Warily, Luca sat silent as J.T. smoothed his special-cut designer suit down the front, unbuttoned the jacket, and sat opposite him. On the table he set down a brand-new pack of playing cards.
Luca sighed weakly. Opening the box would aggravate his wounds. The pain medication was beginning to lose its potency. “Cards?”
“I’ll open them. I can shuffle them if you can’t.”
Luca moistened his lips. They’d become so dry and cracked in Sicily. He waited for J.T. Greer to clear the stack of the box and then he set them face-down on the table. “Simple game today, Luca. War.”
“Okay.” Luca shuffled despite the ache in his fresh wounds. The crisp cards fell into formation magnificently. “And what is it that you have to tell me while we play?”
“I’ve offered your son Milo a job on my team. Offensive coordinator position. His stats are impeccable and I received some privileged information that he had been in training for a year to return to the field in a jersey. It’s not going to happen for him, though. If he didn’t already tell you, let him do it in his own time. But I want you to know that I am looking out for your boys.”
“What about Jeremiah?”
“Jeremiah is engaged to my daughter Waverly.”
“Bella Waverly.” Luca shook his head, bewildered. He was missing this, and for what?
“When he marries my daughter, he’ll become part of my family whether he accepts that or not. I’ll watch out for your children, Luca. That is something you can trust.”
Luca began to deal the cards, slowly, solemnly. “Why help me?”
“We have something in common. I have a wife I love. You have yours.”
“My wife. My Anne…”
J.T. nodded slightly as Luca continued to deal. “Tell me about your wife.”
Chapter Twelve
Izzie didn’t find herself sitting at the rear of a synagogue because she had made a firm life-directing decision. She was here for quiet and to better remember her maternal grandmother, who’d asked her to consider remembering all the facets of her that made her an individual—that made her Izzie Phillips.
She was Christian, Jewish, German, African American, Polish, Armenian, Native American—and yet she lived disconnected from everything that made her Izzie Phillips. The pressure to choose, to settle on an alliance, was one she resisted. All or none was the choice she’d given herself when she’d left her parents’ home ten years ago.
Today she wondered if any religion would have her and all the issues she came with. Sitting with her lace-gloved hands folded in her lap and the trim of her delicate scarf tickling the sides of her face, she sat quietly and wondered if the rabbi would notice her.
“Have you come to pray?” he asked before she’d realized that he watched her with a peaceful curiosity.
She shook her head. “I’m not a member.”
“Are you Jewish?”
“I don’t know,” she said and expected irritation.
But the rabbi only nodded.
“Rabbi?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know much about religion, but my heritage is complicated and part of my family practices Christianity while another part practices Judaism. I don’t want to choose, but…I want to belong to somebody—to something.”
“Hybrid religious identities are becoming more common,” the rabbi shared, moving so slowly his robes barely rustled. “We will welcome and accept you should you choose Judaism or a hybrid religious identity. Please don’t take the decision lightly. Why is it so important to you? I’d like to hear your answer to that.”
“Because…” Well, why was it? “Because I don’t belong anywhere.”
“Is that true?”
“Yes… I mean, well, I have no family to belong to now, except myself.”
“Then you do still have family.”
“I can be my own family? Seriously?” But oh, didn’t it make sense? She belonged to herself.
“Are you not adequate to serve as your own meaning of family?”
“I’m adequate,” she said, unable to stop the note of hesitation. After a lifetime of realizing only her shortcomings and social value, it felt strange to think she could be important. “I’m enough, and I’m important.”
“Who says you’re important?” the rabbi pressed.
“I do. I love myself.”
Smiling, he nodded.
“May I sit here for a few more minutes?” Izzie asked, smiling, too.
“Of course.”
Izzie wasn’t waiting for anything, just sitting still and listening to nothing. Who she would be and where she would go was truly a decision only she could make. The reality of it made her feel alone yet brave.
There was that, too. Izzie Phillips was brave.
