Otherwise Unharmed

Chapter 8—Unveiled Threats

I resisted the urge to pull out the Beretta and shove it in his face.

“I assume I have you to thank for all of this,” I muttered back. “What the fuck do you want?”

“Just wanted to make sure you weren’t packing up to leave town or anything stupid like that,” Trent replied. “I also wanted to make sure you realize I know exactly where you are and what you’re doing—at all times.”

I watched him closely. He crossed his arms as he leaned casually against the door—too casually. He was making a point of looking nonchalant, which meant he didn’t completely feel that way. My eyes searched for other clues about him, but he was practiced in the art of being a complete and total asshole, which was throwing me off my game.

In an attempt to gain some ground, I snapped my fingers and pointed to Odin’s bed. He quickly moved from my side and went to his place but continued to growl low at the federal agent.

“I told you I would take care of it all,” I reminded him. “Fuck off and let me do it.”

“You’re quite the conversationalist,” he said with a snide laugh.

“I don’t converse with feds,” I snapped back. I was immediately pissed off at myself for letting him get to me.

“Just don’t forget to take your dick out of your slut long enough to get your job done.”

I clenched my teeth and glared, trying to keep myself from just walking over and beating the living shit out of him. I had no doubt that Johnson was nearby, and assaulting a fed in my apartment while I was out on bail wasn’t the very best idea.

“Are you going to spend a lot of time keeping me from getting shit done?” I asked through my teeth.

“I’m going to spend a lot of time making sure you are getting shit done,” Trent retorted. “If I feel like you’re stalling, I’m going to take it out on her. What do you think of that?”

“I think that’s an invitation to an underground party.”

We locked stares for a long moment. Trent eventually cracked half of an insincere smile and then nodded.

“I’ll be seeing you around.” He turned and walked out the door.

I dropped my ass on the couch and rubbed my temples. Odin assumed he was free to leave his bed because he came up and leaned his fuzzy mug on my knee. I rubbed at his head and tried to calm myself down a bit.

None of this was going to work.

Despite promises to Trent, I had no idea how I was going to get into Greco’s confidence—none whatsoever. Even if I did have a plan, it certainly wasn’t going to be easy, and part of my strategy was going to have to include figuring out a way for Moretti to believe I was still working for him.

I was, really.

He just wasn’t going to know it.

But I had to make him think he knew it.

Fuck, none of the shit even made sense to me, so how was I going to pull it all off?

Lia came back just a few minutes later.

“That was odd,” she said as she walked in.

“What was?”

“There was a guy downstairs near the dumpsters,” she told me. “He started asking me a lot of weird questions. I guess maybe he was the building super or something.”

My stomach churned.

“What did he look like?”

“A little older,” she said. “Maybe as old as fifty. He was wearing a suit and tie. His hair was getting pretty gray, and he had a beard.”

Agent Johnson.

“What did he want to know?”

“He asked if I lived here,” she told me. “I guess he wanted to make sure I wasn’t just dumping my trash in his dumpsters.”

Fucking bastards, tag-teaming me like that, one of them delaying Lia so the other could harass me. My skin felt hot at the thought. I took a couple of steps toward her and grabbed her arms.

“What did you tell him?” I demanded.

“Evan!” Lia yelled as she pulled from me. “What the hell?”

Her eyes blazed, and I realized how it must have seemed.

“Sorry,” I muttered. “I’m a bit on edge. I don’t want people bothering you.”

“He didn’t bother me; he was just asking weird questions.”

“Like what?” I tried to calm myself and released her arms. The whole “hiding my identity” bullshit was seriously frustrating.

Maybe it would be easier to just come clean.

Nah.

“He asked what apartment I lived in, and he asked if I had a dog. Isn’t that weird?”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said I was just visiting a friend. He wanted to know who, and I said I had to go and came back inside.”

I reached behind my back to make sure my Beretta was still in place before I stood up from the couch and went over to her.

“If you see him again, come right back up here,” I told her. “Don’t talk to him. Don’t even make eye contact with him. I don’t care what he says.”

