Page 42

Joy, because she didn’t have to lie.

Joy, because, for the first time, she could tell Yardley whatever she wanted.

“Do you want to play a game?” she asked.

Yardley’s eyes widened. “I want to play a game more than anything.”

“Let me tell you about it before you commit. You know how, in corny spy movies, when the handsome spy in the tuxedo has figured out the beautiful woman in the evening gown is with the bad guys, she asks him what she wants to know right before he kisses her, and he says, ‘If I told you, I’d have to kill you?’”

“Yes. I know this trope. I’ve never been in a situation where I got to use it, but I have a feeling I would relish the drama.”

KC laughed. “I’m sure you would. Here’s my game. I ask you for intel. About you. About us. And if you want to answer, you tell me, ‘If I told you, I’d have to kiss you.’ Then I decide if I really want to know, because if I do, I have to let you kiss me.”

Yardley captured KC’s gaze for a dark-eyed moment. “There doesn’t seem to be a penalty in this game.”

“The only penalty is if it doesn’t work, and more knowing and more talking doesn’t lead to where we’d really like it to. If it does work but it’s hard, the kissing is a way to make it easier. Positive reinforcement.” She smiled.

Yardley’s exhale was choppy. “Can we have a practice round? One that’s easy. So I’m certain I understand the rules.”

“Yes.” KC thought about something very easy she wanted to know that she should’ve known a long time ago. “What’s the perfume you wear when you go on one of your trips that had nothing to do with finance? I’ve never found a bottle that smells like it.”

Yardley walked on her knees across the long cushion to sit close to KC. “If I told you, I’d have to kiss you.” The pink in her cheeks had spread to her throat.

Well. That sounded as good as KC had hoped it might. The words, combined with Yardley’s new proximity, sent a wave of anticipation racing over her skin. “I want to know.”

Yardley pushed her hand into her own hair, dropping it behind her shoulders in a way that showed KC the outline of her sports bra and the shape of her breasts beneath the white T-shirt she’d changed into.

“It’s my granddaddy’s lucky cologne. He bought it in Ulaanbaatar after he opened a drop package with intel that turned out to be a bomb, but it didn’t detonate. It has santal. And blood orange.”

When KC took a breath, her memory supplied the smell, but instead of it making her feel lonely because the smell meant Yardley was leaving, it made her think about what it would be like to inhale it on her neck knowing exactly what it was.

Yardley leaned forward. “Now I have to kiss you.”

She did. No tongue, no teeth. Only their lips, softly fit together, before she pulled away.

“It’s my turn,” she said. “Maybe this isn’t a practice round question, but I’ve never been brave enough to ask.” She put her hand on KC’s knee. “Do you think you’d ever want to introduce me to your dad?”

KC’s shocked laugh made her eyes sting. There were some feelings there, obviously.

Even before Robbie Nolan had retired to the Florida Keys, it had never been difficult to keep him in the dark about her job.

Or her life. One of his overarching philosophies was to never ask personal questions if he could avoid it.

The last time she’d tried calling him on the phone, he’d offered a series of complaints about the hidden fees for a three-day Margaritaville cruise he’d recently booked and then signed off after seven minutes.

“If I told you,” she said, “I’d have to kiss you.”

It heated her blood to say it aloud. It sounded like a promise, passed back and forth between her and Yardley, that the only consequence of doing something that had always been difficult for them would be to get more of what they wanted.

Could that be true? Could trust build more trust? Was awkward vulnerability the key to unlocking joy?

“Yes.” Yardley sounded like she was answering the questions in KC’s heart. “Tell me.”

“Well, I think it would be much better for him to meet you than it would be for you to meet him. He’s locked himself away from life, and if he met you, he’d be forced to remember how big and lovely it can be, because no one can exchange even a few words with you and not feel like it’s important to live more.

But yes. I will introduce you. It’s about time the different parts of my life got to know each other. ”

KC took Yardley’s hand and pulled it to her chest. It felt like a kiss under a porchlight, the kind of sweet moment filled with butterflies that she’d never had. She pressed her forehead to Yardley’s, coming down from the glittery high of it. “That’s our practice round.”

