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Her blue eyes widened as she stared at the black spec settling at the bottom of the water glass. She parted her lips, but he shook his head and placed two fingers against them.
This might not be the only bug in the place. He continued his search by sweeping the kitchen, but beyond a few false reads from the microwave, he found nothing there.
Swallowing hard, he moved toward the hallway. He turned into the first room on the right and turned on the bathroom light. He gestured toward the sink, and Jennifer cranked on the water.
His throat tightened when he saw the yellow rubber duck on the edge of the tub and the cartoon fish on the shower curtain. He’d missed so damn much.
A familiar sharp pain lanced the back of his head and he dragged in a long breath. He had to stay focused if he didn’t want to miss even more of his son’s life.
With the bathroom clear, Miguel turned back into the hallway, holding his breath. He stepped into his son’s room, a gentle glow from a night-light illuminating a path to his bed.
Miguel followed the light and crouched next to his son’s bed. Pride and joy overwhelmed his senses, and he reached out and traced Mikey’s chubby cheek with the tip of his finger. He wanted to gather the boy in his arms and never let go, but he had unfinished business.
Jen had come up behind him and squeezed his shoulder.
He covered her hand with his own and squeezed back, hoping to convey all his regret and sorrow at not being here with her during her pregnancy and the first year and a half of Mikey’s life.
His nose stung, but he knew there would be no tears. He’d lost the ability to cry, but crouching here next to his son, inhaling the smell of his hair and skin, he knew he hadn’t lost the ability to feel.
That thought had been the one thing that terrified him during his months of captivity.
Miguel pushed to his feet and scanned this room with even more vigor than the others. The guys who’d planted that bug obviously hadn’t wanted to listen to the crying and fussing of a toddler.
Miguel shook his head at Jennifer and she straightened Mikey’s covers before leading him out of the room.
When he walked into Jen’s bedroom, the scent of her signature perfume hit him like a wave. Some nights he’d wake up in his cell smelling that fragrance. He knew it was a dream or hallucination at the time, but he’d wallowed in it anyway.
His gaze tripped over the king-size bed, and he momentarily squeezed his eyes shut. Had she shared that bed with anyone else since his...disappearance? He couldn’t hold that against her if she did. She had every right to move on with her life.
But the way she’d kissed him and clung to him outside gave him a selfish hope that she hadn’t.
He swept the room and got a hit. The blood boiled in his veins as he removed the device from a picture frame above her bed. He dropped that bug in the same glass of water and then finished his search of the rest of the house.
He tossed the bug detector on the kitchen counter and enfolded Jen in his arms again. “I’m just glad they didn’t plant a camera, or all of that would’ve been for nothing.”
She squirmed from his grasp and pressed her palms against his chest. “You’re going to tell me what’s going on, where you’ve been and why someone is bugging my house.” Her fingers curled into the material of his shirt. “Not that I’m not thrilled you’re back and safe, even if I am still pinching myself.”
He took both of her hands and kissed one wrist and then the other. “Let’s sit down.”
“Do you want something to drink? To eat?” She skimmed her hands down his sides. “You’ve lost weight.”
“I’ll just get some water.” He pushed aside the glass with the two bugs. “Not this glass.”
She filled a glass with water from a dispenser in the fridge and handed it to him. “Let’s talk.”
As he followed her to the sofa in the living room, his mind whirled with images from the past two years of his life. What could he tell her? What would she want to hear?
The truth? Nobody could bear that. He’d barely survived it.
Jennifer sat on the sofa, curling one leg beneath her. “Can you start at the beginning?”
He settled beside her and draped an arm around her shoulders. “God, it’s amazing to see you. Unbelievable.”
“How do you think I feel? At least you knew I was alive. You even knew about Mikey...somehow.” She threaded her fingers through his. “I thought—They told me you were dead.”
“I’m sorry.” He kissed the side of her head. “If I could take it all back, all those months, everything.”
