Man Down (A Rookie Rebels Novel)

by Kate Meader

  Sadie stepped toward Gunnar and splayed a hand on his chest. “You okay?”

  He nodded. “Time to go.”

  Lauren wanted to stay to see the fireworks and Jenny offered to drive her home later. This worked out because Sadie needed to discuss what had happened with Gunnar and his teammate at the party and it was best to do it when Lauren wasn’t around. But before they left, Jenny pulled Sadie aside and told her something she wished she’d known sooner.

  Today was the anniversary of his family’s death.

  She must have missed that in her research on him. Why hadn’t he told her? If she meant something, anything, to him, surely he could have shared that. But maybe she wasn’t as important as she thought.

  For the thirty minute drive, she tried to get him to speak, but he merely grunted, so she left it until they got home.

  Home. The word popped into her thoughts a little too easily, and not because she’d lived here for the first eighteen years of her life. Gunnar protecting, cooking, sleeping, doing yard work, for God’s sake. All that gave the word extra heft.

  He parked the car in the driveway and hopped out quickly, his eyes scanning the exterior for anything different. Still assessing, he moved toward the door, subtly blocking her until he was satisfied she could put the key in the lock safely.

  Once she’d turned it, he blocked her again—gently—and entered the house before her. She rolled her eyes, even though she liked it a little too much.

  “Stay here,” he ordered, though she could’ve told him the house was empty. Its sounds were as known to her as a favorite piece of music. No one was here but them.

  He returned, held up a finger, and moved upstairs, while she walked into the vetted kitchen and took out a glass and an open bottle of wine. She’d head over to the Isners later on foot and hope that walking the ten minutes back with Lauren would create a space for them to talk.

  Gunnar returned to the kitchen. “All clear.”

  “I know.”

  He frowned. “I just want you to be safe.”

  Why? They weren’t his family. And while she understood a protective streak, he wouldn’t be here forever. She wouldn’t be here at all.

  “Want to tell me what happened back there?”

  “One of my teammates mouthed off and I took care of it.”

  Sadie shook her head. “He wasn’t doing much and he has a right to be angry.”

  “To the point of threatening you?”

  She waved that off. “He didn’t. So what happened to him other than my father?”

  “His wife kicked him out. He’s estranged from his kids.”

  Her heart bled for another survivor of Jonah Yates’s schemes. “You shouldn’t have hit him.”

  “What would you have me do? Let him ‘talk’ to you or Lauren? Not going to happen.”

  “I talk to people all the time. Using words is generally a good thing.”

  He made a sound of disgust. “Is that what you’d like to do with whoever threw that rock or painted your door? Talk to them?”

  “Maybe! I know you don’t buy it because it smacks of therapy. Better to talk than defaulting to your id in times of crisis. Sex and violence only works up to a point.”

  “You’ve lived too long in California, Sadie.”

  “So you don’t want to talk? About anything?” She shoved a finger in his chest, angry as a swarm of bad-tempered bees. Confide in me. Open your heart. Love me.

  “No, Sadie, I don’t want to talk.”

  His nostrils flared, his eyes darkened to smoke and sin. She could feel his anger. His hurt. That skirmish back at Chase Manor had failed to take the edge off his pain. There was only one thing for it.

  “Here or—”

  “Upstairs,” he finished as he took her hand.

  She didn’t have to be dragged but his urgency fueled that impression. Rather than undress themselves, they stripped each other with jerky, angry movements. Even annoyed, her desire was plain. A flush across her chest, pebbled nipples without the slightest touch, the slickness between her thighs.

  He pulled on a condom and she pretended not to see that slight shake of his hands. Lying over her with that hard length pressed to her feminine softness, he cupped her jaw. Turbulent emotion in his gaze gave way to something gentler.

  She wasn’t having it. If he couldn’t speak it, she didn’t want to know.

  “Don’t go soft on me now, Bond.”

