The Mercenary Next Door (Rogues and Rescuers #2) - Lucy Leroux Page 0,34
soured. “When can we fly back to the States?”
“Not sure, but it may be a while.”
Mason shook his head. It still hurt. “I gotta get back to L.A. Where is my phone?”
“It’s here.” Ransom fished it out of his pocket. “But no worries. I’ve been keeping the home office updated.”
“That’s not who I’m worried about,” Mason said, pressing the power button on his phone. It stayed dark. The battery was dead.
“Have you got the charger on you?”
Ransom sucked in a breath. “No. You didn’t have it on you. It must be with your gear.”
“Can you find me another one?”
“Yeah,” Ransom agreed, but he didn’t seem happy about it. “But I don’t think it’s going to do any good.”
“What?” Mason wrinkled his nose, still mashing the buttons on his phone as if that would magically get it to restart. “Why?”
“You’ve been asking for Laila.”
Mason blinked. “I have?”
Ransom’s face twisted. “Yeah. You keep calling out for her in your sleep.”
“Oh.”
Uncomfortably, his friend shifted in his seat. “It was enough that I tried to call her with your phone before it ran out of juice. She didn’t answer or respond to any texts. I couldn’t find her on social media because you don’t have her last name down in your contacts—and I scoured pics of every Layla living in L.A. on Facebook. Nada.” He swiped at his nose with his cast. “I even had one of the guys swing by her place a few days ago. He knocked for a while, but she wasn’t home.”
Mason tried to shrug. It hurt too much to finish the gesture. “She works a lot.”
Ransom grunted. “Look, I don’t mean to get in your business, but this girl is no good.”
The IED hadn’t kill Mason, but the irony might. “Laila is the definition of good.”
Ransom scoffed. “If she can’t be bothered to answer the phone while you’re in the goddamn hospital, then she isn’t worth shit.”
God, Mason didn’t want to talk about this. But he couldn’t let Ransom think the worst of Laila. “She must have blocked my number. And she probably did it before we went wheels-up to Columbia.”
Confusion creased his friend’s face. “Why’s that?”
Mason sighed. “Things went tits up before I left.”
“That was fast.” Ransom raised his brows. “You don’t usually make ‘em run screaming until a few months in. Didn’t you just start things with Laila?”
“One night,” Mason muttered, sounding like an emo fuckboy. “All I got was one damn night.”
The memory of waking up next to Laila was vivid and a little fucked up. How could he have freaked like that? The night before had been mind-blowingly intense, but he’d known then and there his life would never be the same. And then one stupid mistake—one he hadn’t even made—and it had all got blown to smithereens.
Mason studied the view out of the window. “Did you ever save someone for later?” he asked in a low voice.
“What do you mean?” Ransom looked like he was trying to compute complex calculus in his head. But he was a neck-or-nothing type. Mason doubted Ransom ever thought about holding anything back in any aspect of his life.
God, this sucked. Mason’s chest ached, and not because of his ribs. Great. I am an emo fuckboy.
“I mean…did you ever avoid spending time with someone, not because you didn’t like them but because you liked them too much? Well, that’s what I did with Laila. I tried not to think about her. And I was damn good at not thinking about her, but she was always there in the back of my mind.”
Mason wished his arms were free because he wanted to strangle himself. “I knew if I let my guard down, that she’d be it for me. The whole nine yards—marriage, house, kids—and I wasn’t fucking ready for it.”
He was kicking himself for it now. All the time he’d wasted…
“I kept telling myself later. Laila was for later—once I was done with this job and cashed out. Then I’d ask her out properly. It was a mistake. She was there the whole time…waiting.”
Seemingly at a loss for words, Ransom just stared at him.
“Am I making any sense, or is my brain so scrambled this is coming out as gibberish?”
“Nah, I get it.” Ransom raised his cast, his face screwing up. “You had a someday girl, but you fucked it up before it ever got going. I’m still waiting for that story, cause that’s the part I can’t figure out.”
“Well, I had help with that last bit.” Mason reluctantly told