Page 113 of Inexplicable

I wasn’t ashamed to admit that I needed this woman.

She’d changed my entire life for the better.

“I’ll fly back for my last lecture,” she told me. “I can pack up my house at the same time and put it on the market.”

“What about your surgery?” I asked. I didn’t want her to skip something that meant that much to her.

“I can go back for the surgery,” she informed me.

“I’ll go with you,” I told her. “We can stay somewhere nice until you’re ready to go home.”

“I miss all of my new family,” she said. “Now that I have them in my life, I’m not sure how I survived without them. I don’t want to live like that again, Brock. I guess I was resigned to being alone before we met, but after I met you, I realized that wasn’t really a choice. I wanted more, but I didn’t know how to find it.”

“You found me,” I told her in a satisfied voice. “I’m not a guy who believes in fate and destiny, but my opinions may have shifted a little since we met. I knew you were mine almost from the beginning, sweetheart.”

“I’m positive that we were meant to meet,” she said in a dreamy tone. “I didn’t realize it, but I was so lonely without you.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly because I felt exactly the same way.

It was incredibly cliché, but Jenna completed me.

Maybe I’d been content with my life before I’d met her, but that contentment had been a pale substitute for the way I felt now that she was mine.

“I was lonely without you, too, baby,” I said huskily as I stroked her hair. “Sleep for a while.”

“I think I will take a nap. I’ve always felt safe with you,” she told me with a yawn.

Fuck! That humbled me more than she’d ever know. I’d let her down by letting her get kidnapped a second time, but she still trusted me.

I’d probably drive her crazy by being an overprotective pain in her ass, but I was never going to let her down again.

I trailed the back of my fingers down her cheek as her breathing became slow and steady.

There was a certain vulnerability in admitting that a woman was your entire fucking life, but I’d learn to live with that uncertainty if I could call this woman mine.

I closed my eyes and tightened my grip a little on the woman who had become my everything.

Yep. I could easily deal with just about anything if I could always fall asleep feeling like the luckiest asshole on the planet.

Chapter 31

Jenna

“I’m not sure I can do another two nights like the last two,” I told Brock three weeks later as I sat on the bed, watching him disrobe. “I’ll learn to deal with the fear while you’re gone on a Last Hope operation because I know what you’re doing is important. But dealing with Sara’s fear when you guys are gone is intolerable. She was worried sick, and she has no idea what’s going on.”

It had been so hard to see Sara’s fear.

Had she been going through this every time the guys left on a mission?

They probably didn’t know because…they weren’t here.

This time, I’d been here to see her worry, and I hated it.

Brock frowned before he pulled the T-shirt over his head. “Is it really that bad?”

“Horrible,” I confirmed. “I think it’s time for Nate to tell her where he goes every time he has to leave for a mission. I understand that it’s better that very few people know the truth, but Sara is a loved one. She’s close to all of you. Yeah, I think she’s crazy about Nate, but she sees the rest of you as family.”

Sara had been distraught when the guys had been gone for two days without a single bit of information about where they’d gone.