by Nicole Snow
She goes pale. “What kind of motive? Why would anyone ever –”
“I don’t know,” I bite off. “But it almost feels like someone’s trying to send a message.”
Kenna frowns. She doesn’t say anything, but she looks away, her gaze shuttering, and it’s not hard to tell she’s trying not to look frightened in front of me; trying to look tough.
It’s not hard to tell that she's scared, either. Not with the way she wraps her arms around her shoulders. I don’t think she even realizes she’s doing it, but I’ve learned to read people’s body cues, the language of flesh that speaks louder than words.
It always gives intentions. Feelings. Fears. When people wrap their arms around themselves like that, they’re creating a defensive barrier and covering any places that feel exposed, vulnerable. They’re trying to make themselves small so they’re less of a target.
Right now, she’s trying to make herself so small absolutely nothing can hurt her.
Not like I did before.
I try not to shake my head openly. I don’t want to keep thinking these things, much less feeling them.
Especially not guilt.
It’s not my fault. None of this is, and a pair of big green eyes and soft dark lashes aren’t going to fucking change it.
I look away with a snarl. If I don’t look at her, I don’t have to feel this way. “Look,” I growl. “You don’t have to stay here alone. If it’s too much, you can pack up and go the fuck home. I’ll even pay for your tank of gas.”
Her breath catches. “No! Landon – I’ll be fine. It’ll be okay. Really. You’ve got your security system and if the alarm goes off I’ll just call the cops and hide. It’s just a bunch of dumb kids anyway, I'm sure. If I come out shrieking like a banshee they’ll probably pee themselves and run away screaming.”
My mouth is doing this thing. I don’t really like it.
It’s gone all twitchy, trying to curve upward like I actually want to smile at her visual, arms flailing and eyes wide, careening out my front door and at a bunch of terrified, screaming rich kids who think they're heirs to the universe.
A low growl bubbles up in my throat. I fold my arms over my chest with a grunt and force the corners of my mouth to turn downward. “Don’t know. This whole thing is probably a bad fucking idea. Let's be honest.”
“How bad can it be?”
“You don’t want to know.” I blow out an explosive sigh. “Fine. Whatever. Stay. But first, you’re going to memorize the security access code and the location of every intercom panel. I’m going to drill you before I go.”
“K. Am I supposed to salute, sir?”
For some unholy reason, my dick throbs, right before I remember this is no joke.
“Don’t be a brat. Listen.” I fling her a glare, but she’s smiling in that impudent-yet-shy little way that makes her such a fascinating mess of appealing contradictions. “Every intercom has emergency police call buttons. I’ll leave one of my guys from Enguard, too. He’ll do regular patrols a couple times a day. If you’re really convinced you want to do this.”
She squares her shoulders and lifts her chin. It’s not hard to tell she’s still nervous, a little tick of her pulse against her soft, vulnerable throat, but there’s pride flashing in her eyes.
I don’t want to admire it, but I can’t help myself. Can’t help how I linger on all her soft bare skin, stretching from the soft hollows beneath her jaw down to her collarbones. How those collarbones dip down toward –
I jerk my gaze away.
Not again.
Her eyes are up there, Landon. Those tits, the ones I badly want to suck, might just be out of this world.
“I’m convinced,” she says, so seriously you’d think she was swearing in before a judge seats her. “I’ve got this Don't worry.”
Little Reb. Always so earnest, always putting her heart into everythi –
She’s not Little Reb anymore, idiot.
She’s a pain in your fucking ass, I tell myself, and she knows too much.
I tear my eyes away from her again. I’m so done with this shit, and I have too much to do to be wasting more time here with her.
I can’t even say anything else; I just turn around and walk away, stalking toward the stairs and my bedroom.
I can’t believe Reb is back in my life like this. Fucking up my business again. Must come naturally.
Worst part is, this time, I’ve invited her.
7
Old Familiar Names (Kenna)
I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
Okay. Not quite.
I do know. I’m close to hyperventilating. But in the broader sense, I have no freaking clue what I’m doing in this situation.
To be fair, I don’t really know what I’m doing in most situations. I’m a pantser, not a plotter. I dive in and let my muse have the driver's seat.
But this isn’t one of my books. It's real life. And I can’t just delete a part that isn’t working and then rewrite it in my favor.
If I could, I’d rewrite my entire history with Landon Strauss. No question.
Of course, that isn’t possible. We can only write new pages, new chapters, and what’s staring at me in ink as dark as the feral lines on his body?
Messages. Signals. Warnings that say things aren’t as cut and dry as they seem.
Part of me says he hates me. That part of me is currently screaming toward a panic attack of self-recrimination and guilt, wondering why I didn’t just pack up and go after our first catastrophic run-in.