“Who is he?” she asked.

“No one.”

“Could you provide slightly less useful information?” she quipped. “I mean, there could be a Guinness record for it.”

“Nice,” I replied. Normally I would have been pissed off by the sarcasm, but for some reason, hearing it from Lia just made my cock jump. I took a deep breath and let it out. “I know who he is, and he really just wants to harass me. I don’t want him annoying you as well.”

“Who is he?” she asked again.

“Never mind. Just tell me if you see him again.”

“Jesus, you are frustrating!”

I shrugged. I couldn’t argue with the sentiment, and it didn’t matter if I was frustrating her or not. It wasn’t going to change the answer at this point. It wasn’t that I wanted to piss her off, it was just the way it was. I couldn’t exactly come out and tell her the dude was a federal agent, monitoring me because I was supposed to infiltrate and bring down a rival mob organization.

Yeah, that would go over well.

So I was stuck with her being upset because I wouldn’t answer her. I wondered how many times we were going to end up playing the same game and wondered how others dealt with this kind of shit. Rinaldo was married, but his wife worked at one of his clubs, so she knew what the deal was before they were involved. Mario was also married, but I didn’t have any idea where his wife came from. She only spoke Italian, and I only understood her about a third of the time because she talked so damn fast.

How many times would Lia put up with my evasiveness?

I ran my hand over my face and growled under my breath. It wasn’t that I was angry—not with her, anyway—but the whole situation had me as tense as I could be. Johnson talking to her was crossing a line as far as I was concerned, and it reminded me that I should really just get her the fuck out of town.

“I also wanted to make sure you realize I know exactly where you are and what you’re doing—at all times.”

If Trent wasn’t full of shit, and I doubted he was, he would know if I were to take her out of the danger zone. If that were the case, and he decided to go after her once I’d returned, I would have no way of keeping her safe. I had to make sure she was safe.

Where was the safest place for her?

With me.

It was also probably the most dangerous, but a lot of that was because she had no idea what she was dealing with, and I wasn’t going to tell her. Telling her could result in anything, up to and including her taking off. If she took off, he might decide to follow her. If she was on her own, I still wouldn’t be able to protect her.

Another option was to forget about the whole deal with the feds, take Lia, and leave town. I would probably be able to manage getting us both away without being followed, though it would take some effort. At least then I wasn’t going to have to balance keeping Rinaldo off my trail and Greco convinced I was on his side.

It was the best option.

“We’re going to leave,” I said definitively.

Lia was pissed.

I couldn’t really blame her. I’d told her basically nothing but demanded she put a few days’ worth of clothes in a bag and just follow me. I didn’t want Odin left on his own—the woman who usually took care of him when I was out of town worked for Moretti, and I didn’t want to risk anything coming out while we were gone, so I tossed him on top of a towel in the back of the car and took him to a dog-boarding kennel. I’d come back for him later.

I drove my Audi up to the north side of the city and parked it outside a nightclub. Grabbing our bags out of the back of the car, I led a protesting Lia through the front entrance of the club, through the throbbing techno music, and then out the back door. Once out back, we made our way down a graffiti-covered alley between the buildings, across the street, and over to a small conference center where I called a cab to take us back south.

I gave the driver an address, and he turned around to look at me.

“That ain’t no place to be,” he said.

“Look,” I replied, “I don’t have a shitload of patience right now, so here’s how this shit works. You drive me where I say, and I give you cash. Capisce?”

He narrowed his eyes, said he was charging me double, and then made me pay up front before he’d drive us there. Under other circumstances, I would have put a gun to his head and told him to be happy if he got paid at all, but I had Lia with me, and I was doing my best not to scare her.

A pissed-off Lia was definitely preferable to a scared one. As it was, she had completely stopped speaking to me about halfway to where I ditched the car, and she continued to sit next to me, looking out the window with her arms crossed over her chest and her lips smashed tightly together.

I took a long breath and leaned back in the seat to relax a few minutes. I was rushing all of this, and I knew I hadn’t thought through everything. Not telling Lia why we were leaving was part of the problem as she was fighting me the whole way, but there was a lot more to it.

