“What’s the matter?” I asked, stepping toward him.
With a sob, he flung himself at me, his light frame knocking into me so hard I rocked back on my heels.
“Baby doll, tell me.”
“You called them your babies,” he wailed.
That’s what this was about?Oh, for shit’s sake.“You heard me on the phone,” I commented.
His cheek rubbed against my chest when he nodded. “You called them your babies. And your children,” he repeated. “You got them a door. You love them,” he wailed.
“I love you,” I said simply. “And you love them.”
“No,” he said, jerking away from my chest to blink at me with those big, innocent wrecking balls for eyes. “You love them too.”
I pursed my lips.
His lip wobbled.
I sighed. “Fine. They’re not as ugly as I might have said.”
Hugging me, he swiped his tears on my shirt. “You’re a way better fish daddy than you are a plant daddy.”
This was what my life had become.
“I love you, Kieran. So much.”
And it was better than I ever expected it to be.
Haz pulled back. “You really bought the Neon Reef?”
“If you want to run the place, you’re going to have to quit all those other jobs,” I said.
“You’re going to let me run it?”
“It’s yours now. You can run it. Sell it. Pay someone else to manage it. Whatever you want.”
His eyes rounded. “You’regivingit to me?”
“I sure as hell don’t want it.”
He started crying again. My shirt was soaked. I might keep this one, add it to the new wardrobe.
“It’s too much. You can’t just give it to me. I don’t deserve it.”
I lifted him off his feet, and his legs wrapped around my waist. “You do deserve it. I’m going to make sure you have everything you could ever want.”
“I already do because I have you,” he whispered.
I swiped the wetness from his cheeks and leaned in, kissing him so deep it wasn’t just our tongues that tangled but our fates. I would never let him go. He changed my life. Me.
No version of myself in the past thirty years would ever have seen this coming. And even if I’d seen it with my own eyes, I still wouldn’t have believed it.
But seeing Haz wasn’t believing.It’s feeling.
It was living.
And for a hitman like me, life had always been elusive. Until a little hazard showed me how to defy death by loving him.
