a/n: Only a few more chapters to go! I started editing this chapter at a significantly higher level of alertness than how I ended, so beware of increased mistakes and typos along the way. I haven't managed to respond to the comments on chapter 13 yet (maybe tomorrow!), but I figured you'd rather have me ease you off of that Lucy-is-captured cliffhanger of an ending than get a slew of half-coherent PMs instead ;) So with that said, I am incredibly thankful for the consistent support!
Another quarter of an inch and his plan would have been shot to smithereens. That was all the space he had, if that. His means of entry didn't allow for much wiggle room, but wiggling wasn't on the agenda. Burning this entire building to the ground, however, was a more distinct possibility.
With Jiya still in his ear, Wyatt was able to worm his way through the warehouse's network of air ducts without a grain of doubt as to whether or not he was crawling in the right direction. The blip that was Lucy still flickered steadily across her screen back at the safehouse, and with the Mothership not yet charged, this was all the more backup he had - the constancy of a dependable voice telling him when to turn; a living person on the other end of the line who could pay him some meager tribute if he didn't make it out of alive.
He was far less concerned with that particular outcome than the one that teased menacingly at the outer fringes of his brain - arriving too late, finding a tracking device pinned to nothing but an empty shell, losing Lucy from right between his fingertips, because the entire universe was committed to one overarching plot of fucking him over at every opportunity.
The line crackled and then Jiya spoke again, detaching him from his grisliest nightmare. "Okay, another left turn and…"
"And?"
"And you'll be directly overhead in about thirty seconds."
Caution laced her voice, but she withheld the lecture. Probably because she knew it would be wasted on him by now.
"How much longer for you?" he whispered back as he negotiated the final corner.
"Five minutes. Maybe less."
"Don't come inside."
A loud gust of breath blew across the line. "Wyatt - "
"Just tell me what direction I'm running in, Jiya. I need an escape route, not an added liability."
"I'm trained," she protested stiffly. "I'm just as good as any other field agent. I - "
"I know. You're damn good, I'm not arguing that, but what I need is a pilot who can get our asses out. Fast. That's the bottom line. You with me?" There was more breathing. Huffing, resentful, ready-to-tear-him-a-new-one breathing. "Jiya?"
"There's a clear spot on the north side of the building. About forty-five degrees northeast of your current position."
He exhaled grim relief. "In case I don't get a chance at saying it later, I love you, Jiya Marri."
She scoffed, but that sound did nothing to mask the grin weaving through her words. "Save it for your damsel in distress, Logan."
His next response - one that would adamantly warn her off from ever using that same term in Lucy's presence - was promptly forgotten when a muffled rise and fall of noise echoed from up ahead, snagging his attention and accelerating his pulse. He signed off with a curt farewell, not waiting for her to return the sentiment before the link went quiet. Another moment of concentration, a few more inches forward, and he could hear the repulsive sneer in Emma's voice.
A sneer he couldn't wait to wipe ruthlessly off of her face.
"Poor little Princess. Dethroned and disinherited without dear ole' mom, no one here to champion your cause from behind the scenes this time around. How does that make you feel?"
If Lucy extended any response, the sound of it didn't reach Wyatt's ears. The gnawing pit that had taken up residence in his gut grew a little wider.
"I'll ask it again, Lucy. Where's your ragtag team of mosquitoes hiding their time machine? You give us a location and this is over. No one has to get hurt, not even you."
"I told you, I don't know." Lucy's voice trembled, but the ire behind each word was undeniable. Wyatt drew a breath fueled with combustible adrenaline, straining forward to hear more. "They don't tell me, okay? I never know where the hell we are. Never. For this exact reason, I'm guessing."
Hearing her hitting that particular nail on the head made him want to recoil. Little did she know, it was far more than a random hunch that had held them back from confiding in her.
"One scrap of information and we let you see Rufus. It's a damn good offer."
"An offer I couldn't match even if I wanted to," Lucy spat back angrily. "Besides, what reason do I have to believe that bullshit? We didn't even make the jump with him. How do I know he's actually here? You've done nothing to instill any sort of confidence."
Wyatt shifted his weight back and went to work on dismantling a strip of the ductwork as they continued to argue, holding his breath until he was sure the move had gone undetected.
