She huffed a laugh, but it was quiet. “I’m a reporter. Thinking is literally my job.”
“Good point.” His lips ghosted over the back of her shoulder, and the rush of warmth sent another ripple of goose bumps across her skin, confusing her even more. Because while her body screamed to just melt into him, her brain lined up questions like bullets.
“Hudson…” She hesitated, his name heavy in her mouth. “I need to understand something.”
His sigh was low, patient, but she could feel the tension creeping back into his muscles. “That sounds like the start of an interrogation.”
She rolled halfway toward him, propping herself on one elbow so she could study his face in the low light spilling from the cracks in the blinds.
His expression was shadowed and unreadable except for the faint pull of exhaustion around his mouth.
“It’s not an interrogation. It’s just…this.” She gestured between them, at the bed, at his body still pressed against hers. “It’s good. Really good. But it’s also confusing. I need to know what’s going on.”
His gaze searched hers for a long moment before he sat up against the headboard, dragging her easily with him until she was tucked under his arm again. “Confusing how?”
“Your life.” Her voice came out sharper than she intended. She softened it, but the frustration lingered. “This team. What it means. I’ve been trying to analyze you all since the moment I got close enough. And I can’t get a clear picture. I’m used to digging and finding the truth, but with you…” She exhaled, the sound full of exasperation. “It feels impossible.”
Hudson was quiet for a long beat. Then the words came, low. “You want me to define us.”
“Yes.” Her chest tightened. “I don’t do well with gray areas. I tell stories for a living—I need beginnings, middles, endings. Facts.”
He tilted his head against hers, lips on her temple. “Izzy, what I do doesn’t come with definitions. Hell, most of the time it doesn’t even come with rules I get to make.”
“You’re black ops.”
He exhaled through his nostrils. “Yes. You want a definition, but maybe you don’t want to hear it.”
“I do.” Her words came with a quiet conviction. No matter how difficult a story was—even her own—she had to hear it.
He sighed. “Black ops means operating in the shadows. It means being a ghost. Sometimes…it means being dead.”
She flinched at the bluntness of his words, her breath catching. “Dead?”
“That’s what the world thinks,” he said quietly. “That’s the only way we can operate. Our names don’t exist. Our missions don’t exist. And that makes it hard to have…” He broke off, dragging a hand through his hair. “Hard to have anything outside of it.”
“Like wives,” she whispered. “Families.”
His silence was answer enough.
Izzy pulled back just enough to see his face. Her chest burned with a strange mix of anger and grief. “So what are we doing then? Because I finally—” Her voice cracked, and she swallowed hard before pushing on. “I finally found someone I actually want to connect with. A place I feel safe. And now you’re telling me it’s impossible?”
He winced, his big hand coming up to cup her cheek. “I’m not saying impossible.”
“It sounds like you are.”
“I’m saying hard.” His thumb skimmed over her skin, gentle. “But you should understand this better than anyone.”
Her brows drew together. “How?”
“You’re a reporter,” he said simply. “You know what secrecy feels like. You can’t tell me everything you uncover. Sometimes you have to protect your sources, hold back pieces of the truth because putting them out there would ruin people or cost lives. You live with that. You understand the rules of silence.”
She stilled. He was right.
Dammit, he was right.
Before Syria and her long break from the world, she lived every day walking the line between what she could reveal and what she had to bury to protect someone who’d trusted her.
“And I understand the flip side.” His eyes glittered at her through the darkness. “I can’t tell you every detail about missions. About the team. About the things I’ve done. But I can give you the parts that matter. Just like you do when you choose your words.”