I knew deep down that Trent wasn’t going to just let this shit go. He wouldn’t just come after me; it would end up being a countrywide manhunt. Any chance of having the charges against me dropped would disappear completely, and he’d probably come up with a few others to tack on. At best, we would have to live on the run, leave the country, and change our names.

No doubt about it—I wasn’t thinking straight.

Why?

Because Lia was with me, and I didn’t want her scared or hurt.

Rinaldo had been right—having a chick in your life complicated everything. It wasn’t worth it—not for me or for her. What I really needed to do was just take her to the airport so I could buy her a plane ticket back to her mom’s.

The very thought brought the taste of bile to the back of my throat. If I wasn’t doing my very best thinking now, how much more rattled would I be if I hadn’t slept last night?

Fuck the sleep.

Waking up with her—that had been worth the world to me.

My eyes squeezed shut, and I shook my head sharply. I couldn’t cope with all this shit. I couldn’t even have named all the conflicting thoughts and emotions going on inside my head, let alone make sense of them. It was too complicated. It was too dangerous for both of us. I should definitely tell the cab driver to head west and buy her a plane ticket.

I didn’t say a word but stared out the opposite window and hoped I’d be able to come up with some way of explaining all of this that didn’t end up with her leaving me.

Chicago has some really beautiful areas to live in. Auburn Gresham isn’t one of them. Though it was one of the roughest places in a city littered with crime, it was exactly what I needed for the moment. Not only would it be difficult for the Feds to follow me around the area, but they'd also have to watch their own backs at the same time.

The cab driver took his own sweet time getting there, and by the time we’d arrived near the address I’d given him, the sky was darkening. He dumped us on the corner, refusing to actually go up the block at night. I was tired of listening to the guy bitch, so I just got out where we were, Lia still in tow.

“Are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on?” Lia asked as the cab sped away.

“Not out here on the street,” I replied.

We only had about two blocks to walk, but that’s all it took.

Two dudes with hooded sweatshirts pulled down their foreheads and pants shagged down to show their striped boxers came at us from across the street. I felt Lia tense beside me, but I was nothing but annoyed.

“I got me a damn fine idea,” the guy on the left said as he walked up and blocked our path. I reached out and pushed Lia slightly behind my back. “You give me all yo shit, and maybe my frien’ don’t cut yo bitch.”

He reached down to yank up his pants and glanced over at his younger buddy. The other guy brandished a switchblade, which might have been scary to someone who hadn’t been around much larger knives. The knife-wielder moved his head back and forth like he was listening to some kind of phantom dance music. Other days I might have laughed, but I wasn’t in the mood for stupid gang shit. Moretti and Greco’s outfits had put them in their place plenty of times, and I was happy to do it again.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and centered myself before speaking.

“I’ve got a better idea,” I told him. “You turn around and go back to the slimy cunt you crawled out of, and I won’t blow your dick off and shove it into the sewer. I’m pretty sure this particular sewer flows right up to the river. You know the river, right? It’s where all of us who own your sorry asses work.”

The older guy’s eyes opened wide, but the younger one just looked pissed.

“I think fuckin’ you up would be a lesson you don’t soon forgit!” he sneered.

“Evan,” Lia whispered as her hand gripped my bicep, “just give them what they want. It’s okay.”

“Fuck that,” I spat. “I’ll give them what they fucking deserve.”

“You need to listen to yo bitch,” the kid with the knife started to say as the other one tried to stop him.

It was too late, though. I’d already had enough.

I pulled my Beretta out, pointed it between the younger kid’s eyes, and flicked the safety off. I could hear Lia’s quiet gasp and watched the younger guy as he started to take a step back. He seemed confused for a moment, and I thought he might actually be stupid enough to take a stab at me.

“Go ahead, you piece of shit,” I said calmly. My eyes stayed locked with his. “Take a swing. I’ll make sure my bullet doesn’t hit you fatally so you can watch me castrate you with that piece of shit blade. Dick to throat, I’ll show you what a cut really looks like, and then I’ll slam my fist through your ribcage and fuck the hole I made. What do you think of that?”

