As his tongue flicked against hers, she tried to force herself back in the moment, to stop thinking about all the things that were flipping through her mind. Daisy plopped down on her foot and let out a long sigh. The sound made her smile, and as she did, Grant let his hands move from her face and he sat back.
“Was my kiss that bad?”
“What?” she asked, finally opening her eyes and looking at him. “No...that’s not it.” He had the best eyes—they were green around the outsides and brown in the middle, and in the thin morning light they even picked up bits of gray and purple from the sky.
His eyes, just like the man to which they belonged, were perfect. They were everything, every color...he was the embodiment of all the things she wanted to see and feel, and damn it if he didn’t make every part of her body spark with want. But she couldn’t have him.
She stood up, carefully away from Daisy, and Grant moved to reach for her, but she noted how he stopped himself. Maybe he realized they were wrong, too. Maybe he had seen her kiss for what she had intended it to be—a stopgap in the moment, anything to make her stop feeling. And then...well, and then it screwed everything up.
She turned her back to him, afraid if she looked into that perfect face and those perfect eyes she would sink back down to the ground and beg for him to take her into his arms. Closing her eyes, she reached up and touched the place on her lip where his tongue had brushed against her. It was still wet from their kiss, and she gently licked the residue.
She tasted like him, and she wished she could keep that flavor on her lips forever—it could be the one part of him that she could keep. The rest of him, she had to let go. Not only was she far too big of a dumpster fire to think having a relationship was a good idea, but she needed to get Lily back and make sure that she would still have a job with STEALTH after this major screwup.
“Elle, you don’t need to run away from me.”
Oh yes, she did. But unless she and Daisy were about to jog down a damned mountain by themselves, there weren’t a whole lot of places she could run to.
“I’m not running away.” Not a lie. “I just...” Can’t get caught up in falling for someone right now, or ever. “I don’t want to...”
“It’s okay,” he said, sounding dejected. “You don’t need to tell me that you think it was a mistake to kiss me. You’re hardly the first woman to kiss and run.”
Now that sounded like a story from his past that she wanted to hear, but if she stopped and asked him about it, he might get the wrong idea.
“What is wrong with women?” he countered.
Every hair on the back of her neck stood up. “What in the hell is that supposed to mean?”
His face fell, and he gave her an apologetic stare; he looked like Lily did when she knew she had said something she wasn’t supposed to and had been overheard. Unlike Lily, she couldn’t send Grant to the corner for a timeout and a moment to reflect on his mistake.
“I...I don’t mean you... I just meant...”
“You most certainly did mean me,” she seethed. “Have you men ever stopped to think that maybe it isn’t the women who have something wrong with them? Have you ever considered that maybe it’s men and their failure to actually talk to women? Maybe if you could actually take a moment and express yourself carefully and with accurate language, maybe we could work together?”
“Whoa,” he said, sitting back like she had just thrown mud at him. “I... I’m sorry.”
She turned to the fire and kicked a pile of snow atop the flames; the logs sizzled as the ice hit them and instantly evaporated into the dry air. She kicked again and again as Grant tried to talk to her, but she blocked him out with the manic kicking and her heaving breaths as she fought the fire, choking it out.
As she worked herself down off the edge of anger, she realized her mistake. Grant hadn’t meant to be misogynistic, not the now not-quite-as-perfect specimen of man. He had definitely misspoken, but he wasn’t guilty of the things that she had called him out for being.
Just like his statement about kissing and running, it was easy to tell that her own baggage had come back to be hauled out and strewn into the open.
“Elle,” he whispered her name, begging, “please listen to me.”
Exhausted by her fury, she took a deep breath and released it into the steam rising from the fire. Finally, she turned but said nothing as she looked at him. She didn’t know what she wanted him to say to her, or what she should say to him. If anything, she should have apologized for her outburst. She was embarrassed by her overreaction, but at the same time, she had found something cathartic in the meltdown. Maybe Lily and her toddler tantrums had worn off on her, but if they had, there was something to be said for their efficacy in bringing her back to an internal stasis.
She dropped her hands to her sides, releasing the tension from her shoulders as she finally met his pleading gaze. “I’m listening,” she said plaintively.
He reached up and took her hands in his, squeezing them. “I think you are so beautiful. I kissed you because I wanted to kiss you. And damn it, if you’d let me, I’d kiss you again—”
“But,” she said, interrupting. It was only what he said after the but that would really matter. Those words would be the ones he truly meant, the ones that weren’t said to assuage the pain but instead would do the tearing.
“But you aren’t in a good place right now.”
She opened her mouth to speak, or perhaps it was from the shock of his words. Did he mean that she was too big of a mess to give love to? Or did he mean that he thought she would never be in a place where they could be together?
Well, if he felt even remotely close to either of those things, she didn’t need him. Her anger threatened to boil back up thanks to the salt he had thrown.
She closed her mouth. Maybe he wasn’t wrong; she had already admitted to herself that she was a dumpster fire right now. But how dare he actually call her out for it?
