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I knew it when I saw it.
So she was right.
She was different.
But I was right too.
She was still the girl she used to be.
It was going to be fun to see the old mixed with the new, to see the ways she was different, and the ways she was the same.
It would be nice to have the shot we had never had in the past. A real shot. That included real names, real backgrounds, shopping for ingredients then attempting to cook dinner, having a lazy Sunday morning followed by a productive afternoon of cleaning, then the rest of the day in bed.
We could do something neither of us had really had the chance to in life.
We could put down roots.
Let them settle in deep.
Build a life on those foundations.
I hadn't known a lot of security, a lot of comfort, a lot of hope.
But there was no denying my system was swarmed with those unfamiliar, yet wholly recognizable, sensations at the idea of being able to have Mack. To grow with her. To have her to come home to, to fall into, to go to sleep with, wake up next to.
To have a chance to try again.
Not a lot of people got second chances in life.
I wasn't about to take the opportunity for granted.
"Hey," Mack's voice called, snapping me out of my own thoughts, finding her standing there in the hallway opening, hand on her hip, the other lifted, waving a bit impatiently. "Are you coming or what?" she asked, giving me a slow, sexy smile. Like she knew exactly how good she looked right then.
Oh, I was coming.
And then she was coming.
Over and over until we got our fill, until we made up for the lost fifteen years.
Luckily, if things were going to go the way I wanted them to, we had the rest of our lives to get there.
I wasn't going to scare her by saying that. Yet.
It had barely taken more than a glance all those years ago.
All it took this time was another glance.
She was the one then.
She was the one now.
She was going to be the one forever.
But there was time to talk about that later.
Now?
Now, we had a bed to break in.EPILOGUEMackenzie - 3 days"Only in the world of the uber-rich would the old bat's hairdresser be the one to dognap her Schnauzer, and hold it for ransom," Roan said, shaking his head as we walked through the lobby of our hotel.
"I think the best part is she isn't charging him," I told him, smiling a bit to myself when his hand slid into the back ass pocket of my jeans, easy, confident, like he did it all the time.
"Well, who the hell else is going to do her hair right?" Roan asked, hitching his voice up, over-enunciating his words just as the client had.
"I can't even fault the guy," I decided as we waited for the elevator to empty as it got to the floor. "He's been doing her hair for thirty-five years, and she never once tipped him? Knowing she was worth eighty-million? It took some real self-control not to snap sooner."
"Are your jobs always this interesting?" he asked as we moved inside, watching the doors close.
"It was made more interesting by your running commentary on the matter. When did you become a late-night comedy host?" I asked, nudging him with my hip.
"About the time you became some badass finder, I guess."
"I guess I am going to have to retire, huh?" I asked, feeling only a small sinking in my stomach. And not because I would miss getting shot at or chased across different continents. But maybe because I was good at it. And there were a lot of missing people in the world. And no one else seemed inclined to even attempt to find them.
"I was thinking about that," he told me as he steered me down the hall toward our room, one we hadn't spent more than a few minutes in since we checked in, having been mostly in the car the whole time. And in the client's 'estate,' as she so pretentiously insisted on calling it. If you had a mansion, call it a mansion. I would never really understand wealthy people. Even if I was technically one.
"Oh yeah?" I asked as we opened the door to the room, the bed calling my name.
Maybe it hadn't been the most taxing of jobs, the most dangerous, the kind that had my muscles screaming in objection as I pushed them to their limits. But it had been tiring in a 'figure out who the nasty old lady pissed off badly enough to extort money from her' kind of way.
That said, it was the most enjoyable job at the same time.
Thanks, entirely, to Roan.
It was hard to believe we went from fighting and a cat-and-mouse game to this so easily.
