Lance: A Hitman Romance (Santa Espera #2) (16 page)

Katie

Sunlight streams in through the window at the front of the motel room as Lance and I sit together at the round table.

Spread out in front of us are two Egg McMuffins, some hash browns, and a coffee each. The brown McDonald’s bag sits crumpled to one side of the table, and the two of us eat in silence. I’m wearing the t-shirt and shorts that Lance got me. He’s just wearing a t-shirt and jeans now, having taken off his leather jacket.

I can’t stop thinking about last night as we eat. I was so certain nothing was going to happen between Lance and me. But I guess I’ve been feeling better towards him after how much he’s helped to save me. And then hearing about his life and how he got to the way that he is … it showed me a side of him I never knew.

And then, when he came out of that shower with only the towel in front of him … well, can you blame me? All rational thought went out of my head. For the first time in a long time I let go and actually did something I
wanted
to do. Without thinking of the consequences. I didn’t think. I just let myself be free.

And it felt absolutely amazing.

I fell asleep right after, and then in the middle of a dream I woke up to find Lance behind me and we made love again before I fell right back to sleep. This morning we woke up in each other’s arms. We didn’t talk as we lay together … it didn’t feel as if we had to. After a while my stomach rumbled and Lance said he would get us something to eat, and then he left to go grab us some breakfast.

I take another bite of my Egg McMuffin. I look over at Lance. He’s chewing his food, staring off as he thinks. When he swallows, his eyes dart over to me and I smile, swallowing my mouthful of food as well.

“You seem in a better mood than yesterday,” I say.

Lance gives a slow nod.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says. “About how I’m going to talk to Gil, and what I’m going to say.”

“Oh?” I ask, putting down my food to take a sip of coffee.

“Well, considering how Gil has been lately, I don’t think he’s going to take the news of me wanting to leave that well. I don’t think I’ll be able to just quit and let that be it.”

I furrow my brow as Lance goes on.

“I could leave town, but I have connections here. And to be honest I don’t want to leave Willy on his own. He’s a great guy but he’s a bit soft when it comes to this work. He’s too used to just getting his way.”

“Maybe you could do something else for Gil?” I propose. “Switch to another line of work?”

Lance gives it some thought.

“Maybe. It’s just …” he gives an exasperated sigh. “What he’s been getting into is not what I want to do. I’ve tried turning a blind eye to it, but if I’m right in with it I don’t know how well that would work out. Plus these last few assignments he gave me …”

“What sort of assignments?” I ask, and Lance falls silent for a moment.

“I told you he wanted me to kill a baby,” Lance says, and I nod, my stomach curdling at the thought of such an act. “The target I had before that was a man Gil thought had stolen from him. He was this kid’s dad. When I looked into it, it turned out that Gil exaggerated the amount he took — the guy maybe stole some money, but not nearly as much as Gil said.”

“How much did he take?” I ask.

Lance shakes his head. “Just five hundred dollars, and Lord knows why.”

“And how much did Gil say he took?”

“Twenty thousand,” he says, and my eyes widen.

“Wow,” I say. “That’s quite the mistake.”

“Mistake?” Lance says. “Maybe. But by the time I found this out Gil was going on about how much he wanted the guy dead, and I reasoned that if he’d stolen once he would probably steal again. So I ended up doing the job.

“But the worst part was that … usually, when I have to do a job, the target begs me not to kill them. They cry, they try to bargain … they just don’t want to die.”

I swallow, nodding my head. The thought of this is disturbing, but not nearly as disturbing as I’d imagined.

“This guy, though,” Lance says, shaking his head. “He didn’t beg for his life. He begged for the life of his son. The one Gil wanted me to kill later on. This guy begged for me to make sure that his son, Nathan, was okay. That he was going to be okay.”

I take in a breath, letting it out.

“What did you do?” And Lance gives me a look.

“I did the job,” he says. “But I didn’t do anything to that kid. And I never will. That is one line I will not cross.”

Lance is breathing hard. I can see his shoulders rising and falling as he stares at the table, no longer eating the food in front of him.

“Lance, how does all this make you feel?” I ask.

“How does it make me feel?” he repeats, swinging his gaze over to me. “How the fuck do you
think
it makes me feel?”

“Agitated,” I say.

“Yeah, agitated is certainly one word for it. How about disgusted? Or pissed the fuck off?”

He cringes and puts a hand to his stomach, rubbing it for a second.

“Does your stomach hurt?” I ask.

“It’s the coffee,” he says through gritted teeth. He looks angry. But I shake my head.

“I remember your stomach was bothering you back in my office. Do you remember that? I think it may be the stress of this job that’s getting to you.”

“So?” he spits. “Every job is stressful.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s a foregone conclusion. Look, Lance … are you sure you want to go back to this line of work?”

“Will you stop psychoanalyzing me?” Lance snaps, turning an angry face in my direction. My heartbeat picks up but years of practice have taught me to keep my body still, not to react to such obvious acts of aggression.

“I just want to help,” I say.

“Well, I don’t need your help,” he tells me, and he pushes back from the table. I watch him stand up and turn around, leaving his half-finished meal behind.

“Lance, you need to deal with these things,” I say to him, still sitting down. “Keeping your feelings bottled up isn’t at all healthy. Okay? It’s better to get them out, to recognize and to acknowledge them.”

“You want me to acknowledge my feelings?” he asks, spinning back around. “Okay, here’s what I’m feeling right now. I feel like you’re only asking me these things because you feel like you have to. It’s because you’ve got some superiority complex where you want to feel like you’re better than everybody else by talking down to them and trying to help them with
their
problems. And all the while you have to never deal with problems of your own.”

