“It’s the only one you’re getting right now. Is someone after you?”
“I already answered that back at the hospital. I don’t know.”
“That’s not the whole truth.” His sharp gaze is trained on my face, not missing a single flicker of emotion as it passes over my features.
“Someone tossed my apartment,” I reply, because I know this questioning will get nowhere if one of us doesn’t give in. “I found my door ajar and peeked inside to see that everything had been tossed. I ran and was jumped just outside.”
“Where?”
“Savannah.”
“Georgia?”
“That’s the one.”
He nods and crosses his arms, his powerful stance igniting an even stronger attraction within me.
Get it together, Tessa.
“Is that where you’ve been for the last eighteen years?” The question is a punch to my gut because it’s exactly what I’d wanted to avoid. How do you tell the man you loved more than anything that you chose to leave him out of fear? That living a half-life was easier than a simple one with him?
That the pain was more familiar than the love, so you chose the former?
Chapter 7
Zane
Standing here in Tessa’s childhood bedroom is undoing me. Every memory I have here, from visiting her to bring her food because I knew she wasn’t eating enough, to checking in just to make sure she was alive, slams into me at once.
Even the time her dad tried to kill me because I’d fallen asleep talking to her, and he’d thought we were sleeping together. It hadn’t mattered that I told him I had no intention of having sex until marriage.
Something I didn’t stick to when I strayed from God after losing Tessa. I’ve since asked His forgiveness and stuck to my new vow of celibacy, even knowing I would likely never marry. I’ve never felt anything for anyone else that even came close to what I felt for Tessa.
What I still feel for her even as she stands here, staring at me like I’m the enemy.
“We agreed that we wouldn’t talk about it.” Her walls are back up, firmly in place, and she glares at me like I betrayed her.
“We agreed not to talk about the night you left. Not about where you’ve been.”
Tessa glares at me. “I’ve been all over the place. Most recently, Savannah,” she says.
“Why there?”
“I like peaches.”
“You hate peaches.”
It was the one fruit she never liked to eat. I found out a few years after we met that the reason was because her mother always drank peach schnaps, so the smell nauseated her.
“People change,” she retorts. “What do you do for a living?”
“Government work.”
“Which explains nothing,” she replies.
“I was in the Navy for a while. After that, I got pulled in for contract work.” She doesn’t have to know it was by force. Or that I’ve pulled a trigger more times than I can count. Always when it was mine or innocent lives on the line—though that doesn’t make it any better.
Killing is still killing. There’s no positive spin on it.
