Spy Games (Tarnished Heroes #1)(39)

“Can you switch the feeds to four?”

“Sure thing.” He tapped a button, tabbing through to the valet in the suite’s conference-style room. “Anything?”

“Now they’re talking about each other.” She sighed and leaned her head back against the headboard. “Is it always this exciting?”

“Once I listened to a guy snore for three days straight. He’d wake up for about ten minutes every eight hours to piss, drink some water, and then get back to it. I thought my eyes were going to start bleeding from boredom.”

“Yikes. Okay. It could always be worse. Check.”

“You remember when Matt broke his nose on that lineman’s shoulder in high school?”

“Oh my God.” Sarah turned toward him, mouth gaped open, eyes wide. “I thought I was going to kill him. That sound.”

“I was pretty sure I could hear him across the street. I don’t know how you survived. I spent the night that one time… God, that was bad.”

“Emily says he snores a little now, and I just keep thinking about the broken nose snoring. I don’t know how she hasn’t smothered him in his sleep already. It’s probably Jillian. Their youngest is up at all hours. I swear, I get emails from Emily at the weirdest times. It’s almost to the point if she emails me during a normal human hour I’m like, what’s wrong?”

Rand chuckled. His memory of Emily was a little fuzzy. She and Sarah had become friends in high school, the year before he’d graduated. He hadn’t had much time to get to know the new addition to Sarah’s life, in part because he’d been trying to stay away from her.

“Still talking about each other.” Sarah sighed.

“You ever wanted that?” Rand leaned his head against the wall, the headboard hitting at just the right angle to make him tip his chin up.

“What?”

“A family. Kids.”

“Maybe.” Her shoulder nudged his. A shrug? “I graduated and went to work with one real goal in mind, then this happened and I haven’t really been thinking beyond the next twelve months. Planning any farther in advance just seems…pointless.”

“Yeah, I know how that goes.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t know if I’m cut out to be a family man.” All the things he’d done wrong. The orders he’d had to carry through. How could he lie in bed next to someone with that kind of shit on his conscience? What if he passed on that…ability, the cold-hearted killer instinct the company had honed into a tool, to a child?

“What? Seriously?”

Sarah’s gaze made the hair on his arms stand up. She had a picture of him from a different time and place. Yeah, the SEALs had equipped him to do his job well, but they hadn’t stripped him down to the bone, they hadn’t demanded his humanity. There was a difference between going toe-to-toe with your enemy and waiting in a dark alley to put a knife in their back.

“I just remember how you were with those twins from down the street. Pulling them around in that wagon. Matt hated those kids. I mean, he’d see them in their yard and he’d pull all the blinds, lock the doors, and practically hide. But you’d go out there and…I don’t know, you were just so good with them.”

“Yeah, I distinctly remember someone calling me for help with them.” Rand glared at Sarah, but he didn’t really mean it.

“Yeah, well, uh, what was I supposed to do?” She glanced down, her cheeks a tad bit pink. “You’d said you couldn’t babysit. I figured, how hard could it be?”

“Did you ever clean that crap off the ceiling?”

“Yes. I did that while you wrestled the little gremlins back into bed. God, your girlfriend was so pissed at me.”

“Who was it?” He’d dated plenty, cycling through most of the girls he could stand long before graduating.

“You’re terrible.”

“What? Was it that…blonde?”

“It was Maggie Price. Red hair. Big tits.”

“Uh…”

“You spilled that milkshake on her at the pep rally?”

“Oh, yeah. That one. Didn’t miss much.”

“What?” Sarah laughed and shook her head. “She was so in love with you, and you barely remember her?”

“She was not.”

“Uh, yeah she was. I’ll never forget her doodling little ‘Maggie Duncan,’ swirly name things on stuff.”

“No…”

“Yeah.” Sarah laughed.

“Huh.”

“God, you’re so blind.”

“She wasn’t the girl who really mattered.” He shrugged.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Wasn’t it obvious?

He had no business thinking about a future, settling down, and yet…after all this time, it was still her. Maybe this was his chance to get this off his chest, exorcise the demon that’d haunted him all this time.

“She wasn’t you.”

Sarah’s gaze might as well have weighed a ton.

He stared at the ceiling, playing back his personal highlight reel of favorite Sarah moments. Volleyball shorts, water gun fights, sitting on the swings late at night, holding her in his arms while she slept.