The Negotiator (Professionals 7)

“I’ll deal with Bellamy and Fenway,” he said, a promise in his voice, and I didn’t want to ever be on the receiving end of a man like Quin’s wrath. “But, for fuck’s sake, Miller, you’re fucking a man who held you against your will? What the hell is going on with you?”

“I don’t have a good answer to that. It just… happened. A lot has happened since that day on the yacht, Quin. And I think we can all agree that worry over a loved one can make us do crazy things we wouldn’t normally ever even consider. I mean, can you look me in the face, and tell me with one-hundred-percent certainty that if someone took Aven, you wouldn’t move heaven and earth to bring her back? That if you heard about someone like me who could help, you wouldn’t do exactly what Christopher did?”

I knew he couldn’t.

“There are channels, Miller.”

“He didn’t have time.”

“We handle emergency situations every month, babe. No one is more equipped to handle setting up hostage negotiations on the drop of a dime than we are.”

“He didn’t know that. Or he didn’t want to risk us telling him no. And he had Bells there in his ear saying he could cut out the middle man. I think we both can see why he did it this way.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s right.”

“No,” I agreed, nodding.

“And it doesn’t mean you should be able to look past it enough to fall into bed with him.”

As a general rule, not many people could bring me down. I had worked really hard to build myself up, made of materials no one could chip away at.

But Quin, the man who gave me a chance, the man who offered me a life I knew I never could have gotten without him; he could make me feel really small and really breakable.

“He has been good to me.”

“He’s kept you against your will.”

“To keep me safe.”

“I keep you safe,” Quin shot back, voice raising. “Gunner, Smith, Kai, Finn, Lincoln, and even fucking Ranger if need be, keep you safe. But he didn’t give you that option, did he?”

No, no he didn’t.

But at that point, I wasn’t even questioning him.

“Look, I get it,” he said, even though I really, really didn’t think he did. “Things have been survival, life and death. And he has fed you and clothed you and kept you alive. I understand how that can foster feelings that the Miller I know, the Miller I helped train, the Miller I have worked side-by-side with for years, would never feel toward someone who did this to her. And I am asking you to see this situation through the eyes of the woman you were just a couple weeks ago.”

That was the problem, wasn’t it?

I wasn’t the woman I was a couple of weeks ago. So much had changed. Parts of me had opened up. I let down guards. I learned new skills, explored new passions.

I learned that a man could be a hard and a soft place, somehow, at the same time. I learned that they could actually want me for more than a night. And that I could want them for more than that as well.

I couldn’t think like the Miller from a few weeks ago. Because I wasn’t her anymore.

“Mills,” Quin tried, voice going softer, eyes pleading with me. “You have to leave with me. You see that, right? You have to come home.”

“Chernev is holding a grudge against me,” I told him, unable to say what he wanted to hear.

“And you more than anyone else, knows that we are equipped not only to keep you safe, but to chase that bastard down, and take him out. I know you have some sort of… feelings for that man in there,” he said, casting angry eyes at the house. “But you know that we are better at this than he is.”

That was likely true.

We were, after all, the people that men and women like Christopher turned to when they couldn’t solve their own problems. Precisely because we were good at it, because we could produce the results desired.

And if Quin—not to mention Smith and Gunner and Kai and Lincoln and Ranger—wanted Chernev rooted out and strung up, that was exactly what they would get. They wouldn’t rest until it happened.

“You have a life, Miller,” he tried, voice softer, more coaxing. “I get you maybe had some fun with this guy, but you need to come back to your life.”

The thing was, he was right, wasn’t he?

I had a job.

I had a home.

I had friends.

I had a life.

And it was half the world away.

And I knew better than to put my everything into a man. I’d seen the blowback of that many, many times in my career. When it ended. And, let’s face it, it usually ended. The deck was stacked against love and relationships. People changed. Life tore them apart. And there would be devastation and uncertainty.