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I fought the tears, the happy ones, welling in my eyes. “It’s not fleeting,” I choked out. “It’s you. It’s us. We are each other’s peace, aren’t we?”
He lightly kissed my lips. “Yeah, and we’re each other’s chaos.”
“But it works.”
“Oh, it more than works.”
I traced the side of his head with my hand. “Can we just keep this slow? Just for us?”
He searched my face. “Don’t want slow,” he muttered. “Also want to shout from the rooftops that you’re mine.” He sighed. “But I get what you want, why you want it, and fuck if I’ll say no.”
I grinned. “It bodes well for me, that does.”
He shook his head. “And not for me.”
Luke closed the door quietly, his hands finding the back of my neck, landing on the exact spot that had been throbbing from tension and rubbing at it.
I sank back into his touch, the warmth of his front igniting the back of my body.
“I don’t suppose you’d consider not taking the job and stopping the vigilante stuff, even if I asked real nice?” he murmured, lips on my ear.
I shivered. “Not a chance,” I whispered, failing to find any anger at his request. “One or the other. You pick, buddy.”
He kept rubbing for a long while.
It was evening, the next day. Right after our first day at work. There were no stakeouts or foot chases through the streets; as I was disappointed to find out, it was more paperwork and meetings. And meeting the team.
I totally got why Greenstone was the most popular security company in LA. You threw a rock in those offices and it would hit a hot guy.
Not that you wanted to throw a rock at these guys. They all radiated menace.
The hot kind.
“Well, let me be the first to say that I’m very happy Keltan has finally been listening to my lectures on equality in the workplace,” Matt—one of Keltan’s kiwi buddies from the army, I’d found out later—said, grinning at me wickedly. “I’m all about women’s rights. And I can’t wait to see your moves.” He winked.
I thought Luke’s head might’ve exploded at that.
He was begrudgingly sticking to our secrecy pact.
That meant professional in the workplace.
Well, he’d fucked me on his desk about five minutes after that meeting. Oh, and then he’d buried his head between my legs and gave me two orgasms in the weight room a couple of hours after that. So it wasn’t strictly professional, but it was as close as I’d get.
“I don’t want you to get hurt,” Luke said, back at my apartment. There had been no question that that’s where he was spending the night. “That is the last thing in the fucking world that I want.” He paused, sucking in a breath and looking away. Even though he was focused on my sofa, I knew he was somehow still looking at me. Just not the me standing in front of him. A past me, perhaps. Or maybe the version of me he’d made in his head. The version he could completely nurture, love. The ideal Rosie. Maybe he was looking and her and wishing he could swap us out.
“I want to protect you,” he finished, cutting off my dangerous interior game of which Rosie does Luke actually want.
I laughed, more to shake off the chill that came with those thoughts of the ideal Rosie. “Protect me?” I repeated. “From getting hurt?” I glanced down to his hip. “Well, then there’s only one thing to do if that’s what you want. Put a bullet in my temple.” He flinched, visibly and harshly at my cold words. I ignored it. “Death is the only thing that’s certain to protect humans from the horror of life. Death isn’t the bad and scary thing everyone makes it out to be. In fact, for those in the business of dying, I suspect it’s a welcome reprieve from the pain of living. After the fact, of course. Death is only bad for those left behind.”
My mind, as it always did in conversations such as this, flickered to Laurie. Even though years had passed, fresh agony ripped through my midsection with the memory of my friend being gone. I sucked in oxygen through the pain. “Pain is a recreational hazard in the job of life, Luke,” I said. “You’ll only be able to protect me from it if you’re willing to end my life.”
The words hung in the air bitterly, their truth polluting everything. Not that it was untainted. It had never been clean and fresh. Even when it began at five years old, the time in life where everyone was supposed to experience pure naivety, it was blackened, dirty. Gray. I was born into a gray world.
Luke had been holding a hard jaw while I spoke, it setting like marble the more I said.
