Cry No More Read online

  She couldn’t see a future with him, but neither could she see one without him.

  “You might as well say it,” he murmured, still looking out at the ocean. He hadn’t looked at her once since telling her he loved her. “I know you do.”

  “Love you? Yes.” She sighed and sipped her coffee. It had gone cold and she grimaced, setting the cup aside. “I do love you.”

  “Enough to marry me and have my kids?”

  Her breath left her and she felt herself tilt sideways before she caught her balance. “What?” she asked, her voice reedy with shock.

  “Marriage. Will you marry me?”

  “How could that possibly work out between us?”

  “I love you. You love me. It’s a natural progression.”

  She raked her hand through her hair, more upset than she’d thought possible at a marriage proposal from him. It was unexpected, and tantalizingly sweet, but the enormity of the problems facing them if they got married was almost too much to comprehend. And part of her was terrified. He’d mentioned not just marriage, but children, too. How could she?

  “Getting married wouldn’t be smart,” she said.

  He turned and watched her with those dark, grave eyes, studying her, waiting for her to continue.

  “Between us, we have enough emotional baggage to fill an airliner. I probably need to be in therapy.” She gave a cracked laugh. “And you’re an assassin. What kind of job security is that? I don’t even know what I want to do, if I should keep on with Finders or go into teaching the way I’d always planned. Part of me wants to quit, but how can I? I’m good at what I do. I’m just so tired and—”

  “Afraid,” he said.

  “Of the future? You bet.”

  “No. You’re afraid to be happy.”

  She stared at him, frozen by the accuracy with which he’d seen behind the smoke screen of solid reasoning.

  “Have you really convinced yourself that you don’t deserve anything because you let Justin be taken from you?” he asked, relentlessly pinning her down. “You think you can’t have a husband, another baby, because—what?—you were a bad mother and didn’t hold on to him tight enough?”

  Her throat worked as she tried to swallow. She felt as if her lungs had seized, her heart stopped. No one had ever said it was her fault; she’d fought for her baby, had fought nearly to the death. Only a knife in her back had stopped her. And yet, for over ten years, she’d struggled with the bone-deep knowledge that she’d failed to protect her child. “I . . . I shouldn’t have had him at the market,” she said, her voice stifled. “He was just six weeks old. He was too young—”

  “You couldn’t have left him by himself. What else were you going to do?”

  Her lips trembled. God, how that question had gone around and around in her mind! What else could she have done? There had to be something else, something she hadn’t thought of, hadn’t seen, because she’d let those men take Justin from her.

  “Haven’t you bought enough redemption for yourself, with all the other lost kids you’ve found? What will it take for you to forgive yourself?”

  Her baby home, safe and sound, and that was never going to be.

  Diaz left his post by the door and squatted down in front of her, folding her hands in his. A cold, wet wind tangled her hair, lifted the curls. “Is that why you gave him up? To make yourself pay?”

  “No. I gave him up because it was the right thing to do.” She saw him shiver, and realized he’d been outside all this time without even a jacket. Impulsively she opened up the blanket and invited him inside its warmth. He was fast to accept, but when they settled back down, she was somehow sprawled half across his lap, with the blanket tucked over and around them and her head resting in the hollow of his shoulder. Their combined body heat quickly chased away the chill.

  “It’s okay to live,” he said softly, stroking her face, tracing the lines of it with one finger. “It’s okay to be happy again.”

  Just the idea made her feel as if she were balancing on the edge of a cliff, with a stiff wind trying to push her over. “It’s too soon.”

  Even admitting that she might one day allow herself to be happy, to get on with life, was like lifting one foot and letting it dangle over the cliff.

  “It’s been ten years. You’ve found your son, and you’ve done what was right by him. How is it ‘too soon’?”

  “It just is.” Once again, she sought refuge in logic. “By being happy, you mean getting married to you.”

  “I can make you happy.”

  And she could make him happy, she thought, feeling dizzy at the prospect. He was a complicated, difficult man; if she turned him down, given his solitary nature, he would in all likelihood never marry. She was his one shot at a family, at a halfway normal life.

  As if any life with James Diaz could ever be normal.

  “How can we get married? What do we know about each other? I don’t even know how old you are.”

  “Thirty-three.”

  She paused, taken aback and immediately sidetracked from the other salient points she’d been about to make. He seemed older, even though there was no gray in his hair and his face was unlined. “That’s my age. When’s your birthday?”

  “August seventh.”

  “Oh, my God, I’m older than you! My birthday is April twenty-seventh.”

  She was so dismayed that the corners of his mouth kicked up. “I’ve always wanted to sleep with an older woman.”

  She thumped him on the chest, which earned her a kiss that was deeper than she’d expected, and longer. When he released her she buried her cold nose against his throat, inhaling the warm scent of him. She wanted to say yes. She loved him, more than she’d thought she would ever love a man again. As difficult as he was, in so many ways they perfectly complemented each other. With her he talked, he joked, he even laughed. Something about her opened him up; something about him pulled her away from the rigid path she’d set for herself.

  But she was right about the problems they’d face, and she knew it. Getting married would only compound those problems. “What would you do for a job? If we got married, you couldn’t keep chasing all over Mexico looking for the bad guys, maybe getting killed—” She stopped, because she couldn’t continue with that thread.

  “I don’t know what else I could do, but I’ll find something.”

  There weren’t many job openings for retired bounty hunters/assassins. She couldn’t see him in any kind of office setting, or doing anything that required him to work with the public. Just what kind of job could he do?

  She was thinking about the future, she realized. Things were moving too fast, and she still didn’t have her feet under her, emotionally speaking. “I can’t say yes,” she said. “Not yet. There are too many problems we have to work through.”

  He kissed her again, closing his eyes as he hugged her to him. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll ask again next year,” he said, standing up with her in his arms and maneuvering to open the door.

  Ten minutes later, as he moved between her opened legs and settled into place, she realized that this was December. Next year was in three weeks.

  30

  “Mama! Thane’s tearing up my homework! Make him stop!”

  Milla stirred the spaghetti sauce and cast a harried eye toward the living room, where the shrieks were growing louder. “James! Get Thane away from Linnea.”

  He was already on his way. The screams grew louder, evidently while he was in the process of peeling Thane away from his eight-year-old sister’s homework, but in just a few minutes blessed peace settled over the household, except for an occasional grumble from Linnea as she set about redoing her pages. Diaz appeared in the doorway with a giggling Thane draped around his neck. “What do I do with him now?”

  “Play with him. Or tie him to a chair. Something.”

  Six-year-old Zara was sitting at the kitchen table industriously practicing her letters, working to get them exactly right. Her dark eyes wer