“No. But, c’mon, man.” Quinn encompassed the apartment with a sweep of his arm. “This isn’t you. What the hell?”
Gabe felt a muscle tick under his eye and loosened his clamped jaw. “Can we talk about something else? Like the reason you’re here.”
“Yeah, but you’re gonna listen to me first. I know it’s none of my business, but I have to say this. I’ve known you for twelve years, and in all that time, I’d never have dreamed of calling you a coward. Until now.”
Gabe ground his teeth as the blow hit exactly where Quinn had calculated it to: his pride. He was not a coward. “Noted. Now can we get to work? You wanted to talk to me about the team.”
Quinn took a long drink from his beer, then sat on the arm of the couch. “That mission in Colombia could have gone much worse.”
“No shit.”
“We were undertrained, underequipped. We put our team in danger.”
“Yes, I know.” Gabe couldn’t keep the heat out of his tone. He had put his team in danger, all because he had wanted back into the action. “And I’ve been working around the clock to rectify those problems.”
“When you’re not moping,” Quinn muttered, but then held up his hand. “Sorry. Low blow. I know you’ve been working your ass off here, but there is one problem you haven’t addressed yet.”
Gabe sat down in the chair across from him. “And what’s that?”
“We don’t have enough men.”
“I’ve been looking at dossiers.”
“We need a sniper.”
Hell, no. Gabe saw where this was going and frowned. “I know what you’re thinking, Q. Didn’t I already make that decision?”
“Yeah, but we need a sniper. A good one, at that. Seth Harlan’s one of the best and he wants on the team. He wants a second chance.”
Second chance.
In a flash of understanding, Gabe suddenly knew how the sniper must feel. In fact, hadn’t he felt the exact same way only a month and a half ago as he stood in his parents’ house in his dress whites, dreading his future? HORNET had given him and all of the other guys another shot. What was stopping him from doing the same for Seth Harlan?
What the hell. Not like his team wasn’t a ragtag bunch already. Why not add a potentially traumatized sniper to the mix?
And, speaking of second chances, maybe Quinn was right about other things, too.
Gabe picked up his beer, drained it on one breath, and stood. “All right, I’ll give Harlan a call, but he’s going to be your responsibility, Q.” With that, he strode toward his bedroom. He needed a shower, a shave, and to pack a bag.
“Where are you going?” Quinn called.
Gabe stopped just outside his bedroom door and glanced back at his messy apartment, curling his lip in disgust with himself. Why the hell had he let it get this bad? “I’m not a coward.”
Quinn raised his bottle in salute. “Hooyah.”
DOMINICAL, COSTA RICA
If someone had told Audrey this morning that she’d come home from a lunch meeting with her manager in San Jose to find Gabriel Bristow swimming in her slice of the Pacific, she would have called them crazy.
“Gabe?”
She walked out to the end of the dock, sure she was dreaming. She had to be. He’d starred in her dreams every night and they all began like this. She’d come home to find him begging forgiveness for being a class A asshole, then one of two things would happen. One, she’d yell at him, call him a bunch of creative four-letter words, and then kick him out with the righteousness of a woman scorned. Or two, she’d fall into his arms and make wild, passionate love to him for hours before they lived happily ever after.
It was still a toss-up which dream she liked better.
Maybe she fell asleep on the bus ride home? But she didn’t feel like she was sleeping. This was all too vivid, and as good of an imagination as she had, she didn’t think she could conjure up the feel of the salty ocean breeze playing with her skirt or the hot sun burning her cheeks. Plus, if she was dreaming, the air, soupy with summer humidity, would not be making her dress stick to the sweat rolling down her spine and her hair would not be a frizzy mess right now.
So he really was here.
“Gabe?” she said again, so stunned she couldn’t find any other words for a solid five seconds. She shook her head. “What are you doing?”
Treading water, he looked up at her. His hair was slicked back, his long eyelashes spiked around wary golden eyes. “Well, uh, I’m swimming.”
“You came all the way to Costa Rica for that?”
Rata playfully bumped his side, and the smile that spread over his face was so genuine it melted the ice wall she’d tried to build around her heart to ward off his memory. He stroked the dolphin’s head, and then took hold of a rope and ball dog toy she’d never seen before and chucked it into the waves. With a happy chirp, Rata dove after it.