I stare up at Lance, standing in the middle of the room.

“You want to talk about acting superior?” I say to him. “How about you? You say you want to rid the world of bad people, but what makes you so God damned perfect? Did you ever consider that killing other people might, oh I don’t know,
make you bad?
”

“At least I do something about it. I go out and I act. You just sit in a chair and charge people a hundred and fifty an hour while you listen to them cry about their problems. You don’t fix anybody, you just make them more aware of what’s wrong.”

“Oh, and killing people is fixing them?”

“They stop being bad, so yeah, I guess it kinda is.”

I shake my head.

“I don’t understand how you can’t see the irony in what you’re saying.”

“And I don’t understand,” Lance takes a step towards me, “how you can’t see what your life is really like!”

“What?” I say. “What does that mean?”

“I mean that you’re a phony!” he yells, and for a moment I’m stunned. “You hide behind your mahogany desk and your fucking degrees but you’re just as inexperienced as everybody else. You have problems, I know you do. But you pretend like you’re perfect! At least
I
don’t pretend that I’m not who I am. Yes, I kill people for a living. Yes, I’m probably going to hell! But you? You’re wasting the life of someone who could have it so much better and all because somebody broke your heart eight years ago.”

I stare at Lance. His words hit me like a slap to the face. Lance narrows his eyes.

“Don’t think I couldn’t tell,” he says. “I’ve had my heart broken before too, you know. That air of indifference you put on? The pulling away? Focusing so hard on anything but what you’re feeling? Yeah, I know it. Seven years of hard work, but nobody talks about that one year sabbatical you took before you started. Somebody broke your heart, and you’re just running from the pain.”

I can feel my jaw trembling, and it’s an effort to make it stop.

“Shut up,” I finally say, dropping my gaze. It’s an effort to ignore the burning wetness in my eyes. I feel Lance staring at me but I don’t raise my head. He speaks again.

“Was he your husband?” he asks, and his voice is much softer now. I give a wet sniff and shake my head at the floor.

“No,” I say. “But we were engaged. He called it off.”

Out of the edge of my vision I see Lance walk towards me and sit back down in his chair. He reaches forward and puts his hands around mine. He feels warm.

“Tell me what happened,” he says. I sniff again and blink, two small tears falling from my eyes.

“Zach and I were together for three years,” I say, surprised I’m telling this story. I’ve avoided it so much for almost a decade. “We hit it off immediately. It was like love at first sight. Everybody thought we were going to be together forever, and that’s what I thought too.

“We moved in together after only six months, and at first it was great. We spent all our time together, and I was so happy. But slowly things started going downhill. It was little things at first … he wasn’t smiling as much, and he became less talkative. Our sex life dwindled, and we began getting into more petty arguments. I thought we could talk about anything before, but soon I felt like anything I said was going to start a fight.”

“The honeymoon period ended,” Lance says, and I nod, swallowing.

“I know. I knew it from experience, and I learned about it in school, but it just seemed to hit harder with Zach than with anybody I’d been with before.

“We stayed together and tried to make things works, but our arguments only got bigger and bigger. To our friends we were always the perfect couple, though. We put on a show whenever we were out, and fought whenever we came home. My friends would tell me how envious they were, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them what things were like behind the scenes. I guess like you say, I like to maintain an air of professionalism.

“Time went on and our relationship was like a roller coaster ride. Just when I thought we’d figured something out, something else would start to become a problem. And then, one night, we had a major fight. And Zach finally told me what was really bothering him. After three years, he told me what the real problem in our relationship was.

“It was me. He told me it was me. He said the problem with our relationship wasn’t anything between the two of us. He said that it was just me.”

I blink and two more tears fall from my eyes, landing on the carpet below. I can see the argument playing out in my head, the memory so vivid even though it happened eight long years ago.

“He said I wasn’t capable of love, and that he saw that in me the first time we met. He said he thought he could change me. Like I was some broken machine that he could make better by getting into a relationship with me. But apparently I’m too mechanical, too analytic. He said I was like a robot, and that I was lucky to have someone like him in my life. Just so I could see what another human being was like on a day-by-day basis.”

I take in a shuddering breath and let it out. Lance’s hands are still holding mine, and he hasn’t said anything.

“And the last thing he said,” I go on, “as he took off our engagement ring, was that he hoped I realized how lucky I was to have experienced an actual, real connection with somebody.

“And then he left. He stayed at a friend’s house for a few days, and then kicked me out of the apartment. I didn’t want to be there anyways. I got a place on my own and I was an absolute wreck for a year.” I let out a solitary laugh. “It was pitiful, you should have seen me. But that’s what made me decide to make my own career. So I went back to school and got my other degrees and made the practice for myself. And I haven’t stopped since.”

I finish talking, and when I look up Lance is looking at me. His expression is soft, and almost sad.

“Did you believe him?” he asks, and I give the question some thought before answering him.

“In some ways, yes,” I say.

“Do you think he was right when he said that you’re incapable of love?”

I feel my heartbeat pick up as Lance’s hands still hold onto mine, covering them.

“I don’t know,” I say, my throat feeling tight. “I don’t know if I am.”

I feel his hands squeeze mine.

“I think you are,” he says.

Lance is still looking at me, and his eyes look so blue right now, so beautiful. I sniff wetly as Lance leans forward in his seat and he kisses me. And as his lips press into mine I close my eyes and I kiss him back, our hands together between us, the two of us together in this room.