Page 58 of Haunted

11THE BEGINNING OF FOREVER

Keaton

“Dude. You’re fucked.”

“What are you talking about, Koen?”

We’d finished up at the truck stop without finding anything significant, then met back at the office for a briefing. He and Lanie arrived fifteen minutes after us with the first bit of good news we’d had since this whole shitshow started. Jennifer Collins, our latest victim, had dried blood underneath her fingernails. She’d fought him off and because of her quick thinking, and a little luck, hopefully we’d have DNA soon.

“You just told Henley you loved her.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yeah, ya did, loverboy.” Lanie smacked my arm on her way to the coffeepot.

I paused, thinking back to our conversation.Love you, baby.“Oh shit.” The blood drained from my face, not because I’d told her the truth, but I’d fucked up my damn plan. I was gonna take her out for a night on the town, maybe dinner and dancing, then finish the night burieddeep inside her. Once we were both fully satisfied, I’d look deep into her beautiful green eyes and open my heart wide.

“You can’t rewind time, Keaton, so you might want to figure out how to make it up to her.”

“Thanks for the obvious, Noah. How about some suggestions? I screwed the pooch on this one.”

“Did you mean it?” Lanie rested her back against the counter, watching me closely while sipping her coffee.

“Of course I did. But I didn’t mean to let it fly when she’s not even here for me to see her reaction. What if she doesn’t feel the same?”

They laughed, and not just a little snicker at my expense either. No. My teammates, my friends, were bent in half, roaring with the kind of side-splitting laughter you’d expect to find at a comedy club, not an FBI field office. Well, fuck that and fuck them. My future was on the line.

“For such a smart guy, you're a total idiot.” She shook her head as she strolled to her desk and moved the chair out of the way. Then she pushed aside the paperwork stacked up in the center and hopped up to claim a seat. With her legs swinging back and forth excitedly, like a teenage girl on the brink of meeting Taylor Swift, she said, “The timing of your blunder may have been off, but you didn’t fuck anything up. Believe me when I say, Henley is over-the-moon in love with you too.”

“She’s not wrong, man,” Noah added. “You don’t see it because you’re too busy losing your man card over her, but it couldn’t be more obvious if it smacked you in the face.”

“So how do I make it right?”

“First off, you said what you said. Own it. Don't backpedal, build on it instead.” My brows furrowed, not because of the suggestion, rather who made it. Koen wasn’texactly known for his expertise in long-term relationships, none of them were, yet I was desperate enough to listen.

“I’ve got it,” Lanie announced with a shriek.

We gathered around her desk, as if the words she was about to speak were part of a classified mission. In a way, I guess they were. She laid out her plan in great detail and, surprisingly, it was a good one.

“Keaton.” Waverly stuck her head out of her office. “Can I see you for a minute?”

Amid the teasing calls of “Oooh you’re in trouble” from the immature agents behind me, I entered her office, nudging the door closed with my foot.

“Have a seat.” She motioned to the oversized, dark-blue cushioned chair in front of her desk we’d all dubbed “the hot seat,” because typically if you were in it, chances were good she was about to light your ass on fire for some reason or another.

“Whatever it is you think I did, it was probably Noah’s fault. He’s a bad influence.”

She gave me a knowing grin. If anything, I was the bad influence and we both knew it. Noah was the doesn’t-color-outside-the-lines agent, whereas I did everything possible to scramble those colors until they were grayed out.

“One of the best decisions I ever made was pairing the two of you together,” she began. “Second only to answering the phone eleven years ago. I had no way of knowing the punk-ass teenager I encountered would turn out to be one of the best agents I’d ever work with.”

“I wasn’t that bad.”

“You were worse.”

Honestly, what did she expect? My whole world had imploded around me spectacularly. Very few would haverecovered from the aftermath, yet here I was not only surviving the hell my father left in his wake, I was thriving.

“Is there a compliment in there somewhere? If so, I’m having a hard time finding it.” I shifted uncomfortably.

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