His first glimpse downward produced a twisted slap of déjà vu. It was just as Jiya had described it. Tears streamed down Lucy's cheeks, dark tendrils of hair were plastered to her face, a streak of blood was crusted to one corner of her mouth, and that fate-stricken flowered dress was torn at the shoulder. Even in a state of total disarray, resilient poise practically leapt off of her, stubborn resolve keeping her spine straight, her chin pointed out, eyebrows bent together. She may not have given a rat's ass about their creepy fascination for family dynasties, but there was no two ways about it - Lucy Preston was far more regal than the whole damn lot of Rittenhouse pricks put together.
"I don't think you're comprehending the stakes this time around," Emma intoned with a sickening smile. "I don't give a damn who your great-great-piece-of-shit-granddaddy was. Something tells me I wouldn't have liked the guy anyway. So I'm really under no obligation to keep you in one piece, and I have an associate you might remember who's been rather enthusiastic about the prospect of taking you out herself. Maybe it's time I let her off her leash."
Only one associate came to Wyatt's mind as he processed that ultimatum, and with absolute hellfire climbing through his esophagus, he sank back into position and made one final sweep of the room. Emma was in his crosshairs. She had one guard stationed on this side of the door, and from his current angle, Wyatt could easily pick him off with a second consecutive shot before the guy had a chance at properly assessing the situation. All he needed was for Lucy to stay exactly where she was, and while that sort of guarantee was typically a gigantic gamble where she was concerned, Emma had inadvertently done him a solid this time around - Lucy was bound tightly to a chair and had no means of getting in his way.
Win-win-win. He fired without another breath of hesitation.
Emma collapsed with a sharp grunt. Her goon at the door jerked a gun upward just as Wyatt anticipated he would, but the poor jackass had no chance. He dropped too, falling over Emma's body in quick succession. Wyatt kept his gun trained on the door, not willing to risk the draw of additional company even with a silencer to dull the reverberations of his shots.
A cowering noise from Lucy ripped his attention to her as she bucked against her restraints. There was no way she could see him from where she sat, and her fear urged him forward in less than an instant.
Wyatt dropped to the ground with a reflexive roll in her direction, aiming another watchful glance toward the door before he was at her side. "Hey, you okay?"
"How - " she extracted a shallow breath, working double time to keep her flurry of nerves in check. "I'm fine, but how are you here so - we've barely been here more than - than..."
"You're wearing a tracking device," he confessed with zero preamble as he yanked a knife from its spot on his belt and started sawing through the cords that held her. "It's connected to the pager, which transmits a signal to the Mothership's CPU. I know that's going to totally weird you out - "
"You've got that right," she retorted without much conviction.
"Judging by your current predicament, one would think you'd appreciate the gesture."
"Once again, you've got that right."
The attempt at dry humor couldn't overcome the magnitude of what she'd suffered. He heard the small sniffle she sought to conceal, and it took a herculean amount of determination for Wyatt to not waste precious seconds on his frivolous urge to mop up her tears or get transfixed by his own relief.
He wouldn't let it derail him, but he was reveling in it all the same. She was okay. He'd gotten here in time. She was okay.
His resolve to stay on task was obliterated once she was free, not for his own lack of gritted sense of purpose, but surprisingly, for hers. Lucy heaved herself out of the chair before the last coil of rope had hit the floor, bombarding Wyatt with a death grip of a hug that sent him reeling into another time, another place, another stratosphere. Lucy Preston's were arms wound around him with a tenacity that would make a lesser man go blue from oxygen deprivation. But, him? He could handle it, and even if he couldn't, Wyatt was sure he would do just fine with a temporary shortage of oxygen.
With her face jammed into the crook of his neck, she stammered her way through an aftershock of several heart-stopping syllables. "I - I thought I'd never see you again."
He didn't remind her of the obvious contradiction - as recently as yesterday, she seemed fairly convinced that she didn't want to ever see him again. The breathtaking reversal in that opinion was a powerful drug to his already overwhelmed nervous system.
"We...we get out of here first," he murmured a little erratically, "then I - I need you to level with me on just what you mean by that, ma'am."
Lucy nodded, a few strands of hair teasing across his face as she withdrew. "Yeah, solid plan."
He wove the fingers of his free hand through one of hers, each heady wave of frenetic energy decreasing in its power over him as he let the solace of her skin bring him back to earth. He pulled her closely behind him, an unlikely contrast of her rustling 19th century skirts clashing against his tactical uniform of all black, a perfectly bizarre snapshot of a mission that was so unlike any other. It just so happened to also be the most important mission of his life.
He wedged Lucy behind him at the doorway, diligently scanning for any sign of activity in either direction before plunging out into the bright white corridor.