Could she really be upset with him for saying what she had clearly been unable to hide?
No. She couldn’t be. It wasn’t his fault for the way she was feeling. It was only hers.
All she could really do was try to find the stasis she had thought she had brought into her life only moments before. It sucked, feeling this unbalanced. If only there was some simple fix—if only his kiss could have been that for her.
Though it had led to nothing more than a few extra hurt feelings, at least she had tried. For a moment, he had given her an escape from her thoughts, but it was her responsibility to set things right.
She squeezed his hands as she closed her eyes, taking in the smell of the campfire and the world around them.
He was a sweet man. He was trying to do the right thing. No matter how badly she wanted to push him away and tell him he was wrong in his assessment of her, she couldn’t deny the nearly perfect man hadn’t missed the mark.
He stood up and let go of her hands so he could wrap his arms around her. He pulled her into his embrace and held her there. She went rigid for a moment, at odds with all the feelings and thoughts inside her, but as his breath caressed her cheek and warmed her, she fell into the rhythm of him. She wished he wasn’t wearing a heavy coat so she could hear his heart. It was strange how listening to another person’s heartbeat could bring calm. More than calm—she couldn’t help but wonder if that in this instance listening to his heartbeat would also bring some semblance of love.
She needed to press herself away at the mere consideration or fluttering of the word love from within her. That was the real fire. That word, that sensation, had the power to burn down everything, including the feeble foundation of self-control she was teetering upon.
“You’re okay.” He whispered the words into her hair, but as he spoke, she could hear the thumping of a helicopter moving toward them in the distance.
As relieved as she was t
o hear the chopper coming, she couldn’t help feeling disappointment, as well. She needed this moment, one only his embrace could provide.
Chapter Eight
His father had always told him that the key to a good life was to live for today and prepare for tomorrow. It had been two days since he had spoken to Elle, and he couldn’t help the feeling that if he had heeded his father’s advice, his life could have been going in an entirely different direction. If only he had given in to more than just her kiss, if only he had told her that he wanted her...all of her.
Sure, they didn’t need to act on it, but if he had just told her all the things that had been roiling inside him at least she could have known, and he could have been free from going over the what-ifs.
He’d had no excuse to contact her, which made it worse. The case wasn’t moving, and the trail seemed cold. No ransom calls had come in. No new information. He knew there were others in DC working it—with a US senator involved, FBI and Secret Service were in the mix—but they weren’t sharing information in anything approaching a fulsome way. No one on his team had even been able to get to the senator for an interview. Two days after his wife’s murder and daughter’s disappearance.
Luckily, it was only in his downtime, the hours after he came home and was standing in the shower, that his mind had been allowed to wander to that night spent on the mountain beside Elle. She had been so sexy, lying there in the campfire light, the oranges and reds picking up the bits of copper in her dark locks and making them shimmer in the night.
He couldn’t think of any other woman who’d stayed in his mind that way, where he remembered those kinds of details about her. It made him almost feel bad. He had been with his ex-girlfriend for two years. He had loved her, but he could barely even remember the feel of her hair in his fingers or the color of it in the moonlight. Yet he had spent one night with Elle—probably one of the hardest nights she had ever experienced—and he couldn’t get the thoughts of her out of his mind.
Had he really ever loved his ex like he had thought he had? Or were time and absence making those little details, the ones he was noticing about Elle, disappear from his memory? He hoped it was time, because every woman he professed to love deserved to be loved with as much energy and feeling as he could muster. What was love if not given in its entirety?
Any man worth his weight should give his woman every ounce of himself. It was why he couldn’t understand cheating. While he could understand the ability to love more than one person in life, he couldn’t understand how a person could have enough love to give two people everything they had at the same time. It was impossible. And if a person wasn’t giving all of their love to the person they were with, and had the capacity to spill the same romantic love out to others, then they had to have been with the wrong person.
That was what had happened with his ex. He hadn’t cheated, but he found that he could suddenly look at other women and think about wanting them. In that moment, he had known his relationship with her was over. She was a good woman, a lawyer, but he couldn’t be with anyone whom he couldn’t give himself fully to. She deserved better, a love that would keep them both up at night. And he loved her enough to give that to her, even if that meant it was another man who gave her all she deserved.
It had hurt to let her go, even more when he explained that he didn’t think he was enough for her, and she hadn’t wanted to accept his rationale. Yet, in the end they had gone their separate ways as friends. She had married a doctor a year later, and Grant couldn’t have been happier for her.
Sometimes, like now, he found he was jealous of her ability to move on and find the right man for her while he was still single, but he was happy for her. She deserved the best things in life, and if life wasn’t ready to bring him the same grace of happiness...well, he had to just accept the things it did have to offer.
As he turned off the shower and stepped out and started drying off, his thoughts moved back to Elle. Was she the one he was supposed to have in his life? Was that why every thought he had came back to her? Or was it that he was addicted to her because in that moment on the hillside he got to be her knight in shining armor?
