Page 41 of Baby One Last Time
“Derek, I’m sorry.” I furrowed my brow in earnest. “I didn’t mean him. I meant his choice. I didn’t realize I was being so...”
“Worried about me?” He shook my hand with his. “It’s okay, Cynth. I get it. We all have our blind spots when it comes to our families. You weren’t wrong. He is a daredevil and he doesn’t always make good choices. But you’d love him.”
Well, damn. I didn’t doubt I would, but Derek had hinted at introducing us. A knife of regret sank into my chest as I realized I’d never meet the people Derek loved so much.
“How’s your family?” he asked. “Your mom and Aunt Anita?”
Letting him change the subject was easier than dissecting the emptiness that had settled over me when I thought about the Wilder clan. “They’re doing great. They love Seattle, especially Mom.”
“Is she finally ready to settle in one place?”
I nodded. “I think it’s possible. I didn’t think I’d ever see the day.”
“It’s a nice place to visit.” He tugged on my pinkie. “They don’t get much snow, though.”
Heat washed over my face and I closed my eyes for a minute. “Why did I ever tell you that stupid idea?”
“Because it’s not an idea, it’s a dream. Hey.”
I opened my eyes and looked at him. “It’s a fairytale about a place that probably doesn’t even exist.” I’d done more than dream about a quaint, snow-covered-in-the-winter little town where I could buy a cozy cottage. I’d been using my research skills to scour the Northeastern states in search of it.
“Nothing in New Hampshire?” Derek asked. He remembered my little side project, even though I’d only mentioned it once.
I shook my head. “I’m going to start looking in Vermont soon. Or maybe I won’t. Like I said, it probably doesn’t exist.”
He twisted to face me. “Whether it exists or not, it’s a safe place. That’s why you told me about it that night. You needed a safe place, even if only in your head, especially after the mission we’d been through.”
It had been the worst kind of job. The kind that involved kids. The perverts we’d taken down a few years earlier when I was still a Fed had accomplices we’d missed. Not only had the child trafficking ring rebounded, it had expanded. To contain it, the on-the-books agencies had brought in HEAT.
Derek and I had one of the easier assignments, focused on the shit-bags in charge of the operation. We weren’t responsible for extracting the kids, didn’t even lay eyes on any of them. But the cross-agency team was a tight-knit group and we heard the stories. Shit that haunts your nightmares. We it was over, we were both ordered to a month of company-mandated counseling and neither of us fought it.
“This fucking job,” I muttered. I took pranayama breaths—one of the things I’d carried away from my more recent mandated counseling—and stared at the lake, which had turned blood red with the sunset.
Derek slid his hand all the way into mine.
“I’m okay,” I said, even as I clung to his warm fingers. “I really have learned how to process things better.”
“I know,” he said. “I never doubted you would.”
I extricated my hand, and he shifted away from me.
“I should go,” he said, “and you should hit that running trail if you want to make it back in time for dinner.”
I tried to think of something clever to say, but the day had been too long and bleak. “Yeah, I need that run.”
Derek pushed off the bench. He walked a few feet away, then turned back toward me. “Hey Kessler, a word of advice from one Tactical op to another.”
I’d brought him here to give him my advice, but he’d turned the conversation back on me. So annoying. So Derek. One more thing I was going to miss about him. “What’s that?”
“When you’re in the tactical database, don’t go snooping around your own operations reviews. It’s too easy to take them out of context. That can mess with your head.”
My stomach clenched. He was guarding his expression. Did heknowI’d already done it, or did he suspect? Or was he actually trying to pass along helpful advice?
I pushed down thoughts of Jensen’s report and pasted on a half-smile. “Thanks for the ass-vice, Wilder.”
He shook his head, but also grinned as he turned to leave again.
The knife lodged firmly in my chest twisted, and my breath caught in my throat. Making him smile might be the thing I’d miss most, because the day was coming very soon when he would walk away from me for good.
