Page 96 of Reckless Love

I cuddle closer, and I squeeze him. Relief that he’s here, that he’s all right, mixes with gratitude that I get to be like this with him again. Whatever occurred didn’t rob us of this second chance. “Will you tell me what happened?”

“That was the deal, wasn’t it?” He weaves his fingers into my hair, but it takes a while before he says anything more. “I can’t tell you who was involved. A lot of what I did for Owen internationally was top secret, and I don’t know, maybe some of our missions weren’t that legal. I didn’t ask a lot of questions. Now, my future is tied in a knot with Owen’s. He looks after me and mine, and I protect his reputation and the company’s.”

So much of me wants to be someone Stephen claims as his too. To be under the umbrella of his protection. When I was younger, I fought against Stephen’s claim of “you’re mine” whenever we’d come back together after a separation. But he was right. I was his. I’m still his. The idea that I could have ever been anyone else’s feels silly now, a childish notion. Like I didn’t really understand myself or us. He is as essential to me as breathing. If he’d died in the accident, I’d never have recovered. Even with time and distance between us, his death would have collapsed my lungs, left me gasping for life. No surgery or repair in the world would have been able to fix his loss.

“So you weren’t just a bodyguard?” I whisper, willing myself not to cry. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive and he’s mine again.

“Sometimes I was. Depended on what was needed. What I was willing to do. Which was everything when I first left. Nothing was too dangerous. In a lot of ways, I was lucky it took as long as it did for something bad to happen.”

“I need you to tell me. Just tell me.” Part of me doesn’t want to know, but I hate that anyone could ever know Stephen better than me, understand him more than me, map his history with greater accuracy than me.

He releases a deep sigh and plays with my hair for another couple of minutes before he says, “Short version or long version?”

“Long,” I say.

“You always did like all the details.”

“I liked being the one you told everything to. That I got to know you and your life in ways no one else could.” And I want that again, desperately. To me, tonight is the start. “I gave you all my ugly moments.”

“Fair enough,” he says. “I was in Russia. We had a very wealthy client who made some bad financial deals, which put his family in a sticky situation.” He swallows. “Standard bodyguard stuff. Or so Owen told us in the briefing before we went in. I’d been going from one high-risk situation to another, and this assignment was supposed to be contained, lower risk. Easy.”

When he pauses, I want to pepper him with questions, but if telling me feels anything like when I have to talk about the car accident, I understand his struggle. Retelling is reliving, which may be remembrance in its mildest form, but the feelings those memories stir up aren’t nothing.

“Right away, the situation wasn’t exactly as described, but that was… sometimes par for the course. People didn’t want to be honest about their dirty dealings. I was used to those half truths. The vibe on the compound was off too. Tense and paranoid. They wanted round-the-clock security from us, but they weren’t willing to pay the number of staff we’d need to make it airtight. Owen thought that was fine because the assignment scored as minimal risk on almost every metric. And after we’d been there a few weeks, I mostly agreed with Owen. But I should have trusted my initial gut feeling and had Owen pull us out. Client safety, our safety is supposed to be number one and two. With the way we were forced to run shifts and coverage, I couldn’t guarantee either of them.”

“Sounds like Owen should have done his job better.”

“He’s got regrets. We all do.” He runs his big hand along my spine in a soothing motion. “The morning it all went sideways, there’d been a last-minute schedule change for the family, which meant we were scrambling. Out of routine. The car we needed wasn’t where it was supposed to be. One of the other guys went to get it near the garage. Instead of sweeping the car for bugs or explosives, he just got in. Completely against protocol. Whatever extra sense I have switched to high alert, and I started running toward the car to remind him. That’s not the way we do things. And then the car exploded.” He makes a blow-up gesture with his hands. “My memory is pretty fragmented after that.”

“You don’t remember any of it?” Maybe that’s a blessing. The car accident is like that for me too. Snippets of memory that I’m not even sure are accurate.

“I haven’t talked about it a lot,” Stephen admits, his voice gruff. “Owen forced me into therapy after my physical injuries were sufficiently healed. Said he couldn’t have someone running the Bellerive division who was wounded physically and mentally.”

“These?” I ask, tracing the little scars on his cheek.

“Shrapnel from the car. Lucky I didn’t lose an eye.”

“You just woke up in a Russian hospital?”

He takes a deep breath, and his hand digs deep into my hair again. He kisses the top of my head. “I don’t know if I should tell you this.”

“I want to know.”

“One of the fragments of memory I have is… When I was fighting for consciousness, I thought you were there. I was so sure it was you. Long, dark hair, blue eyes, and I think I wanted it to be you. That if I was going to die, I wanted the last person I saw to be you.”

“Stephen,” I say, choking on tears.

“And I think I kept saying your name, asking this person, who I thought was you, not to leave me.” His voice is rough with emotion.

I almost can’t bear to hear more. To know I’m the reason he left, that he was in that situation because of me, and yet I was still the only person he wanted in that moment. Feels impossible for both realities to be true. He should have hated me. He should still hate me. Clutching him, I scoot forward to bury my face in his neck. “I’m so sorry.”

“You’re the reason I’m here, Ava. Every time I’d almost lose consciousness, I’d fight to come back because I didn’t want to give up the sight of you—or who I thought was you. More time. I just wanted more time. Later, in the hospital, I asked for you, and the doctor showed me a photo of the paramedic who’d worked on me—dark hair, blue eyes—not you. But that explosion didn’t just cause this… tremendous physical shift. The injuries. The concussion. The long recovery. That was all the outward stuff that people could see. Inside, I knew I needed to come back, see you, figure shit out.”

“Oh, god,” I whisper, realizing what he’d have learned about me.

“Then I got back to Bellerive, and Owen told me you were married to one of the richest men on the island. That the two of you had a kid.” He takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I swear it was like having my life blow up all over again. And it was too hard to know the details, so I avoided them. It wasn’t until Tucker Securities got the contract for your protection that I looked at the dates.”

“And you thought I lied about Landon?”