She pulls back, hands on my shoulders, and looks at me straight on. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for me.”

“It was nothing,” I say, my cheeks heating up a bit.

She scoffs. “It was everything to me.”

My cheeks heat up and she releases me, motioning toward the table. “Sit down. You want a cup of coffee?”

“That would be great,” I answer as I move to take a seat.

“I’ll grab the coffee and rolls,” Tacker offers, and I do a double-take. He truly has changed. “You two sit and talk.”

Nora saunters to Tacker, puts her hand on his hip, and rises on her tiptoes to kiss him. He closes his eyes to receive her lips, and my heart flutters in response to their love. For a moment—a mere wisp of time—I think perhaps I might want that someday.

Then stark reality slaps me in the face, a reminder I did try it once. Love had shit all over me—so badly I will gladly go without that kind of devotion, thank you very much.

“Sit,” Nora says as she heads to the table.

I pull out a chair, plop into it, and remove my iPad from my cross-body satchel. “I brought you some photos.”

Nora freezes, butt halfway to the padded chair beside me, her eyes wide with surprise.

I turn on the tablet. “I spent some time in Albania and Kosovo, including the Drenica Valley.”

Nora finally lowers herself. Sucking in a deep breath, she releases it slowly.

“If you’d rather not,” I offer quickly. It never occurred to me that she might not want to see the area that had once been her home. When Tacker invited me out, he’d said Nora was hungry for information on Kosovo and what it was like today. She’d not been back since she left twenty years ago.

“No,” she exclaims, giving me a confident smile. “I do want to see them. It’s more than I ever thought would be possible. I mean… you finding my family’s graves and—”

She trails off as it’s a heavy moment. I had, indeed, located the graves. Two of them—the massive hole in the ground they’d unceremoniously tossed the rebels’ bodies into after they were slaughtered, and the decent burial sites the international peace workers gave them years later. I took a lot of photographs of both, along with some of the beautiful countryside, old buildings, and interesting people.

With the help of the embassy, I had also gotten the ball rolling on figuring out how to get Nora’s family disinterred and moved to the United States to be buried on Shërim Ranch alongside her adoptive mother, Helen Wayne. It’s the main reason I thought Nora and Tacker wanted me to come out today, so I could tell them everything I’d learned.

“I can’t imagine the horrors you suffered,” I say. Dax had told me all about it and if I’d had to watch my family be gunned down, I’m not sure I could have survived it the way Nora had. “So, I’m not sure if these photographs will be healing or not. But they are beautiful. Albania is gorgeous, as I’m sure you remember. And the people there are just as beautiful. We could start with those if you want.”

It’s where she was born. My understanding is she didn’t live there long before her family moved to Kosovo, but it’s still her heritage.

“Yes, please,” she says eagerly, but her voice tremors slightly. Tacker comes up behind her, leaning to place two cups of coffee on the table. He presses a kiss to the top of her head as his eyes come to mine. I can tell he’s glad I brought pictures and he obviously thinks it will be good for her.

For the next hour, we nibble on cinnamon rolls as we scroll through my footage. I only go as fast as Nora wants me to, starting with her childhood country of Albania before she bravely moves on to Kosovo. She studies every single picture, sometimes in silence and other times telling Tacker and me about a happy moment she remembers. It brings tears to her eyes, which makes mine reciprocate. Tacker holds her hand the entire time.

I finish the last sip of my second cup of coffee, the iPad off now as we chitchat about the playoffs.

“Where are you off to next?” Tacker asks as Nora rises to take the empty plates and cups to the sink.

I slide my tablet into my satchel. “Actually, I just had an offer come through for a job in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

“Why? What’s there?”

I grimace. “War, pestilence, starvation… the usual. In this case, however, unrest over upcoming elections.”

“Is it dangerous?” Nora asks.

“Could be,” I reply with a smile. “But that’s just part of the job.”

“The part you like,” Tacker guesses.

While it’s true I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie, I don’t enjoy putting my life in danger. I just happen to love my job so much it’s a risk I have to take.

Tags: Sawyer Bennett Arizona Vengeance Romance
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