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He was talking about the Phantoms, wasn’t he? And for the past year, he’d been my phantom, flitting in and out of my bed under cover of darkness. A ghost with a magical cock.
“I’m so sorry.”
“We’d rented a house, and my room was on the top floor.” He gave a joyless laugh. “The only reason I’m alive today is because the stairs creaked.”
“Did you get them?”
“Too damn right I got them. The aftermath…it wasn’t pretty. There must have been a leak somewhere, and the brass tried to say it came from my team, but that was a lie. The Phantoms were tight. We didn’t leak.”
I traced one of the tattoos on his left arm, four ethereal beings being chased by a monster. “This is you? Them?”
“Yeah. Four foot-soldiers being hunted by bureaucracy. They tried to put me on a new team, but I quit after that. How could I carry on when I didn’t trust the people I worked for?”
“That was why you came back home?”
He nodded. “Some of the men in The Darkness might be assholes, but they don’t sell out their friends. And I found myself a new crew—Snake, Sailor, Smith, and Mouse—but you already know about that.”
“And then you joined Blackwood.”
“Emmy earned my trust. Man, that bitch is crazy.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
He ran a hand through damp hair. “But losing my brothers hurt. Fuck, it hurt, and I swore I’d never put myself in that situation again. Swore I’d never get close enough to anyone to care.” Finally, I got a smile. “Sure screwed that up.”
“You did?”
“I thought that if I just kept my distance from you, it would be okay, but…” He ran a finger down my cheek. “That turned out to be harder than I thought.”
“Really? You only spent one whole night in my bed, and that was because you passed out from exhaustion.”
His smile was sheepish. “Yeah, well, I wanted to stay plenty of other times.”
“Then why didn’t you say something?”
“I was… I was scared. Scared of the past repeating itself, and scared that you wouldn’t want more anyway. You seemed happy the way things were.”
“I thought you were a commitment-phobe.”
“At first, I was. But I like you, Agatha. I really fucking like you.”
“I like you too.” My turn to take a steadying breath. “Maybe I even more than like you. How much of this weekend has been an act?”
“None of it. Apart from fishing with Stu—that guy’s a fucking asshole.”
“No dissent here. So… What are you saying? That you want to try dating?”
“Would you consider it? I still have a dangerous job, and there’s always risk involved, and—”
I put a finger over his lips. “At this stage, I’m more terrified of missing out on the good times with you than I am of facing up to the bad.”
He kissed me softly on the lips. “What about you? There was a nasty break-up in your past, wasn’t there?”
“My long-term ex cheated and blamed it on my job.” I worked too much, he said. It was practically impossible for him not to sleep with our neighbour. “So I had a dumb rebound fling with a colleague, and when we split, he bad-mouthed me all over the office.” And because he also worked in cyber, he’d made a deepfake porn vid and sent it to his friends. Just his little joke, ha-ha. I’d become known as Bukkake Special Agent Lerner. “But you’re not either of those men, Hawk. I know that much.” He’d kept our hookups quiet for nearly a year, given me the space to heal and get used to the idea of being part of a couple again. “I get depo shots. We don’t need the condom.”
This time when he kissed me, there was a whole new level of heat. Deeper, more intense, feelings twining around us. Hawk wasn’t a fake boyfriend anymore. This was real. Which left me with the awkward problem of explaining to my family that he was Brendan and not Kellan, but I’d worry about that later.
Right now, I had more important things to focus on. Like Hawk’s molten gaze as I straddled him. Like the delicious stretch as he sank into me bare. Like the new emotions we’d unlocked with our heart-to-heart. Like the argument Clarice was having with Buckley on the balcony next door.
