Did the boys share that much?

I didn’t ask, because if Boone didn’t share, it wasn’t my place to do it.

Instead, I said softly, “You guys know each other really well.”

His hand at my chest moved up so he could stroke my throat as he replied, “Honest to Christ, if I hadn’t found them, I don’t know where I’d be.”

“Then I’m glad you found them,” I replied.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“And Boone and I talked it out and he’s of the same mind. If Ryn’s onstage, he’s not on Smithie’s duty.”

“Hopefully soon, this’ll be all over, so it won’t matter.”

That was the hope.

Though, since not a thing was happening, dangerous or otherwise, it seemed this was going to drag on forever.

“Shower then bed?” he asked.

I smiled at him and nodded.

He started to push away as I was making my own preparations to get up with him, and in doing so, turned my head and saw his laptop open on the coffee table.

There were Zillow listings on it.

Weird.

“Moving?” I joked after he was on his feet and he’d grabbed my hand to pull me to mine.

“I can rent this pad easy, make a whack,” he told me. “And I got some money saved up. I’m not a stock portfolio type of guy. So…” He trailed off.

So…

Although I had utterly no experience with this, he meant, if you have money—and apparently, he had some money—invest in real estate.

But I looked down again at the laptop and saw he wasn’t looking for a property that might offer future income as a rental, like another condo or a townhouse.

He was looking at homes.

It was then, something I didn’t understand at the time, and forgot about it until then, came to mind.

Something that Nikki had said about Mag’s place being temporary and not even his.

Thus, even though he’d begun to move us toward his room, I tugged on his hand to stop him.

He looked at me.

“Are you, you know, restless?” I asked.

His mouth cocked up at one side.

“Is that code for ‘do I want an orgasm?’” he returned, but before I could answer, he continued, “And just to say, the answer to that will never be no.”

I swayed closer to him and his head was coming down in that way I loved.

Still…

“What I mean is, are you wanting to move on from this place?” I clarified.

His head stopped its downward descent and he shook it. “Just moving up.”

“Not moving on?”

Now his whole head cocked. “What are you really asking, baby?”

“It’s just that Nikki said this place was temporary and it sounded like that was a thing with you. It was also around the time when she thought she might be able to get back in with you.”

Mag shifted how he was standing in order to position himself fully in front of me, and as he already had one of my hands in his, he took up the other, so he was holding both.

“Okay, yeah, after I got out of the military, I moved around a lot,” he shared. “Crashing on couches. Having a roommate, getting fed up with that roommate, finding somewhere else to be. I met Nikki when I was doin’ that and we dated, but we didn’t get serious because, I see it, looking back, I was restless. It wasn’t good. I also see now that, without the Marines, I’d lost my purpose. I didn’t know who I was. I needed some grounding. That was when I applied for the job with Hawk, got it, found the guys.” He shrugged and carried on, “And I had my place again. I learned who I was and what I needed to be doing. And I got a job doing it.”

“The commando calling.”

I said it like it was a tease, and he grinned, but we both knew it was no joke.

“Yeah, I gotta be challenged in that way. I gotta belong to a team. I gotta feel like I’m doin’ something with a purpose. A lot of vets have this same issue. When they’re serving, their job has meaning. They got into it because of that. And then they’re out and it’s hard to find that again.”

“So, your job has more meaning than just the fact you know what you’re doing, you’re good at it and it provides a challenge?”

His hands gave mine a squeeze. “Yeah, honey. I can’t say a lot more, but Hawk doesn’t do business with assholes.” He started to study me intently before he said carefully, “Though that doesn’t mean we don’t run into our fair share of them. They’re just not paying Hawk’s invoices.”

I nodded when he quit talking, deciding to ignore the scary part of what he just said, and when I didn’t speak, he started again.

“That was when things settled with Nikki. After I got onboard with Hawk’s team. That said, looking back, we never settled.” He squeezed my hands again. “Now, with it being over, seeing it for how it was between her and me, what she wanted from an us, which was not for me to be a part of that, but the person she wanted me to be, I didn’t fit. I love my job. I love my brothers. I respect the fuck outta Hawk. But at home, none of that mattered. So yeah, with her, that manifested itself in a lot of temporary. Finding someplace to be, and it was never right. Then we moved in together, and I gotta admit, we’d break leases, move and we’d do it a lot. And then where we moved wouldn’t be right. So, repeat. But this,” he tipped his chin to the laptop on his coffee table, “isn’t that.”

“Okay then, what is it?”

“Bungalows and a couple Denver squares that, if we go the distance, you can boho the fuck out of and they got big garages so I can have some space for my man cave to get away from the macramé.”

I blinked up at him.

“You want kids?” he asked.

I bobbed my head mutely.

“Two? Three?” he went on.

I shook my head.

His brows went up. “Four?”

“No,” I said softly. “I don’t know. Two. Maybe three, because, if the first two are the same gender, I’d want to try it again so I could have both.”

He smiled down at me and shifted closer, holding tight to my hands.

“Mo’s old room would be crowded for all that,” he whispered.

“Yeah,” I pushed out.

“Babe, relax,” he said on another hand squeeze. “This isn’t pressure. And this isn’t restlessness. This is me being a thirty-four-year-old guy who’s got a wad of cash in the bank who lives in a condo, shotgunning beers, and he’s beginning to wonder what fertilizers will make the greenest lawn. It’s growing up, honey, bein’ smart with my money. And I just happened to meet this girl I like a fuckuva lot, so why not?”

Oh man.

He was on the road to leave behind the frat boy and become a full-blown Hawk.

I felt a highly pleasant internal quiver at that thought and choked out, “Yeah. Why not?”

“And just so you know, that’s not gonna be the forever home. I’ll always be working to give more to my woman, more to my kids, until the kids are off and it’s time to downsize.” He got even closer. “What I’m sayin’ is, don’t let Nikki put shit into your head that that’s an issue. It wasn’t right with her and I didn’t read it, but my behavior stated it clear. We settled but we never settled in and definitely didn’t settle down because, if I did that with her, it would be settling, and that wasn’t what I wanted.”