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Chapter 3
The Gibbs men carried in the plates of breakfast, steaming hot, with a delicious smell wafting in with them, setting all three on the old dining table and took their seats. Jethro sat at the head of the table with Emerald to his left and Jackson to his right. He looked at the two of them. This just feels right, Jethro. What is it about her?

“Breakfast smells wonderful, you two. Did you teach your son to cook, Mr. Gibbs?” asked Emerald, making polite conversation.

Jethro’s father smiled kindly at the young woman, his eyes lighting up at the opportunity to talk to someone other than his son after so much time locked up in the house together since he arrived in D.C. “Please, call me Jack, dear.” He took a sip of his coffee. “I’m afraid Leroy was a stubborn young man. Didn’t want to learn much from me after his mom died. He’s managed well enough on his own all this time though. Despite my mistakes, he turned out all right.” Jack glanced over with pride in his eyes at Jethro who met his gaze only briefly before turning back to his own coffee.

Emerald silently studied the two men for a moment and went on attempting to make conversation. “So how long have you lived here with Jethro?”

Gibbs tensed at the question, not wanting to involve her in the details of the current situation with the Reynosa cartel, but knowing a trained federal agent as herself would likely notice the NCIS agents posted outside his house soon enough. “Dad doesn’t live here really. He’s sort of visiting, but not by choice.” He looked for the right choice of words to explain himself. You can’t tell her you’re a murderer. She’d never look at you with an ounce of respect after that. There’s no way to explain the truth. “I crossed paths with the wrong people in Mexico and have a drug cartel on the warpath after me with a vengeance, threatening to kill everyone I care about, starting with my dad.” So you’re gonna be a selfish bastard and care about her, putting her at risk too. You can’t possibly protect everyone. You’re not Superman, Jethro.

Jack saw the tension in Jethro’s face and knew his son was struggling with an explanation. “Paloma Reynosa of the Reynosa drug cartel showed up in my store at home, pointed a gun at me, but thought better of shooting me when I pulled out my old Winchester rifle. Didn’t stop her from having her goons shoot up my storefront though. Thankfully, I was able to hide in an old storm shelter before they came back in to try to finish me off. After that, Jethro decided I’d be safer here with him and didn’t give me much choice. Guess he thinks at my age he can boss me around like he’s the father.” He gave a slight smile, only half-joking.

She sat quietly for a moment contemplating what could have brought on such a strong response in the drug cartel. Jethro must have really pissed someone off, of that she was quite aware. In her own experience, the Mexican drug cartels would have no reason to come after someone on such a personal level unless Paloma Reynosa had suffered some deeply personal insult at Jethro’s hands. She could only guess it was not truly official NCIS business, but they were protecting their own. That she could understand. She’d seen it both at the FBI and the DOD.

They all three sat quietly eating their breakfasts for a few minutes before Jack spoke up. “Could I get you anything else, Emerald? Do you drink coffee? I don’t think Leroy even offered you any.”

She grinned. “For one, you can just call me Em if you like, Jack. Secondly, I absolutely love coffee. My team always says I just need an IV drip set up at my desk so I don’t need to make so many coffee runs.” Em winced slightly and reached her hand to the back of her head.

A pang of guilt shot through Gibbs’ stomach at the sight of her in pain. “Do you want some pain medicine? I picked up the prescription they gave you at the hospital pharmacy before bringing you home.” He stretched an arm out to the ironing board behind him and picked up a prescription bottle sitting there. Reaching across the table to a pair of reading glasses lying on the morning’s newspaper, he lifted them to his face and slid them on, reading the label. “Looks like you can have one or two of these Percocets every four to six hours as needed for pain.”

“No thanks. Do you have any Tylenol?” Her pain wasn’t unbearable, and she knew all too well the drunken-like stupor that narcotic painkillers put her in. She really didn’t want to embarrass herself more than necessary in front of Jethro.

Jethro looked a bit skeptical, but replied calmly. “Sure, excuse me for a second. I’ll go get it.”

“What do you take in your coffee, sweetheart?” called Jack from the kitchen. She had barely even noticed that he had left the table during her exchange with Jethro.