Yardley leaned away, squeezed KC’s hand, and slid off the sofa. “I want to play in my room, but”—she smoothed her hands over her hair—“just this game. Just kissing in my bed and telling each other everything we should already know. No… sex.”

“Are you sure what you’re describing isn’t sex?”

Yardley laughed. “Let’s go find out.” She led KC out of the lounge and down a hallway to the room that Zinnia had given her, a narrow space with white-painted stone walls, a simple wooden dresser, and a bed with a white duvet.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, she pushed off her shoes. “Lay down with me.”

KC was nervous. They’d never had this. They’d arrowed right at each other at that party because neither one of them had a future in mind. It was one reason why the certainty they’d felt at the party had never translated into the relationship the other needed.

They were nervous now because they were telling themselves the truth about what was at stake. Because they were acknowledging that they both needed something, and they didn’t know if they would get it.

KC was starting to see that love risked everything.

Gramercy had explained it as knowing that one of you had to leave first. When KC had told him she hated that, it was because she could only focus on the loss.

She couldn’t see the magic of Gramercy and Lucas’s revelation, which was the choice to be together.

The choice to accept that your love would extend far beyond life as you knew it and into experiences impossible to imagine.

It meant the willingness to tell someone you would bear the loss if they left first, just to have had the privilege of loving them.

She didn’t hate that . At this point in her life—when she had uncoupled a canon from the top of an armored vehicle with a remarkable woman beside her—it was the only kind of love that felt remotely big enough. Yardley patted the mattress. “Let’s go, Officer.”

KC shut the door and turned the bolt. She took off her shoes and crawled onto the bed and wrapped herself around Yardley’s waist, smiling, tugging until Yardley fell into the circle of her arms.

Yardley’s face was close. She adjusted her position, pushed her knee between KC’s, and wiggled until she’d found the spot where she liked to rest her head, cradled in the crook of KC’s neck. She sighed. “I missed you. A lot.”

“I missed you, too.” She kissed the top of Yardley’s head. “But we didn’t get everything wrong, did we?” She pulled Yardley tighter against her. “Or this wouldn’t feel so excellent.”

Yardley rested her palm on KC’s chest, over her heart. “I will admit there were compensations for the grief we put each other through.”

“Are you going to ask me a question?”

They didn’t have much time. If Kris hadn’t insisted KC leave her alone earlier so she could think, KC would be sitting in front of a computer right this minute.

As soon as Yardley’s plan fell into place, they’d be on another plane, or a train, or a helicopter, pursuing information that would lead them to Dr. Brown.

But not right now.

“Mmm.” Yardley’s voice was low but suspiciously alert. “I’m thinking.”

Yardley’s thinking tended to generate its own weather. This was not Yardley Whitmer thinking. “You’re stalling. You already know what you want to ask, you’re just working up the courage.”

Yardley lightly smacked her arm. “Don’t rush me. Do you want to get married?”

KC couldn’t be certain she’d heard right. Could a simple question rip the breath from her body?

“I’m not proposing. To be clear.” Yardley spoke in a rush. “But I’ve never asked you about it. Like we said in the linen closet, there was a lot of tense, uneasy silence around future conversations between us. Remember when I suggested the entryway should have a skylight so it wasn’t so dark?”

KC did remember. Prior to that moment, Yardley had made a few mild suggestions that KC had accepted gratefully as evidence she’d failed to navigate some part of adulthood correctly.

Updating the hand towels in the kitchen, for instance.

That had been easy to do. But the suggestion of the skylight fell in a different category, a big and permanent change to the house where—with the exception of her years in Boston at MIT—KC had always lived.

The house that had never, in her memory, changed at all.

Yardley hadn’t been calling contractors. She’d floated the idea impulsively, but KC had shot it down like a clay pigeon at the rifle range, her heart exploding to pieces in her chest.

She’d asked Yardley to move in with her, but she had never really believed that Yardley would stay .

Overfocus, stoic self-sacrifice, aggressive independence, and silently waiting for the worst to happen—that was how KC had gotten through every challenge life put in front of her. But she couldn’t love Yardley that way.

