“Silas Thompson was the one who picked me up and got me to the nearest hospital,” he said slowly, his tone anguished. “He didn’t want to leave me there on my own, but he didn’t have a choice. It’s MI6 protocol in a situation like that. Less chance of the team being compromised if they scatter. I stayed there while Weatherford got the rest of the team out of the country, so none of them were there to see all the damage when the doctors got around to stripping my clothes off.”
Harley couldn’t imagine what that must have been like for him. To go through something like that alone was beyond awful.
“I still can’t believe they left you,” she said.
If something like that happened to her or anyone else in STAT, there was no way she or her teammates would ever bail on each other. But maybe that was because they were more than a team. They were a pack. And that included the humans.
“It’s not that they wanted to,” he said. “But if they’d stayed, there’s a good chance local law enforcement—or worse, some foreign covert organization—would have picked them up. It was safer for me to be a John Doe than to have my teammates hanging around.”
Harley wasn’t sure she believed that. She’d want to be with her teammate if one of them was badly hurt. “Didn’t the doctors realize there was something strange going on once they saw how badly you’d been wounded? The extent of the injuries and the amount of blood you lost must have made it into your medical records.”
He shrugged. “I suppose so. When the extraction team came a few days later to get me, they snagged my medical records too, and by then, my injuries didn’t look nearly as bad. I was still beat up when I got back to London, but it wasn’t bad enough to suggest how close I’d come to dying. And it wasn’t like I was going to bring it up. MI6 put me on six weeks of medical leave to heal up, so there wasn’t anyone around to see me going through the worst of the change. By the time I went back to work, I was in control of my abilities. I almost died ten times over and got turned into a werewolf because I have the gene and no one even noticed.”
She frowned at that. “No one on your team noticed you saved their lives in Odessa?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said with a soft laugh. Harley was amazed at how the sound lightened the weight that had been bearing down on her chest. “In between ducking and diving, they noticed my heroics. By the time I got back from medical leave, I had a reputation of sorts thanks to the stories Erin, Rory, and Elliott told. According to them, I was fearless, driven, selfless, etc. Most of it was complete rubbish, but Weatherford insisted the entire team would have been wiped out if not for me. It ended his field career but got me noticed by upper levels of management. They offered me my own team and anyone in MI6 I wanted. Silas was senior enough to get his own team, and Sarah Parker and Cedric Abbot got out of MI6. I heard though the grapevine that they’d ended up with new identities and got married. The rest, as they say, is history.” His mouth curved into a sexy smile. “And now here I am having dinner with a beautiful werewolf in Paris and waiting to hear her story.”
Harley was saved from having to reply right away by their server’s arrival once again. This time, he had their crème brûlée and coffee. She immediately dug into the rich custard with its expertly caramelized top, thinking about what Sawyer had told her. The events that had led to his change had been drastically different than her own, but what struck her the most was how different his life had been after going through the change compared to hers. Other than the fact that he had to hide his werewolf identity from his teammates, he’d clearly embraced his animal nature. Harley couldn’t help but compare that to her own situation. While she didn’t have to hide what she was from her team, she didn’t feel comfortable embracing her talents at all.
Harley could feel Sawyer’s gaze on her as they ate dessert and she knew he was giving her time to tell her story. The only problem was, she didn’t have any idea how to start. While her change hadn’t been nearly as traumatic as Sawyer’s, it was still difficult to talk about it. Hell, thinking about it made her stomach churn. But when her spoon scrapped the bottom of the ramekin and she still didn’t know what to say, she accepted she was in trouble.
Then her phone rang. She was so happy to be interrupted.
“It’s Jake,” her alpha said when she answered. “You and Sawyer need to get back to the hotel ASAP. We leave Paris in an hour.”
On the other side of the table, Sawyer caught the server’s attention and motioned for the check. Obviously, the British werewolf had easily heard what Jake said.
“Where are we going?” she asked Jake.
“Morocco. Our analysts spent the past few hours going over every second of Adriana’s captivity and believe there’s another holding cell in Casablanca. They aren’t sure if that’s where the auction is supposed to take place or if the kidnappers took the captives they were holding here in Paris, but it’s all we have right now.”
Sawyer was signing the bill as Harley hung up. A quick glance at the bottom line of the receipt showed her that dinner for the two of them had cost about as much as a week of groceries. Yikes!
“I hope you don’t think I’m letting you off the hook when it comes to telling me your story,” Sawyer said, coming over to slide her chair out. “You