But the other part of me remembers the wild look in his eyes by firelight. The frantic desperation in his movements. The fervor, how viciously, desperately, and beautifully he battered at the door to the beach house lashed by flames.
The way he shouted my name.
That part says, he hates me not.
It sends shivers through me even now. No one's ever tried to save my life before.
There’s probably something messed up about me that it gets under my skin, but I can’t forget the dark tattoos gleaming on the sweat covering his body, the tight ripple of muscle, that strength focused into pure animal frenzy. That bestial savagery. That bravery leaving no doubt he’d have crawled through the worst of the fire if he’d had to.
It does something to a girl, seeing a man willing to destroy every inch of his powerful body for her sake. Something compelling. Something heady.
Something I can’t possibly have, much less hang onto, which is why I’m pouring it all into my Work-in-Progress.
At least he’s given me words.
I thought I’d struggle to fill up the page after the death blow my publisher dealt my ego, but I feel like I’m fresh and new again. Back when I first started writing, I’d loved the craft so much – even if I wasn’t always that good at it and had to work night and day to refine my skill.
What I lacked in experience, passion made up, but somewhere along the way the ratio reversed until the work part dominated.
Somewhere along the way, I guess I lost the fire. It became routine. A never ending battle against writer's block and creative inertia.
Funny that it took a fire to get my spark back.
We’ll chalk it up to that.
Certainly not the embers cooling in my blood from the way Landon looked last night.
Or this morning, drawing his body through the ocean like a dark leviathan gliding sleek and dangerous through the deeps.
He has no idea I saw him during his swim.
When I’d come down for coffee, I’d caught a glimpse of motion on the strip of beach backing the house and thought it might be a prowler, or something. I’d peeked out the window instead and caught sight of water glistening on burnished skin, chiseled muscle.
My stomach dropped like an elevator. Without thinking, I’d hidden myself to one side of the window frame, everything inside me bristling.
Landon was everything I remembered and nothing I knew.
Before, his body had be
en lean. Hard. A smug, sexy Peter Pan with mischief in his eyes and power in his bones.
Now, it’s been punished by life. Beaten into a vastly bigger, better shape – like forging and tempering a steel bar into a sharp-edged sword. It's incredible what years in a war zone and then becoming a private mercenary can do to a human body.
Battle-worn is too gentle a term. Each and every one of his new tattoos was a war wound turned into a scar, the one on his shoulder blotted and darkened by the bruise he earned last night, a badge of combat.
I couldn’t quite make out what the ink was, but the designs were as compelling as music turned into art. Like, if I could trace them with my fingers, they’d sing dark, dangerous, beautiful hymns. Entirely disturbing things in the chorus of muscle and strength and power and broken, wounded, defiant things.
Watching him swim was enthralling. I lost time, lingering on the grace of his movements, the way he cut the water like soft butter. A rare, strange glimpse of a wild beast in his habit, and the urge to do so much more than just gawk, even knowing he'd turn at any moment and savage me to bits if I tried.
Landon Strauss is as dangerous as any feral animal – because he’s as unpredictable as one.
I don’t know him anymore.
I don’t know what he could do to me.
I don't know what kind of trouble my own two eyes could get me into with him, if I kept letting them feast, imagining his full, fierce weight holding me down. Driving in. Filling and so fulfilling it hurts.
And that’s why, when I saw him rising out of the waves like Poseidon announcing himself to awestruck mortals, I scrambled to fling myself onto the barstool and start writing.
If he’d caught me watching, he might have put me out on my ass.
It’s strange how much I don’t want to go. Not anymore.
I want to stay here. Just for a little while.
I want to help him, and if that means staying alone and watching for creepers, so be it. I also really don’t want to go crawling home to L.A. defeated. Life's handed me a few too many kicks to the teeth lately, and if I crash down after this one it’ll be a while before I pick myself up.
Plus being here has inspired some of the hottest sex scenes I've ever put into words.
We’ll just call it a coincidence that my smoldering, dark-haired hero is a complete and utter dominant beast in the sheets. And on his yacht, his car, his private jet, her parents' house – damn near everywhere I have him all over my very happy heroine.
I wonder if I’ll give my hero some tortured secret, too. If he’ll look at the heroine with melancholy blue eyes that remember the past.
Just like Landon did, this morning.
I lean against the railing of the spacious balcony off the kitchen, tilting my head back to stare up at the brilliant blue California sky, and sigh. It's late afternoon.
He didn’t have to say a word this morning to cut me open with that look and tell me exactly what he was thinking. It’s like we're both living the same memory in real-time every moment we’re together.
No, we don’t have to say a single thing to each other to know we’re both re-living the same exact moment.