There was a long moment of silence as the kid’s eyes got bigger and bigger. He didn’t seem able to move or speak.

“We cool,” the older one finally said as he cleared his throat and took a step back. He smacked his friend on the arm with the back of his hand. “Come on and let these nice folks git on wid der business.”

They backed up slowly until they were a good twenty feet away, then turned around and quickly made their way back across the street toward some nasty-looking liquor store. I took a calming breath and turned to face an ashen Lia.

“Come on,” I said quietly. “Let’s get inside before any other trash wanders up, okay?”

She could only nod dumbly.

“You fuckin’ mo-ron,” the older guy was saying as the pair reached the other side of the street, “don’t you know who dat is?”

I grabbed Lia by the arm and headed for the motel entrance before the gang-bangers started yelling out parts of my resume for everyone to hear. She’d already seen and heard enough from my own mouth. It wasn’t something I wanted her to see, but I wasn’t about to risk her getting hurt. Demonstrating exactly who I was ensured her safety.

They knew better than to mess with the mafia. We’d put them in their place before, and we’d do it again. Even though I was in their territory, they still knew power when they saw it.

Lia didn’t say a word until after we’d checked into the motel, found the right door, and hauled our bags inside.

“Are you going to explain that to me?” Lia asked quietly as she sat down on the end of the bed.

“Explain what?”

“For fuck’s sake!” Lia stood up and put her hands on her hips as she glared at me. “Explain all of this shit! What are we doing here, and where are we going? What the hell was that testosterone display outside? Where the fuck did that gun come from?”

“I wasn’t going to let them mug us,” I said with a shrug. “This isn’t a great neighborhood, so I was prepared to deal with it. I was in the Marines, so yeah—I have a gun.”

“Don’t you bullshit me,” she snapped. “That was hardly a little display of self-defense. I am not stupid, and I’m not blind!”

I sighed and dropped my ass to the edge of the little desk and looked her in the eyes. I knew immediately that she wasn’t buying any of this shit and that holding off on answering her questions wasn’t going to work much longer.

“That guy out there—he knew who you were.”

I rolled my eyes.

“How did he know you, Evan?”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t even look at her.

I really didn’t know what to say.

“Fuck this,” she snapped. She stood up, grabbed her bag, and headed to the door.

Moving quickly, I stood between her and the door and placed my hands on her shoulders.

“You can’t leave,” I said.

“Like hell I can’t!” she retorted. “Am I a prisoner or something? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, but it’s not safe for you in this area by yourself. You might have noticed that already.”

Her eyes tried to burn little holes in my forehead.

“I think I’ll be fine,” she said. “I think all I have to do is tell anyone who tries to fuck with me that I’m Evan Arden’s girlfriend, and they’d just leave me alone, wouldn’t they? Or do you have some code name I should use instead?”

Fuck.

She kept telling me she wasn’t stupid, and she was right. I still hadn’t given her enough credit though. She kept catching me off guard with her ability to infer the relationship between my words and the actions of others. Maybe I was just used to chicks who knew enough about what was going on to turn a blind eye to their surroundings, and Lia didn’t fit into that category. She was trying to figure this shit out, and she knew how to put the pieces together.

It wasn’t helping.

Lia must have tired of me staring at her and tried to push past me again. I wouldn’t let her, and she glared nuclear bombs at me from her irises.

“Get out of my way,” she growled.

“I can’t,” I replied with a shake of my head.

“You won’t,” she snapped back. “That isn’t the same. I’ve already gotten rid of one dickhead who spent a lot of time controlling me, Evan. I didn’t do that just to pick up another one.”

“Lia, I can’t let you go out there. It’s dark and it’s the fucking murder capital of the world out that door. You are not going out there!”

“Bullshit.”

“You want me to bring it up on the fucking internet? You go look up this neighborhood!”

She paused for a moment and glanced from me to the door and back again. She took a breath and clenched her teeth together. The tension in her arms and legs told me exactly what she was thinking: one, she didn’t believe me, and two, she was considering punching me right in the face to get by.