“Just coffee, Jack. I take my coffee with just coffee in it.” Despite her increasingly throbbing head, she laughed at her own joke, one she’d used several times at the office. Her team always said her sense of humor took some getting used to.

“You sound like Leroy. He calls it Marine style,” Jack was saying as he reentered the room holding a steaming cup of java, placing it carefully in front of her. “He makes it awfully strong too. Hope it’s not too much for you.”

She blew lightly on it to cool the hot liquid and took a sip. “No, it’s perfect. I love strong coffee.”

Holding a bottle of Tylenol in his hands, Jethro came walking back in and reseated himself. “How many would you like?”

“Four.”

“Four?”

“Yes. Four,” she replied, holding out her hand.

He hesitated for second knowing that was double the recommended dosage, but opened the bottle, shook out four pills, and handed them to her anyway. Four Tylenol couldn’t possibly be nearly as strong as one Percocet he figured. She tossed the pills in her mouth and took a gulp of her coffee to wash them down before looking up, realizing he was staring at her. Emerald met his gaze unwaveringly, falling into his ocean blue eyes and forgetting her aches and pains while she was in those eyes.

Jack looked at Em and then at Leroy, feeling a bit like a third wheel, recognizing that something was happening between his son and this mysterious younger woman from the supermarket. He hadn’t seen Leroy look at a woman like that since his first wife Shannon who had been murdered nearly twenty years earlier along with their daughter Kelly. Like any father, Jack only wanted Jethro to be happy, wanted him to find someone to love and be loved by. He sat back quietly and drank his coffee for the time being, trying not to interrupt their moment.

The intensity of her eyes gazing into his left Gibbs incapable of breathing. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt so overwhelmed by a woman. Shannon. Only Shannon could ever do this to you. The thought was almost too much for him. She couldn’t be… He couldn’t let himself finish the thought. It was just too much to comprehend.

Suddenly feeling the need for oxygen and becoming increasingly aware of the presence of his father, Gibbs tried to break free of her eyes. He sat there, no longer feeling like a fifty-one year-old man, but rather like a fifteen year-old boy caught by his father while trying to sneak off for a tryst with a neighborhood girl. Taking in a deep breath, he let a smile cross his lips and found it met by one on her face as well. As if on cue, they both glanced over to Jack and saw him busily finishing his breakfast, pretending he didn’t notice anything.

Jack looked up acting like nothing had just transpired. “So, Em, where are you from? Sound like you got a bit of Boston in you. Your parents still live in your hometown?”

Emerald grinned at Jack’s nonchalance but dreaded the barrage of questions about her past. “Wow, Jack, you have a keen ear. I grew up in Wellesley, a suburb west of Boston. Unfortunately, my parents are no longer living. They died in a car accident a few months before I graduated from college.” She tried not to think about it more than necessary for fear of the tears choking the back of her throat. From the corner of her eye, she could see the look on Jethro’s face and could tell he knew more about her than he was letting on. It was a pained expression, but not one of pity so much as a sense of kinship of sorrow.

Jack looked sorry to have asked the question. “I apologize, my dear. I had no idea.” He cleared his throat while thinking of perhaps a safer subject to chat about. “So, you’re a federal agent like Leroy. FBI? How’d a pretty young thing like you get into such a dangerous field of work?”

With the tightening of her throat relaxing at the change in topics, Emerald pushed the remaining eggs around her plate with her fork and gave a broad smile. “Actually, that’s kind of a funny thing to ask. No sad story there.” She pushed away the plate in front of her and reached for the coffee mug, taking a deep drink to clear away the last of the clenching feeling in her throat. “I actually was torn between two extremely different career interests. On one hand, I been taking classical music lessons since I was three, and by the time I graduated high school was exceptional with the piano, flute, and clarinet. I had won many state and national competitions playing each of those instruments. Everyone told me I was good enough to play professionally. Encouraged by my music instructor, I applied and was accepted to Julliard.”

Gibbs tried to picture Emerald sitting behind a piano gracefully playing some complicated composition. She seemed so delicate and refined. It seemed a better fit than the “bad ass” fed the nurse at the hospital portrayed her to be.