“The beginning, Miguel.” She pursed her lips together in that schoolteacher way she had.
“We received some intel on Vlad. You remember I told you about him, right?”
“He was the sniper for the other side you guys kept coming up against until he disappeared from the field.”
“He seemed to have dropped off the face of the Earth. We thought he might be dead, but we heard chatter and then received specific intelligence that he was regrouping in the caves of Afghanistan, which seemed totally likely.”
“The last I heard from you was that you were going off on some assignment as a lone sniper, apart from your team.”
“That assignment was tracking Vlad to his hideaway. I was pulled off a mission with my own team to help this one.” He might be revealing classified information to Jen, but he didn’t give a damn. The navy, his brothers, had never turned their backs on him, but he couldn’t say the same for the shadowy intelligence agencies that called the shots.
“And it all went horribly wrong. The navy wouldn’t tell me much, but I knew others had died with you.” She bumped her knee against his. “Are they alive, too?”
“No. They’re all dead.”
She covered her eyes with one hand and sniffed. “So I’m the only one who gets the homecoming.”
Miguel closed his eyes and clearly saw the ambush of the other SEALs at the cave, the pop of the guns, the flash of the gunpowder.
“What happened to you, Miguel?”
His lips twisted. “Do you have a few days?”
She snuggled closer to him and rested her head on his chest. “I have all the time you need, mi amor.”
Smiling, he ruffled her soft hair. He’d been teaching her Spanish and she’d picked it up quickly, despite her atrocious accent.
“The mission went to hell. Someone set a trap. The SEAL team on the ground was ambushed and killed, and I was captured.”
Her back rose and fell with quick, panting breaths. “H-how long? How long were you a prisoner?”
“Just over eighteen months.”
She must’ve been doing the calculation in her head because her shoulders stiffened. She mumbled into his shirt. “Where have you been the past four to five months? Why didn’t you contact me?”
“Various hospitals, starting with the one in Germany, debriefing sessions, intelligence meetings.” He didn’t mention the psychiatric units. He didn’t want her pity.
She finally raised her head from his chest and met his gaze. “I’m sure you needed...treatment. I’m sure the navy and the CIA wanted to pick your brain. But those places didn’t have telephones?”
“No. Literally, no. None for me anyway.”
“They wouldn’t allow you to use the phone?”
“No.”
“And they wouldn’t notify me? Your father? Your brother? Miguel, your father...”
“I know he’s dead.” His nostrils flared. “They wanted you to go on believing I was dead, too. They still want you believing that.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Those bugs you found—is that the navy, the FBI, some intelligence agency I don’t need to know about?”
“It’s not the navy. At least the navy is not calling the shots on this one.”
“But you have reason to believe forces in the intelligence community broke into my home and planted listening devices?”
“Yes...maybe.” He didn’t know who was behind the sinister vibe he’d picked up at the debriefing center.
“Miguel, why? They should be treating you like the hero you are. They should be throwing you a ticker tape parade.”
“Part of it is the sensitive nature of the assignment. They never went public with it.”
“Part of it.” She smoothed a hand across the shirt she’d wrinkled earlier. “What’s the other part? Why wouldn’t they allow you to contact me?”
Running a hand through his hair, longer than he usually wore it, he said, “I don’t know.”
“They don’t know you’re here.”
“They don’t know where I am, but I’m sure they can make an educated guess that I’m coming here.”
“You spent eighteen months as a prisoner of war and now your own government wants to imprison you again?” Her cheeks flew red flags, indignation making her voice squeak.
“I don’t know what they want, but I wasn’t going to stick around anymore to find out.” Guilt stabbed at his gut. The FBI had warned him that he could be putting Jennifer in danger by showing up on her doorstep, but he was afraid she already was in danger and he knew he was the only one who could protect her.
She trailed her fingertips along his tense jaw beneath his new beard. “What did your captors do to you, Miguel?”
“Tried to get information out of me.” He rubbed a spot on his hip, still sore from the wounds he received from his captors.
