Page 203 of The Vigilante's Lover

The medic leads her away.

Jax’s strong arms come around me. He kisses the top of my head. “So is that what you plan to do?” he asks. “Start your Phase One training?”

I turn around in his embrace and look up at him. Beautiful, sleek, perfectly dressed Jax. You’d never tell from the look of him that he’d been executed that morning, run miles in pajama pants, nearly suffocated in an elevator, and survived a chemical explosion. I could never make Vigilantism look as good as he did.

“Can I just get the shoes?” I ask. “Somebody blew up my first pair.”

His megawatt smile is like a room lighting up. “Perhaps, if it’s the only thing you wear.”

And he kisses me, the currents of air still blowing around us, the medics carting people to the elevator, and guards clearing out the War Room.

I will go wherever he does. Vigilante. Civilian. Dart guns or ropes.

I’m his.

Epilogue

Six Months Later

Jax looks so much like a sheep herder from a Swiss children’s book that I have to laugh out loud.

He hurries down the side of the hill at a half run, half gallop. His hair blows wildly. He’s wearing goofy green shorts and a white collared shirt. All he needs is a pair of suspenders to complete the ensemble.

Spring in the Alps is breathtaking and much easier to manage than the winter, not that I was here that much. After leaving the Vigilante headquarters in D.C., we agreed I would go through Phase One training in Missouri with Alan Carter while Jax helped establish some order in the syndicates ravaged by Sutherland and Jovana’s plan to undercut their authority.

Sutherland was decommissioned, and Colette and Sam reinstated. Jovana went off grid again. Jax hasn’t decided what to do about Klaus. Currently he is working a Vigilante desk job in some rural area.

I was a model Vigilante trainee, already well schooled in a number of basics, including knot tying, dart guns, and engaging the enemy.

I got my own pair of Phase One shoes. I ran into Katya, who wasjust about to graduate to Phase Two. I apologized for the way I stole her shoes. She shrugged and said she learned a valuable lesson about never letting anyone, no matter how innocent seeming, learn about her food allergies.

“At least you called the medic after doctoring the tea,” she said. “A real enemy wouldn’t.”

I didn’t know what sort of place Katya would find among the Vigilantes. I’d check up on her later, see where she ended up.

The wind picks up on the hillside, ruffling the waves of colorful wildflower blooms. The chateau Jax bought me to replace my blown-up house is small and cozy and all mine. It’s been paradise here, but a faint restlessness has started to build in me again since my Phase One training ended and we both left the network.

Jax makes it down to where I’m marking the spots where I have stubbornly planted watermelon seeds, despite warnings from the locals that they will never grow in this soil. I remember cutting fat green fruit from the vines with my parents, and I’m determined to bring some small part of my heritage with me, even as far away as I find myself now.

“Who was the man who came by?” I ask. Jax is returning from greeting a visitor, a rare event as remote as we are from any decent-sized cities.

“Just a delivery,” he says and kisses the top of my head. “Any sprouts yet?”

I press down on the damp earth beneath my fingers. “Still hoping,” I say.

“They’ll come.”

He sits down next to me. The sun is low on the horizon, turning the mountaintops in the distance a warm gold. I scoot up next to him on the soft grass at the edge of my little garden.

He fingers the bottom of my cotton shirt, finding a strip of skin.

“You know what I love most about living out here?” he asks.

I lean into him. “What?”

“Stripping you naked under a bright blue sky.”

His eyes are mischievous as his hand slips beneath my soft shirt.