“That depends. What would you rather do?”
He waggled his eyebrows, and she rolled her eyes, even though her pulse skipped a beat.
It would be so easy to surrender to temptation. She remembered, in vivid detail, exactly what his body could do. How alive he could make her feel. She missed it—missed him, more than she cared to admit—but she knew that giving in to the need would only lead to heartache. She refused to make the same mistake twice, and she never gave second chances.
In a sick twist of fate, she kind of wished Navarre was home, because his presence alone would have deterred Jackson from going down this road.
On the heels of a sigh, she set her drink on the coffee table. This wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have, but they might as well get it over with. “You need to find somebody else, Russell.”
And just like that, his smile vanished. Jackson killed the movie—thank God—and put on a hockey game, which suited her just fine. “Ain’t nobody else. Never will be. My heart belongs to you.”
“That’s funny. Before you, I didn’t think my heart could be broken.” Now she doubted it would ever mend. Even if it did, she never wanted to risk feeling that kind of pain again.
Jackson leaned toward her, his forearms resting on his knees. “I never meant to hurt you.”
She scoffed. “Right. When things got hard, you showed me what mattered most in your life, and it sure as hell wasn’t me.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“Oh, really?” Despite her best efforts, she failed to keep the pain out of her voice. And here she’d hoped to keep things light while they worked and lived together. “When things got rocky between us, I quit my job—put my career on hold—so I could focus my energy on fixing us, because I stupidly considered our marriage the most important thing in my life. And what did you do?”
“The dumbest thing in my life.” He’d re-enlisted in the Army for two more years and didn’t bother to tell her until weeks after the ink had dried on the paperwork. “At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing for us, thought you needed time away from me.”
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder?” She bit the words out.
“Something like that.” Jackson pushed out a heavy breath as he rubbed one hand along the back of his scalp. For a few long moments, he looked exhausted, defeated, and she fought an instinctual urge to provide comfort. “You have no idea how much I’ve regretted that decision. I’ll do anything, Essie.Anything. Just tell me what to do to make things right.”
“It’s not that simple, Jackson. Thereisno making this right. All that’s left is moving on and learning from our mistakes.” Essie sipped her sweet white wine, but all she tasted was bitter. She hated revisiting old failures. They made her feel like a failure all over again. “Our biggest mistake was that we never got to know each other outside the bedroom.”
“We can fix that.” A spark lit his eyes. “A question for a question. Are you in?”
“What’s the point?”
“I want to know you, Essie.”
Straining for patience, she blew out a breath. “This isn’t going to fix anything.”
“Maybe not, but I still want to know you better, especially now that we’re working together. Humor me, will you?”
Wariness churned in Essie’s belly, and she tried her best to ignore it. Emotional intimacy had never been one of her strong suits. In fact, if she were being honest with herself, her inability to share had been one of the reasons their marriage imploded. With that in mind, she supposed the least she could do was answer a few questions.
“What do you want to know?”
“How about we start with something easy, like your code name?”
For a second or two, she simply stared at him. “Seriously? Of all the things, that’s the first one you ask about?”
He shrugged. “Got to start somewhere.”
That particular piece of information was no longer considered classified, but the thought of sharing it—even with Jackson—made her insides clench. What could she say? Old habits died hard. “You can’t tell anybody, not even Navarre.”
“I won’t, but why? You’re not in the business anymore.”
“No, but I still know a lot of sensitive information that could get good people killed. The fewer who know, the better.”
He nodded. “Fair enough. Now, let’s hear it.”
She swallowed hard, and then forced it out. “Cricket.”
