Page 42 of Eight Years Gone

She looked both ways, then pulled onto the main road, heading toward town. “Not since the night I left.”

“How’s Bea?”

“She’s good—getting older. She lives closer to her son—about twenty minutes outside Philly. We get together for lunch a couple of times a year.”

“What about your dad? How’s he?”

“I have no idea.”

“You don’t talk to him?”

She shook her head again.

“Not at all?”

“I haven’t seen him since Logan’s funeral.”

The car got quiet again. The swish of the wipers and battering rain on the windshield were the only sounds.

Dropping his hands, Jagger turned his body closer to her. “Listen, Grace—”

She adamantly shook her head, having a good idea of where this was going. “I don’t want to talk about the past. Let’s talk about now. Just now. Tell me about what you’ve been doing all these years.”

He scratched at his jaw in the way that he did when he was frustrated. “I’ve been in the service.”

“I know. Where?”

“I can’t really talk about it.”

She shrugged, even as she grew slightly irritated. He’d vanished from her life, and he couldn’t talk about it. “Fine.”

“I’m not being evasive.”

Her shoulders jerked again. “Your life is your own.”

“I was a soldier in Delta Force. I did a lot of clandestine and covert operations—a lot of black ops.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Everything was off the books. When I was in the field, I was a ghost. That’s all I can tell you.”

Talking like this was much better than the silence—twenty questions. Plus, she was curious about the life he’d lived. “And that’s where you got the scar on your arm?”

His brow furrowed as he glanced toward his tricep. “No. I got that a few weeks ago. I’ve been doing private contracting for the past couple of years.”

“That’s top secret, too?”

He shook his head. “It’s not top secret, but I sign NDAs—nondisclosure agreements.”

“Why?”

“Because the clients I work for are either government entities or ultra-wealthy private citizens who like to keep what they do to themselves.”

She frowned this time. “It’s illegal?”

He shook his head. “I think we operate in a gray area sometimes, but I don’t take jobs that I know are shady. My last assignment got a little sketchy, but we were already on the ground when I figured that out.”

Why did she love the sound of his voice so much—the sound she’d craved to hear again for so long? “Oh. Where do you do these jobs?”

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