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“Talk to me, kitten,” Gate whispered, using the nickname he’d given me years ago, in what seemed another lifetime.
I reached for my wine glass and downed the rest of the sweet white. “I really am an attorney, but there’s a lot more to what I do than just that,” I said.
Gate leaned in, giving me his full attention, “Okay.”
“I mean, alotmore.”
“Seems like you’re pretty hands-on with counseling your clients,” Gate added.
I rubbed at a spot on my forehead that had suddenly begun to pound, “There’s a reason for that.”
“You wanna tell me what that reason is?”
I crossed to the fridge and emptied the wine bottle into my glass. Turning back to Gate, I went on, “I investigate human trafficking for the FBI.”
“I know.”
My eyes flipped to his, “You know?”
“Look, Anna,” Gate said, standing to prowl the length of the kitchen, “I’ve got so much surveillance at the compound, your bosses would be jealous.” My jaw dropped, but he kept going, “Yeah, I know who you are. And I know what you do. Admire it even. What I don’t know is why you thought you had to leave me to do it.”
At Gate’s words, the breath left my lungs in awhoosh.
“How long have you known?” I asked, my mind scrambling to keep up with Gate’s revelation.
“Days,” Gate answered on a frown. “And you can be damned sure that if I’d known sooner, we would have had this conversation a long time ago. So I’m gonna ask you again. Why’d you leave? And quit hiding from the answer.”
I leaned back against the wall, crossed my arms over my chest, and studied Gate.
And in that moment, I knew that I was standing on the edge of the rest of my life. I was on the precipice of my future, staring into the abyss of life without Gate, or maybe looking at riding into the sunset on the back of his Harley.
It’s not like things between us could really get worse.
So I told the truth.
All of it.
Chapter Twenty-One
Finally
Gate
Gate watched Anna lean her head back against the wall, and then he watched as she seemed to come to her decision, and he hoped like fuck it was one he could live with because the alternative wasn’t something he could even think about.
He’d lived without her this long, and he was done with that shit.
If he had even the slimmest chance, he was grabbing it with both hands and wrestling that motherfucker to the ground.
So he waited.
She refilled her glass, and then he followed her while she carried it into the den and sat down.
And when her eyes rose to meet his, and he saw that they were the blue of a stormy ocean, he knew he had her.
“I always thought my dad was in the FBI, but he wasn’t. He was DEA,” Anna started, and Gate swallowed every expletive that ran through his mind.
Anna perched on the edge of a sofa cushion like she still carried too much excess energy to relax. “I didn’t find that out until he approached me about you,” she said, gesturing in his direction.
