Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 128307 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 513(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128307 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 513(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
I gaze at him, mouth open, and with fresh tears welling in my eyes.
He said our son.
Not mine.
Not his.
Ours.
Overcome by emotion, I grab his shirt and kiss him as I’ve always dreamed. Grayson’s lips part after a single lash of my tongue, igniting me with searing heat.
I kiss him with everything I have. I pour my heart and soul into our embrace.
It is gentle and full of love, but also passionate.
In seconds, we get carried away in its bliss.
Each lick, moan, and nip soothes the cracks of betrayal—for both of us.
It is an embrace that’s full of hope and healing, and a promise of something new. It goes above and beyond anything I could have ever imagined, and it has me tempted to pinch myself again.
Several long minutes later, we break apart. Not by choice, but because a nurse enters my room, uncaring that she’s interrupting what should be an uninterruptible moment. She has the right. She saw what took Grayson and me years to stop denying. She saw a love so strong that it would overcome any obstacle placed in its path.
I will make sure of it.
After dumping a stack of patient records onto the table where a jug of water sits, Adeline commences checking my vitals, as if the increase in my heart rate has nothing to do with Grayson’s awe-inspiring kiss. She asks all the right questions for a student nurse and checks my bumps and grazes, but when she leaves my room without the patient records she brought in, I realize how deeply undercover our team is this time around.
The patient records are in a foreign language, but even a rookie agent could deduce that there’s enough evidence of an active baby-making syndicate peeking out of the first file to make our son’s demands for hourly nighttime feedings seem like a walk in the park.
39
GRAYSON
Eight weeks. That’s how long it’s been since I almost lost Macy. Eight weeks since she fought with everything she had to find a way back to me—back to us. Eight weeks since I thought the weight of Cameron’s lies would swallow us whole.
I ought to have known better. Macy is too strong to let someone as immorally barren as Cameron pull her down. She took what we learned from the thousands of lies our team unraveled about Cameron’s new life while I maintained a candlelight vigil at her bedside and rewrote the procedural manual all agents refer to while working this deeply undercover.
She had every right to be angry, to be bitter, but instead of letting the ugliness of the hateful world that almost claimed her life twist her into someone who trusted no one and cared about nothing, she did the opposite. She refused to let evil win, and her strength and determination over the past eight weeks have encouraged me to do the same.
When Cameron refused to speak to anyone but me, still of the belief she could play my guilt like a fiddle, I could have built walls so high that nothing could ever reach me. I didn’t, because Macy was there, anchoring me through the storm.
She told me it is okay to be angry, that there’s no shame in admitting that Cameron’s betrayal hurt me. But not once was I allowed to let her choices change who I am.
I always knew Macy was strong, but that day, in a county jail a few miles out of San Diego, it hit me like a bolt of lightning. I’m not just in love with this beautifully smart and stubborn woman. I am obsessed with her. She is the entirety of my universe, and I will die before I will ever allow an emotion like regret or guilt stop me from ensuring she knows that.
I tune back in to the briefing on an upcoming undercover operative when a techie asks Macy to sound check the listening device woven into the underwire of her bra.
We’ve run stings like this a hundred times already, but this is different since it isn’t officially under the bureau’s umbrella. We’re twenty clicks over the Mexican border. The air smells different here. It’s dirtier and full of possibilities. It smells like controversy—the exact scent we chase while hunting trafficking syndicates.
Although Macy will never admit it, I can tell she’s nervous. This is her first undercover sting since one almost irrevocably changed her life. She didn’t sustain long-term side effects from her assault, but she’s a mother and a partner now. That changes everything.
She’s also juggling a ton of balls. Even the most seasoned agent would be a little on edge.
Don’t misconstrue what I’m saying. Despite the files we were gifted weeks ago not holding the name we seek, Macy will still give this case her all. Every woman we bring home puts us one step closer to finding Kendall.