Page 118 of Last Chance Love

And then I remembered. “Leon, I love you, but you can’t be in here. Jesus, if you’re seen.”

“Really? You think I showed up with perfect timing after Max left and that the key to your cell would just be lying around when he went to talk to Riley?”

I stared, mouth agape, as I put the pieces together. “You did not ask him to?—”

“I didn’t,” he said, giving me a small smile. “That was all him.”

“Jesus, if you get caught by anyone else.”

“Then I’ll get in serious trouble, and Max will only be guilty of wandering off when he was supposed to be on duty. How was he supposed to know I was lurking around, hoping he might wander off after I knew he was going to talk to Riley? Wrong on my part, stupid on his, he’ll get chewed out.”

“You’re so…” I began, but I didn’t have words to encompass just how he was the stupid one, how mad I was at him for this, and how this was the bright spot in the darkness I’d been stuck in, and how much I loved him. “I hate you.”

“No, you don’t,” he said, pulling me in, filling my nose with the smell of dirt and hay and just a tinge of clean-smelling soap, reminding me of the showers we’d spent together or his skin when we lay together at night, silently loving each other.

It was the crappy cot I pulled him to as I held onto him, both of us facing one another. I lay there with my eyes closed, facing him as our arms and legs tangled, and I basked in his presence. I didn’t know how much time we had, but considering this little plan had been cooked up by Max and Leon, I could trust that he would know when he needed to go.

Then I realized he was talking to me, and I had to bring myself back to reality. “And Ireallywant to find out who the potential buyers were.”

“We already figured one of them was Dom,” I said, a little distracted as I tried to keep up with his sudden energy.

“Yoususpect, but how many guys did you treat every week?”

“Shit, I don’t know. It varied.”

“And this whole smuggling thing has been going on for months now.”

“Probably, yes.”

“Then would you really be able to keep track of who was showing symptoms and who wasn’t? God, I wish we’d known about this sooner or been tipped off. Then we could have done something, put the pieces together, talked to these guys.”

“It’s a little late for that milk to go back into the udder,” I told him gently. “There’s not much we can do. I will probably be gone in a few days, and I won’t be leaving this building until they come to get me.”

A strange light flooded his eyes as he grew quiet, and I felt a twinge of unease when I realized what he was thinking. “You know?—”

God, he wasn’t. “Leon?—”

“We have time.”

“Leon, that isstupidbeyond belief. That is exactly the kind of impulsive, blind behavior that always gets people into trouble.”

“It’s the middle of the night. Everyone’s asleep.”

“Yeah, except for whoever’s working the clinic tonight.”

“Why, it’s your favorite sleepy, lazy, technologically incoherent doctor.”

I stared at him, letting out a growl of frustration. “This isn’t a spur-of-the-moment plan, is it? You’ve been thinking about it for a while. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have bothered to check who was working the clinic.”

“Hey, less impulsive than you originally accused me of,” he said with a shrug.

“Still blind and stupid.”

“Sweetheart, Icannotstand around and let this happen without trying something. I’m only roping you into this because I was going to do it anyway. Even if you don’t tell me the login information, I will find a way to get it and go digging.”

“Great, so your plan is to root around the clinic, hoping no one but Dr. Gideon is in there so you can snoop for legally protected login information, to find the smallest clue. Then, to interrogate people in the hopes they’ll give you another clue so you can solve a mystery that not even Mona managed with all her resources without making the wrong conclusion?”

“Huh, when you put it like that, it sounds like one hell of a desperate and stupid plan.”

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