Three steps in the direction of freedom and the building's eerie blankness was broken with a burst of open fire. The first bullet hit Wyatt squarely in the torso, robbing him of his breath and likely leaving one hell of a bruise, but doing no further damage thanks to the Kevlar barrier around his chest.
His opponent was no fool, though. Wyatt swung around and began to return fire just as a second shot plunged through his arm, sending his gun clattering and ripping a deep curse from his throat.
"Wyatt!"
He did his best to keep Lucy tucked behind him, but she tore free with a tenacity he wasn't able to match. The roar in his ears wasn't loud enough to drown out the resulting scuffle - two feverishly persistent voices, both striking a flame of profound recognition inside of him. By the time he was blinking the blinding pain from his eyes, Lucy stood like a statue before him, her back shielding him as best she could, his gun trembling in her hands.
Jessica matched her stance from no more than five or six feet away, her own gun forsaken between her feet, a bloodied hand clutched against her chest.
So he'd gotten a good shot off on her, apparently blasting the gun right out of her grasp. Too bad some scrambled neuron in his brain still seemed incapable of labeling that feat as a victory when she was on the other end of the barrel.
"Back up," Lucy demanded shakily, her voice eeking out between rigidly clamped rows of teeth. "Now."
"I think this is a matter better left to husband and wife, if you don't mind."
"I do mind. Back the hell up. I'm not asking again."
He easily perceived each pitfall of the situation. That gun was far better off in his hands, but even the quickest transfer from Lucy's grip to his could give Jess the opening she needed to snatch up her own weapon. The woman he knew - the wife he'd loved - didn't possess a single combat-ready reflex, but there was no counting on this Jess being anything like his. Her jaw was sharper than a razor, disgust filled her eyes as she stared unblinkingly at Lucy, and there was no second guessing the itch of her uninjured hand. She was ready to seize any thread of weakness and pull with the bloodlust of a trained assassin.
But Lucy being the one to shoot Jess...that was a trade-off worthy of the devil of himself. It wasn't - he couldn't…
"You're not going to do it," she taunted with a steely smile. "You're Lucy Preston. You're not made of the same stuff that we are. "
"That's for damn sure," Lucy grumbled beneath her breath.
"Shooting Wyatt's wife? The woman who loved him, took care of him, vowed 'till death do us part' light years ahead of him even learning your name? I'm calling bullshit on that right now. You won't do it. You can't."
A massive shudder rocked Lucy's shoulders. She was succumbing to the war against her better nature. Risk be damned, he had to get that gun away from her or they were both finished. Wyatt had a hand stretched forward, ready to ease it from her white-knuckled grip, but Jess was ready to pounce at his first twitch of movement.
The repercussions had to be irrelevant. They had to be. Jessica with a gun in hand was the signature on Lucy's death certificate, and his would surely be next in line.
He was bellowing an unfathomable order before his head was even on board with his mouth. "Shoot, Lucy! Now!"
Lucy's body snapped backwards into his as Jessica's knees crumbled beneath her. Piercing vibrations of shock were running through her, convulsions so fierce, he was half-convinced she'd somehow taken a hit even though the other gun had never gotten off the floor.
The disorder in his own head pressed against him on all sides. It already required too great an effort to keep an arm around Lucy. To speak words, to formulate a response - any response - to what had just happened felt like a mountain too steep to be climbed. The reverberations of that lone gunshot circled him relentlessly.
Jess...his Jess or not, she was still Jessica, and she was…
A shout of several voices rang down the hall, too distant to pose an immediate threat, but strident enough to clear the eclipsing daze from Wyatt's mind. One voice rose above the others, a voice that was supposed to be out of commission. Emma.
Wyatt liberated his gun from Lucy's barely-there hold, whirling her around with him, some absent corner of his mind worrying that his wounded arm wouldn't be enough to keep her listing frame from toppling over.
A scattered trail of blood outlined the meandering path from where he stood all the way to the end of the corridor...a path Jessica had mostly likely sacrificed her life to defend, just so Emma could keep her own. He'd realized long ago that Jess had no loyalty to him, not anymore, but somehow - beyond all discernible reason - a part of him couldn't cope with the reality he'd just lived. Her ultimate devotion to Rittenhouse...to Emma fucking Whitmore...had relinquished her to a fate as tragic as this. Her second chance at a long life had been snuffed out just as senselessly as the first.
