Mandy tilted her head. “Our son.”
He reached up to touch her hair. He pulled her in for a kiss. “Our son,” he said, smiling against her lips. She wrapped her arms around his neck. He felt as if he were kissing her for the first time all over again. Her mouth was warm and soft against his, her tongue sweet. After a long moment, he broke the kiss. “I hate to stop this, but I need to go talk to Kit.”
They both stood up, but she wrapped her arms around him in a tight hug that he was in no hurry to end. He smiled, loving the fact that she didn’t want to let him go. That, after everything he’d put her through. He rubbed her back. Zavi wasn’t the only one he needed to put back together. “Em—did you mean it when you said you’d marry me?”
She looked up at him and smiled. “Yes.”
He shut his eyes. “Thank God. Losing you would end me.”
She shook her head and touched his face. “You’re stronger than you give yourself credit for.”
“But not strong enough for that.”
*
Rocco grinned the whole way back to the big house. He walked outside as long as he could, heading straight for the den. He’d called ahead to make sure Kit came up. There would be time enough to tell the rest of the team his news—he wanted Kit to be the first to hear it. After all, it was his sister he was going to marry.
Rocco lifted his face to the sky, feeling the heat of the sun on his face as if for the first time in a long, long while. It was the same sun now as it had been the past few months. Why did it now have heat that he could feel? It was as if he’d been trapped in a bubble that had kept him cold and had dulled his senses. Fiona had said that she chose the sunshine when she was working through the shock of her trauma. He’d told her that he believed in sunshine, but he hadn’t at that point.
He did now. And it felt fucking fabulous. He was still grinning when he walked into the den.
“Aw, hell,” Kit snapped.
His soon-to-be brother-in-law was the only one in the den. Rocco smiled at him. Kit dug out his phone and started punching in a number. “Who are you calling?”
“Blade. I need backup. I think you finally broke.”
“Hang up. I’m cool.” His stupid grin weakened that assertion. “You talk to Max?”
“I talk to Max all the time.”
“He tell you about the fax I got?”
Kit pocketed his phone and studied him before answering. “No.”
Rocco pulled the folded paper out of his back pocket and handed it to Kit. His team lead skimmed the paper. He wasn’t fluent in French, but Rocco knew he could make out most of it. Kit and Blade, his longtime handlers in Afghanistan, had been well aware of the mission that had taken him away from Kadisha for those key months before her pregnancy.
Rocco knew the exact moment when Kit read the doctor’s determination of Kadisha’s pregnancy. Kit lowered the paper, lost in thought. He looked over at Rocco. “I thought she was two months along when she blew up the village.”
“She was four months. I wasn’t the father of her second child.”
Kit’s eyes widened. “Ehsan?”
“That’s my guess.”
“What made you remember this?”
Rocco caught him up on everything. He nodded toward the paper that Kit still held. “I sent her to see a doctor.”
“She lied to you.”
“Yeah. No matter how she looked at it, life as she knew it was over.” Rocco thought about what Kadisha had said as she handed Zavi to him. You did this. You killed us. He hadn’t been blameless, but he hadn’t been the one to blow up the village. Had she come to him, he would have helped her find a solution. He knew Ehsan had figured out who he was by then. He supposed that Kadisha knew Ehsan would never have her once her infidelity became known to the village. And likewise, she could never live with the shame of having married the enemy—an infidel—much less accept his help.
“It feels like the last few pieces just fell into place,” he said.
His team lead looked into his eyes. “You do seem different.”
“Mandy’s going to marry me.”
Kit grinned at that. “About fucking time, true?”
Rocco smiled. He didn’t tell Kit why this last missing piece almost broke him. He had told Mandy. What really mattered was that he understood it.
Kit held out his hand. They shook, then leaned in for a shoulder bump. “Glad you’re back in the land of the living, man. It was bad watching you die in front of my eyes, knowing there was nothing I could really do about it.” Kit smiled. “Imagine you marrying my redheaded monster sister.”
Rocco returned his smile. “I’m a lucky man. You can fill the team in on it if you want, but keep it on the down-low. I want to talk to Zavi before there’s a lot of chatter about it.”
Kit laughed. “Get it done. The team’s going to be pretty excited for this wedding.”
Chapter Twelve