saw her lift that gun and point it at your head, my life flashed in front of my eyes. I don’t get scared a lot, just ask the guys, but at that moment, I was terrified.”
Gillian got up on an elbow so she could look him in the eyes. “I know. I think I was more scared that night than on the hijacked plane. Maybe because of the hatred I saw in Andrea’s eyes. She legit despised me. It was a hard thing to reconcile in my brain because of how nice she’d been to me since the hijacking, and how bad I felt because of what I’d thought had happened to her while we were on that plane.”
“How do you feel about what happened to her?”
“About her being killed in prison?”
“Yeah.”
Gillian tried to sort through her feelings before she answered. “Relieved,” she said after a beat. “I know that’s bad, but—”
“It’s not bad. I celebrated with the team today when I heard,” Walker admitted. “I was so damn glad she was dead, and you wouldn’t have to testify, and that hopefully any threat her connection with the Sinaloa Cartel might’ve caused you is now over and done with for good. It’s not as if the authorities don’t already have the cartel on their radar, and since it’s not a secret that Andrea was the seventh hijacker anymore, there’s no real need to be concerned about Salazar coming for you.”
Gillian lay back down, her head resting on his shoulder once more. “The news said she was targeted at the prison?”
“Yeah,” Walker said. “She’d been in isolation, but someone fucked up, or maybe they did it on purpose, and she was let out into the yard with the general population. My guess is that someone connected to Sinaloa took the opportunity to take her out. She wasn’t exactly on their good list. They have long memories and a certain code they live by.”
“I do feel bad for her,” Gillian said on a sigh.
“Uh-uh,” Walker said, shaking his head. “She gets none of your goodness. None of your sympathy.”
“But her husband was killed,” Gillian protested.
“They chose that life,” Walker said as he rolled her onto her back and loomed over her. His eyes were intense as they stared down into hers. “No one forced them to get involved with the cartel. No one forced them to be drug dealers. Luis was a murderer. It’s not like he was on an innocent business trip and was killed in a car wreck. She doesn’t deserve one ounce of your goodness.”
“Okay, Walker.”
“I mean it, Gillian. She got what was coming to her.”
“I said, okay.”
She watched as he took a deep breath and relaxed when he rolled back over and pulled her back into his side.
“I’m proud of you, Di,” Walker told her. “I wasn’t thrilled to have to leave you a month after it happened, but you were tough as hell through that deployment.”
“I wasn’t thrilled either, but I hung out with my girls and got a lot of work done on the few upcoming events I was planning.”
“I almost begged my commander to let me stay back stateside, before I figured it would be just as hard to leave you the next time we got called out, so I bit the bullet and went. But I thought about you every second.”
“Which isn’t safe,” Gillian scolded.
Walker chuckled. “The guys knew I wasn’t one hundred percent and made sure I didn’t take point on anything.”
Gillian wasn’t sure what that meant, and she didn’t really want to know. “They’re good guys,” she murmured.
“They are.” Walker moved then, reaching over her to a drawer in the small table next to the bed.
She grunted as she was mushed against his chest for a second before he lay back down. “What the hell?” she grumbled. “Sniffing armpits is not sexy, Walker.”
Before she could shift and get comfortable again, Walker had taken hold of her hand, which had been resting on his chest. Her eyes got huge as he slid a beautiful, perfect princess-cut diamond ring onto her ring finger.
“Wha—”
“I love you, Gillian Romano. I can’t imagine spending my life without you. Will you marry me?”
The proposal came out of nowhere…but then again, it didn’t. They’d settled into living together so easily it was as if she’d lived with him forever. She’d officially canceled her lease for her apartment in Georgetown, and the stuff that wouldn’t fit into his apartment was sitting in storage, waiting for them to find a bigger