His feet surged mechanically ahead. There was an outlying echo behind him, a whimper and a footfall that he belatedly knew to be Lucy's, but he wasn't able to tap into the part of his brain that meant to warn her off, to keep her at bay. The wheels had fallen off and there was no processing his actions, no slowing his momentum.
He wasn't charging down that hallway for himself. He was storming the gates for Jess, an innocent who never had any claim to this goddamn war, never should have so much as overheard the name Rittenhouse, never been asked to spill blood for their abhorrent cause. And for Lucy, forever changed, all because years of her mother's influence had been wagered against her on night one of this all-consuming appointment with time itself. She'd never again be the same woman who loved and fought and cared as freely and eagerly as anyone he'd ever known. She was crippled with fear now, shackled to her pain. He wanted to give her everything, but with the sins of so many others - Wyatt's included - blackening her heart, she no longer knew how to receive any of it without keeping one eye cast over her shoulder. She was suspicious, uncertain, permanently marked by too much loss.
He had to do this for Rufus too; their comedian of a friend, isolated, lost, a prisoner for far too long. And for Jiya, who hadn't been herself from the moment Rufus was taken away from her. For the sacrifice of good people, the best people. People who would never escape the taint of this tangled, messy brawl for power and control.
And yeah, Wyatt was maybe running straight into the eye of the storm for his own sake too, because the only two women he'd ever loved were damaged and destroyed by the crushing tide of Rittenhouse's plague upon their lives.
Red-hot rage fueled every step, but it still wasn't enough. Emma's trail ended at the foot of her resuscitated Mothership, the one that threw Wyatt straight onto his ass just as he got close enough to offload a fleet of bullets. One flash of dark skin at the helm and he knew he couldn't risk it.
Rufus, with a silver barrel pointed directly to his temple, had been the one to push the button that brought Wyatt up short. The hatch closed, the machine whistled out of sight, and Rufus was gone with it.
Apparently Emma was living to see another day.
Lucy knew that look of flattened dejection. The face of failure. A face she'd arranged for him through her own actions time and time again since they'd reunited. She couldn't help but assume she'd aided in bringing this latest misery upon him too.
One squeeze of her index finger and she was forever branded with the title of his wife's killer.
She decided it was best to keep quiet on their way out even with a hive full of questions swarming her head. There was still so much about this whole ordeal that didn't add up for her, and that wasn't the end of it. A multifaceted defense unfurled through her mind, an airtight exoneration that boiled down to one point - you told me to shoot - begged for release, but she wouldn't dare be so selfish.
Today Wyatt had walked - no, ran - away from Jessica's lifeless body for a second time. No word of apology or plea for understanding could possibly be worth the effort now.
Maybe it wasn't as bad as Lucy thought…static limbs, pooling blood...that didn't mean - there was still a chance, wasn't there? That same woman had certainly defied much larger odds.
But the probability of Jessica Logan cheating death again was actively making her woozy, so she stuffed that line of thinking down with a crucial blaze of self-preservation.
Lucy took the lead when they met Jiya outside, murmuring as few sentences as possible to relay the Reader's Digest version of their escape. Wyatt only broke his silence to divulge that he'd seen Rufus for himself, blandly declaring that he was well enough to pilot a time machine if that was any consolation, and then his expression was blankly impassible again.
They dispersed quietly once the Mothership was on home turf again. The farmhouse, Lucy thought was a twinge of discomfort. They were back in that cavernous barn again, the one that was attached to a knot of rooms that housed too much of her shame. Surely this place was far too confined to properly give shelter to the craggy hill of Wyatt's grief.
She tried to go straight to bed, pausing to do little more than trade her petticoats for pajamas and rinse away the rust-colored gathering of dried blood from her face. An hour of staring at the planked ceiling brought her more aggravation, more dread, more guilt. Every stab of remorse she'd ever felt over her role in Wyatt's pain was now doubled, maybe tripled. Why was she - why was the whole damn world, for that matter - so intent on punishing him like this? She could hardly imagine a man less deserving of it than him.
Hour two passed in the same state of agitation, and she wasn't willing to subject herself to a third. She stuffed her feet into a pair of fuzzy slippers - slippers that had been hidden away here for later use upon their last exit, the strangest semblance of nomadic homeyness she'd ever known - and padded downstairs to the kitchen. Her first visit to this place had required copious amounts of alcohol to make it even remotely habitable. If only Lucy could find some remnant of that stash, then maybe she'd have a real shot at eventually closing her eyes without a mournfully long-faced Wyatt mocking her attempts at claiming a slice of restful oblivion.
