She finished taping the bandage. Smoothed it down with her fingertips. Let her hand rest on his arm a beat longer than necessary.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For changing your bandage?”
“For staying.”
She met his dark blue eyes and knew he wasn’t talking about the safehouse. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “We covered that last night.”
He kissed the tip of her nose, drew her into his lap for a long, lingering kiss. “Good.”
They dressed, and he called Claire while Alyssa made coffee. “Road’s clear,” he said when the call ended. “We can head to SPS headquarters. Garrett’s expecting us.” He paused. “Forty minutes and we’re behind compound walls. Best security in the state.”
Forty minutes. After everything—the party, the blizzard, the cabin, the shooting, the courthouse, this apartment—forty minutes stood between them and safety. It felt impossibly close and impossibly far at the same time.
She saw the ghost of a smile on his face as he checked his go-bag, holstered his weapon, and secured the sat phone. She watched the transformation and marveled at it, the way he could carry both versions of himself simultaneously. The man who’d whispered her name in the dark and the soldier who mapped exits before entering a room.
She gathered her own things. Sketchbook. Bag. Migraine medication. The borrowed clothes she’d been living in. It was the sum total of her life at the moment.
At the apartment door, Mack paused, hand on the deadbolt, and looked at her with an expression she couldn’t quite read. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“The ring.” He said. “Do you still have it?”
The look on his face made sense now. The question made her heart clench.
She’d kept it in its velvet box in the back of her nightstand drawer, underneath a book she never read and a stack of old birthday cards Mack had sent her while he was on his tours.
She’d told herself she kept it because she couldn’t bring herself to sell it, it was too beautiful to throw away, that it would be wasteful. She’d figured someday, she’d know what to do with it.
She’d told herself a lot of things. None of them had been the truth.
The truth was that getting rid of the ring would have meant accepting that she and Mack were over. And some part of her—the part that had never stopped loving him—had refused to let go.
“Yes,” she said. “I still have it.”
He nodded, gave her that ghost of a smile again. He started to speak, closed his mouth, and stared at the floor.
“When this is over,” she said, saving him from the roller coaster emotions she read on his face, “I plan to start wearing it again.” She met his eyes and held them. “If you’re ready to commit.”
The if was deliberate—an invitation. She wasn’t asking him to propose. She was telling him the door was open, and it was his move.
The smile grew with a bit of surprise, then warmth, then something fiercer than both. He pulled her toward him, kissed her once, hard, and said, “I bought that ring because I was sure. I’ve never stopped being sure.”
She grinned and nipped at his bottom lip. “Then let’s get to SPS,” she said. “I don’t know what the future holds, but I’m ready for it as long as I’m with you.”
The morning was bright and cold—the sun sharp against fresh snow, the sky so blue it looked artificial. Mack loaded their gear into the SUV and held open her door under the watchful eyes of the DEA agents.
She climbed in, buckled her seatbelt, and set the sketchbook in her lap.
With a nod to the agents, Mack pulled out of the lot behind the dry cleaners and headed north toward the highway.
The route to the Shadow Point Security headquarters wound through the foothills—two-lane roads flanked by timber, the mountains rising white and massive on either side. Traffic was sparse: a plow, a logging truck, a pickup with a dog in the bed, tongue flapping in the wind.
Normal life.
Mack scanned the road, his right hand resting on the gearshift, his left on the wheel. The scarred knuckles were spotlighted by the sun coming through his window.