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“No,” I said, watching the smile fall a bit. Just for a second. “I really love you,” I corrected.
“I love you back,” he told me, sealing his lips over mine.
It wasn’t a kiss that was meant to lead to more.
But it moved through me like a healing salve, taking all the stress and fear and ugliness, wrapping it up in the smooth warmth of new, shared feelings.
My head fell to his shoulder, taking in a deep breath.
“Why do you always do that?” he asked, lazily stroking a hand down my spine.
“Do what?”
“Sniff me,” he clarified, making me snort a little at realizing he noticed I did it. And I knew just how often I did it too.
“You smell good. I usually hate cologne. It smells like chemicals. But yours, for some reason, doesn’t. It almost smells, you know, natural.”
“Timber.”
“What?” I asked, brows furrowing.
“It’s called Timber.”
“That sounds vaguely familiar.”
“It should. One day, Jules called you in because we had this epic case, and she needed a hand. You had your arms loaded down with reusable grocery bags. And you were talking about all the stuff you had picked up. Then you looked over at me and said you found this cologne called Timber that was the only one men should ever be allowed to wear.”
“You went out and bought some?” I asked, my heart just… overflowing.
“I bought every bottle they had,” he corrected. “Then bought more when they had it in stock again.”
“Why so much?”
“It was a dinky little operation,” he told me. “I was afraid they would close down, and I would be out of it.”
“Because I liked it?”
“That, yeah. But also because I couldn’t wear cologne. My skin itches like crazy when I try. Kinda gave up on it. But then I figured that if you thought it was good, that maybe the ingredients wouldn’t mess with my skin. It didn’t. Just happened to be a bonus that it makes you climb all over me,” he added, hand moving down to give my butt a pat.
“Lincoln,” I said a long moment later, voice a little hollow.
“Yeah, baby?”
“I saw a man get killed today.”
“I know you did.”
“Am I always going to see that when I close my eyes?”
“Maybe for a while,” he told me. “I wish I could tell you it won’t be like that, but you will see how it is in your own time.”
“On a rational level, I know that he had killed three people–and was willing to kill hundreds more–for his own greed.”
“It’s okay that you feel bad that he’s dead, Gem. I know your feelings on killing.” Likely because I had once spent an afternoon debating with the team about capital punishment when I learned that four percent of people put to death were actually innocent.
“He wasn’t a good man.”
“No,” Lincoln agreed. “But I understand that you believe that it is not up to another person to make the choice to kill them, regardless of their actions.”
“You don’t agree.”
“No. I think some people deserve killing, that there is an evil so unforgivable that it can’t be allowed to keep walking around with innocents all around. To be fair, I wouldn’t have considered David someone who needed killing. But that doesn’t mean I’m sad he’s gone either.”
“I didn’t want him to die, but… but I’m not sad he’s gone either,” I agreed, finding myself more than a little surprised that it was true.
I didn’t agree with Lincoln as a whole. Then again, I hadn’t lived the life he’d lived, I hadn’t come into contact with the people he likely had.
I did believe there were people who couldn’t be saved, that there could be a wrongness in someone’s genetic code, that they couldn’t–or didn’t want–to get better, to turn their lives around. But I couldn’t quite make myself believe the idea of that meaning we could decide to end their lives.
I certainly didn’t believe people should be shot dead in cold blood.
All that said, though, I couldn’t help but think maybe, in a way, the world was a slightly better place now that David couldn’t plot to allow hundreds of people to die just so he could live in luxury.
“You know what really surprised me?” Lincoln asked, dragging me out of my thoughts.
“What’s that?”
“Your old boss,” he told me, shaking his head. “I had him figured for a highly functioning idiot.”
“He is,” I assured him. “But I guess he is a vengeful man on top of that as well.”
“He’s done that before,” Lincoln told me. My brows must have lowered, because he went on. “He was too quick to that reaction. Too sure of himself. That wasn’t a crime of passion. He was cold and calculated.”
“What do you think is going to happen now? Is Quin really going to take on the case?”
“Hard to say. Quin can be hard to read sometimes. But if anyone can come up with the right course of action, it’s him.”