He nearly groaned at the thought. He did not just think that.
Yep. There had to be something wrong with him. Maybe he needed to just have a few more minutes alone in the shower in order to clear his mind. Yeah, that could have been it.
She wasn’t interested in him. If she had been, she would have called him by now. As it was, he was surprised she hadn’t called him to check in on the case. Two days was a hell of a long time when there was a little girl missing.
So far, they had managed to track down the helicopter that had picked up the man and Lily. It had come from the Neptune airfield and was owned by a private party who was hard to track. It was registered to an LLC out of Nevada called NightGens, and when he had tried to call the company it was registered to, he had only come to voice mails and dead ends. Even their address was just some lawyer’s office in Las Vegas, and that fellow had been close-mouthed, not even willing to admit he handled the business. Grant had reached out to LVPD, and they’d done him a solid by scoping out the airfield only to come up empty. It had looked abandoned.
Whoever owned that helicopter must have loved their anonymity, or else the person who had hired them had known they needed a company and a team that could keep them from being found. Either way, it made his investigation and search for the little girl that much harder.
Luckily, Deputy Terrill had taken the lead on Lily’s disappearance and had been putting boots on the ground when Grant was off shift. His phone had been pinging nonstop with updates from the teams, but so far everyone had been coming up empty-handed.
The little girl’s father, Dean Clark, was set to return to the state today, and Grant would be at the airport waiting to pick him up the minute his plane touched down. The senator had been informed of his wife’s death and his daughter’s disappearance but had been playing on the stage in Washington, DC, and some office assistant had informed him Senator Clark was working with federal authorities and would talk to him when he returned.
Grant had a hard time not being angry with the man. In this day and age, when information availability was nearly immediate, he couldn’t believe that the senator hadn’t bothered to check in with the law enforcement who’d first been on the scene. Then, there was nothing about this case that hadn’t been a goat rope. If things started to go smoothly and things just easily clicked into place, Grant wasn’t sure if he would have trusted it.
From what Grant had been told, the senator hadn’t received the news well, which was to be expected. One of the members of the team who had been tasked with tracking him down had managed to talk to the agent who’d first given Clark the news. The senator had actually begun to cry. It was the man’s one saving grace in being nearly inaccessible.
In an investigation with a wife and child involved, normally the first suspect on any list for a disappearance or death was the spouse. They were usually the ones with the motive and opportunity. However, from the limited number of interviews they had been doing with household staff and neighbors, including the one who had reported the crime, the senator and his wife appeared to be the picture-perfect couple.
He had even been able to pull the phone records for both Catherine and Dean, and neither had seemed to have any dastardly texts or phone calls from lovers. Really, on paper, they were just as picturesque as everyone had touted them to be. Then again, Elle had made a point of telling him how everything would be exactly that way with this family.
No one on his teams had yet to figure out who the other people had been in the house the day of the kidnapping, the ones Elle had seen. They’d reached out to neighbors, friends, business associates. And fingerprints had been smudged or nonexistent. If those men had been involved, they were smart enough to wipe things down.
After putting on his shoes and gr
abbing his phone, Grant headed out to his department-issued truck. His phone pinged, and he considered not looking at it while he got settled into his driver’s seat.
But it could be Elle. He couldn’t gain control of the thought, and if he was honest with himself, it was the only thought he had every time his phone had gone off since he had left her.
She had almost run away from him when they had come down from the mountain. Unfortunately, he had been forced to go in and write up his report about what had happened up there and then give it to the oncoming teams. He had told her to call him and given her his card, but...yeah, nothing.
Maybe she had lost his card. Maybe she’d left it in her pants pocket and then washed it, making it into the little crispy white ball of paper that he so often found when doing his own laundry.
He took out his phone and looked down at the screen. It was another of the deputies who had been on last night. Apparently, they’d had just about as much luck as he and his team had in tracking down any leads.
If they didn’t find something soon, anything that could point to Lily’s location, he feared that the little girl would get lost to the system. Sure, no one would ever just say they would stop looking, but the everyday grind of what they did, answering calls and serving warrants, had a way of pulling attention away from the crimes that he truly wished he could solve.
If he never found Lily, he would never forgive himself. Elle would never forgive him. From the look on her face when he had told her about Lily going missing from the mountain, he couldn’t help but feel like she was already blaming him for not having found her. If only they had hiked faster, if he hadn’t slowed them down, maybe they would have made it to Catherine before she had been murdered... And if they hadn’t focused so much on Catherine’s body, maybe they could have made it to Lily before she had been swept off the mountain.
There had to be answers, something he was missing.
For now, though, he had to call Elle. He had to know she was okay. Hopefully she was doing better than the last time he had seen her. She had been such a mess; her emotions were all over the map and all he could do was be there. It hadn’t been enough. Not when all he wanted to do was set things right and be the hero whom she had so desperately needed and yet he had been unable to become.
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