Page 27 of Howl Lotta Love

“There’s no wedding.” Emma typed back there is no wedding, Gerri and got a single reply—a photograph of a sapphire ring, no caption, no further comment necessary. She turned the phone facedown on the table and refused to look at it again. “Reality has never once slowed Gerri Wilder down. Why start now?”

The waiter refilled their wine, and somewhere between the bread basket and an entrée neither of them ordered with any urgency, the conversation drifted well clear of the case entirely.

“Tell me one true thing.” Jace said it low, echoing the gala, except there was no ballroom full of donors to perform for this time. “Not the professional answer.”

“About what?”

“The thing you’re avoiding. You’ve got a list. I’ve watched you not-say things several times.”

Emma turned her wine glass by the stem, buying a second she didn’t need. “I was engaged. Before any of this.”

“I know. You mentioned the ex.”

“I mentioned the lesson. Not the story.” She kept her eyes on the glass, which made it easier. “He was brilliant. Ambitious. The kind of brilliant that needs an audience, and for a while, I was a very good one. Then I started getting recognition he didn’t, and it turned out he never wanted an equal. He wanted a mirror that made him look taller.”

“Not your fault.”

“I know that now. Took me a while to believe it.” She looked up, and her voice thinned out at the edges despite her best effort to keep it level. “The second I stopped being useful to his ego, I became the villain instead. Cold. Difficult. Married to my job. Every word men use for a woman who won’t shrink so he can feel bigger standing next to her.”

“You’re not any of those things.”

“I know that too. Doesn’t mean it didn’t leave a mark.” Her hands had gone still around the stem of her glass, knuckles pale. “After him, I stopped trying to be loved and started making sure I was needed instead. Needed was survivable. Nobody walks out on the person solving their problem. They only leave once you stop being useful enough to keep around.”

Something in Jace settled into a stillness she was starting to recognize—not tension, she’d learned, but a man listening with his whole body instead of only his ears. “That’s a hell of a lonely way to build a life.”

“It’s efficient.” Thin smile, aiming for light, landing somewhere closer to raw. “Everyone’s got a list.”

He didn’t let her hide behind the joke this time. Reached across the table and closed his hand over hers before she’d finished the sentence, thumb pressed hard against her knuckles like he could physically keep the rest of it from falling apart. “You’re not hard to love. You’re hard to fool. Whoever told you those were the same thing was lying to cover for himself.”

Her chest split open, fast and unexpected, and she had to look down at the tablecloth to keep it off her face. Her eyes stung, which hadn’t happened over this ghost in longer than she wanted to admit.

“Does anyone else know? The real version, not the deposition version.”

“My sister does. Claire.” A small, unguarded smile crossed her face, there and gone. “She’s the only one who ever got the honest account—she still calls if I go quiet too long, which is often, because I’m terrible about calling back. She doesn’t know exactly what I do most days, or who I do it for. Easier that way. She worries enough about me as it is.”

“I’d like to meet her sometime.”

“You say that now.” She turned her wine glass a quarter turn, considering it. “She’d like you. She’s always been a better judge of people than I am. It’s deeply annoying, growing up with that. Your turn,” she managed, once she trusted her voice again. “Tell me the thing you don’t say out loud.”

Jace turned his glass, slow, and for a second, she thought he’d deflect the way he deflected everything that wasn’t tactical.

He didn’t.

“Before Maddox Tactical, I ran a unit overseas. Good men. Good unit.” His voice dropped into the register she’d only heard once before, in a parking garage, right before things went very wrong. “Job went bad in ways nobody planned for. I got most of my people home.”

He stopped. She didn’t fill the silence—she’d learned enough about this man to know an easy exit would only let him take it.

“Not all of them,” he said, finally, jaw cracking wide open along with the words. “I told myself I’d see it coming next time. Every threat. Every angle. Every way a good plan turns into a body count I have to carry alone. That’s why I don’t do halfway with people I’m responsible for. It was never about control. It’s about never again standing over someone I couldn’t get home.”

“That’s not overbearing.” She turned her hand under his, laced their fingers, held on. “It’s the opposite of what I thought it was.”

“Doesn’t make it easier to live inside.”

“No.” She didn’t let go. “But it makes it make sense.”

They sat like that until the waiter came back a third time, visibly confused, to ask if they still wanted dessert.

They did. Jace ordered tiramisu without an ounce of self-consciousness, and Emma stared at him like he’d confessed to a felony.