Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
She kissed his cheek and turned and walked out of the room.
He felt his fists clench at the irony. Now she told him? Now? When she’d utterly betrayed him? Now she used the words he’d longed to hear.
He felt like she’d kicked him in the gut. There was a part of him that wanted to chase after her, to force her to fight with him.
He was too dramatic? He loved her. Of course he was going to lose his shit when he thought she was dead. The fact that she wouldn’t meant… What did it mean? Did she have to love him the exact way he loved her? Would her quiet mourning mean less than his histrionic one?
What the fuck was he doing? He needed to chill this thing out. His father was right, and he was behaving in an overly emotional fashion.
Wasn’t this exactly what his mother had warned him about? That he would try to mold her into something she wasn’t. That he’d decided he loved her a very long time before, and he’d been chasing her ever since without truly knowing who she was and accepting her.
Accepting Kala meant embracing all of her, including the parts that sometimes felt remote. She wasn’t. She often seemed standoffish when she was thinking, but she didn’t want to be alone. Well, she did, but she rarely didn’t want him around. He was the one who could soothe her. What did he get in return?
He got a part of her absolutely no one else got. He got her softness.
His heart clenched. She was more fragile than anyone thought. She hid it, and she would never complain, never treat him like shit even when he’d done the same to her.
A laugh huffed from his chest. Nope. His girl would keep it all inside. She would show her love in different ways, including protecting him like he was something precious. Even when they weren’t together.
She was exactly the woman who would see her boyfriend get his dumb ass tranqed because he couldn’t keep his shit together in a potentially dangerous situation, put a pillow under his head, probably kiss him on the forehead and then sit down and get the damn job done.
If it had been him being carried out by someone, she would have died inside but not given up the op. She would have sat by his bedside and held his hand—unless she needed to stab someone.
She was never going to be some swoony, romantic heroine who needed him to save her from the bad guy.
But she did need him to save her from the black hole that sometimes threatened to swallow her whole. She needed him to pull her back to the real world and remind her how much her love was worth.
He sat there for a moment and realized that while he’d thought he’d made a decision before, this was really it. She’d done something he never would have done—allowed Zach to go free. She’d handled things in a way that hurt his feelings. She hadn’t chosen to scrap a mission to save his pride.
What the fuck was his pride worth?
It certainly wasn’t worth the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. He stood, glancing at the clock and realizing how much time had gone by while he’d sat here.
Nothing was more important than Kala. Nothing. If she didn’t want to work with him anymore, he would take it. He would support her. It would be her choice.
Although he would try to sway her because he loved working with her. He wanted to work with her at the Agency until she was ready to embark on something else.
If she wanted him to hear Zach out, well, he was already rethinking that, too.
What the hell would he have done had he been the one in Zach’s position? While he certainly wouldn’t have ended up leaving his team, he might have found a way to put himself on it so he could get to know his brother.
He should have done his job, sat beside her and worked it out. He might have been able to talk her into bringing him in, but no, he’d gotten his butt hurt because she hadn’t wailed and cried and made an already dramatic situation worse.
He was going to have to buy so many chocolate croissants and give a million foot rubs and probably agree to another dog because he was pretty sure Kenzie would try to keep Bud 2 and Kala had never not had a dog in her life.
But the most important thing he could do was put his arms around her and ask her for forgiveness.
He walked out into the hallway and into the big living room where his father was sitting in Big Tag’s lounge chair, a serious expression on his face. He looked up. “Are you feeling okay?”