The joke was inevitably on her. Mournfully long-faced Wyatt was a concrete figure in the dimly lit dining area, more compellingly heartbreaking in the flesh than any distorted replica her subconscious could conjure up in his place. The stash she'd been seeking was displayed before him in the form of a tall amber bottle, the contents of which were partially spent in the clear glass tumbler at his fingertips.
"They say something about this, you know," Lucy said quietly. "Drinking alone…"
He glanced up with red-stained eyes, seeming not at all taken aback by her sudden intrusion. "They who?"
"You know...they. The collective masses. People with insight."
"People with insight would be scared shitless to spend a single day in our shoes."
She couldn't deny the truth of that statement. Her mouth was too dry, too uselessly vacant, but something of substance had to come out. She had to try. "I know you're - you have every right to be upset, but she's - she isn't…"
"Isn't worth a drunken eulogy?" he asked with some unexpected twinkle of humor in his crinkled expression. "Rest assured. It's only a toast. You won't find me under this table in the morning."
"A toast, huh?"
Wyatt beckoned her forward with a signal from two of his fingers, smirking a little sadly as she stared back at him dumbly, but it was still a Wyatt Logan smirk all the same. "C'mon. It's the least I can offer her now."
The solid requisite weight of culpability kept her from uprooting her feet. "I - I'm so sorry, Wyatt. I - "
"You did exactly what I told you to do," he answered solemnly, "and if you hadn't, neither of us would be here right now. I'm sure of that."
Lucy lowered her gaze to the floor, speechless in the wake of his startling black-and-white clarity.
"Did you come down here for a drink, or didn't you?"
"How did you - " her eyes skipped upwards, coming to rest on another one of his patented smirks. "I never said that I - "
"You didn't have to say it," he intercepted with a shrug.
Whether that meant she'd earned a strong drink, or if her motives were really that paper thin, there was no fighting the basic conclusion. She was definitely here for a dose of whatever it took to numb the noise in her head, and if he was issuing an invitation, she was powerless to turn it down.
She took a clean tumbler from the oak cabinet and settled into a chair adjacent to his, allowing him the privilege of pouring her poison. With the flutter of fingers that still seemed to reek of gunshot residue despite her insanely thorough scrubbing, Lucy took hold of her drink and tapped the rim gently to his. "To Jessica."
Wyatt smiled a shadowed smile, eyes alight with thousands of deafening emotions. "To Jessica. Wherever she may really be, this one's for her."
They drank in unison. The burn in her throat quelled some raucous element inside of her, helping to smooth down the rawest of her nervous edges. She studied Wyatt in the low light, finding him astonishingly steady regardless of his bandaged arm, his limitless suffering.
She didn't have to voice the observation. He stared back with a wry hook to his lips, replying to her wordless reflection without prompting. "My Jess has been gone for a very long time, Lucy. She didn't die today. She died years ago."
"I was with her, you know...in Oklahoma. She found me after we got separated and held me at gunpoint until Emma could...retrieve us."
His thumb circled the rim of his glass, their entire tragedy of a day pulling severely at his face. "I didn't know that."
"I kept...I don't know - " Lucy floundered helplessly, " - kept trying to find something in her that said...said Wyatt's wife, and it just wasn't there. All this time, with everything you've told me, everything I've tried to convince myself of...is it crazy to say I wanted to be happy for you guys even when - even when it meant anything but happiness for me?"
"It's not crazy. It's noble. The crazy part is me not seeing her for the pawn she really was. It should have been blatant from the minute she walked back into my life."
"But you don't have to - " she stopped, rearranged her faltering feelings, and started again. "That's not fair to you. And you have every right to not handle this well. You know that, right? I don't need to be shielded."
His good hand slid across the table to brush lightly over hers. "I know. And that's not what I'm doing."
Lucy sipped haltingly, fighting every instinct that told her to draw back, stealing strength from the blissful blur of alcohol on her tongue. "You're sure?"
"I'm sure," he said with the slightest bob of his head. "The way I see it, I've lost her twice already. Once because I was a selfish bastard who needed to grow the hell up, and it cost her everything. Then the second time came around, and I was still a selfish bastard who was so focused on proving I'd changed, that I...I lost sight of the people who'd changed me, and that cost us all too damn much. Selfish...selfish can't be an option for me anymore."
