“You what?” she asked with a small smile.
“I don’t want to lose you,” I admitted softly. Maybe it wasn’t the whole truth, but it was the part that I’d figured out by now.
“I think we are well past that part by now,” she told me with a teasing smile twitching on her lips. “I think I’ve grown strong feelings for you too.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Neither do I,” she said and there was a calmness in her tone that soothed me. “But maybe we can figure it out together.”
I didn’t know what else to say.
So I kissed her again, trying my hardest to keep it sweet.
“How about some breakfast,” she said like she just knew what I needed right now. And I wasn’t talking about food.
“Yeah. I’m excited for some eggs.” I had a feeling that though the burner was off, they were way overdone. It didn’t matter, I’d choke them down if it made her happy.
As I sat down at the table, my mom’s words replayed in my head.
Keep Jessica safe and protected.
Yeah, that was the plan.
It was the deep need that I felt growing in my soul.
But could I go on until I knew that I could do that?
I was starting to wonder if I had a choice.
-28-
Silas
My phone finally rang with the call that I had been waiting on for far too damn long.
“Hey,” I answered right away.
Thank God I was in my bedroom alone. Then again, I’d kind of planned it this way knowing he would call. Granted, it was a couple hours earlier than I had expected, but I wasn’t going to complain. It seemed like he was breaking his twenty-four hour thing and I hoped that meant he had some good news for me.
“You might not like this, but this is really the best thing I could do.”
“Just fucking tell me already,” I barked at Dalton.
“I have a friend that needs to meet with her. He’ll be at the closest FBI location to where you are tomorrow.” Yeah, I didn’t fucking like that.
“And what if I say no?”
“You want this whole thing over, then you’ve got to trust me.”
“I need to know how this is all going to work out,” I told him. “I’m not sending her in there if there is even a chance that I’ll lose her.”
“Yeah, I figured that much out already,” he said. If he were an eye-rolling kind of man, I imagined he’d be doing it now. “Just show up. Don’t make me regret doing this, I burned a lot of bridges for you today.”
I had no clue what he was talking about and I probably didn’t want to know. As long as I wasn’t one of those bridges then it didn’t matter. I could only imagine the kind of information he had to offer up to get the type of strings pulled that we needed.
The more I thought about it, the more worried for him that I became. Giving up the kind of information that he had was bound to put a target on his back.
Which led me to wonder yet again why and how the fuck he had contacts in the FBI.
