Page 44
Jordan took a call from Abel Jones a few minutes later, after they’d fed Spot and were having their first cup of coffee. Benny appreciated that she put the phone on speaker again, and when he heard the warm affection in her voice as Jones spoke, he felt a tiny twitch of jealousy.
He knew from what Jordan had relayed that the man was married, happily so, but it didn’t stop the beast within him from flexing just a little bit.
“I didn’t want to bug you yesterday,” Abel said. “Are you okay? One of the guys said you were shot.”
“Just a graze. It feels better already.”
Abel cleared his throat. “Any, ahem, enhancements?”
“Not like you’re thinking,” she said. “I’ll fill you in on some maybes later, face-to-face. This all ends today. At least we hope it will. Again, I’ll fill you in later, in person.”
“Understood. I’ll look forward to the update. You take care of yourself, okay?”
Benny heard the concern in his voice.
Yeah, he was definitely a little jealous.
Jordan disconnected and turned to him.
“Thank you for keeping quiet. Abel doesn’t know about your return. The less he knows, the safer he is, and he’s been a really good boss and ally.”
“Did he know about us?” Benny asked.
Jordan shook her head. “He knew I was seeing someone and that it ended badly, but not the extent of it. Certainly not that I’d lost you. I just let him go with the erroneous assumption that you’d been a dick.” She grinned a little.
He tried to look affronted but couldn’t quite manage it.
“Well, good then. You can introduce him to Chance Johnson.” He tilted his head and considered the name for a moment. “Yeah, I like CJ better.”
“CJ it is.” She smiled. “It may take me a little while to get used to that, though. I can still call you Benito in bed.”
Just the mention of it, the thought of her beneath him, made him go hard.
She correctly read the expression on his face and laughed. “You’re such a horndog.” The amusement was plain in her voice.
If this was what it had been like between them, the laughter and teasing, the easy affection, the fact that he genuinely liked her in addition to finding her the hottest woman he’d ever been with, then yeah.
He was beginning to understand how it had happened the first time.
Not the sex. That part was easy. It was everything else. It was waking up with her wrapped around him. Drinking coffee together. Solving problems together. Trusting her without having to think about it. Knowing she would have his back no matter how ugly things got, and realizing he wanted to be the person who had hers.
Maybe that was what bothered him most about the memories he’d lost. Somewhere in those missing four months, there had been a thousand tiny moments like this one. Nothing important enough to record or photograph, but all of them adding up until Jordan had become his person.
He couldn't get those moments back, but he could make new ones.
Jordan was still smiling at him over the rim of her coffee cup, completely unaware of the revelation happening on his side of the table.
Something inside him settled.
He didn't have to remember why he'd fallen in love with her, because he was well past halfway there all over again. This time, he intended to remember every fucking second of it.
~
When they logged in to the video meeting, Davenport was already waiting for them, which should have surprised no one, and certainly not Benny at this point.
He had no idea what the steely-eyed ex-Delta operative had in mind beyond what he’d already told them, but Benny wanted this to be over.
Cali had reached out to the OSI agent they knew through Dr. Hancock, Grant Eaton. Benny vaguely remembered something going down right around the time they’d started therapy, when Dr. Hancock had been involved in an attempted kidnapping.
