She laughed softly. “Damn, you’re funny, Borg.”
“I don’t think I’ve been accused of that before. Besides,” he continued, “your house was too exposed. The cabin too far away. A hotel too impersonal. You needed rest.”
“What do you mean my house is too exposed? You think they will come after me even with Maldonado dead?”
“I don’t think so. No narco’s empire is built on blind trust and loyalty. Once the king is down, the fights will start to crown a new king, and that one won’t give a rat’s ass what happened to the last one. Heck, he’d probably be thankful to you for it, but I didn’t want to risk it, because if Maldonado had been alive, he’d have gone there to search for you. As it is now, with him dead, you’re off the hook. Attending the Diablos event and unhooding for that crying kid wasn’t the most brilliant of ideas, but I’ll grant you it worked out pretty well. Now you don’t need to testify. You’re free,” he continued. “You don’t have to put up with me anymore.”
The air got so thick, she had difficulty breathing.
Going for light, she shrugged. “Putting up with you had its perks.”
Jack’s laughter rumbled through her body.
She lifted her head to him. Yes, the whole nightmare with Maldonado was over, she was free from that, but did she want to be free of Jack?
“About that.” She cleared her throat. She wasn’t sure how to say this. She wasn’t used to having to spell it out for guys. The intense way he was staring at her wasn’t helping either.
But they’d been through so much together. She’d seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of him. And he’d sure as hell gotten closely acquainted with all her sides. She’d told him things she hadn’t opened up about with anybody else, not even her sister. Yes, they had their sticking points, but what worthwhile relationship didn’t? She couldn’t quite believe she was using the words “Jack” and “relationship” in the same sentence, but there it was.
She wanted to reach out for him because it felt right, even if she might get her hand chopped off, so she caressed his cheek. “From one to ten, how bad was it to be around me?”
A smile flashed on his otherwise severe face. “Let’s recap: you’ve yelled at me and accused me of being married to my sister, you ditched me to go to work, disposed of my tracking bugs. You got me dressed up like a devil, tail included. I almost beat the shit out of everybody in the gym and had a heart attack during your twerking class. Actually, you’ve given me several heart attacks. You made me lose all my marbles and fuck you in a public parking lot—”
“And a boxing ring,” she added.
“True. You had me drive all over Boston to make it to a flash mob in the middle of a busy intersection. You shortened my life span by fifteen years, at the very least. So from one to ten, ten being the worst? Twelve, pet. Being involved with you has been a twelve.”
She grimaced. “That bad?”
“Yeah. It was that fucking bad because it was that fucking good.”
What the hell did that mean? Whatever. In for a penny, in for a pound. “Who says we have to stop seeing each other?”
He snorted. “Common sense? This was just a temporary arrangement.”
“I know, but circumstances change, right?”
“Nothing has changed,” he said, the lightness suddenly disappearing from his tone.
“For me it has.” Elle tried to ignore his forbidding stare and the silence and forged ahead. “I know I’m not exactly what you’re searching for, but let’s face it, you won’t find it in this century,” she said with a smile. “And I am a way better option: I do exist. I’m real. Not to mention you also need some work, you know, in the human interface department, which I’m ready to take on.”
Her attempts at joking didn’t get her anywhere. His face was inscrutable.
For some reason, she felt unsure for the first time around Jack, and, pulling at the sheet, she covered herself.
“I can drive you a bit crazy, and you press so many of my buttons you make me see red, but we haven’t killed each other. The good trumps the bad.” There she went, taking the huge leap of faith. Hoping he’d catch her. “I don’t believe I’m saying this, but I really like you and I think we have something worth pursuing here. It’s undeniable that the chemistry between us is off the charts. I enjoy spending time with you, in a weirdly masochistic sort of way, but I do. And I’d say you do too. Now that we don’t have all that life-and-death stuff hanging over our heads, we could give this a go. See where it takes us. Start light and do normal things normal people do. I know a little Italian restaurant that could take a short-notice reservation for dinner tomorrow. What do you say?”
“We agreed there was no future for this.”
“Walking away from each other is probably the smartest thing to do, but I don’t want to. I really, really don’t want to.”
“I do,” he said curtly.
O-kay.
There, her hand chopped off.
Her whole head, actually.