Page 69 of Proof

I would always love JJ, but it was like I’d said. Being around him wasn’t safe for me. It would be too easy to give myself over to the man and whether I lost him to another tragedy, or he walked away when he finally realized he couldn’t build a life with a man he’d pitied, the outcome would be the same.

I ignored the warning bells in my head that were telling me I was about to make yet another terrible mistake that would leaveme with even fewer pieces of myself and gave JJ a quick nod. His unmasked relief relit the ember of warmth within me—the one that had been snuffed out the moment JJ had told me to let him go during our last encounter at the cabin. As I remembered how I’d begged him not to leave me, all the warmth fled my body.

Losing that warmth gave me the control I needed to now make it possible for me to function like the soldier I’d been. Confident, distant, efficient.

When JJ slowly took several steps back from me, I knew I was mentally back where I needed to be. I could hold myself together while he said his piece and then he’d walk out of my life for good and I’d start trying to figure out how to put myself back together again.

“Do you have somewhere we can go? Sully’s not really going to be in the best frame of mind right now and chances are that if we don’t go soon, his guys will find us,” JJ asked, his voice stiff.

“My mother’s parents left her a houseboat in Ventura Harbor. That’s where I’ve been staying since we?—”

I stopped abruptly when I realized what I’d been about to say. “I’ve been staying there,” I said curtly.

JJ nodded.

My stomach tightened into dozens of painful knots when JJ moved to the door and unlocked it. He pulled the gun he’d stashed in his waistband at the small of his back and turned the safety off. Although it was absolutely the most inopportune moment to be thinking about it, I was both proud and a little turned on by how confidently he held the weapon. I’d already drawn my own gun but didn’t try and move past JJ despite my desperate need to be the first one to clear the area outside the door and around the park.

JJ and I clung to the shadows as he followed me to my rental car. He didn’t question me about where my Mustang was.Instead, he quietly slipped into the passenger seat and scanned our surroundings as I got the car moving.

Neither of us spoke during the two-hour ride to Ventura Harbor. I’d already learned the schedule of the nighttime security guard who monitored the gate that kept strangers away from the dock that led to several houseboats. Like clockwork, the guard took his break five minutes after JJ and I reached the marina.

The cover of darkness made it easy to get to my grandparents’ houseboat. Once we’d boarded the vessel, I led JJ to the innermost part of the house, which happened to be the living room, and turned on a single light that had a dimmer attached. Even at the lowest setting, I had no trouble seeing JJ’s face as he settled into the single oversized chair in the room.

“I’ll get us something to drink,” I said clumsily. “I’ve got beer or water.”

“Water’s fine,” JJ called because I was already heading out of the room. Although the houseboat was larger than most in the harbor, it suddenly felt like the smallest. I fiddled with the bottle of JJ’s water and my own bottle of beer. My hands were still shaking, just like they’d been in the bathroom as well as the car ride. My befuddled brain somehow remembered to grab one of the many burner phones from a drawer before returning to the living room.

“Here,” I said with as much disinterest as I could muster as I handed JJ the water and the phone. “It’s a burner,” I explained. He nodded in understanding. Even if he hadn’t been a cop, Sully would have made damn sure that his little brother knew what a throwaway phone was and what it was used for.

“Call your brother,” I said. “He’s got to be going out of his mind by now.”

I used the moment to return to the kitchen so I could swallow several slugs of the beer before I began rummaging around forsome snacks. The cupboards were bare and there was only a half-eaten carton of Chinese food in the fridge.

There was plenty of beer, though.

I grabbed a second longneck bottle as I finished off the first one. I nearly choked when I heard a voice behind me.

“Where do you want this?” JJ asked as he held out the burner phone. His eyes were on my beer instead of me.

Well, they were onbothbeers. I grabbed the phone from him and then turned my back so I wouldn’t have to see the disappointment in his eyes. I tossed the phone into a large bucket filled with water that already held at least a dozen other now dead burner phones. Since I’d missed the evolution of technology, I wasn’t sure what kind of resources JJ’s brother and his men had access to when it came to tracing the phones, so I’d been paying for them in cash and destroying them after a single use.

“I left my phone at my house,” JJ said as he settled onto one of the barstools that took up one side of the kitchen counter.

I nodded and took a long swallow of beer.

“When did you start drinking?” JJ asked. The question held no judgment, but I could tell he was surprised. He’d known from the time I’d been a teenager that I didn’t drink. I’d left that to my father, grandfather, and endless assortment of stepmothers, uncles, aunts, and cousins. I’d had the occasional beer here and there, but I’d always steered clear of the hard stuff. Even when I did have a beer, I rarely finished the bottle because I’d never wanted to lose control of myself to something that had the power to do so much damage.

“Does it matter?” I asked crisply. I wanted to laugh at the irony of it all. A single touch from the man sitting before me had more power over me than every last beer in the entire world.

Despite the space between JJ and me being considerably greater than it had been in that dingy public bathroom, he mightas well have had his body pressed right up against mine. The knowledge that I finally had him alone, truly alone, was making all the blood rush south. Thankfully, the darkened interior of the boat made it easy to hide my predicament.

I was surprised when JJ suddenly jumped up so he could open a sliding door that let in the ocean breeze and the sound of waves that I’d come to love in the short time I’d been staying on the houseboat.

Just like the public bathroom, I hadn’t given the closed door any thought because I’d been too focused on JJ. It was the same now, but fortunately he didn’t know that.

Unfortunately,Idid. His thoughtfulness put another dent in the concrete I’d been trying to encase my heart in ever since he had left the cabin.

“It doesn’t,” JJ said. It took me a second to realize he was responding to my question about whether or not it mattered if I was drinking. “I just thought?—”

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