Page 51 of How Much For A Broken Heart?

“Probably.”

“It was hot though. I felt all big bad protective hero.” He smirked.

I wanted to shove him at first, but his humor pierced the introspection I had going on, and let some light in. “Yeah, it was.”

“I rock,” he teased, and we sat on the large rocks in companionable silence again.

“You know what scares me more than anything?” I blurted after a while.

“Spiders? Snakes? My sexy ass? I mean, I hate snakes, but why anyone would hate on my ass is another thing altogether.”

I side-eyed him, wondering if he were trying to make me snap out of this, but all he did was meet my steady gaze with curiosity and the hint of a smile, and something shifted inside me. I really wanted another kiss, because when he was kissing me, it was as if I didn’t have to think—as if he was caring for me, despite everything. Instead of kissing, I fell back on humor.

“Jesus, Army, what kind of soldier hates innocent little snakes?”

“Don’t change the subject.” Ryder let out an exaggerated huff, and we exchanged smiles. “So, Annie?”

“What if I talk to her and tell her about her dad, and she never remembers me?” I asked, feeling the words heavy in my throat.

Ryder didn’t try to sugarcoat things. “You knew her dad. You tried to help him. That’s gotta count for something.”

“I was only in their lives from just after her first birthday, six months is all, she was a baby.”

“But James and you were a couple, right?”

“What?”

“Fake-married, but I’m guessing you were together?”

My heart hurt. “It was easy with him,” I admitted. “Does everyone know about me and him?”

“Was it supposed to be a secret?” Ryder asked after a pause, worried. There wasn’t much in my official file, most of it redacted, and the stuff about James and Annie would have been buried deep—still, not deep enough for Ryder and this Shadow Team not to dig up. But the fact Ryder assumed this about me, and that others would judge me for something I was failing at, was too hard.

“Not to you fuckers it seems,” I snapped, and Ryder winced, and my ire slid away like it was nothing. It wasn’t fair for me to take it out on him. “Sorry.”

“I think you’re entitled.”

“Sleeping with her dad sure doesn’t make up for the rest of it.”

“What, you mean, the bits where you turned in a significant amount of the cartel to Sanctuary, or saving two trucks full of trafficked kids?”

“I didn’t… I…”

“Twenty-one kids,” Ryder said and leaned back on his elbows, tilting his head toward the weak spring sun. “Sanctuary found homes for the ones who didn’t have families and put the money in to make sure all the kidnapped kids got a good start in life. That’s on you passing the information to us. The rest… every person on that wall in there that you killed, well, that’s something you’ll work through the same as the rest of us bad guys who started out good and had to do things to survive that we’d never have contemplated before, and yeah… that’s all I have to say.”

We sat in silence again, and hatred burned inside me at Amos for thinking he had any hold over her, but amidst that anger, there was a flicker of determination.

“I’m not Annie’s daddy,” I muttered to myself, a mantra to remind me of my place in her life. James had trusted me to care for them both, and I’d let him down. “I want to make sure she goes to a good family, but… me? That’s not happening.”

I had to unravel the tangle of emotions that had built up over the past years. Maybe a counselor was a good idea, and if I could start the process of figuring out how to be in Annie’s life as a friend, then surely, that was a good thing?

After Amos was gone. After I put a bullet between his eyes.

“You and her, you’ll work it out,” Ryder said. “You’re not the same guy you were, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be a good person in her life. It’s about how you go forward, not what happened before.”

He had a point. It was about what I did now, about trying to be there for her in whatever way I could. But it was also naive. I’d changed from someone who wanted to be one of the good guys to a man who was nothing but bad.

But for being in Annie’s life, finding something in that innocent connection? Maybe that could happen one day.

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