  Anger flared again in his eyes. She embraced it with her parted thighs and a grip of his perfect ass. Still he hovered, waiting, for what—she had no idea. This is all you want from me, so just do it, do it, do—oh! The thrust took her by surprise, its reach deep and pure. There, there, yes.

  She kept her eyes open so she could dare him to look away. He didn’t break, merely maintained eye contact to a scary degree. No more anger, only lust-stoked intensity stared back at her.

  Bravery deserted her and she turned her head, but his big hand gentled her jaw to return what he was giving her. Fury leeched from her body, replaced with love. Maybe it was the same thing. She could feel it flow through her, giving her strength, bringing her closer to him.

  “Gunnar,” she whispered. “It’s okay.”

  He shook his head, sadness she absorbed through her skin in that gesture.

  “It’s okay,” she repeated. “Because I love you.

  He stopped mid-thrust and stared at her in sheer disbelief.

  “I love you,” she repeated.

  “Sadie.” His mouth claimed hers. Shut up, that mouth said. Don’t say it. Don’t need it. But she kissed him back with every ounce of love she had in her heart to give, and even the ounces she didn’t.

  Her bruised heart belonged to him anyway.

  32

  Nothing was broken. I knew that much. I wasn’t even in any significant pain, or at least I couldn’t feel it. Probably adrenaline. I knew my face was cut up as the window was smashed and a thick branch was inside, pretty close to my eye. My body was held flush by gravity, pinned against the blown, deflated airbag and the dash, with the car at a forty-five degree angle in the ravine. A tree had stopped the descent.

  I must have passed out. It wasn’t dark yet, but the shadows of the late evening were reaching inside the car. I turned my head. Kelly’s eyes were closed while she slept.

  I hoped she was asleep.

  “Kel, can you hear me?” Nothing. “Kel, can you—?”

  She moaned, coming alert for a second. “Are they here? Is someone here?”

  No. No one was coming. No one had seen the accident.

  “Not yet. But someone will come soon.” The lie felt like ash in my mouth.

  “I can’t breathe, Gunnar. I know it’s not—not good.”

  She was a doctor, but I didn’t want to hear this. She couldn’t know for sure. “You’ve got to hold on, babe.”

  “Janie,” she called out, though it sounded like she was speaking with her mouth full of water. She coughed up blood. “Janie, are you awake, honey?”

  We’d stopped calling Danny’s name a while back.

  My phone had fallen to the floor or at least, I assumed so, knocked from the holder while we used it for its GPS. My arms were pinned. I tried to turn my head to see if Janie was still awake, but she looked different.

  Not Janie. Where was Janie? This wasn’t—it was someone else. Amelie, Harper’s daughter. But—

  I turned to Kelly but she was gone. Sadie sat in the passenger seat and that’s when I knew I was in a dream.

  Euphoria flooded my veins. Kelly wasn’t dead. Janie wasn’t here. This, I could control, a video game where I could select the outcomes.

  “Sadie, you shouldn’t be here.”

  She gave that wicked smile, the one that hooked me from the start.

  “I love you.”

  He shook his head. “No.” And then again, “you shouldn’t be here.”

  “This is your dream. Make me go away.”

  I could do that. I had the power to
win or lose, save or damn. I could think a thought and send her packing. Bring Kelly and Janie and Danny back.

  Sadie wasn’t injured. She didn’t even look like she’d been in a crash. She could leave at any time.

  She would. Back to LA. Back to her real life.

  “I don’t want you to leave,” I said, which was all wrong because I did. She wasn’t Kelly and this would get her safe. Or maybe Kelly would be saved. I was so confused.

  I needed to take action. Find my phone. Get help. I needed to—

  Gunnar flew awake, jerking to consciousness quickly. Sadie was there, watching him carefully.

  “Hey,” she said softly.

  He lay back, his forearm shielding his eyes while he got his bearings.

  She spoke again. “You said my name.”

  “Just a bad dream.”

  “You also called out your daughter’s name.”

