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He lands face first on the ground. “That’s gotta hurt,” I say as I rifle through his pockets. I find the satchel and tuck it into my inner pocket. I raise my fist to punch him but catch a gendarme eyeing me with suspicion. I get to my feet, hauling the thief with me.
“Sorry about bumping into you like that,” I say in mangled French.
The thief scowls and is about to say something that would get us both in hot water but stops when I jerk my head to the policeman lurking nearby. He immediately replies with a fake apology of his own. We give each other a few overly hearty taps on the back before I let him go.
When I return to Georgia, her drink is gone, and her food tray is empty. Her phone is face down, and her face is lifted toward the sun. My chest physically aches with love for her.
I drop to one knee beside her chair. “I’d better give this to you before I lose it.”
Her eyes pop open and she dips toward me. Her hand comes to my forehead. “You’re a little warm. Did you have to work hard?”
“No. Not even a bit. Are you wondering if I caught my mark?”
“In the five years we’ve been together, you’ve never not been successful.” She places a kiss on my brow. “You caught me, after all.”
I grab her hand and press it to my face. “My biggest prize.” With my free hand, I reach inside for the satchel. I roll it out, displaying the ring and necklace that once belonged to her grandmother. She gasps, bringing her hands to her mouth. She doesn’t have any contact with her family now, but I know her grandmother meant so much to her. Hell, the woman brought her to me.
“You didn’t,” she says behind her fingers. Her eyes begin to sparkle.
“Don’t cry,” I order.
“I’m not,” she lies as the tears leak out. Her hand trembles as she reaches for the jewelry pieces. “I thought these were lost forever.”
We’d tried to recover them when we first returned from Paris. I was going to give them to her for our wedding and then our first anniversary, but I couldn’t find the damned things. A couple years ago, she told me to give up, but I refused.
“If I can find a terrorist in a remote hideout in a mountain village in Van Turkey, I figured these would show up someday. A woman had bought them from the secondhand dealer,” I explain as I fasten the necklace around Georgia’s throat. “Then she died, and the will was in probate for years as her kids fought over the estate. The will got overturned, and then it was appealed and the whole thing didn’t resolve itself until a month ago. The son who won sold everything in the estate, and that’s how I found these.”
I sit back on my haunches. Her smile is brighter than the sun. “I wish you had more things to recover so I could put this expression on your face every day.”
The smile turns impish. “You put a better one on my face this morning.”
“Oh, I did, didn’t I?” I can feel my damned chest swell. “Maybe we should go back to the hotel so I can see it again.”
I rise and pick her up in my arms. There are probably a dozen cameras on us.
“I thought the first rule of hitmen is to not cause a scene,” she murmurs against my neck as I walk out of the park.
“I’m on vacation, and I’m wearing a hat.”
“What about the mark you took care of when we first got here?”
“That was on the first day. We’ve been here two weeks,” I protest.
“Mercy is going to be mad.”
I hike Georgia up higher. “I’m using you as my shield.”
“Against the photographs or Mercy?”
“Both.”
She throws back her head and laughs. I love that sound as much as the ones she makes in the bedroom. All of her sounds—her sighs, her moans, her cries are the only music I want to hear for the rest of my life. “I love you, starlight. You know that, right?”
She tightens her grip around my neck. “I do. I love you right back and not just because you spent five years hunting down this jewelry that was nearly stolen by a pickpocket but because you’re everything I ever wanted in a man.”
My pace picks up. “Even though I’m a hitman?”
“Who always gets his mark,” she reminds me.
That’s true. I’ve never failed. Not even when the mark was love.
* * *
