THE CRAZY GOOD SERIES - Rachel Robinson Page 0,263

her laugh as much as you can. Make her happy. Put that huge smile on her face any chance you can. Give her everything I failed to give her. Strip away the layers of ice and find the woman who is buried in there—the person who is soft, emotional, the person who hides from the rest of the world for fear of failing.

Give her a life, Stevey. She’s my heart. My whole heart. But I realized somewhere along the way that maybe she’s your heart, too. Maybe I just borrowed her from you because I needed her more. There’s no denying I need her more than oxygen. There’s also no denying that she loved you first. That should piss me off, but given these circumstances nothing makes me happier. She’s told me how much of a presence you were in her life—how you befriended her when no one else took a chance on her. Morganna doesn’t belong to anyone. She owns herself. She owns the world and everything that she touches.

I won’t say she’s yours, because that wouldn’t make much sense.

You’re hers now.

Love her even when it hurts—even when she pushes you away. Love her more than I did. Love her forever. It breaks my heart to write this while I’m still breathing, but you need to hear it from me. It was always you.

Keep smiling, bro. Keep on smiling.

Stone

TIME AND SPACE

I shut my eyes. It fades to black

A wilted flower never coming back

A jaded heart torn in two

A life with him, a life with you

Sorrow stalks on windswept trees

A troubled whisper finds the breeze

A dirty window looking out

Hear me, see me, it’s a silent shout

A hint of promise never made true

A life with him, a life with you

-Lainey Rosemont

CHAPTER ONE

Prologue

Cody

IF YOU WERE to open my mind and look inside you’d find binary code, formulas, and endless lines of script—things that make the average human’s brain twitch away in protest. Inside my skull also resides knowledge, practicality, and wisdom. If you were to crack apart any of my two hundred and six bones, you’d find her. That’s how deeply she’s rooted inside. She’s hidden away, tucked neatly in a place where not even time can touch her. Dementia and other human ailments are capable of stealing the confines of the mind. Bones? They protect everything. You get to take them with you to your grave.

Lainey Rosemont is the woman who owns my bones. When I met her she had this peculiar way about weaving herself into my life: a life that no one else could penetrate, but still she coiled herself around me all the same. Her wild blue eyes and soft demeanor challenged my good side. My bad side merely wanted to devour her whole just to make her mine forever. I knew from the moment I laid eyes on her that my life would forever be changed—complicated, contented.

I met her during the time in my life when I walked the straight and narrow. I did what I was supposed to do—what was expected of me as an upstanding Naval Officer. I’ve long since left that life behind. The Navy SEAL ethos is too strong for a decent man to break. Good men are SEALs. I was a good man for a long time—a leader of some of the best men in the world. And then I got out of the Navy because I simply wasn’t meant to be good and moral anymore. My talents were merely more desirable elsewhere. I still hunt down high value targets, mind you, and my aim with all firearms is just as lethal, but now I don’t answer to anyone. That strong ethos I used to live by had to die a slow death for me to fulfill my new purpose in life. The people who now answer to me are usually seconds away from death.

I’m a gun for hire. A consultant. A contractor. A computer genius. A jack of all trades.

Mostly I’m a hand for hire these days, or a knife for hire, or any other way you can dream up to kill a human. My new ethos is much less demanding. Confirm the evil, kill the evil, and never dwell on a job for too long. I’ve reached the point in my life where my name carries as much notoriety as my long list of snuffed targets. My physical skills combined with my love and proficiency with technology make for a pretty spectacular, lethal pair. I founded, own, and run the