
“You gave me those extra six months because Ella Hawkins got engaged,” Thatcher said smugly, a self-satisfied gleam in his eyes. Jesse had never shared that with the man, but Thatcher knew everything, so.
After his weekend with Ella in New York City, Jesse had resolved to walk away from Thatcher and his job. To turn his cover story into his real story and learn to be the kind of man Ella deserved. But Thatcher made him give one more year of his life as a trade for getting “out” without complications.
And over the course of that year, Ella had moved on, just as Jesse had instructed her to do. She’d announced her engagement exactly one year after their New York Christmas, which was two days before Jesse had planned to walk away from Thatcher.
“You’re why she didn’t walk down that aisle, I suspect?”
“I thought you knew everything,” Jesse grumbled, hating Thatcher speaking her name. Ella was innocent and sweet, and Thatcher was, at best, a necessary evil. “The night before her wedding, I told her I couldn’t watch her marry that dipshit,” he slowly confessed because as much as Thatcher’s presence pissed him off, the man had been like a second father.
“And you quit on me when she canceled the wedding. Eighteen months ago.”
“I would have quit regardless, and you know damn well why,” he hissed.
“What happened that day wasn’t our fault, but . . .”
But what? The words remained lodged in Jesse’s head though.
“Why aren’t you and Ella together?” he asked, throwing Jesse a curveball. “Because you know a woman like her deserves someone—”
“Better?”
“Different.” Thatcher paused. “Safer.”
“Stop with the mind games.” Jesse stepped forward, his hand going to Thatcher’s chest. This man was no longer his boss. Screw the chain of command and Thatcher’s former E-9 status in the Air Force. “I know what you’re doing. You taught me this fuckery. How to get inside your enemy’s head without ever lifting a finger.” Head games could be even more tortuous than physical pain. He knew that all too well.
“You slept with Ella in New York three years ago. That’s why you wanted out in the first place, right?”
Why was he fishing for more information? What did it matter to him? And how in the hell did he know that?
“Does she know you strangled the life from a man not even a week before that romantic New York getaway? The hands you used to touch her took the life of another.”
Jesse sucked in a sharp breath, his palm swiftly clamping on to Thatcher’s throat. They were at eye level, both six foot one. Thatcher kept his gaze locked with Jesse’s and didn’t flinch while Jesse contemplated actually squeezing.
“Does she know your kill count?” Thatcher whispered as Jesse tightened his grip a hair more. “Your kill count after you were no longer a Ranger, I mean.”
“Fuck. You.” Jesse released his hold and retreated three steps before lifting his palms in the air as a signal for Thatcher to get-the-fuck-out. “You need to go before my number goes up by one.”
The smile that lit Thatcher’s face wasn’t cold or calculating, nor was it menacing. It was the smile a father gave a son after he’d done something to make him proud—a smile his own father had never once given him.
Over the years, Thatcher hadn’t hidden the fact that he admired Jesse’s passion, his fierce and loyal devotion to those he loved. So pressing Jesse’s “Ella buttons” must have been his way of trying to get Jesse to snap. Thatcher was actively trying to provoke the beast inside Jesse, the beast he’d been working to rid himself of since the day Ella canceled her wedding.
Thatcher was also aware that no matter how hard he pushed, Jesse would never actually hurt him.
“You need to leave before my sister sees you here and sics her dog on you. Bear will smell a threat the moment he sets his eyes on you.”
Jesse’s sister, Rory, and her husband, Chris, were staying with him for the holidays. But Chris had left an hour ago to meet up with A.J.—one of Ella’s four brothers—and Griffin, at the outdoor shooting range at the Hawkins Ranch. Jesse now wished he’d accepted Chris’s invite to join them.
Griffin Andrews was one of his teammates at Falcon Falls Security as well as Savanna’s fiancé. He’d met Griffin in October right after Savanna was attacked in her home, the night Jesse had no choice but to take a man’s life before her eyes.