I stop abruptly. When I make a move to rise, Connor throws his leg over me and pins me down.
“No way,” he says softly. “You’re not running away from me, Tabby. Not anymore.”
I close my eyes and turn my head.
“Don’t hide from me,” he urges, squeezing me. “Tell me what you wanted.”
I’m breathing fast and hard, choking on so many feelings, it’s hard to decide which one is worst. And maybe because I know in a few hours it’s possible that this chapter of my life will finally be closed, or because I’ve been slowly revealing myself to Connor, one crumb at a time, tiny truth-chunks that he’s always gobbled up, but I don’t want to hide from him anymore. At least, not right now.
Right now, I want there to be no walls between us.
For this one wild moment, I want to let him in.
I look at him. I let him see everything. All the pain and confusion, all the hope and tenderness and absolute terror of getting too close. In a raw, shaking voice, I say, “I just wanted to belong to someone.”
Connor’s face goes through a dozen expressions before it settles on adoration. He breathes, “And now you do.”
He kisses me so passionately, I’m stunned.
I flatten my hands on his chest and push him away.
We break apart and stare at each other in throbbing silence, both of us breathing raggedly. Finally, I whisper, “What did you say?”
Connor’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. “You heard me.”
“Say it again.”
Connor wraps his hands around my wrists. He carefully peels my hands from his chest, lowers them to the pillow above my head so he’s on top of me, his chest pressed to mine, his nose inches from mine. Staring into my eyes, he says firmly, “You belong to me. You belong with me. You’re mine, and I’m never letting you go.”
There’s a long, tense silence.
Then I burst into tears.
“Goddammit!” I sob. “You asshole! Look what you did!”
Connor kisses me all over my red, wet face, murmuring soothing words that I only catch snippets of because I’m bawling like a damn baby. He releases my wrists, and I fling my arms around his broad shoulders and bury my face in his neck.
“Love your tears, princess, ’cause I know you’d never give them to anyone but me,” he murmurs into my ear. For once, I don’t mind that he used that forbidden four-letter word.
I let him hold me and listen to his sweet, beautiful words, wondering through my tears and hiccupping breaths if this is what religion is like for some people, all this awe and mystery and the feeling of having found your way home.
Sometime shortly after my tears slow to sniffles, we fall asleep in each other’s arms.
And sometime after that, I wake up sweating, with a pounding heart and an awful premonition that something is terribly wrong.
On the table beside the bed, Connor’s cell phone rings. He’s awake instantly, snatching it up.
“Talk to me,” he commands.
He listens. After a moment, he wordlessly ends the call. When he looks at me, I know. I already know.
“S?ren,” I whisper, my heart in my throat.
Connor’s body is completely still. In the shadows, his eyes shine with a strange, deadly light. “The team in Miami that went in to get him…” He hesitates. “It was an abandoned house. The place was rigged with explosives.”
Horrified, I gasp. I bolt upright and clutch his arm. “Oh my God. How many were hurt?”
“Nine agents went in.”
“How many came out?”
Connor says simply, “None.”
Twenty-Seven
Connor
On the ride to the studio, Tabby is silent. Unnervingly silent, like she might have lost the ability to speak. I keep her hand tightly wrapped in mine, but in spite of that physical connection, there’s a chasm between us. She’s beside me, but she’s a million miles away.
I sense that somehow, with some twisted logic that only makes sense to her, she’s blaming herself for what happened.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I say as gently as I can.
We’re stopped at a red traffic signal only a few blocks from the studio. Her face is lit crimson, bathed in a devilish light. She doesn’t answer me. She doesn’t even blink. She just stares through the windshield into the gray dawn of early morning, her face as white as chalk beneath the traffic light’s eerie glow.
“Tabby—”
“I should have known it was too easy. I should have known it was a trap.”
Her voice is flat. Empty, like she’s dead inside. I squeeze her hand, but she doesn’t squeeze back.
When we drive into the parking structure at the studio, she’s out of the car and striding across the dark lot before I’ve even turned the engine off, leaving the passenger door wide open behind her.
“Tabby! Wait!” I curse when she ignores me.