There was an asshole inside of me who wanted to tell her to just fucking go and leave her on her own. She was making all of this too difficult, and I didn’t have the time to fuck around with it. It was the same part of me that took over when I fixed my scope between someone’s eyes and pulled back on the trigger. That part of me, however, apparently wasn’t in control.

“I need you,” I said quietly.

“What? So you can sleep?”

It was snarky and sarcastic, and I deserved it.

“Yes, but not just that.”

Her look softened, and she dropped her hands from her hips.

“I mean it,” I said with a softer tone. “I can’t let you go out there by yourself. Fuck, I shouldn’t be out there, but it was the best option for now. In the morning…”

I paused, felt my heart start beating faster in protest but continued anyway.

“In the morning, if you still want to, I’ll take you to the airport and buy you a plane ticket to wherever you want to go. You don’t ever have to see me again, but I can’t let you wander around this area of town at night. You wouldn’t last an hour.”

Her eyes locked with mine again.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” she finally said.

I nodded, and she dropped her head and shook it slowly as she turned around and walked back toward the bed. She turned abruptly and yelled at me.

"I don't know what's going on here, but you're scaring me!"

Stepping forward and reaching out with my hand, I cupped the side of her face and moved in to kiss her. She wasn't going to have any of that, though, and turned her head away as I leaned in. I pulled back and ran my tongue across my lips.

"I'm not trying to scare you."

“Well, you are!”

My stomach tightened up on itself. I couldn’t figure out any way to resolve this with her and didn’t have the slightest idea what to do or say. My normal reaction to anyone else would have been to sit down, shut up, and I would do what I needed to do. With her, everything was ridiculously complex. None of my usual responses worked.

“You need to stop with all the cryptic shit,” she informed me. Her hands moved up to pull out the scrunchie holding up her ponytail. I tried not to get too distracted by the way her hair fell around her shoulders, but all I could think of was running my fingers through it.

“I told you; I’ve never done the boyfriend thing before. I have no idea what to do here.”

“Start by telling me what the hell is going on,” Lia said.

I sighed and rubbed my fingers into my eyes.

“I don’t know if that’s really the best way.”

“It’s a start.”

It was more likely to be an end, which was what had me on edge. The thing was, I was afraid she was going to walk out. I even recognized it as fear though I might not have admitted it to anyone else. If she left and I never saw her again, I wasn’t so sure I’d survive. I had to do something to keep her with me a little longer.

“Tell me about you,” I said. It was my last ditch effort to try to delay what was coming. “I hardly know anything about you, either. You tell me about you, and then in the morning, I’ll tell you about me.”

It gave me one last night with her and one last morning of waking up with her.

Lia looked skeptical, but I also saw a hint of resignation in her eyes, which allowed me to breathe without my lungs feeling like they were being compressed.

“I don’t think what I have to say is all that interesting,” Lia sighed as she sat down on the edge of the bed again.

I sat down next to her and reached for her hand.

“I still want to know,” I told her. “I’ll get something for us to eat, and then you can tell me, okay?”

Lia took a long breath and nodded her acquiescence.

Auburn Gresham wasn’t an area I’d spent much time exploring in the past, but when gang activity in the area began to push up into Rinaldo’s heroin trade, I’d been part of a group that came down and let them know exactly who was in control in the city. The message had been clear—go ahead and do what you want in the south, but don’t fuck with businesses in the north. We even picked a line—the 47th Parallel. It didn’t quite match Korea, but it still served as an easy reminder. It was based on 47th street, not any line of latitude, but it served its purpose.

During my tenure in the area, I’d found the best pizza place and made friends with the owners.

“Is that who I think it is?”

Jack Anderson leaned over the cash register and stuck out his hand, which I shook. He was a dark-skinned man in his mid-fifties with white hair and stubble around his chin. He’d been running the pizza place since his father passed away in the seventies.

“It’s been a while,” I said with a smile.

“You want the usual?” Jack asked.

