Page 15 of Cooper

“I don’t know what I feel,” she says. “It’s like I don’t belong anywhere anymore. I’m a woman, but also a Royal Protector. And now there’s a part of me that’s also a marine.”

“Is that bad? It’s okay to be all those things.”

“Yes, but I’m not sure it’s sustainable. I feel pulled, like I have to pick one and can’t.”

“Don’t you want to be a Royal Protector anymore?”

“I don’t know.” Her eyes meet mine guiltily.

“Because Logan died?”

“Maybe.”

“From what you told me, there was nothing anyone could do. Wrong place, wrong time… he knew what he was getting into.”

“But I didn’t!” She throws up her hands. “I knew, intellectually, that there was risk involved, but I thought… I don’t know. I guess I thought with the proper training and skills, we would be invincible. That the Royal Protectors couldn’t justdielike that.”

“Knowing something intellectually is different than seeing it firsthand. And your intimate relationship with him made it that much more intense.”

“I don’t know that my relationship with him made a difference.”

“It had to. That’s the nature of who we are and how people like us react to this kind of thing.”

“People like us?”

“Soldiers. Marines. Royal Protectors. Whatever title you want to give it, it boils down to people like us. We’re bound by duty, ready to sacrifice everything for a greater cause. My country, your royal family. We take oaths and then have to learn to live with them. Sometimes it’s a lot.”

“Is it a lot for you too?” She looks so lost I instinctively reach for her hand. Natalia rarely shows vulnerability, so it catches me off-guard, but I like that she trusts me enough to open up.

“Yeah, but not for myself. It becomes a lot, maybe even too much, for me when it impacts my men. Watching Passero and Seghin potentially die was the part that scared me the most. I didn’t care what they did to me, but I needed to protect my men.”

“And now that it’s over?”

“Now I’ll beat myself up for almost getting them killed. For not being able to protect them.”

“Even though it’s not rational?”

“Even though it’s not rational.”

“So everything I’m feeling is irrational?”

“No, honey, it’shuman. For people like us anyway.”

“I don’t know if I’m one of us people anymore.”

I pause, unsure what she’s trying to tell me. “Are you afraid you’re going to die?” I ask after a moment.

She makes a wry face. “It’s not that I’m afraid to die—it’s that now I’m much more afraid to live.”

SIX

Natalia

I’m notsure what I’m going to say until I say it, and then it all makes sense. Because I’m truly not afraid of death. My fear is about living again. I started to give myself to Logan emotionally and he was killed, and then after finding someone as special as Cooper, I almost lost him as well. It’s hard to put into words, but I feel like a bad luck charm or something.

“What happened to me wasn’t your fault,” Cooper says softly, practically reading my mind. “And neither was what happened to Logan. I don’t know what’s going through that pretty head of yours, but stop blaming yourself. You’ve lost weight, so I don’t think you’re eating. You have dark circles under your eyes, so you’re obviously not sleeping… You’re not taking care of yourself, and you have to know, even if it’s only subconsciously, what you’re doing.”

I blink in confusion. “What am I doing?”

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