"You've anything but selfish these days, Wyatt," she muttered at the table's distressed surface, incapable of maintaining eye contact as the reverse of those words scratched across her mind. She...she knew selfish. She saw it mirrored back at her every time she caught a glimpse of her hollowed-out reflection.
"I don't know about that," he answered in a stale tone. He pulled his hand away, rubbing it across the back of his neck instead. "You want to hear something truly awful? There's a reason we were so prepared to come after you today, Lucy. We - Jiya and I - we knew. She saw it. She had a vision, one of you in that same dress you wore in Oklahoma, and...and she told me. She told me before you'd joined us, before you even knew Rufus was missing."
The pieces were falling together, snippets of several mismatched conversations piling higher as the enigma of so many trivial secrets and guarded whispers came to light. "She...she saw what, exactly? Me in that room with Emma?"
"Yes," he croaked wearily. "It's the reason we - "
"Kept me in the dark about virtually everything?"
Wyatt nodded, grim lines of apology carving around his eyes and collecting at the corners of his mouth. "We knew what kind of questions she'd ask you, which is why we never disclosed our location at any of the bases. And I know it's total bullshit, but I didn't want to scare you off by telling you about it. Hell, I didn't know if - if getting Rufus back would even be possible if you weren't there, because that's the way Jiya saw it - you, with us in some capacity." He tossed back the remainder of his drink with a scowl. "Doesn't get much more self-serving than that, does it? Not to mention that it was incredibly manipulative, a complete abuse of information and power and - and everything you've been talking about, right?"
Her well-worn route to furious indignation was mysteriously failing to make itself known. She dug further, rummaging for the cliff notes of that venomous speech she'd delivered in Houston, but the longer she searched, the emptier she felt. It was one hell of an ass-backwards choice he'd made, keeping vital information from her while quietly strategizing for the worst possible outcome, but he'd delivered on his reckless shitshow of a plan. Lucy was safe, at home in the warmth of this cozy kitchen nook, sporting no more damage than a few surface scratches and gratefully drinking her way toward a half-decent night's sleep. It had all happened within a matter of hours - not days, not weeks. Hours.
"I was already a major flight risk," she admitted slowly. "I can see why you weren't exactly eager to double down on those poor odds…"
"Lucy, c'mon," he implored, desperate to communicate every ounce of his anguish. "Don't. Don't you dare downplay this. I never should have - "
"No," she agreed, her tone far more pacifying than anything she'd managed in quite some time, "you shouldn't have. But we both have our fair share of never-should-haves by now, don't we?"
"You could say that," he agreed in a nearly indistinguishable mumble.
"Can we...can we maybe just call it even?"
It was a brazen request. His slate may not have been lily white, but hers felt impossibly polluted after everything she'd put him through in the last few weeks. From where she sat, he was under no obligation to make such an unbalanced bargain. He should have shot her down without any further consideration.
But he was Wyatt. Far too prone to baring his ragged heart again and again. "That's really what you - you'd actually be okay with that?"
"Yes," she said just above a whisper, far too taken in by the soft glow of hope possessing his blue eyes.
His tumbler tipped to hers, initiating another token of symbolic understanding between them. "To leveling the scales, ma'am."
She drank to that in a heartbeat, swallowing fast enough to make the room orbit a little faster once her glass returned to the table.
"More?"
More? More would surely sabotage their tentative camaraderie, catapulting her inhibitions straight into a dangerous no-fly zone of dubious judgment. More would undoubtedly take their newfound truce and flip it on its head, dragging Lucy back into that same place where the smallest dose of indulgence had ended in a one-way ticket out of Wyatt's life.
"No thanks," she said with tight smile, the refusal not coming nearly as easily as it should have. "Not tonight, anyway."
Wyatt seemed to find a surprising sliver of charm in that answer. The most convincing smile of the night eased over his mouth, and before she had any hope of preparing herself, he was leaning over the table and pressing a gilded kiss to her cheek.
"Another time then," he answered in a honeyed rumble of his deep voice. "Goodnight, Lucy."
She rose to her feet in a curious haze, one that could only be attributed to another slip in her ever-weakening stance against his stubborn affection. "Goodnight, Wyatt."
Whether it was the hush of liquor to her brain or the too-good-to-be-true offering of forgiveness from the one person who had every right to collect on all her debts, Lucy faded away almost immediately when her head met the pillow this time, her shoulders finally unburdened from the strain of so many regrets.
Too good to be true, she reminded herself. Too good to...
She was asleep before she could assert that same line of defense a second time.