  He leaned up on his elbow. “For months after, I dreamed about the crash. It always ends the same way, with me waking up and them not here.” At her stricken look, he added, “That’s not a dig at you. I’m glad you’re here. How long was I out?”

  “Not long, maybe an hour.” She rubbed his bicep. “Was I in the dream?” The tremble in her voice was barely discernible.

  He didn’t need a psychology degree to figure it out. Sadie in the same seat as Kelly. Sadie telling him she loved him.

  He nodded slowly.

  “Oh. Well, the broad you’re bopping is probably going to figure in your subconscious, no matter how much you try to resist that.”

  “You’re in my dream because you’re in my life, Sadie.” She’d told him she loved him, not only in the dream. Before, while he was inside her.

  “Right, but you don’t like that I’m there, do you? In your dream.” Her silver eyes glittered, hard as icicles.

  “I don’t think anything of it.” Lie. “You’re there because you’re here. Because you’re part of—” Me. “—my life.”

  “You can’t have it both ways,” she said quietly. “I can’t be important and unimportant.”

  She was right, but he wasn’t ready to acknowledge it. He wanted her to fight to assume the role she deserved—with Lauren, with her boss, with her father.

  But not with him. She didn’t deserve that and he didn’t deserve a woman like her.

  “We should go to pick up Lauren.”

  Her eyes filled with hurt. “That’s it. You have a bad dream with me in it and we’re not going to talk about it?”

  “It’s only a dream, Sadie. It doesn’t mean anything.” He reached for his jeans and pulled them on.

  “I know what day it is,” she said. “You should have told me.”

  “Why?”

  The cant of her head said it all. Gunnar, you fool. Because you’ll feel better. Because you’ll start to heal.

  “I’m not putting this on you.”

  “You said that before, that you didn’t want me to be your therapy. But it’s okay for you to be our protector, to listen to my complaints, to give me advice? And I can’t be there for you?”

  He jerked his tee over his head and closed his eyes, wondering if he could find his way back to the dream. Where he could control the journey. With Sadie, control was a slippery fish. She made it impossible.

  “You don’t need to hear this.” He didn’t want to say it aloud. Keep it inside. Keep it in my dreams. His heart beat so violently he worried it would jump right out of his chest.

  “I do. I want to.”

  He could so easily rely on her. He already did, taking her to the Chase Manor party, a crutch for his rotten social skills. Stepping in to defend Sadie and Lo was another crutch, a means to fake it as a family man.

  But he wasn’t a family man. He had a single line phone plan. His actions on that road three years ago had ended all that. What would Kelly want for him?

  “I wish I could still talk to her,” he whispered.

  She reached for him and he jerked away, jumping to a stand like a scalded cat. “What kept me going was texting Kelly. Talking to her every day kept me sane.”

  “Until I texted back.”

  “Yes.” It was cruel, a streak he never thought he had in him.

  “I stopped that. The conversation with your wife.”

  She did. The resentment should have passed, but now he wondered if it had. Or if he resented the fact he felt better with Sadie. Not whole, but getting there.

  “You did. I miss her like crazy. I miss my kids and every fucking day it hurts that I’ll never hear or see them again. Thing is, talking to you brought me comfort. I looked forward to every text, analyzed every word, trying to learn who you were, what you were about. But then I realized what a mistake that was. What a mistake this is. I can’t depend on that going forward. I won’t.”

  There it was. The crux of the problem.

  Her eyes went soft and shiny. “You don’t want to depend on me?”

  “On anyone.”

  “I’m not trying to replace Kelly.”

  “You can’t.”

  Her breath caught. Harsh, but it had to be done.

  “This isn’t going to happen,” he said, hammering it home. “Us.”

  She flinched again. Jesus, he’d known he had the capacity to bear pain but had no idea he could inflict it so well. The things you learn about yourself.

  There’s a knot in my chest. A hard, tangled, ugly lump that can’t be unraveled. Not by you. Not by anyone.