“I haven’t been here in nearly a year,” I laughed. I couldn’t believe after all this time the dude still remembered what I wanted on my pizza. He didn’t do the traditional Chicago style, but the guy made the best thin crust and sauce around. “Can it still be referred to as a ‘usual’?”

“Well, I don’t know anyone else who ever orders it,” Jack said. “Face it, Evan, no one else thinks pineapple and mushroom go together.”

We laughed as he put in my order, caught up on some neighborhood shit, and then said our goodbyes as he handed me my pizza in a cardboard box with a stack of napkins on top. I hoofed it back to the motel and Lia. She gave me a strange look when I told her what was on the pizza but seemed to like it once she tried it.

“So, where were you born?” I asked.

“Dallas,” she said. “My father worked for AT&T when I was young. When my parents divorced, he and my mom split custody while I was growing up. When mom got an offer for a new job in Phoenix, Dad didn’t want to be that far from me, so he quit his job and moved to Arizona as well. He started working with the Navajo Nation to set up their computer networks.”

“What does your mom do?” I asked.

“She’s in the financial business.” Lia took another bite of pizza, chewed for a bit, and then put the slice back in the box. “I know she works in information security, but I honestly don’t quite understand it all. She keeps hackers out of their systems, basically.”

I snorted.

“Is that funny?”

I shook my head.

“I just don’t think it’s very successful,” I said. “There are a lot of people out there who are very good at getting past the security folks.”

“I’m sure that’s true, but she tries. It’s pretty good money, at least, so she could afford to set aside money to send me to school. I still haven’t managed to get a degree anywhere, of course, because that was about the time Dad died.”

“How did he die?”

“Cancer,” she said with a shrug. “It fucking sucked.”

I watched her closely, noticing her fingers twitch and her eyes blink rapidly a few times to hold back the moisture forming in them.

“You were with him,” I said.

“I had just finished high school when he was diagnosed. They said he had maybe a year, but he didn’t make it past eight months even with all the chemo and shit. I took care of him because there really wasn’t anyone else, and William did all the business stuff while he was sick so we could afford medical bills.”

“So your fiancé worked for your dad?”

“Yes, for about six years.”

“While you were in high school.”

“We started dating when I was fifteen.”

“How old was he?”

She blushed a little, and my suspicions about him being quite a bit older were confirmed before she answered.

“He was twenty four at the time.”

“Around here, we would’ve called you jail bait,” I said.

“Only if the parents pressed charges,” she said, and I knew she was right. If the parents were okay with it, well, at least one parent, then the law would turn a blind eye.

“What did your mom think?”

“She didn’t like it,” Lia said. “She didn’t like Will, anyway, and definitely didn’t like me being with him.”

“Just because of the age thing or something else?”

“I think just age initially, but I also think she realized, long before I did, that he wasn’t quite what he pretended to be.”

“You mean before he threw you out of a moving car and left you for dead?”

Lia glanced at me with dark eyes and then looked down at her hands.

“Something like that.”

“Have you seen him since then?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

She looked back up at and me and bit her lip for a moment.

“He was there at my mom’s house.”

“After I dropped you at the bus station?”

Lia nodded.

“What happened?”

“The usual,” she responded. She seemed to want to leave it at that, but I wouldn’t let her. Eventually she told me the rest. “He was drunk; Mom was yelling, and I was stuck between them. The major difference was that I had decided I wasn’t going to do it anymore.”

“Do what?”

“Put up with him and his crap!” she growled. “He could have really hurt me when he pushed me out of that car, and then he just left me there! I wasn’t going to listen to him go on about how he came right back and was so sorry and spent hours looking for me—it was bullshit, and I wasn’t going to listen to it!”

She took a deep breath before she went on.

“I told him I’d found someone else.” Lia glanced at me, seeming embarrassed for a moment. “I know we didn’t really…well, it’s not like we committed to each other or anything, but for the first time since high school, I realized there were other options out there besides Will and how he treated me.”

She looked up at me, and her eyes began to sparkle with tears.

“It’s all right,” I soothed. “Go on.”