***
It was raining when Izzie turned away from her windowsill plants and called Milo’s phone. When he answered, she blurted, “I fucking love you.”
“I fucking love you,” he said. “We should start all of our phone calls like this.”
“I want to see you. Are you home?”
“I’m going to be someplace else, actually,” he clarified. “Write this address down.”
Izzie jotted it on a grocery list pad and rushed through her apartment to dress up her button-down shirt and sexy jeans with tall brown boots, a hunter-green jacket, and tons of mismatched beaded bracelets.
Rainy days were excellent days to make life-sculpting decisions.
They were also terrible days to leave the house without any shelter other than a glossy magazine. She stopped in front of a stone-fronted house that looked like it might belong to a wealthy fairy tale giant who knew zilch about landscaping.
Getting out of the Grand Cherokee, she walked around the front of the vehicle, holding the magazine in place on top of her head. As she neared the veranda, her jacket began to feel heavy from all the absorbed rainwater.
Milo, way too sexy-hot for a rainy day in a dark gray suit and white shirt, opened the door before she made it up the steps. Instead of letting her in, he joined her outside and took her free hand. “This way.”
“Okay, this feels a little covert. Whose house is this? Is this wariness what you experienced when I asked you to bring a car seat to my apartment?”
“First, what do you think of all these hedges and shrubs and trees?”
“They have potential,” she said slowly. “A little TLC from somebody with an eye for it. Repairing the entire lawn isn’t insurmountable.”
“How much time do you think that’d take?”
“A bit. This property is…wow. The grounds are all the privacy anyone could want in this part of Las Vegas.” Now the rain was stroking into her hair in spite of her efforts to shield it. She lowered the magazine. “So whose property?”
“Mine.”
“You own this house? Why did you buy it?”
“So my someone could have somewhere to belong.”
Izzie laughed, or was she crying? She didn’t know if the wetness on her face was from the rain or her tears, but she didn’t care as she grabbed his face and kissed him. “You know what someone and somewhere mean?”
“I picked up on the clues when you and your friend referenced them.”
“And you bought a place that I could belong to? But Las Vegas…”
“If you don’t want Las Vegas, you don’t have to have it. Your future is your choice. But this house will be here. And I want you here. With me. Because I love you and no, I don’t want you to run away from Las Vegas and what you did wrong. Leaving a place doesn’t mean you can escape what you’re running from. My father tried that shit.”
Izzie dropped her forehead to his chest. He raised a couple of damn good points. Running wouldn’t guarantee that she could forget who she used to be. Still, she was free to do as she pleased.
“Fight for happiness. Fight for this—you and me.”
They were a this now. And he w
as her someone. He was already fighting to keep her in his life because he loved her. Sometimes love meant letting go. But other times, like right now, it meant trusting someone to protect you.
“What’s inside the house right now?” she asked, looking up at him.
“A baby grand piano and a box of random novelty stuff.”
“You rescued them!” Just as he rescued her and let her rescue him.
“If you want, I can teach you to play.”
“So you’ll teach me piano and I can teach you how to conquer this landscaping dilemma? The only other thing I can offer you is love.”
“Love?”
She nodded. “That’s all.”
“That’s everything, Izzie.”
Izzie looked from him to the massive house. No—home. Their home. With massive, sturdy trees that’d make perfect structures to choose for a swing. If not for a child someday, then for her. “Take me home.”
Kissing her, Milo took her hand and they raced through the rain to get cracking on their future.
* * *
Hurting her was his ultimate sacrifice. Read THE FORGIVEN, the explosive conclusion of the END GAME series by Piper Westbrook.
continue to sample…
A gunshot had ended them. So had his lies.
Remy hadn’t deserved her in the beginning and sure as hell didn’t deserve her now, but he was too selfish to deprive himself.
That first brush of his knuckles down that open trail at the front of Meg’s dress almost weakened him to uselessness. Watching her, he saw her lashes tremble and her lips press together.
