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Haley
“Princess, you're going to pace a hole in the new floor.”
I pulled my thumb away from my mouth. I’d been chewing on my nails for the last six hours. At this point, I was surprised I even had any left.
“How about you distract me and tell me why in the world we're in a new building? What the hell happened to your old apartment?” I turned to find him resting his forearms on his knees. He’d been watching me pace back and forth in front of this tiny ass window for the last thirty minutes. A shadow fell over his face as his brow came together.
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to, Haley.”
The tone in his voice caused my steps to falter. “What happened?”
His jaw tightened as he turned his head to the side. “I lost control.”
My feet began moving again, this time toward him, not stopping until I was right in front of him. “Tell me,” I demanded, running my fingers through his dark locks.
He put his forehead against my stomach, and his arms snaked up my thighs and around me. “We don’t have to talk about this now,” he sighed. He was exhausted.
“Fine, then we can talk about Collin.”
He looked to the ceiling. “Jesus,” he muttered.
“The big man upstairs has nothing to do with this, James Garner,” I quipped, pulling his hair a bit. “Are you sending the man who saved me to jail?”
He let go of me then, standing up and walking to the hideous tiny window. I hated this apartment. We were far away from everyone. It was outside the city, and it smelled like chemicals. We finally got the bad guy; I wasnotdying because of some stupid apartment the Bureau shacked us up in. I had a life to live. But I couldn’t live my life until I knew my friend got to live his—which would be with Kay by his side.
We all deserved to be fucking happy, and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to fight for that.
“Haley, he was a hitman.”
“He killed bad people. You do that, and I don’t see you in prison.”
His hand was in his hair, and as it fell to his side, those dark eyes looked me up and down. “Maybe I should be.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” he barked, grabbing my shoulders. “Do you know how hellbent I was when it came to finding you? If you knew the shit I've done since the night I lost you…”
Shaking my head, I cupped his face. “I love—no, James, look at me. I love you. We have all done –”
“If you say some bullshit line…” he growled. My hands fell away from him, and I took a step back, pointing at him.
“Fine. I’ll say what I really want to say.”
He tilted his head, and I raised my chin higher. “Fuck you, James Garner. Fuck you for thinking I can’t handle it. I was kidnapped and beaten by men who thrived on nightmares and pain. But guess what? I survived. Me. All because of him!”
My agent’s throat bobbed as he watched me let it all out.
“You are an FBI agent. You just took down a huge piece of the sex trafficking rings—Romano’srings. And you want to know who led you to them? Collin! For you to stand there and assume I can’t handle the things you did—things that you did in order to save me—”
He rushed to me, gripping the hair at the back of my neck. “You want to know what I did? Hm? After you were taken from me, I nearly killed Jeremy Jones,” he clipped, his nostrils flared as he stared down at my face. He held me against him firmly. “Then, when Dean pulled me off of him, I went to every single mafia cunt lying dead in the streets and shot them three more times.In. The. Face.”
“James,” I breathed, my heart breaking for him.
“I made each one of them unrecognizable. They didn’t deserve to have a fucking identity. They took what wasmine, hurt what wasmine.” His fist tightened in my hair, yanking my head back slightly. He looked like a madman. “You got it all wrong, princess. You can handle anything life throws at you. It’s who you are. You are strong, Haley. You are a fighter. You fight for the people you love, and goddammit, that only makes me love you more.”
“Keep going,” I whispered as my hands held onto the sides of his shirt.
