With Every Breath (Slow Burn #4) - Maya Banks Page 0,30
felt good. It felt solid when nothing else in her life was solid. He was strong and just for a moment she allowed herself to lean on him and to be strong for her. She closed her eyes.
“I know,” he said, fury in his voice. “Because I can’t sleep either, Lizzie. Because for the worst minutes of my life I thought we were too late. That I had failed you. That we hadn’t made it in time and that you were dead. You endured unspeakable torture and you still managed to kick ass doing it. In case I haven’t told you lately or often enough, there is no one I’d rather have at my back than you.”
In a rare moment, she didn’t resist, didn’t avoid or pull away from the close contact with cocky words meant to diffuse an awkward, emotional moment. Instead she rested her temple against Dane’s chest and closed her eyes.
“I just need to get away for a while,” she whispered. “They took something from me, Dane. As much as I hate it, hate admitting it, hate allowing those bastards to have taken any piece of me, they did, and I have to get it back. I don’t expect you to understand. But if I’m going to continue doing my job, and I have no intention of letting those assholes ruin the one good thing in my life, then I just need some time to pull myself back together so I can come back whole again. Because right now I’m a liability. You know it. I know it. Caleb and Beau and the others know it too. And I could never live with myself if I got one of the people I care about hurt or killed because my head wasn’t where it should have been.”
Dane frowned, but as she’d known, he hadn’t argued. She knew she was fragile and it had nothing to do with the assholes who’d abducted her and tortured her. But it suited her purposes for Dane and all the rest to believe just that because then they’d look no further than the surface. She’d never asked for vacation time in all the years she’d worked for DSS. Since its inception, and even before, she and Dane had worked together in a much smaller personal security agency, taking jobs on a much smaller scale.
When Dane had been recruited by Caleb and Beau, he’d accepted with one condition. He brought Eliza with him. No negotiation. And so they’d made the move together and continued to work together, strengthening their already very strong bond.
It was why they had such a close working relationship. They could predict the other’s thoughts, movements . . . She choked back the suffocating, vile thoughts because she’d been about to compare her friendship with Dane, the only true thing she had in this world, to her relationship with Thomas, a man who had known her every thought, fantasy and deepest longing, and used them to manipulate her and make it so easy for her to fall into his lap with no resistance from her whatsoever. Never would she defile and disrespect Dane in that manner. He deserved so much better than the depraved, broken monster she’d become, still was, to guard his back. She just prayed her replacement would take that responsibility to heart and recognize how truly great a man Dane Elliot was and that they, like her, would be willing to lay down their life for him.
“How long?” Dane asked, momentarily confusing her because she’d been so caught up in her own thoughts.
She recovered quickly and glanced nervously at him, hoping he didn’t read too much into the length of her request. Then she shrugged as if she hadn’t put that much thought into it at all. “A month. Maybe six weeks. Provided y’all can do without me that long. Things are quiet right now but we all knows how that goes,” she said with a grin. “I don’t really have a plan. I just want to go where the wind takes me and enjoy the downtime.”
Dane studied her a long time as if determining the veracity of her statement. Just about the time her iron discipline was about to desert her and she started to squirm under his scrutiny, he once again struck her speechless.
“You managed to hide it well, Lizzie. Even from me . . . until recently,” he said in a painful tone that sounded almost hurt. As if the thought of her holding out