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“It would have told me that it was more than a little nothing affair to you.”
“It was more than an affair to me,” he clarified. “But I couldn’t ask you to leave everything else that mattered to you just to spend more time with me. I can’t claim to know anything about love, Melody, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t meant to be that selfish.”
“You didn’t have to ask me to give anything up.”
“We live in different parts of the world.”
“Yes, and in the golden age of the internet.”
“I don’t want to have a relationship through a phone screen, Melody.”
“You don’t know what kind of relationship you want, Christopher. Any more than I do. Since this is something new for both of us.”
“I know I like having you in my house. In my bed.”
“I like being there too. But, I think we are both reasonable adults who can learn to balance life and work and everything else out.”
“So, you want to try to do that?” he asked, sounding hopeful.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I am pretty damn good at negotiating a deal so that all parties involved walk away happy.”
“I think that might come in handy,” he agreed, smiling as his arms went around me.
It did.
I negotiated him right out of his clothes.
And into my bed.
Everything else could wait.
EPILOGUE
Christopher – 3 days
I should have been back in Greece. Keeping an eye on my brother, making sure my business was still running properly.
It had been Quin—of all people—who had said something when he showed up the next day that had changed my mindset.
The point of being the boss is to delegate the workload so you can pursue the things that are important to you.
He’d been right.
I controlled my work the way I did because it was all that I had in the past. Especially once Alexander went away to school.
Now that there was something in my life that I wanted, Quin was right. It was time to trust the men who had been with me the longest, who I knew could be trusted. Especially now that all my men—Laird, Collis, and Marco included—had each had a session with the elusive man by the name of Holden, and I felt confident leaving my businesses, in his hands while I spent some time with Melody. In her house. In her world. With her friends.
In the span of two days, I had met every single person she worked with save for Ranger and his wife Meadow, because they lived further away.
I got to put faces to the stories she’d told me.
I toured around the town she decided to call home, getting an earful about the interesting criminal dynamics to be found there.
I looked through all the knick-knacks scattered around Melody’s home, hearing little stories about which countries she’d bought them in, what job she’d been on when she picked them up.
It was much like back in Zagori. But instead of tiptoeing around the budding feelings between us, we were openly facing them, talking about them, analyzing them.
There was nothing sexy about calendars and work schedules, but there was something undeniably exciting in sitting down and hashing out the details on how we were going to make this work. How much time we would spend in New Jersey, how much in Greece, what would happen if she was called on a job.
“You’re going to need to relax that jaw,” she demanded when she brought up the topic. “Like it or not, I am going to keep working. If you wanted a woman barefoot in your kitchen until the end of time, you shouldn’t have decided to catch feelings for me.”
To that, my lips curved upward a bit.
I appreciated her drive.
I respected her desire to have a career, even if it wasn’t necessary for her anymore. She wouldn’t need to work once that check cleared for her most recent job for me. But I understood that work could become a part of you, that you wouldn’t feel like yourself anymore if you didn’t have it.
Even if the idea of her particular job put a pit of uncertainty in my stomach.
Especially after having heard how dangerous some of those jobs had been.
“What happens if, some day down the road, you decide you are ready to have children?” I asked. If it were up to me, we’d start immediately. But she was younger. She had time to decide.
“Obviously, I would not be putting myself in dangerous situations if I were pregnant. And, well, after that… I would have to give that some thought,” she admitted. “I don’t foresee myself ever not working. But I can see slowing down, or only taking jobs I knew would be safe.”
“Like getting Fenway out of some new international mishap?”
“Exactly,” she agreed, giving me a smile. “I still haven’t figured out how I am going to make him pay for his involvement in kidnapping me.”
