Shield (Greenstone Security 2)

“You know I’d never fuckin’ arrest you, Rosie,” he rasped. “You know.”

He pressed the weight of his last visit heavily on the air, without saying anything.

I breathed heavily, gazing at him through hooded eyes. “Do I, Luke? I would think it’d be a prize, arresting one of the big bad outlaws.”

“You’re not one of them,” he clipped.

I glared. “Yes I am. That’s exactly what I am. You just can’t reconcile that in your head. What do you want me to be, Luke?”

He stayed silent, eyeing me, not answering.

“Yeah,” I whispered, then stepped back, not caring about it being a sign of weakness at that point. “You’re so convinced that I couldn’t belong to something you think is so evil just because it’s not normal. It’s spectacular. Not always good, not always bad, never fitting into labels like that.”

My eyes found his cruiser, parked at the curb. I wondered how many people would see that, how long it would take to get back to the club. My gaze went to the perfectly manicured lawns beyond it.

“Look at it.” I thrust my hand outward.

“At what?” Luke’s eyes didn’t move from me, seeming like he wouldn’t move that gaze if the world was burning around us.

Or maybe that was just another little fantasy.

“This fucking lifestyle you’re trying to preserve,” I said. “This hamster wheel that begins with preschool, elementary, high school, college. Then a shitty entry-level job. Find a woman, one who maybe started out okay, but then due to constant demands, leaving the seat up, kids who ruin her vagina, a husband who ruins her identity, she gets shitty too. And then both of those people grow to hate each other, resent their kids, and hate themselves most of all. And they work at it, all of it, until they die.” I wrenched my gaze away from the yards back to Luke’s eyes. “And they’re all wearing masks. All so fucking unhappy. That’s what you’re trying to enforce. A life like that. You’re trying to destroy people who refuse to get on the hamster wheel, who refuse to settle for shitty and decide to look for spectacular instead. You’re trying to ruin that because it fucks with your status quo. It’s anarchy, and you live for order. You enforce order, so you have to destroy the spectacular. If I have anything to do with it, you won’t. Because that’s destroying me too, whether you choose to believe it or not. I’m anarchy too. You’re order. Let’s see who wins. I’m thinking it’ll be neither, but I’ll be okay with that.”

“Rosie…,” Luke said, his voice almost a whisper, all professional façade crumbling away with my words.

I didn’t react. “Get back in your cruiser, Deputy. To your order. You won’t find that here.”

He looked at me for the longest moment, too long. Too short too.

Then he turned on his heel and left.

Emerging from the memory, I sat there staring at the rapidly disappearing images of Luke and me, of the variety of interactions that had both broken and swelled my heart, if that was even possible.

I sipped my wine, hating that I was so fucking stubborn. Why didn’t I find him? He was in the same city, for fuck’s sake. It would be a lot better than sitting on my own, drinking a glass of wine and feeling sorry for myself like Bridget fucking Jones.

But then I thought of the image with that starlet. Of his life he was trying to rebuild that didn’t have broken girls with wild hearts and chaotic lives blowing everything up with the drama that came with her.

That was her.

That was me.

So I sat there, drinking my wine, pining after a guy I couldn’t have, like a million other women.

So fucking cliché.

Chapter Thirteen

One Month Later

Settling into civilian life—well, my version of civilian life—was hard.

Hard for a variety of reasons. Killing people and risking your life on a daily basis became my norm for six months. Not just that, it somehow felt natural amongst the unnatural feeling of heartbreak and loneliness.

It jolted me, waking up somewhere I didn’t have a chance of being shot at, raped or murdered.

It wasn’t even that.

It was because when life and death was my nine-to-five, it made it easier not to let myself be consumed by my heart. Not impossible, because he was always there, even in the midst of the worst of it, but not so demanding in the forefront of my mind.

Because I’d replaced the blood I’d made him spill with the blood that I spilled. Waking up in a warm bed, in my own apartment, in my own country was not just a level of monotony but another level of Hell.

Because I’d stopped running. I had the memory of his skin on mine. His touch. His taste. How perfect he fit me. How utterly safe I felt in his arms. And it took everything I had just to function without showing what a fucking wreck I was.