It meant that she hadn’t asked the right questions. Why, when she met Yardley Whitmer and felt something she’d never felt before, had KC assumed she knew everything she needed to know to navigate what would come next?

She’d never bothered to learn how to do the work of loving Yardley—how to make herself weak and vulnerable to their love in acknowledgment that she couldn’t love Yardley by herself .

She had to give herself over to who they were together, two women who adored each other and knew nothing about love, not yet, but were ready to knock holes in the ceilings of their lives to let in the light.

“Also, here’s the thing.” Yardley pressed her hand a little harder against KC’s heart, which by this point was beating madly.

“I had grown up believing marriage was special. Sacred. It was also something I believed I would never have, not just because of my conviction to give my life to service to my country, but because when the first of my sorority sisters were getting married, it wasn’t legal for me to, and I think my certainty that I never would had been a balm on that wound.

Then the law changed, and I could get married, and my wound has felt a little raw and exposed ever since.

” She laughed. “You look so scared. That’s okay.

It’s okay. I’ve been too afraid to even ask the question, and so here I am, ripping it off like a Band-Aid, because no matter what you say, I’ll get a kiss. ”

“Yardley—”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but I made that much breezier than I should have.

” Yardley frowned. “I want to know if you want to get married because the real truth is, just the idea of calling a woman my wife makes my heart fall three hundred stories in my chest, like a runaway elevator, thrilling and terrifying at the same time. I’ve never said that word out loud talking about myself.

Wife. My wife.” Yardley was bright pink. “I’m working myself up.”

“If I told you,” KC said, “I’d have to kiss you.”

Yardley put both her hands over her mouth and shook her head back and forth. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.” She moved so close that KC had to adjust her legs as Yardley buried her face into her neck. “Tell me, though,” she whispered.

“When I decided to give you my mom’s watch, I had to take it to the jeweler to have it cleaned and checked and to have one of the little diamonds replaced.

I went to pick it up, and she told me that the maker of the watch also made coordinating jewelry.

The pattern of apple blossoms in the gold band and around the face is called ‘spring love,’ which I learned because she pulled out an entire tray of spring love gold jewelry, and in the middle of the tray was a genuinely enormous engagement ring and a wedding band.

Which, of course, were the first items she lifted out to show me. ”

“Did you freak?” Yardley asked this with a huff of warm breath on KC’s neck that made KC laugh.

“Um, no. I took the ring set from her and proceeded to have a thirty-minute conversation about what my girlfriend might like. I played make-believe. It felt… well, it felt good. I liked telling this jeweler all about you and your tastes and my thoughts about carat weight. Of course, I liked talking to the stranger about it because I couldn’t talk to you.

” KC threaded her fingers through Yardley’s hair. “Come here.”

Yardley lifted her face to KC’s, her eyes huge in the low light.

“I think I would like to be married, yes.” KC said it solemnly, because Yardley was right, this was a sacred thing. And because she couldn’t say that she would like to be married to Yardley until they got to a different “later” than this one.

Yardley’s mouth was velvet. KC held on to the back of her neck like the anchor that would keep her here, in this moment, her tongue sliding between Yardley’s parted lips, their bodies pressed together on top of a feather bed in a safe room, hidden away from the world.

It was a whispering kiss, an asking kiss. KC moved her lips over Yardley’s, rubbed her thumb over her mouth as if to ask, Did you like that? And Yardley sighed over KC’s thumb, her tongue just touching the pad, and smiled before kissing KC back, deeper. Yes, I liked it so much.

It wasn’t like any kiss they’d ever had, but it was one they should have had, if their ignorance and self-protection hadn’t kept them from it.

If Yardley hadn’t always been on her way out the door with her suitcase wheel squeaking and KC hadn’t hunkered down and hid behind a computer monitor every time she felt the slightest bit intimidated.

If they’d just told each other what they felt. Who they were. What they needed.

Every day they hadn’t made it to this kiss had pushed them farther apart, but they were lucky, because this was a kiss with the kind of magic in it that could pull them back together.

Best kiss ever. Best kiss so far.