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Quinn smiled. For the first time in months, it wasn’t tight or rehearsed.
It wasreal.
“Yeah,” she said softly. “They do.”
Gabe extended a hand, lifting the blueprints in his other. “Let’s get to work.”
But before she followed him, Quinn glanced over her shoulder one more time. Dagger was just stepping out of his vehicle, helmet under one arm, rifle slung, tactical vest clinging to every hard line of muscle, his eyes already scanning, calculating.
But when he looked at her… hesawher. Not the architect. Not the widow. Not the recovering alcoholic or the broken mother trying to rebuild her life. Justher.
In that moment, Quinn realized something earth-shaking.
It wasn’t just that he had her back. It was that he believed in her, in the woman she was now, not the one she used to be.
That made her believe too.
The gear roomsmelled like cordite, oil, and sweat, familiar, grounding. Dagger stripped off his plate carrier, the Velcro ripping loud in the quiet. The mission was over. The embassy site was quiet and secure. For now.
But he didn’t feel settled. Not in the usual way, not in that deep, locked-down compartment where he stored everything too heavy to carry. That place had been pried open, and now everything inside was spilling out.
Quinn. The way she’d looked at him after that call, raw and exposed, like he’d found the chink in her armor she didn’t know how to seal back up. Like maybe, for the first time, she saw him not as a reminder of everything she lost, but as a man who could help her carry it.
He didn’t know what to do with it, this hope, this ache, this gnawing sense that something was changing.
The op was over, the site was secure, the perimeter held.
There was no perimeter anymore.
He’d tried so damn hard to keep Quinn out to keepeverythingout. But now she was everywhere. In his head. In his blood. In the hollow spaces he’d sworn to keep untouched.
He’d thought he could protect her without letting her in.
He’d been wrong.
Because somewhere along the way, she’d slipped past all his defenses, not with noise or force, but with quiet resilience. With the kind of strength he couldn’t fight.
Now he didn’t know how to be the man who could stand still while she walked away again.
His pulse still hadn’t returned to baseline. Not from the adrenaline. Not from the op.
Fromher.
From Quinn’s arms around him after the call, tight and trembling, her face buried in his chest like she couldn’t stop herself. Like she didn’t want to. Hope surged in him. The wayshe looked at him, that fierce longing that sat in his dreams, taunted him with his biggest desire. Could she be falling in love with him? Was she ready to give him her heart and make him the fucking luckiest man on the planet?
Thatrushhit him hard. Harder than it should’ve. A punch straight to the heart. The weight of it still swamped his lungs. With her came those kids, and he wanted them just as fiercely.
He’d suggested the call because he thought it would drive home to her what was at stake for her…for him. Give her the push to rememberwho she was. Their mother. What he hadn’t counted on was what it would do tohim.
The boys. Their little voices.
Their trust. Their love.
His sons.He couldn’t deny it to himself anymore, no distance would be enough to stop the mind shock that he’d never intended to claim them, thinking that losing them wouldn’t hurt as much. He’d been so wrong. Her words in her office had scored him, shooting his delusion right out of the water.
His jaw clenched hard.
He’d meant it as a kindness, a bridge between her and the life she was rebuilding.