“But you’re not willing to step away from the edge,” she said.
“No, I’m not.”
“And you wouldn’t want me to ask you to.”
“No.”
“That’s selfish,” she contended. “Unfair.”
“Yes.”
Her gaze narrowed on him. “I comprehend what you’re saying, what you’re feeling. The inherent fear of losing someone you care for. It can be debilitating. It can destroy you.”
He gave a slight nod. “I’ve lost agents I’ve worked closely with. It’s mentally destructive. Someone like you…could have helped me through it a bit easier than what I suffered with.”
“Because I know what it’s like—not just in theory, not just from a medical or clinical standpoint, but from a personal one?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.”
She gave this further thought. They were skirting the issue of what was developing, personally, between them.
Possibly. Or perhaps all of this was so intricately entwined that acknowledging their attraction to each other and discussing her job and his job/his trauma and this so-called safe space were actually one and the same—all wrapped around each other.
She had difficulty dissecting the components at the moment. But offered another truth. Perhaps an invaluable one.
She said, “I once told Kate that if I’d known Conner?
?s fate, I still wouldn’t have begged him not to rescue all of those people, not to be anywhere near that fire and that canyon.” She gazed intently at Damen. “I lied. To my best friend and therapist. To myself, even.”
“Of course you lied. You wouldn’t have wanted him facing his own death.”
“Others would have died, though. So…what kind of a monster does that make me to feel this way?”
“You’re not a monster, Nikki,” he said with conviction as his eyes darkened. “You’re human. You loved him and you didn’t want anything to happen to him. Naturally, you would have been compelled to use that knowledge to try to save his life.”
Tears stung her eyes. “I don’t want to be held hostage by my fear of losing someone else. But I still feel it so strongly.”
“So do I.”
They continued to gaze at each other. Nikki got where he was coming from.
It put them at an impasse and yet…
Her fingers on his stomach eased upward, to his pecs.
Yes, it’d been forever since she’d kissed a man—and forever since she’d touched one like this. Intimately.
Her palm flattened over his chest. His jaw tightened.
She said, “I do things to you.”
“More than you can possibly know.”
“You want to tell me about it.”
“I want to show you,” he corrected her.