“How?”
He thought he’d imagined the whispered question, spoken so softly, but the question lingered in Jen’s blue eyes.
If he told her everything would it be worse than she imagined? He gazed into those baby blues and a knot tightened in his gut. Never.
“It was rough, Jen, but I’m here. I survived it.” He brushed his lips across hers. “The thought of you gave me strength, pulled me through the most brutal moments of my captivity.”
“How did you know I’d be waiting for you? You must’ve figured the navy would tell me you died. You didn’t even know I was pregnant before you left. I didn’t know I was pregnant.”
“I tried not to think about it. Tried not to think of you moving on with someone else.” He scooped her hair away from her face, his fingers tightening involuntarily. “Have you?”
“Of course not.” Her lashes fluttering, she leaned in for the kiss he had waiting for her, and then she jerked back. “How did you know where I lived? How did you know about Mikey?”
“After the hospital in Germany, I went to a debriefing center near DC. I kept asking about you, kept asking for a phone. All they’d tell me was that you were okay and I needed to concentrate on getting better.” He ground his back teeth. “As if seeing you wouldn’t make me feel better immediately.”
She grabbed his hands. “Did you escape this center? Leave without their permission?”
“Yeah, but not before breaking into an office and looking at my file.” He pulled away from her and smacked a fist into his palm. “They didn’t even tell me I had a son.”
“A-are you AWOL or something?” Her gaze dropped to his clenched fist and then back to his face.
He shrugged, rolling his shoulders and flexing his fingers. “They debriefed me. It’s not like I’m going to confess anything to you about my captivity or about Vlad that I didn’t already spill to them.”
“But you’re not supposed to be here.”
He ran a hand across his mouth. “This is the only place I’m supposed to be.”
“I thought I was dreaming. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again—except in those dreams.”
He curled a hand around her neck and pulled her close, but before he could plant another kiss on her mouth, a crash resounded from the room next to them.
Then he smelled the smoke...and heard the screams of his son.
Chapter Three (#u46a7807e-34b5-5688-a14a-acd85a67ef0e)
Miguel bolted from the sofa and Jennifer lunged after him, tripping over the coffee table and banging her shin. The acrid smell of fire invaded her nostrils and terror ripped through her body like the jagged edge of a knife when she saw black smoke pouring out of Mikey’s bedroom.
“It’s Mikey’s room.”
Miguel charged into the smoke-filled room as Jennifer hung back coughing, her eyes watering. The heat from the flames licking at the drapes spiked her adrenaline, and she stumbled into the room after Miguel.
“Stay back, Jen. I’ve got him.”
Miguel emerged from the dark gray cloud, Mikey clutched against his chest. He slammed the door behind him.
“Get out. Get out of the house now—back door.”
She grabbed her phone on her way to the sliding glass door and gulped in the fresh air when she hit the patio. The smoke and fire from the front of the house hadn’t made it back here yet, hadn’t escaped from Mikey’s room.
She got on the phone with 9-1-1 while stroking the back of Mikey’s head as he sobbed against Miguel’s shoulder. After giving emergency services the details, she held out her arms and Miguel transferred Mikey to her.
Even amid the terror, she couldn’t help noticing how Mikey, in his fear, had clung to Miguel. She whispered in Mikey’s ear, “It’s okay. You’re okay now. Mommy’s here.”
She rested her chin on top of Mikey’s head and met Miguel’s gaze as he pulled her away from the house. “What was that?”
“As far as I can tell from the smell, it was a Molotov cocktail.”
“Meant for you? The FBI would go to those measures to get you back? Risk harming a child?”
Miguel cocked his head at the sound of sirens in the distance. “No, but who said I was being debriefed by the FBI?”
“You’re scaring me even more, if that’s possible.” She squeezed Mikey so tightly, he squirmed in her grasp. At least the FBI had some accountability, rules to follow, public exposure. But these shadowy black ops organizations? Who held them accountable?
