Her lids flipped open and she glared at him. “How old am I?” she demanded. “Come on, how old. Say it.”

“Ah . . . thirty-two.”

“And you know what that means, legally? I can drink, I can smoke, I can vote, I can serve in the army, and I can make my own damn decisions. So how about you let me choose what’s good for me—and what isn’t.”

Right. It was so not the time to get turned on. And he really didn’t think she’d thought through all the implications of being with a man who had his background.

He stepped back. “Go with your father. Let me clean up here and back in town.”

Her eyes held his. “Don’t break my heart, Isaac Rothe. Don’t you dare break my heart when you know perfectly well you don’t have to.”

With that, she kissed him and strode out of the kitchen . . . and as he watched her go, he felt pulled between two outcomes: one where he stayed with her and tried to make it work, the other where he left her to stitch up her life and move along.

Overhead, he heard her and her father walk around as they got themselves ready to go out and pretend like they hadn’t seen two men get killed in their homes and weren’t praying that a soldier who they shouldn’t have ever met disappeared the bodies.

Christ, and he even considered being in her life?

Isaac was alone no more than twenty minutes later, the two of them making a hurried departure for the city in Childe’s Mercedes.

Before they left, Isaac shook her father’s hand, but didn’t offer even his palm to Grier—because he didn’t trust himself not to kiss her one last time: Looking at her in her black dress, with her hair put together and her makeup on, she was as he had first met her, a beautiful, well-educated woman of privilege with the smartest eyes he’d ever had the privilege of staring into.

“Be safe,” he said to her hoarsely. “I’ll call you to let you both know when it’s okay to come back here.”

No tears, no protest on her end. She just nodded once, turned on her heel, and went to her father’s car.

As the pair left, he walked to the front door and tracked the sedan’s taillights.

He had to wipe his eyes. Twice.

And upon the disappearance of those glowing red beacons, he felt as if he had been left behind. But that was such bullshit, wasn’t it. You couldn’t be left, if you were the one doing the departure.

Right?

Needing some kind of contact, some sort of hope, he looked around at the treeline on the far side of the rolling lawn again. No sign of Jim or his boys . . . or that dog.