“It’s a good exhaustion. I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen my brothers so energized and joking with each other. It was like old times.”
She threaded her fingers through his and kissed the back of his hand. Happiness for him bubbled inside her chest.
“I dreaded coming home,” she admitted. “It’s part of the reason I didn’t put up much resistance to staying at my parents’ place last night. I had no idea how I would put his room back to rights.” Her eyes lifted to his. “Thank you.”
He placed a soft kiss on her lips.
“I don’t know how,” she said in a broken whisper, “don’t even want to think about how differently yesterday would’ve turned out had you not been there with me.”
“I’ll always be with you. If you’ll have me.”
Her hands skimmed up his chest and smoothed them over his shoulders, careful not to press anywhere it might hurt. “Are you truly ready to be a dad?”
“Brodie already has a dad. But I’m more than ready to be the man who will protect him and help you guide him through all the tricky parts of life.”
Outside of his father, Liv couldn’t think of anyone else she would trust with such an important role. “It could get really complicated, at times.”
“I’m not afraid of complicated, Liv.” He brushed the backs of his knuckles along the edge of her jaw. “What scares the hell out of me is not having you and Brodie in my life.”
A spark of hope ignited in her chest, then the antithetical nature of their careers doused the budding flame with arctic water.
“What about our jobs?” Had he thought this thing through? How could she, an FBI agent, turn a blind eye to breaking, entering, and stealing?
Amusement lit his eyes. “You mean cops and robbers?”
A surprised laugh escaped. “Yes, exactly.”
“What do you think about coming over to the dark side?”
She blinked. “Are you offering me a job?”
“As it happens, I’m making a few operational changes to BARS. I’ve handed over the management of the recoveries to Cruz and will finish Neuman’s training. I suppose the company could use another recovery artist.” He studied her for a moment. “But what we most need is an expert to authenticate provenance before we take on a recovery.”
Liv’s mind was utterly and completely blank. He wanted her to ditch her career with the Bureau.
Was he freaking mad? Did he understand what he was asking her to give up? She’d busted her butt for years, gone up against ginormous egos, and fought the disdain of her fellow agents who wanted to shove art crime to the bottom of the barrel.
Cracking the O’Fallon case had finally put North Carolina’s art crime problem on Shanice’s radar. Charlotte’s SAC was talking about creating a special unit—right here in Asheville.
Who better to lead that team than Liv? Everything she’d been working toward was finally coming together.
And yet she continued to listen. Began running through the pros and cons. Considered how it would affect her son—
“The team leader can be a bit of a prick sometimes,” Zeke continued, interrupting her spiral into Confusionville, “but his girlfriend has figured out how to smooth out his edges.” He brushed his thumbs over her cheeks. “Can’t beat the five-minute commute.”
She placed her hands on his forearms. “Zeke, I don’t know if I could fully get behind BARS’s mission.”
“Which part?”
“The robber part.”
He grinned. “You and Phin. So black-and-white.” His thumb smoothed along the rim of her lower lip. “Did Callie steal the photo from the Rogers’s basement? Or did she recover Brodie’s treasured picture of his dad?”
Liv froze as her mind sifted through his words. Never in a million years would she label Callie’s actions stealing. In fact, Liv would have done a lot worse than merely lifting the picture frame off Alan’s dresser in order to return it to her son.
Even breaking and entering.
The prospect of an impending disaster lifted from her mind, giving it a weightlessness that she hadn’t felt since leaving Zeke’s hotel room. Now, his single-minded determination to do whatever it took—even tight-roping the law—to recover stolen assets made sense. How satisfying it must be, reuniting people and their treasures.