Page 125 of Possession

My wife…

There’s nothing fake about Landyn. That’s why I introduced her to my mom as my wife.

Introducing her as anything else, felt wrong.

Doing it felt right. It felt good.

Landyn looked shocked for about two beats, but after that, she fell into place.

By my side.

A place I want her to be when I’m me.

We leave the way we entered, and Micah looks up and down the hall as I pull out the keycard to unlock our hotel door. I hold Landyn close when he enters the room first and does a sweep before I pull her inside.

Landyn tosses her purse on the desk and opens her big-ass suitcase. “I need to brush my teeth.”

She doesn’t look at me or Micah, but I grab her hand to stop her on the way to the bathroom holding an enormous bag of girl shit and pajamas.

“Thank you.” I lean down and press my lips to her forehead.

She nods as a small, weary smile tugs at her lips. She glances at Micah giving my hand a squeeze and pulls away. The bathroom door clicks and locks.

Micah glares at me and lowers his voice. “Have you lost your mind and all sense of reality?”

I yank my shirt from my pants and start to unbutton it. “I just sat with my mom in the ICU for hours. I think I have a pretty good grasp on reality right now.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

I push past him as I get out of this damn shirt and rip my belt off. “I’m exhausted, Micah. You can pretend all you want that you’re a machine and can work for days on end, but you need to get some sleep if we’re going to do this all over again tomorrow night. And I have a dinner meeting with Alamandos’ biggest distributor on the east coast tonight to justify this trip. I need to be on top of my game.”

“Yeah, you do,” he bites and eats up half the distance between us but points back to the bathroom. “And that is not the way to stay on top of your game. That is going to distract you. I can tell you’re not seeing straight as it is.”

I shrug my shirt down my arms and toss it on a chair in the corner of the room. “I’ve never been sharper. If anything, she’s made me hone in to get this shit done. I’m close, Micah. So fucking close, I can taste it. Once I find out who killed Brian, I’m pulling the trigger.”

He shakes his head. “You can’t go back with her. She knows everything. Even if she is loyal to you—and that’s a big fuckingif, bro—she has no fucking clue how to work a case. How to pretend.”

I can’t lie, this is something I’ve thought about, but I’m not about to admit that to anyone. “She’ll be fine.”

“Everyone in that world is paranoid. They’d turn on their fucking dog if they thought it would snitch on them.”

“She can handle it, and I can handle her,” I assure him.

Micah drags a hand through his shaggy hair. I know I’ve been gone for two years, but he’s pushing his I-don’t-give-a-fuck mentality closer to the edge than I’ve ever seen.

“I don’t like it,” he bites.

I toss my belt on top of my shirt. “It’s not yours to like. We’ve been up for almost twenty-four hours. Landyn needs sleep, and I’m positive she won’t come out of that bathroom until you’re gone.”

Micah’s long sigh is nothing but frustration mixed with exhaustion, proving he is human after all. “Call me when you wake up. We’ve got an agent sitting at the end of the hall in case you need anything. I’ll get you back to the hospital tonight before you fly out tomorrow. Promise me you’ll think about what I said.”

Micah and I don’t always see eye to eye, but he’s always had my back. That still doesn’t mean I have to promise him shit. “Thanks for being here for my family. You know what that means to me. I’ll see you tonight.”

“You’re fucking frustrating,” he mutters as he turns for the door.

He’s gone, and I barely have a chance to flip the deadbolts when the bathroom door opens and blue eyes peer around it. She looks me up and down before asking, “Is he gone?”

I nod. “I swear, he’s not always an asshole.”

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