Total pages in book: 165
Estimated words: 154925 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 775(@200wpm)___ 620(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154925 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 775(@200wpm)___ 620(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
She glanced over to make sure Kyle wasn’t looking her way. He was arguing a rule with Drake while Hutch paged through the rule book. “I’ve accepted his reasons for leaving me. I do understand them. The question at this point is how do I forgive him?”
“You don’t owe him forgiveness. You know you could live with the man for the rest of your life and still be a little mad at him for something he did in the past. I don’t think there’s such a thing as perfect contentment. Unless you don’t think you can be happy without wholly forgiving him. That’s a whole different thing, and worse when you think about it. Because then you can’t live with him and you can’t live without him, and you’re miserable either way.”
That sounded terrible, but she was right. “So you forgave Drake for letting them take you away?”
“Mostly,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “But the person I really forgave was myself for loving him anyway. Honestly, that’s the hard part. Julia fucks up everyone she touches. Think about it. Her father’s dead. Her mother…Samantha is lost sometimes. She doesn’t understand what went wrong and wonders if it’s her fault. Drake…she was his sister. I use the past tense because she’s not the same person he grew up with. I think Kyle has it worst because in some ways she did show him who she was, and he fell for it briefly. I understand how that kind of mistake can make a person view the world differently. So I had to step back and decide if I could live with loving him.”
That was a good way to put it. One of the things she’d figured out when she’d talked to Kai was that having her view of herself shaken so wildly had contributed to her anger with Kyle. Her world had been tilted on its side, and she’d had to work hard to right it. “How did you do that?”
“I talked to him. I let him top me because I wanted the sex and convinced myself that this time I could take what I wanted and walk away. It was silly, of course. It was my conscious self making excuses for what I needed deep down. I kind of lived day by day with him at my side. We decided that as long as the op was ongoing, we didn’t have to make decisions about the future. We could live in the present, and by the time I got to the other side, I couldn’t imagine that future without him.” She frowned. “Almost watching him die had an effect, too. That was a shitty, crazy night. You know we almost lost Kyle.”
“I know Julia said something about being forced to choose between her father and Kyle.” She hadn’t asked him about it. He’d seemed so wound up after that conversation, and now he was relaxed. She didn’t want him to think about Julia Ennis again tonight. They had spent the day narrowing down places to search, and when they were ready they would be heading to Washington DC first, and they would always be watching their backs. They needed this time when they felt fairly safe.
When they were out in the field, would she be able to sleep without him? Would she force him to stay on whatever couch was around? Or would she do what Taylor had done and bargain with herself?
Taylor nodded. “Yes. It was pretty awful. Mr. Radcliffe was aiming at Kyle, and there was no way he was going to miss. Even the Royal Suite is tight when it comes to a gunfight. To be honest, I’m surprised Kyle survived at all. John Smith was there and he had a couple of excellent shots at Kyle, but all he got was his shoulder. Kyle was lucky as hell that night.”
He could have died, and she wouldn’t have known until someone thought to tell her. She wasn’t his next of kin. The police wouldn’t call her. They would have called Grace and Grace would have told her, but it seemed wrong that she wouldn’t have known first. It was weird, but the idea that there would be hours or days when she didn’t know caught in her brain and rambled around her head.
“He was okay. John was obviously okay since he somehow managed to get away,” Taylor said. “You know we were supposed to go to DC to interrogate him. We changed our flight at the last minute because Kyle wanted us here. Not for him. For you. Turned out to be a good thing since we would have been staring at his replacement’s dead body, but still. Kyle was utterly insistent that we back him up when it came to getting you to safety. He didn’t want to bring his relatives in, and he didn’t trust anyone but us. We’re an odd little family. I don’t have much of one, so I take it seriously. I know we don’t know each other, but I feel like I know you because for Kyle it’s like you were always beside him.”