Midnight Kiss (Men of Midnight #7) - Lisa Marie Rice Page 0,84
moment. “Really? What if I asked you to run up Mount Hood or … or give me a million dollars?”
“You say those things like they are impossible. I’m a runner. I’d run up Mount Hood for you, absolutely. It would probably take me about eight hours but I’d definitely do it. And I don’t have a million dollars, I told you I’m almost wiped out financially. But if you want a million dollars, I’ll just pay it to you over ten or twenty years. No problem. Whoa. Where’s this from?”
Hope didn’t know what he was talking about until she felt coolness on her cheeks and touched them. Her fingers came away wet. She was leaking water from her eyes. Or rather, she was crying. She’d cried earlier, too. Man, this was so not her.
“I never cry,” she said, taken aback. “Never. Not even at Les Mis.”
“Uh huh.” Luke wiped her cheeks with his thumbs. “Not crying. Gotcha.”
Felicity, Emma and Riley would do anything for her, but this — this was a declaration of something approaching love. Hope tried to think of a man who’d do something for her, something hard and that required sacrifice, and came up blank.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
He bent and kissed her, briefly. “I have no idea what you’re thanking me for but I guess I’ll take it.” He waggled his eyebrows. “A grateful woman is always a wonderful thing.”
She knew what he was doing. She’d had a moment in which she felt raw and vulnerable. It had probably been pretty visible and Luke, notwithstanding his tough guy appearance, was really observant.
In that moment, Hope felt like she’d been flayed alive. Someone had just come along and taken away her skin and all her defenses. In that moment, a wrong word, a wrong move, and she’d have been devastated. Like the rebel base when all the shields suddenly went down and there was the Death Star, ready to kill.
Her defenses had been so high and deep all her life, all the life she could remember at any rate, that she thought they were part of her. But they weren’t. Her defenses were artificial. Her disconnection from life had been created.
She was the way she was because a greedy and cruel man, or men, had killed her mother and robbed her of her future.
Well, that was stopping, right now.
“You said you’d get me Jacob Black’s number. So can you?”
Luke blinked, frowned. “What?”
“Frank Glass told me to talk to Jacob Black. That he knows the man who is possibly my father. The man who possibly killed my mother. I want to talk to him, find out what Bard Redfield is like.”
“Whoa. When you said that before, I thought you were kidding.” Luke took an involuntary step back. “Is that — is that wise? Don’t you think we should wait until —”
“No.” Hope was as sure of this as she was of 2 + 2 = 4. She’d waited long enough. Her entire life, in fact. She wanted to set wheels in motion right now, and follow through with them up in Portland, with her team at her back. The thought of having that team shot warmth through her entire body. But whatever was going to happen, whatever her new life was, it had to start right now. Impatience bubbled under her skin. The past was dead. She was shedding her past like a snake shedding its skin and something new, previously unsuspected, was unfolding within her. That dead carapace was lying shattered at her feet and the new Hope was taking her first breaths. Whatever was going to happen next in her life, it was going to be completely different from what was before. “I don’t want to wait another moment more. If Jacob Black knows the man who is my father, and maybe tried to have me and my mother killed, I want to talk to him. There’s this huge black hole in my head where my life should be. I need to start filling in the blanks.”
Luke stood looking at her, mouth a thin line. Clearly, he didn’t agree. Hope waited for him to make counterarguments. Whatever he said, it wouldn’t sway her, but he deserved her listening to him. He swallowed and she prepared to try to listen to him over the drumbeat of impatience filling her chest, but in the end, he simply nodded as he bent over his cell. “Okay. If that’s what you want.”
Tears sprang in her eyes that she impatiently dashed away.