“Anyway, the other side of the story was my tomboy side. Encouraged by my father, I had been training in martial arts since I was six. He had taken me hunting from the time I could hold a gun and aim it. I was raised spending time with my father and grandfather at our family hunting cabin in the Catskills using various firearms and was quite proficient with them all. On top of that, I was always detail-oriented, a whiz with puzzles, had a knack for languages, and could innately read people. My guidance counselor and many of those career aptitude tests you take in high school suggested I would be a natural applying my skills in the areas of law enforcement or psychology. The idea of combining those fields into a career in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit appealed to me. Following that interest, I applied to Harvard as well and was accepted there.”

The picture was becoming clearer now to Gibbs with this new information, allowing him to better imagine her as the federal agent she actually was sitting here in front of him rather than the classical pianist it seemed she should be.

“So, that’s what you do? This behavioral thing you said,” Jack asked for clarification.

“Well, that was the idea.” She sighed for a second and briefly stared out the window as a NCIS agent strolled by patrolling the property. “I applied to the FBI just before graduation and was notified immediately they were interested in me. However, they weren’t looking to fill a slot in the BAU. With my linguistics background, I speak ten foreign languages, and forensic science minor in college in addition to my psychology major, they felt I would be a better fit in an investigative position, particularly counterterrorism.” Emerald clenched her jaw and ground her teeth together absentmindedly, thinking back, then took a gulp of her now lukewarm coffee before continuing. “Of course, this was before the whole country saw the importance in counterterrorism, and we were severely understaffed and underfunded. It’s no wonder we couldn’t do our jobs effectively enough.”

Jethro remembered what the kindly registration clerk at the hospital had told him and felt the urge to pull Emerald into his arms, to tell her everything would be okay. Of course she could find a million places where the system went wrong. The system failed her. The system allowed terrorists to rain airplanes down, crashing one into the Pentagon, killing her beloved husband. He knew all too well how it felt to lose the person you were in love with and thought you’d be with the rest of your life.

Seeing she was obviously struggling to find words for the moment, Jack began to speak again, but Emerald’s voice broke through, and she continued. “After 9/11, things changed. I had been working with a counterterrorism team based out of Quantico. About a year after the attacks, I was called into a meeting with the Director of the FBI and the Secretary of Defense themselves. It seems my work had caught the attention of the highest levels, leading me to be sought out for a special position the Sec Def was starting up at the DOD. That’s when I was offered my current position. I still hold FBI credentials, but I’m based out of the Pentagon, working as the lead investigator for the DOD’s Terroristic Crimes Investigative Unit.”

Now Gibbs was truly curious. He’d never heard of such a unit in the DOD. “So, you work in the D.C. area on terrorist related crimes?” he asked, leaning in towards the table, closer to her.

Enjoying his noticeably piqued interest, Emerald moved slightly in his direction as she spoke. “Not exactly. Our offices and lab are located in D.C. in the Pentagon, but we investigate crimes all over the country. I have a team of three criminal investigators with various areas of expertise, a data systems analyst, two forensic scientists, and access to a medical examiner as needed for cases involving autopsies. The core team and I, the three investigators, travel by Gulfstream jet to whatever location the crime has been committed or believed to been committed for field work investigation and send all the evidence back here to D.C. to our fully state-of-the-art lab for examination.” She spied a hint of jealousy in Jethro’s eyes, likely at the idea of having the kinds of resources at his disposal that she had at her own. “I can’t begin to tell you how many terrorist attacks have been subverted through our investigative work in the past eight years, Jethro.”

“It sounds like you do amazing work,” Jethro replied softly, staring into her eyes again, a smile creeping across his lips and playing at the lines and creases in his face. She sat like a painted still-life, not even allowing herself a breath as she studied his features, trying to memorize every line, every angle, and etch each detail into the fabric of her mind. She wanted to close her eyes and see his face just as clearly as he was in front of her eyes at this moment.

Quietly, Jack shuffled around gathering the breakfast plates and empty coffee mugs, making his way into the kitchen to begin cleaning up. He still wanted to learn more about this beautiful stranger who had his son so entranced, but for now he was satisfied that she was a strong woman, independent and more capable of handling his boy than first impressions gave her credit for.
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