“He didn’t like that answer,” she said with a shrug. “He started yelling, and Mom told him he needed to just leave. She came up near us, and he pushed her away. Then he grabbed my arm and squeezed really hard–”

Lia’s breath caught in her throat, and the tears that had been building up since I stopped her at the door finally cascaded down her cheeks. Dealing with crying chicks was definitely not something within my repertoire, so I went with the only thing I could think of—I grabbed the box of tissues from the bathroom and handed them to her.

Lia wiped her eyes and gripped her fingers around the crumpled tissue as she composed herself.

“I had bruises there for over a week afterwards. Mom started yelling—said she was going to call the police—and that made him let go. I told him we were through and that I never wanted to see him again.”

“What did he do?”

“He laughed. He said I was his, and nothing was going to change that.”

A tickle in the back of my head—one that was rarely wrong—told me that I was going to kill that motherfucker someday.

“He still wasn’t leaving, so Mom ran inside the house and came back out with the phone in her hand. When he realized that she really was calling the cops, he got in the car and left. That was the last I saw him.”

I tried to clear my head enough to listen to the rest of the story, but it wasn’t easy. I didn’t know what the asshole looked like, but I had enough of a vision in my head that I could see myself with the business end of my Beretta in his face. At some point, I was going to have to find a picture of the guy and make all that come true.

Lia continued.

“Mom immediately started quizzing me about the ‘new guy’ and if that meant I really was done with William for good.”

I sat still, wondering just what she might have told her mother about me, not that Lia knew much at that time—even less than she did now—but it still left me feeling a little uneasy. I wondered if any other girl had ever described me to her mother.

“What did you tell her?” I asked.

“Not much.” Lia shrugged one shoulder. “I mean, I didn’t know much, did I? I said you were retired from the military, and we had just met by accident. Once she found out what the ‘accident’ was, it kind of distracted her from the original conversation. We never really talked about you again until I was leaving.”

Her eyes found mine.

“She told me to be careful,” Lia said. “She told me that I didn’t really know much about you and that you might not even be who I think you are.”

“What did you say?”

“I told her I would be careful and not to worry. I didn’t know much about you, but I was sure you weren’t like William. We both considered that a step up, so that was it.”

Lia stared down at her hands as tears started spilling off her eyelashes again.

“And then…and then…” Lia sniffed and wiped at her nose with the tissue again. “Then I found that cabin and your note, and I just…I didn’t know what to do or what to think.”

Without knowing what else I could do, I reached out and took her hand again. Lia’s fingers gripped mine, and she leaned against my shoulder. With one arm around her, I pulled her against my chest and rubbed up and down the top part of her arm while she cried.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered against her hair when she stopped sobbing. “I didn’t want to leave like that. I didn’t have a choice.”

“Where did you go?” she asked.

“Back here,” I said. “My boss told me I had to come back.”

“Your boss?”

Shit.

I wasn’t ready for this yet. I needed to wait until morning. It was selfish and probably shitty, but I wanted inside of her one last time before she knew the truth. There was no telling how she would react, but she seemed like a normal, rational person. The likelihood of her telling me to stay the fuck out of her life was pretty high.

“Where do you work?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She shoved against my chest and glared at me.

“Who is your boss?” she demanded.

“I thought we were saving my life story for the morning.” I tried to make light of it all and failed.

More glaring.

I sighed.

“His name is Rinaldo Moretti,” I said. “He’s a pretty demanding guy, and that’s all I’m saying for now.”

Lia kept her narrowed eyes locked with mine for a minute, but I didn’t falter. Her shoulders rose and fell with the breath she huffed out as she stood up from the bed and tossed the last couple pieces of pizza into the tiny refrigerator in the corner.

“Fine,” she said, “but I want to know tomorrow.”

“I’ll tell you,” I promised. “I just need a little time to…to prepare, I guess.”

She walked back and stood in front of me. I reached up and placed my hands on her hips as she leaned forward and placed her lips to mine. She started with just a quick, closed mouth kiss, but I grabbed the back of her head and deepened it.

Nothing was going to stop me from having one last night with her.