Chapter 28
Despite being a complete and utter pain in the ass, Tenley was great at her job.
She’d managed not to trip any of the home’s obvious alarms, or any of Eric’s hidden ones, all while getting several listening devices placed strategically throughout the home.
She also got photographic evidence of everything in the hidden basement room and managed to put it all back exactly where it had been.
Meanwhile, Ren had coded a program to monitor the data from the devices and pull out any snippets that included a huge list of spy trigger words.
If Eric and Stella said anything suspicious from here on out, Cole and Hadley would be notified.
They could take all their information to Franklin whenever they wanted.
All in all, the mission was going swimmingly so far.
But…
Something wasn’t right.
Cole could feel it. Something that Stella said had made him uneasy and he couldn’t quite put a finger on it. There was some puzzle piece he hadn’t placed yet.
So, he stayed silent and pondered it while Hadley washed their dinner dishes and he dried them. The mindless task should’ve helped him figure everything out. It didn’t.
Mostly because Hadley’s shoulder kept bumping against him while she worked, driving him to distraction. Which was just sad. One graze of her skin and whiff of her perfume and he was suddenly a brainless twat.
“Can we talk about something serious?” she asked.
His blood ran cold and all thoughts of Stella, Eric, and the mission evaporated. This was it. Hadley was going to tell him she thought their night together had been a horrible mistake. And she was right. She deserved better. He knew that.
It was still going to fucking suck to hear it, though. Especially after the apparently swoon-worthy tale of how Eric and Stella met and fell in love at first sight.
Pfffttt. Like that ever really happened.
Instalove was all about chemistry. Butterflies. Really falling in love meant so much more than that.
Real love is found in the quiet moments when nothing is happening and you still can’t think of anyone you’d rather be with.
It’s about trust. Letting someone hold your heart and knowing they won’t break it.
Love is when their happiness means more than your own.
It’s not about needing someone but wanting them with every piece of your soul.
Love is…messy and complicated but still somehow comfortable.
That’s when realization hit him between the eyes like a two-by-four.
Holy shit.
He loved Hadley. Even worse, he was in love with Hadley.
One night with her would never be enough.
She frowned at him. “Are you even listening to me?”
He swallowed hard. “Yeah,” he rasped.
“You’re being weird,” she muttered, and damned if he didn’t also love the way her little button nose wrinkled up when she called him weird.
He was so fucked.
“What’s on your mind?” he eventually managed to ask even though his throat felt like he’d been swallowing razor blades all day.
She dropped the dish brush into the soapy water and turned to face him, leaning a hip against the counter. Great. Now he was turned on by the fact that her breasts—the breasts of the woman he now knew he was in love with— had brushed his forearm.
This was getting worse by the minute. He was probably going to have a stroke or something by the time this conversation ended. He needed to calm the fuck down. He’d been in hostage situations that didn’t have him as discombobulated as he was right now.
“I don’t feel good about this anymore.”
He’d been expecting it and still, it was a knife in the heart to hear it. He swallowed hard. “I understand.”
She looked relieved. “You feel it too, right?”
The shooting, stabbing, crippling pain? The knowledge that he was about to lose what was maybe the only truly good thing he’d ever had in his life? “Yeah. Sure.”
Hadley let out a sigh. “I knew it. So, what are we going to do about it?”
Well, he didn’t know about her. But he was fairly certain he was going to die alone, mourning the loss of her until he was dropped into his grave. “I’m…not sure.”
“I’m not, either. But I definitely don’t feel right telling Franklin about any of this.”
That’s when he got his first inkling that maybe they were having two very different conversations. “Are you talking about this mission? About Stella and Eric?”
She blinked up at him. “Well, yeah. Why? What were you talking about?”
Was it possible for his heart to rip itself out of his ribcage and burst into a million gory pieces? Felt like maybe it was. “Um…doesn’t matter. Tell me more about what you’re thinking.”
“As Stella was talking about him, and after seeing them together, I just found myself wondering, what if Eric was just a guy who’d been given a terrible job to do, but decided he wasn’t going to do it? What if he’s just a guy trying to start over and live a normal life? A guy like…”
“Me,” he finished for her quietly.
Her eyes softened. “Exactly.”
“You don’t want to hand him over to Franklin,” he guessed. “You’re thinking about telling him we came up empty handed, or that there’s no sleeper agent in the neighborhood.”
She bit her lower lip. “What would happen if I was thinking all that?”
Nothing good. Of that he was certain. “We can’t fail. Franklin would make sure I disappeared and you took the fall for murder, but only after telling the Irish mafia you killed Darren and Liam.”
“You don’t think we could convince him his intel was wrong?”
Cole tossed the dishrag over his shoulder and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “In my experience, once Franklin gets something in his head, there’s not much that’ll change his mind.”
She nodded, shifting her glance down before raising her eyes to his once more. “What if we ran? I mean, what if we do what I think Eric did? Run and start a new life somewhere.”
His heart had just started to beat normally again, and here she was, trying to shock it back into dysrhythmia. “Do you mean…together?”
The look she gave him branded him the biggest idiot in the world.
“Duh. Of course I mean together! Why would I want to start up a new identity without you?” When he hesitated, her face fell.
“You’re worried about the one-night stand agreement, aren’t you?
Look, I know you don’t want commitment or a romantic relationship with me.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t run away together. Even if it’s just as frien—”
Cole snagged her by the back of the neck, yanked her into his arms, and crushed his mouth down on hers before she could finish saying that accursed word. How was it possible that her lips felt softer every time he kissed her? He could kiss her for days. Months. Years.
Forever.
But not yet. Because he just wanted to clarify, “You’d truly run away with me?
I’m talking about faking our deaths, having Ren create new identities for us, and disappearing together.
We could probably find a way to let your parents know the truth, but no one else could ever know the truth of who we are. You’re sure you’d be OK with that?”
The smile that lit up her face was damn near blinding and by far the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. “Yeah,” she whispered. “I’d run away with you in a heartbeat.”
Cole was anything but na?ve. He knew they had a lot more to talk about, not the least of which was their actual feelings for each other, because agreeing to run from the government together was not the same as a declaration of eternal love. But he wasn’t going to bring that up.
Not when he was so busy celebrating the fact that she wasn’t leaving him anytime soon.
“So, it’s settled,” he said. “We run. I’ll have Ren get started on our new identities.”
That’s when a new voice piped up with, “I mean, that’s the nuclear option. There is another way, though.”