of him dying makes me want to shrivel up into a tiny ball of sadness.”
Fuck. “I can try, OK?”
“No, Jax. I need you to promise that the only way you will kill him is if he’s trying to kill you. Promise me that much, at least.”
I stroke her hair and kiss her mouth, but she ducks away and hides her face in my neck. I give in. I can’t help it. It’s the mission objective anyway. Bring them in alive is always better than dead. “I promise, then. I promise. I will do anything to make you happy again.”
She lets out a long breath, like she was holding it in until she got my answer. And even though every rational person on this planet understands that life and death don’t obey the law of promises, she believes me. I know she believes me because we climax together. And once again I find myself coming inside her. I hold her close and moan into her neck as I fill her up in every way possible. I don’t care one bit about the consequences. I don’t care that I made her a promise that I can’t keep or she accepted it on misplaced faith.
I do not care.
She is mine and I’m going to keep her forever.
“Yeah,” Jax growls into his cell phone. My eyes are refusing to open, even though I can tell by his ensuing silence something is wrong on the other end. “When?” More silence. “Where’d they take him?” He breathes out a long breath of air and I manage to open my eyes in time to watch him rub his hand down his face and swing his feet over the side of the bed so he can sit up. “I’ll be there in two hours.”
He doesn’t turn to me, just puts his head in his hands and rests his elbows on his knees.
“You OK?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” No emotion in that statement. Just blank.
“You gotta leave?”
He finally turns a little to give me a sideways glance. “I do. I know it’s bad, Sasha. I know I should stay here with you. But I have to go.”
“Should I go with you?”
He smiles then. Like big. And then he lies down and pulls me up to his chest. “God, I wish. See, if you take me up on that offer we could be partners. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
I picture it in my head. “Am I Scully or Mulder?”
“Definitely Mulder,” he says with a huff of laughter.
“I think so too. Can we look for aliens and take on weird X-Files cases?”
“For sure.”
It’s my turn to smile big. I think I might really like Jax. He’s nice. “I’ll think about it.”
“Will you be OK here?”
“I’m OK everywhere, Jax. Don’t worry about me.”
He leans in and kisses me on the lips. It’s a little kiss. Not meant to be spectacular. But for some reason it feels amazing. “I gotta go. That call was about my brother.”
“Oh, did something bad happen?” Jesus, I hope not. I can tell his brother means everything to him.
“Very bad. Very, very fucking bad. But he’s OK, so I can’t ask for anything else without being selfish.”
I prop myself up on my elbow. “Are you religious?”
“What?” He shoots me a confused look.
“Do you have guilt for wanting more out of life, even when you have plenty?”
“A bit.”
“And you think asking for too much makes the bad luck come?”
“In a way, I guess. I just try to be grateful for the small things.”
I lie back and think about that as Jax drags himself out of bed and starts to get dressed. “Do you think we bring our own bad luck? Or do you think sometimes our luck mingles with the luck of someone else, and gets tangled up in it?”
He’s pulling up his pants when I ask this question, but he stops with his fingers on the zipper to look at me in the approaching dawn. “I never thought of it, I guess.”
“What time is it?”
He points to the bedside clock. “Four-thirty. I don’t know when I can come back, Sasha. It’ll probably take me all day just to sort out what happened. So if you want to go home, it’s only a two-hour drive. There’s a car in the garage. The keys are in the kitchen drawer next to the fridge.”
“Is someone coming to pick you up?”
“Yeah,” he says, grabbing a white dress shirt from the closet and sliding his arms into the sleeves. “The jet. There’s an airfield