She wasn’t the glittering young woman who tasted like tequila and could strip off her inhibitions grinding out a salsa on an overcrowded dive bar’s sticky dance floor. She wasn’t even the dogged special agent who fearlessly went deep undercover but always returned to him to remind that good still existed in this goddamn world.
She looked the same and rendered the same savagely primitive effect on his body, but she’d changed.
Skimming his knuckles upward, he curled his fingers around the chain of her purse.
“Shy, Remy?”
He didn’t find the boldness in her tone authentic but accepted the words as a gauntlet thrown. He wasn’t shy; he was desperate and venturing into trouble he couldn’t mend.
Remy leaned, angled his head, and she met him halfway. Her glossy lips were slippery under his kiss, teasing him as if she was flicking a feather across his face.
“Can’t seem to make a solid landing there, can you?” she uttered against his mouth.
The almost and not quite and close misses were a game to her.
But not to him. For Remy, this was life and death.
“Meg…”
“Shh.”
The love that had once breathed between them had been inconvenient and confusing, yet the realest element in either of their lives. It had struck them unexpectedly. Neither was willing to let it go, and for that they were both to blame. Because something that good couldn’t last. Not for people like them who’d done what they had.
“I got to you because I’m on a job,” he told her. Yeah, it was a vague explanation, but he wouldn’t divulge particulars now. “The kiss is because I can’t fight it. I’ve thought about you constantly since that night. It hasn’t been never-ending death, but it’s been a never-ending mindfuck.”
“They put you down, didn’t they? DC?”
“It needed to happen.”
“Down deep, Remy. You didn’t turn up at your parents’ place in Jersey or even in Pakistan. There was talk that you were dead but I didn’t think that. I knew you wouldn’t get time, either, that they’d rather have you on reserve than in a cell. About a year after… What I’m trying to say is I tried to bring you back and I couldn’t find you.”
His mind spun through the past five years. The US government had dragged his ass up for a few missions that needed a sharpshooter of his caliber on the front line but had thrown him back afterward at his request. He was freelance—off record, off the FBI’s payroll, damn near a ghost. He wanted it that way.
“Why’d you want to bring me back?”
“To ask you why you went dirty. You cut a deal with those bastards when I thought we were on the same side. You killed me when you turned, damn it.”
So she still believed he’d defected to the drug-funneling terrorists he’d been quietly hunting since they’d captured, tortured, and murdered his cousin eight years ago. The feds hadn’t gone out of their way to clean up his image, but what did it matter now? There was so much that Meg didn’t know. But she’d been a thread in a web that was bigger than DEA and even now it was necessary to lead her with lies.
“The kiss,” she said finally as fresh tears welled. “Don’t fight it.”
There was something he didn’t altogether trust about her spurring him on, but as he’d said—he couldn’t fight it. Nor would he try. Giving her what she provoked, he let go of her hand to hold her head steady. She yielded, opening her mouth to bring him home.
Her taste became his, the slick stroke of her tongue as necessary to him as oxygen. No borders had been settled, so he let himself roam. Parting the halves of her dress, he bared a pair of firm tits. Palming them, preparing them for his mouth, he grazed a nipple with his tongue before catching it in a sucking kiss.
Remy felt the pressure of her nails burrowing into the back of his neck, but when he started to retreat she pushed him closer. Gasping harshly as his teeth met her flesh, she said, “It doesn’t feel the same. Why doesn’t it feel the same?”
We’re not the same. But he’d be damned if he let that defeat him.
AMAZON | GOODREADS
Author’s Note
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Books By
Piper Westbrook
The End Game Series
The Penalty
The Rush
The Brawler
The Hook
The Forgiven
About The Author
Piper Westbrook is a writer and a city girl whose life is a country song. Reader discretion advised—always.
GOODREADS
The Hook: The End Game Series (Book 4) Page 20