Code Name: Ghost - Sawyer Bennett Page 0,33

point of acceptance for Jimmy and Sal’s death. But now…”

I pause, unsure how to express my disgruntlement of the situation. I had no intentions of even going here with Corinne. Talking to Anna this weekend was a fucking revelation. I’m ashamed I let any type of bond form with the woman whose husband died on my watch.

“But now you have feelings for Anna, which you are having a hard time processing?” Corinne asks, finishing my thought.

She’s completely right, yet I still jerk in shock over the way it sounds when said aloud. Heat creeps up my neck, and I rush to assure her, “I don’t have feelings like that.”

“Like what?” she counters, knowing damn well what I mean.

I refuse to answer because a million different types of feelings bundle up inside me when I think about Anna… and they all seem wrong to me.

Wait… that’s not it. They seem right to me, but I’m afraid they’ll seem wrong to everyone else.

Corinne attempts to come at it another way. “You know there are no rules when it comes to matters of the heart, right?”

My jaw locks down tight, and I make my expression blank. I refuse to believe any of this with Anna has become embedded in my heart. I don’t want that at all.

“Anna is free to do what she wants,” Corinne reminds me. “Free to be your friend. Even free to be your lover if it comes to that.”

“Whoa, now, wait a minute,” I blurt out, holding my hands out defensively to get her to stop. We aren’t going there. “It’s not like that.”

“I’m just saying it could be, and it would be okay,” she replies gently. “Or it could be that you and Anna just continue to have a deep connection that will probably transcend other types of friendships because of your shared grief. My point being that there is absolutely nothing wrong with an emotional connection between you and Anna, whatever it may eventually become”

My breath rushes out, an indication it has been pent up for too long as she hashed this out. It makes me realize I’ve been feeling bad for even having a friendship with Anna. That I don’t feel like I deserve even that basic goodness with a woman I’ve come to admire a great deal in a short time.

I refuse to consider what else could happen. I’d have to be dead not to be attracted to the woman, despite my guilty misgivings. Anna is gorgeous, inside and out.

I think back to walking into Avery’s nursery on Saturday night, seeing Anna’s daughter at her breast. At first, I was so shocked I whipped around. I hadn’t really seen anything, but it was the intimacy of the moment that had caught me off guard.

Anna quickly put me at ease, and something made me turn around to take a good look at her.

She was right… I couldn’t really see anything. Her t-shirt covered the top part of her body, and her daughter shielded the rest. Maybe a flash of skin at the swell of her breast, but I mostly just saw mother and daughter engaged in the most primitive, special type of bonding that can occur between two humans. There was nothing sexual about it, but it touched something deep inside that aroused my emotions.

Made me feel even closer to Anna than I had already become.

That was the transcendental moment that changed everything between us. It had made me determined to spill my guts to Corinne today.

Because I need her to tell me what to do.

Should I keep exploring things with Anna or cut contact off completely? Not even sure if that’s possible given we work together, but fuck if I have to stay at Jameson. There are any number of contract security companies I could work with.

But damn… the thought of actually leaving the people here… of leaving Anna?

Not sure I can do that, either.

Knowing damn well how pleading my expression is, I ask Corinne, “What do I do?”

She shakes her head with an empathetic smile. “I can’t tell you what to do with Anna. The only thing I can urge you to do is revisit your feelings of guilt and work through them.”

A bark of sardonic laughter erupts from me. “You mean forgive myself?”

“Oh no,” Corinne replies with a resounding shake of her head. “I don’t think you have anything to apologize for or to be forgiven for. You need to accept you did nothing wrong. That way, you can move on with your