Her words hit home. “I’m not that cold.”
Her voice softened. “No, you aren’t. You’ve just lived twelve years on Capitol Hill, having to hide every single emotion and every single thought while pushing forward agendas that you believed in but others did not. You’re used to getting your way by bargain and debate without giving away one iota of how important it all is to you. Plus, the last relationship you had was kept a secret, and then you had to pretend it didn’t tear you apart when he left you for his ex on the one night you needed him most.”
Each word sent pinpricks to my heart and soul, and yet I couldn’t deny one word of it. Just like I hadn’t been able to deny the reality of me loving Nash.
“Russell and I were never serious,” I said, trying not to let the thought of that night scramble my nerves. Trying not to hate him for standing me up and leaving me to the wolf.
“You had clothes at his place, Dani. That’s not nothing.”
Russell and I had never agreed to be exclusive. We’d never even named what we did. We’d been stand-in dates for events we had to attend. We’d been the satisfying relief of sex afterward. If anything, it had been the friends-with-benefits that Georgie had just named. It certainly had never been the ground-shaking, world-shattering sensations I felt when I was with Nash.
“It’s not Nash you’re afraid of,” Georgie said. “It’s you. It’s the thought of loving someone and opening up to them in a way that risks a broken heart.”
“What if neither of us can do it?”
“Then, it wasn’t meant to be, and you can enjoy the sex while it lasts.”
I sighed. “You’ve been no help at all.”
“That’s because you thought I’d be shocked and fill you with reasons to run fast and hard away from him.”
Maybe. Maybe I had called her to talk me down from the out of control feelings I had. Maybe I’d looked for her to be the ledge to grab on to before I took an even bigger tumble. Before I fell and shattered in a million pieces. Before I was unable to ever be with another man without comparing it to these dreamlike, honey-and-lemon-scented days with Nash.
Nash
WHAT ABOUT NOW
“This broken heart can still survive,
With a touch of your grace.
Shadows fade into the light,
I am by your side.”
Performed by Daughtry
Written by Hartzler / Moody / Hodges
I left Dani before the sun came up. Unable to sleep, as was often the case with me even before the one mission which had cost me everything, I jogged down to the edge of the property where rows of camellia bushes nestled beneath the live oak trees, sheltering the flowers from the full sun in the afternoon.
The bushes were ones my parents had brought to the farm. My mother had told me they were synonymous with destiny. As I let that word loll around in my brain, I wondered if Dani had any idea I was seeing our futures twisted together. I took the knife from my pocket, trimming a couple of the blooms and heading back toward the house, looking like a joke of a cartoon with hearts floating above my head.
When I got back to the room, Dani was still passed out on her stomach, the sheet barely wrapped around her middle, leaving enough skin exposed to tempt me as it sparkled in the early dawn light. I left the flowers on my pillow where she’d see them when she woke. Then, I grabbed clothes and took off down the hall to shower in another bathroom so I wouldn’t wake her.
Once out, I grabbed a coffee and wandered through the house, restless. A feeling I often had before a new mission—a sense of expectation mixed with adrenaline. I just wasn’t sure what the new mission was, even with Dr. Inez’s words haunting me. A reason to live. A reason to wake up, get up, and smile each day. He’d wanted me to find a purpose outside of my job. A job that defined not only who I was, but how I lived. “For Something Greater” was one hundred percent the reason I did the job, but he was right in that it wasn’t the reason to live. It wasn’t a reason to come back from each mission alive.
The thought of leaving Dani on her own―unprotected―to go on another mission where I killed someone before coming back to her with that hanging on me, tainting our own life... It somehow left a bad taste in my mouth. Metallic, like blood spilling in.
On the other hand, I didn’t know what else to do with myself. I rubbed the small scar over my heart and then the largest scar along my shoulder. All I knew how to do was to go on mission after mission, trying to right the wrongs of this chaotic world. Trying to make our world safer. Taking out terrorists and sex traffickers and anarchists.
I found myself climbing into Betsy and heading off to the General Store. I hadn’t been to the site in more years than I could count. Dr. Inez had been right when he’d said I was on the board for the corporation, but it was a position I’d always delegated to my uncle. To the person who knew the company best. To the person who’d allowed my dog to die, buried my dad, and dragged me away from my drowned mom. To the person who’d taught me how to hunt and play chess and to sacrifice for what I got.
Wellsley Place was just too tied up in my complicated feelings about my uncle for me to ever see it clearly. In rejecting any role with the company, I’d been able to reject him. I’d been able to reject his attempts to reel me back
