“Really? It’s serious between the two of you?”
“I love her.”
Jake grinned. “Well, I’ll be… I’m pleased. I think. Shocked but pleased.” His phone rang and he picked up, listened, his expression blank, then he shoved the phone back in his pocket.
“What was that about?” Zach asked. He had a bad feeling about this.
Jake shook his head. “I’ll be right back.”
Zach watched him go, the door swinging shut behind him. He wanted to follow, but the doctor was bandaging his arm and he couldn’t move. “Crap.”
…
Dani glanced down at her hands. Her fingers were still shaking and she tightened them into a fist, not wanting Jake to see just how scared she was. “How could you let him do this?” she snarled as soon as the door shut behind him.
Jake cast her a glance and raised an eyebrow. “Actually, it wasn’t my idea.”
Dani ignored the comment. Jake was the security expert, so it didn’t matter whose idea it was—he should have stopped it. “He could have been killed.”
“He was wearing a vest.”
“And what if they’d shot him in his thick head instead?”
“But they didn’t,” Jake pointed out mildly. “You can go in and see him. The doctor is just finishing up.”
Dani pursed her lips, considering her next words. “I don’t plan on seeing him.” She dug a hand into her bag and pulled out the note she’d written in the taxi driving over here. The note she’d written when she realized she really couldn’t see Zach again. What they needed was a clean break and both of them to admit that it was never going to work. Zach had shown that when he’d excluded her out of tonight’s event, when he’d told her he loved her and then gone out and risked his life. Why torment herself further?
A shaft of pain stabbed her right through the heart, but she ignored the pain and slapped the paper into Jake’s hand. “Give him this.”
Dani blinked back the tears that threatened to spill over. She hadn’t cried in years, and she had no intention of starting now. She had to stay strong a little while longer, then she could get to Jess’s place, go hide in the spare room, and bawl her eyes out.
Jake was staring at her, his disapproval almost palpable as she picked up her case. He glared at the paper in his hand but made no move to head into Zach’s room. Instead, he leaned against the wall in the corridor, his eyes narrowed on her. “You’re leaving him?”
“I was never really with him, Jake. It was just sex.”
“Don’t be more stupid than you have to be. He loves you. He maybe should have told you about tonight, but get over it. It’s done, and he’s safe.”
The tight grip of fear that had held her since the newsflash loosened its hold, and she almost sagged.
He was safe.
She hadn’t really believed it until now. She’d thought Jake was hiding the truth, or he was dead or… Her mind had conjured up a whole load of horrible scenarios, each worse than the last.
Now the fear slid away.
Leaving her pissed. And that felt so much better.
She pursed her lips. “He loves me? So much that he keeps me out of the most important decision of his life?”
“He wanted you safe.”
“Well, maybe I didn’t want to be safe. Maybe I wanted to be there, so when some fuckwit of a terrorist shot him in the head, I could have held his hand, heard his last dying breaths. But no, it was okay for Jess to risk her life, but little old me had to be tucked away safe in the hotel room.”
A look of relief passed over Jake’s face, and his lips curled in a slow smile.
“What?” she snarled.
“I like you better when you’re angry.”
“Well, good. I always aim to please. Not. Tell me something.”
“Yes?” He sounded wary now.
“Would you keep something like this from Kim?”
“If you’d asked me three months ago, I would have said yes. Now, she’d kill me, and I respect her too much to keep her in the dark.”
She raised her brows, and he sighed. “You’re right. He should have told you. Are you going in there?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I go in there now, I’ll punch him in the nose and that’s probably not a good thing when he’s just been shot.”
“And are you ever going back?”
“I’m reenlisting tomorrow.” And she stalked away.
…
Zach held his breath as the door opened, then released it as Jake’s tall figure filled the opening. “Where is she?”
“Gone.”
At that moment, the doctor finished bandaging Zach’s arm and moved away. “There. You’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll get a prescription for some painkillers, but otherwise you’re good to go.”
Zach waited until he’d left the room. “What the fuck does ‘gone’ mean?”
Jake strolled across the floor, his face expressionless, and handed Zach a crumpled piece of paper.
“What’s this?”
“A note. From Dani.”
Zach smoothed the note, his eyes narrowing as he read.
Zach,
I was happy tonight. I planned to tell you I loved you, that I’d be whatever you wanted me to be.
Then I heard you’d been shot.
I thought you were dead and everything flashed in front of me. Sam. My parents. I can’t do that again. But more than that, I don’t want to do that again.
Then I planned to lie and tell you that I didn’t love you, but that’s not true and not fair. So I love you, but really that’s irrelevant. I think we both knew this was never going to work. We’re too different, and we’re both terrified of commitment, and when you get back to your real life, you’ll realize this is for the best.
I’m reenlisting tomorrow.
Good-bye
Dani
He screwed the letter up and threw it against the wall.
Chapter Eighteen
The anger had drained away by the time she reached Jess’s apartment.
Jess opened the door, took one look at her face, and said nothing, just dosed her with enough whiskey to knock out an elephant and tucked her up in bed. No doubt, her best friend was feeling guilty about her part in tonight’s fiasco, but Dani felt too wrung out to even consider recriminations.
She spent the night wondering if Zach was hurting, interspersed with flashbacks of that moment when she’d realized he’d been shot. At one point, she leaped out of bed, raced for the bathroom, and threw up the whiskey. Then she huddled under the blankets, shivering and missing Zach’s arms around her. They hadn’t spent a night apart since Scotland.