Page 55 of Target Me
The one I’d dislocated the night before.
20
LOGAN
“Thanks for coming with me, man. I really appreciate the backup.”
I felt like shit leaving Avery that way. I had a feeling there would be no coming back from that. I’d officially fucked up the best relationship I’d ever had, and I hadn’t even had the balls to tell her how I felt. I had to make this worth it.
Bear grunted, pushing papers around. “I’m glad you called. I’ve been itching to go through this shit. Things just aren’t adding up.”
“Yeah, I feel you.”
Bear glanced at me, deep blue eyes boring into my soul in a way I really didn’t fucking need right now.
“You did the right thing, you know. Damon will keep her safe while we figure out what the fuck is going on.”
“Yeah, I know. You didn’t see her face, though. I fucked up. Bad.”
“Did you tell her you love her?”
“No.”
The look he gave me made me feel about two feet tall.
“You fucked up worse than bad, my man. Why the hell didn’t you tell her how you feel?”
“Can we just make a start on this paperwork, please?” I muttered, moving around the desk.
“What’s this? Rope play, temperature play, breath play… General, you kinky son of a bitch.”
Fuck.
I snatched the list out of his hands, scanning the desk to see if there were any other pages lying around. Bear cackled so hard his eyes glistened with tears.
“Oh fuck, I would have paid to see the General’s face if he’d found that list among his top-secret shit. Why the hell did you leave that in here?”
“We were being shot at, remember?” I pointed to the bullet hole in the wall, as though he may have forgotten the seriousness of the situation.
“Still funny,” Bear asserted, chuckling as he looked back at the papers on the desk. “Okay, Sir, how do you want to sort this?”
I shot him a dead eyed stare. “Hilarious. Can we knock off the kink jokes now?”
“Yes, Daddy.” He paused. “Oh, fuck, does she actually call you Daddy?”
Why did I like this guy again?
Instead of dignifying his comment with an answer—as if my flaming cheeks weren’t answer enough—I resolutely picked up a piece of paper at random and started to read, ignoring Bear’s continued levity at my expense. Once my idiot friend got over his case of the giggles, he sobered fast, moving through the papers as efficiently as I could do myself.
“Is this the correspondence you were talking about?” he asked, holding up the casualty report outlining Lana’s death.
“Yeah,” I said, barely able to read the words again.
Bear whistled through his teeth, reading over it carefully before putting it aside. We continued to work in silence until photocopies of a text exchange caught my attention.
The numbers listed at the top of the printout sparked a memory, and I scrambled through the papers until I found the text exchange where the General had threatened someone with the price of failure. The first part of the conversation was so much worse.
Collapsing into the General’s chair, I looked back and forth between the pages. Bear looked up curiously and came around the table, slipping the pages out of my hands to read.
