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“Here you go.” Marla handed her a makeup wipe, which Yardley dutifully used to clean her face. Just when she’d lifted away the last shadow of mascara, she started to cry.

“Oh, no,” Yardley choked. The tears weren’t delicate little drops of tears. They were rivers that were swelling her eyelids and snotting her nose, blotching her face in great big red cabbage roses of emotion.

Marla pulled out another vanity stool and sat to face her, handing her a tissue that Yardley immediately needed for a long, embarrassing nose blow. “Tell me,” she said.

Yardley looked at Marla’s perfect, angelic eyelashes and the shining swoop of her cheekbones. When she opened her mouth, she just sobbed again.

“Never thought I’d see the Unicorn brought this low.” Marla’s voice was soothing. “To think of all you’ve been up against, only to be ruined by a ring.”

But it wasn’t the ring.

It was that when all the other little girls said they wanted to grow up to be elementary school teachers or veterinarians, Yardley Whitmer had made herself a sacred promise that she’d be a spy, just like her granddaddy.

When all the other little girls debated with each other about whether they wanted a husband who was a doctor or an attorney, Yardley had known to a certainty that she wasn’t ever—not ever, ever, ever —going to love any man besides her daddy and her granddaddy.

She’d been right on both counts. Although she had grown fond of Gramercy.

Now she was crying because she’d been wrong about absolutely everything else.

The tears were a soft clutch of her diaphragm, a gentle push that moved Yardley’s old hurts out of her body and up to the surface so she could feel them.

She wiped at her eyes, gazing at herself in the mirror.

“I thought I’d never fall in love,” she said.

“I thought it was up to me, which is absurd, and then I did fall in love, and I thought I’d invent a new and brilliant way to have KC in my life without blowing my cover, but that was a lie I was telling myself, because I wasn’t trying to figure out anything at all.

I was just lying and hiding and hoping it would work out. ”

She turned around to look at the woman who’d been kind enough to understand Yardley would need this moment, this space, to prepare herself.

“I ruined it, Marla. I absolutely and completely ruined it, and it’s only by the grace of some very kind and benevolent god that I got a second chance. No one imagined this for me. Not even I could. If I had to guess, I’d say I’m crying because I’m not completely, totally convinced I deserve it.”

“Maybe you don’t,” Marla said. “But maybe it doesn’t work that way.

Maybe love isn’t something you can offer and withdraw at will, or something that’s earned on merit or only belongs to the good or the straight or the humble or the perfect.

Maybe you marry a spy and you have to tell your mama they travel for business while you worry yourself to a bloody knot on the inside.

Maybe your love comes to you when by no measure are you ready, and you lose it.

Maybe you love someone the world tells you you’re not allowed to and you die for it, throwing bricks at the police.

It’s not a pretty thing. It’s a powerful thing.

It will ask so much of you, including change and terrible grief.

” Marla patted Yardley’s hands. “It would be more strange if you didn’t cry. ”

Yardley could understand that. She let herself cry, and then she felt better, as though a storm had passed through and renewed her. “Will you make sure there’s a good video? With decent lighting where you can see both of us in it?”

“Katherine is planning on taking you to our little pond by that big willow tree. Atlas already set up multiple angles of cameras and mics. They’re motion-activated. Splash your face with cold water.”

Yardley splashed until most of the swelling and redness had faded, and Marla whisked cosmetics over her face to take care of the rest.

Then, Yardley found herself focusing on the most unlikely thought of all: the moment when the front of Dr. Brown’s house had crumbled with the explosion, and she’d watched every monitor go shaky and dark except for KC’s contact lens camera.

It showed her diving between the blast shields, but Yardley hadn’t been able to see them, because what KC looked at—what Yardley saw—was how she had Dr. Brown gripped in her arms, saving him.

Yardley’s entire heart had been lodged in her throat.

Gramercy told her later that she’d screamed KC’s name, but she didn’t remember.

It was a moment for Yardley, without a doubt. Not just because she’d only briefly had KC back, but also because it was a moment full of gorgeous awe at this woman who risked herself to save an enemy, simply because she trusted her feelings and acted on them.

Yardley could be as scared as she wanted, walking with KC to that pond. She knew KC Nolan wouldn’t do one blessed thing, not anymore, unless she was sure .

