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My woman. Christ, Leanne realized what Fallon was doing so easily when I couldn’t align the pieces due to the jumbled emotions screwing my head up. All I knew was there were pieces of my woman being given away and it rocked my world. My eyes are leaking a steady stream of salty liquid down my face. “I’m not certain you can call her that any longer.”
“Because you’re a dick?”
“Not to mention the fact she said I’m a fucking hypocrite. She’s right. Who the hell am I to accuse her of heinous activity when mine was worse?” The laugh I let escape holds no humor.
“You did what you did because you were hired to. It was classified. Isn’t that what you said?” I hear Thorn’s chair creak as he settles in for a longer conversation.
“It started that way.” I stand and pace. “God, I can’t take this. I feel completely out of control.”
There’s a tension filled silence before Thorn asks a question that’s been on his mind for years. “What changed you, Ethan? What pushed you from being one of the best agents I had into a renegade I couldn’t control?”
Suddenly, I can’t keep the words to myself any longer. “The lies! Christ, it was the damn lies. It was like a whole house fell down on me again, only this time it landed on my fucking chest.”
Silence stretches between us until Thorn probes, “Because of Fallon?”
“No. Long before I fell for her.” Realizing I was finally going to have to admit to the whole truth, I give my former director the truth he’s been after, “About five years ago, something was revealed in my family.”
Thorn is the head of the Agency for a reason. “Something that was detrimental to you being an agent?”
“Something that made me unable to trust my judgment.”
“What was it?”
I brief him on the events about my mother’s death. Thorn’s a prick but not a complete bastard. “Christ, Ethan. What a clusterfuck. You had no idea of your father’s lies?”
“No, but apparently your buddies at Hudson Investigations found enough evidence for my father to admit the truth to my sister. It’s what caused his heart attack—why I departed from the Agency.” I can’t keep the bitterness out of my voice.
“Why you never asked to come back.”
“How could I? The man who raised me to be an honorable man who believed in my intuition about people deliberately destroyed my sister’s life. How was I to trust my instincts as an agent after that?”
“Truth?”
“Please.”
“You made the right decision. If I can’t trust you one hundred percent, if you can’t trust yourself, you’re useless to me as an agent.” I’m stunned when Thorn surprisingly agrees with my decision after all this time. His next words don’t surprise me at all. “But you were never happy in the field. You’re too much like Q?za—you do your best hunting behind a keyboard.”
“Is this where I say thank you?”
“Fuck you. Your problem with Fallon is a dumpster fire only you can put out.”
Just hearing her name sends pain radiating through my system. It’s like someone has my nuts hooked up to a battery and turned on the juice just to see my body sizzle in agony. I must have made some agonized moan because Thorn says, “Unlike your decision to walk away from the Agency, I think you’d be a stupid jackass to let something like this come between you and your woman.”
“I accused her of being jealous of the money her best friend’s now earning and then admitted I got off on it when it was me on the other end of the phone. I swear if we weren’t standing in her recently deceased mother’s home, she’d have done more than throw me out.”
He makes a pfft sound as if what I’ve done isn’t quite so bad.
“Is this experience talking?” I dare to ask.
“Let’s just say I’m eternally grateful for the life I have and the fact my wife is upstairs,” he admits.
The words are a painful punch to my already bruised heart. “I don’t know what to say to get her back.”
“Sometimes, life is a game we like to call Show and Tell. From what I understand from my sources?—”
“Q?za.”
He neither acknowledges or denies my claim because it could just have easily been Sam who shot him the intel about my years of talking with Fallon. “You’ve spent half a decade talking. Why don’t you try showing the woman you’re in love with how you feel about her?”