Page 317 of Vicious Temptation

She takes it but doesn’t open it yet. “It's a notebook.”

“It’s about you.”

Her eyebrows lift. “You have a notebook about me?”

“That sounds significantly creepier when you say it like that.”

“Is there another way to say it that doesn’t sound creepy?”

“Probably not.”

Laughing lightly, she runs her fingers over the cover. “So what exactly did you write?”

“Read it.”

She opens to the first page, and I watch the amusement slowly disappear from her face as she realizes what she’s holding.

The earliest pages are filled with my father’s handwriting.

Remi looks up at me. “These were your dad’s case notes.”

“Keep turning the pages.”

She drops her gaze to the notebook and reads on. I know when she reaches the parts that no longer belong to my father because she slows down, taking more time with each page.

The entries were never really about the mission. They were about her. The way she talks to herself when she works, the watermelon lollipops, how fucking happy she looks behind the wheel of a car, and how much I love the sound of her laughter.

She turns another page and another, finding everything I couldn’t admit to her then and barely knew how to admit to myself. So I wrote it to the one man I knew would understand me and would forgive me. I wrote about every time I told myself I needed to put distance between us, only to find another reason to see her, and about how much harder it became to ignore the guilt of knowing she trusted me while I was still lying to her.

Remi grows more serious the farther she gets. “You were falling in love with me.”

“Yeah. Long before I was willing to admit it.”

She turns to me, lingering there for a beat, then returns to the notebook. She knew how our story started, but she never got to see this part of it, never knew how quickly the lines between the assignment and what I felt for her started disappearing or how hard I fought against something that had already happened.

When she reaches the entries from after everything fell apart, her brow creases.

“You kept writing.”

“I did. For a while.”

“Why?”

“Because I wasn’t ready to let you go.”

She looks back down at the page.

“I wrote about you. About all the ways I loved you before I knew if you’d ever let me back into your life. The things I missed. The things I noticed once I wasn’t around you every day. I wrote about how different everything felt without you in it.”

Her fingers slow against the edge of the paper.

“I wrote about the first time you laughed with me again. The first night you fell asleep beside me without waking up tense. The first family dinner where your dad stopped looking at me like he was deciding where to bury my body. And the day we finally made love again.”

A small laugh escapes her, but her eyes are already filling with tears.

“I wrote about everything you changed for me, Remi. You made me want a life outside the job. You gave me people to come home to. And I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to give back even half of what you’ve given me.”

Remi turns another page, her thumb brushing over my handwriting before looking back at me.