“That’s my best,” Marla said. “The rest is posture.”

“I know.” She nodded. “Thank you.”

When she left the house, the party had gotten louder in the gathering twilight, and more people had congregated around the chairs, the fire pit, and the coolers with drinks.

It was easy to slip into the fray unnoticed, like she’d been there the whole time with perfect hair and kiss-proof lipstick.

She found a scrum of Lucas’s friends, people she knew casually from larger meetings with Homeland Security, and listened to one of them talk about a playset they’d just put together for their daughter, passing around their phone to show pictures.

Someone touched her elbow.

“Hey,” KC said. “Can I borrow you for a minute?”

Praise be, KC was nervous. Her hand was cold in Yardley’s, and she was talking about nothing too fast as she led Yardley away from the group, and so Yardley gave herself a second to look up at the sky and smile.

Her nerves had melted away, leaving her feeling very hot and very powerful.

Like the best prize. Like a lifetime of good things.

“So Atlas was telling me that this duck on their pond just hatched some ducklings, and I know how much you love baby animals.”

“I do love baby animals.” Yardley slid her arm around KC’s bare waist with a little shiver and an overwhelming pulse of Mine. Yes. Mine.

“But now that we’re here, I’m realizing it’s too late to see them and they’re probably tucked under their mom’s wing in their nest. If ducks sleep in nests. Do they? That seems like the kind of thing you would know.”

Yardley looked at the crisscrossing strings of twinkling stars Atlas had hung up in this dark corner of the yard, taking note of several cameras quietly recording them from every angle. She put her shoulders back and smiled at KC. “I don’t know where ducks sleep.”

She leaned down and kissed KC, at first pretty, for the video, but then it got away from her somewhat.

Yardley had not considered the nuclear impact of this proposal on her susceptibility to KC’s prowess.

She could understand now why first babies were so often “premature,” their births dated roughly forty weeks from the moment of engagement, because she had never felt as ecstatically responsive as she did in this moment.

She stroked her tongue against KC’s, feeling her shoulders relax beneath her palms, and Yardley let out a sigh.

When KC’s hands came up to frame Yardley’s face, it felt so good that Yardley forgot about her posture.

She draped her arms over KC’s shoulders helplessly, boneless with the first really good kiss she’d gotten all day.

KC’s mouth was perfect, and this kiss was horny and direct, sending KC’s hands from Yardley’s jaw to her sides, over her hips.

She was ready to let KC do anything . This corner of the party was dark enough.

Her thighs had burst into flames. Camera footage could always be erased, possibly after watching whatever it had captured over and over.

KC was hardly wearing any clothes, her ridiculous microscopic T-shirt rucked up so easily, and then there was so much of KC between her breasts and her navel, the curve of her hips in those equally invisible shorts.

“Marry me,” KC breathed against Yardley’s neck, biting her just enough that goosebumps showered over her body in the space between that kiss and the next one over her bottom lip. “Marry me, Yardley Lauren Bailey Whitmer the Third.”

“Yes,” she panted. There was no way the microphones were picking that up, but KC’s hand gripped the back of her thigh, right under her ass, and pulled her leg around KC’s waist just as a deep, slick pulse of white-hot yes yes yes made itself as distracting as possible.

“God.” Yardley couldn’t breathe, as KC’s hand found a place while her mouth found another. KC pulled away, just a little, and right when the cool night air was able to fit between them, Yardley opened her eyes.

KC was smiling, but she was also crying.

“Fuck,” KC laughed, her tears rushing over her cheekbones. She looked up at the fairy lights. “I had a very classy proposal planned, for the record. I love you.”

Yardley pulled down the skirt of her dress, laughing, too, and then KC was reaching into her pocket and taking Yardley’s hand and sliding on a ring.

Yardley smiled so hard that it made her cheeks heat. KC had definitely appealed to the greediest debutante that resided in her heart.

“One more thing.” KC held up a key tied on a ribbon.

“Please move in with me. I don’t want to get buzzed up to your apartment ever again.

The bed is hard and small. You took all the throw pillows with you, and now there is nothing to lean on or nap on anywhere in our house.

And it’s not our house without you. It’s fucking dire. ”