CIA 03 - Kiss Me While I Sleep by Linda Howard

Author:Linda Howard [Howard, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Intelligence Officers, Fiction, Romance, Suspense, Crime & Thriller, General, Adventure, thriller, Murder for Hire, Assassins, Action & Adventure, Women Murderers, Revenge, Suspense Fiction, Undercover Operations
ISBN: 9780345453440
Google: sAJIDSyKnbcC
Amazon: 0345453441
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2004-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

Startled, she said, “You’re married?”

He shook his head. “Divorced. Amy—that’s my ex-wife—finally decided I was never going to settle down, and she got tired of raising the kids by herself while I was off in some other country doing things she didn’t want to know about. I don’t blame her. Hell, I’d have divorced me, too. Now that I’m older I know what an ass I was, and I could kick myself for missing my kids growing up. I can’t get those years back. Thank God, Amy did a good job with them . They turned out great, no thanks to me.”

He pulled out his wallet and fished out two small photographs, put them on the table in front of her. They were both high school graduation pictures, of a boy and a girl, and both of them looked a lot like the man sitting across from her. “My daughter Chrissy and my son Sam.”

“They’re good-looking kids.”

“Thank you,” he said with a grin. He knew very well they strongly resembled him. He picked up the photographs and studied them before putting them back in his wallet. “Chrissy was born when I was nineteen. I was way too young and too stupid to get married, much less have a baby, but being young and stupid means you don’t listen to people who know more than you. And if it comes to that, I’d do it over again, because I can’t imagine not having my kids.”

“Are you close to them now?”

“I doubt I’ll ever be as close to them as their mother is, because she’s way more important to them than I am. She was there when I wasn’t. They like me, they even love me because I’m their dad, but they don’t know me the way they know Amy. I was a lousy husband and father,” he said frankly. “Not abusive or lazy or anything like that, but just never at home. The best that can be said is that I always supported them.”

“That’s more than some men do.”

He muttered his opinion of those men, something that started with “stupid” and ended with “sons of bitches,” with several even more uncomplimentary words in between.

Lily was touched by the way he didn’t cut himself any slack. He’d made mistakes and with maturity he could both see them and regret them. As the years had passed he’d been able to appreciate all the things in his children’s lives that he’d missed out on, and he was grateful to his ex-wife for minimizing the damage he’d done to them with his absence.

“Are you thinking about settling down now, going home and living near your children? Is that why you left South America?”

“Nah, I left because I was ass-deep in alligators and they were all hungry.” He grinned. “I like a little excitement in my life, but sometimes a man needs to climb a tree and reassess the situation.”

“So what exactly do you do? For a living, I mean.”

“I’m kind of a jack-of-all-trades. People want something to happen, they hire me to make it happen.

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