  He could temper it. You’re an amazing woman, Sadie. You deserve someone who isn’t weighted down with all this grief.

  But he didn’t say any of that. She’d only respond with a good argument and worse, he might actually listen to her. Instead he watched the play of emotion on her face, the creeping awareness that this wasn’t fixable. It hurt to see her come to that realization. Hurt more to get there first.

  “You shouldn’t have moved in here,” she whispered.

  “Sadie—”

  She raised a hand. “I didn’t want you here. I knew having you around all the time would make it worse.”

  “Make what worse?” But he knew. He just wanted her to know, too.

  “How I feel about you. Because while you’ve been going out of your way not to depend on me, I’ve been starting to depend on you. And you did that!”

  “I told you how it was. What this was about.” The words sounded robotic, spoken by someone else.

  “Right. Sex. Pleasure. No talking about anything important, except sometimes you broke your own rules, Gunnar. We can talk about it if you think it’s okay.” She pointed at him, and spoke in a lower, ragged voice. “You can’t intertwine yourself with someone’s life and then pretend that it means nothing. Not even you could be that stupid.”

  He’d never promised a thing. He was clear about the expectations. So he’d moved the pipes a touch when he moved in, but it shouldn’t have changed the fundamentals. They had no future.

  “You’re moving back to LA. That was always going to happen.”

  “I know. Do you think I don’t know that? Did you think the promise of cross-country separation would keep me safe from your masculine wiles, you—you asshole?” She waved a hand, then slapped at her eyes to wipe tears. He wanted to go to her but he was the wrong person to offer comfort. The wrong person to offer anything.

  “I would have been fine if you hadn’t gone all Mr. Protector for us. If you hadn’t held me when I slept or touched my back when we walked into that cookout or made funny faces at me during Cats. I would have been totally okay if you had showed up with your penis and your beard and did your business and headed out. But no. You had to be a good guy, painting doors and cooking eggs and doing yard work and telling me how to fix Lauren, and I had to be an idiot, enjoying the hell out of someone having my back for once.”

  He had no words, but that had always been their problem.

  “I’m sorry.” He could say that. He could mean that.

  “I know you are. And what’s even
more stupid is I still want to be there for you. Call me a trauma junkie, what have you. I won’t be here in Chicago but I’ll always be a text away. When you’re ready to talk, you know where to find me.”

  After she’d told him she loved him? After he’d taken that love and stomped on it? There was selflessness and there was sadism.

  She would still be here for him because she was the best kind of person. But he could no longer be here for her. “I should go.”

  And so he did.

  33

  “Okay, punettes, I have a secret. A couple of years ago, I did not have the strongest punani muscles. I mean, sometimes I … leaked! Now I wouldn’t admit that if it weren’t true. That’s generally an older woman problem. But I figured I needed to start working out down there, so as well as exercises, I started using Kegel balls. Look at these—aren’t they amazing? You just insert and go about your day, letting the joy of passive contractions do the work. Soon you’ll have vag muscles that can crush a diamond …”

  Sadie went through the motions on Allegra’s latest video. A cut here. A transition there.

  Failure tasted bitter on her tongue. She had thought Gunnar’s shell would melt in the face of her empathy and understanding. That showing—and telling—him he was loved would toggle a switch in his brain and open up that heart more guarded than Fort Knox. Look at their history! The texts! The connection! But it wasn’t enough. She wasn’t enough.

  Not for her father and not for Gunnar. But she still had Lauren, who needed her because she was a minor and had no choice. Fabulous.

  Her phone rang with Darth Vader’s theme.

  “Hi, Allegra, working on it now!” It was getting harder and harder to stay in performance mode for this job.

  “Sadie, we have a problem.”

  Her heart sank, not that it had far to go. Allegra’s problems were not like the problems of other mortals. Everything was magnified a hundredfold, usually in her imagination. Sadie was starting to hit a wall.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Someone made some very rude comments on yesterday’s video. They’re still up there.”