A place I don’t want to travel back to, yet I just can't shake it. Has it really been five long years since we lost ourselves somewhere in hell?
* * *
Five Years Ago
It’s been a whole year, and I still can’t believe Micah Strauss is dead.
It’s weird how people die. How they’re there one minute, gone the next. Making you question the when, how, and why of their existence.
That’s what it was like when I heard about Mr. Strauss. I’d seen him just the night before his end, rushing into a black car with the people who'd hired him for a protection gig. Crown Security's portfolio of celebrities and famous politicians was only getting bigger.
He looked alive. Frantic. Determined.
Then the police found him the next day, just a cooling body dumped in the grass in a park downtown. Alone. The job went wrong, and that was the end result.
But even after death, life goes on.
Steve was a wreck. Landon leaving for the army did nothing to diminish their bond, and it's like my big brother shared his pain. Eventually, he bounced back like the puppy he is, but for a couple vile months, I'd never seen him so depressed.
I was upset, too. The Strausses were like second parents to me, with Mom and Dad traveling all the time. Dad’s a legal attaché to an international firm, and Mom’s his translator. They worked domestically for a while, until Steve and I were old enough to handle them being gone.
Suddenly, Steve became more like a surrogate parent, and Micah and Shirley Strauss were our gatekeepers across the street. Our friends. Adults we could count on.
It made them feel like family, too, and it tore me up to see Micah in a casket. My parents flew in for the funeral, then flew back out again, because business doesn’t stop for death.
Everything went back to normal.
Except for Landon.
In the past year he’s become someone else. Someone I don’t recognize. Someone I don’t understand.
Deep down, I think, he frightens me.
He’s turned from my brother’s charming dick of a best friend, that boy who ruffled my hair and told me I’d have boys lined out to Seattle, into this darkly brooding creature brimming with latent violence.
Not that I think he'd ever hurt me, even now.
I just wish I could still talk to him the way we used to.
Especially since he’s supposed to be leaving soon. Iraq again. His last tour, counting down to his honorable discharge. All he does now when he's home is skulk around and smoke and glower and brush me off when I try to talk.
I’m worried about Landon.
Scared he won’t come back.
That’s why I’m out walking tonight. I tell myself it’s just to clear my head with a good breath of crisp night air, but really, I’m circling the block. Trying to work up the nerve to approach their front door, knock, and hope Landon will open up without chasing me off with my ass smarting from that whiplash tongue of his.
We live right across the street from each other. We have our whole lives. Friends for years, with Steve in the middle, and me secretly hoping that we'd always be more.
I hoped he'd take an interest after I turned eighteen. If there was ever a chance, it was dashed the day Micah died, but I'm a patient woman. And I think he's a man worth waiting for.
It’s just this year it's felt like he’s worlds away. Grieving. He's entitled to his distance, his pain, his need to heal.
I must be on my tenth circuit of the block. Must be.
When I look at the house, I can’t see any silhouettes moving against the window. No dark shape of a big prowling bruiser of a man peering through the curtains, wondering why the crazy girl from across the street is strolling past again with her eyes all wide like she’s whistling past the graveyard.
But this time, as I'm passing, I catch a glimpse of something else. I hadn’t noticed it the first five or ten times around.
A journal.
Sitting on the corner of the porch, pinned down by an empty beer bottle.
I don’t even have to look at it to know it’s his. I’ve seen him with it before on one knee; battered, black, and leather-bound. Clutched in his big hands. Protectively close.
I stop. My tongue dries to the roof of my mouth.
It's like staring into another world. How Alice must've felt gazing down the rabbit hole.
In that journal is everything he won’t say to me.
I shouldn’t.
Sweet Jesus, I shouldn’t. It’s a violation of his privacy, a betrayal, and completely against everything I am, but my heart hurts too much today. If I could just peek inside, see something that says...that says...
That says he doesn’t hate me.
That he may be angry at the world, but he won’t stay angry at me.
That he's going to be all right. H
e's going to get through this. And maybe someday, however long it takes, he'll start grabbing life by the throat and realize he's strong enough to bend it any way he pleases.
My palms sweat. They're so sweaty I could probably use them to wet my mouth. Ew.
Ew, Kenna. Okay.
My brain is sprinting off on rabbit tangents. I’m being weird and I’m scared and my heart is bouncing between the back of my tongue and the pit of my stomach, but I drag myself up the walk.
There’s no one around. Not even cars passing at my back.
No movement in the windows, though lights are on upstairs. I try to remember if the Strauss' front porch has a motion sensor light and can’t. Cringing, my stomach twists when I rest my foot on the top step.
Everything stays dark.
I breathe out slowly, creeping toward the waiting journal like the world’s worst cat burglar.
Slowly, trembling, I slip it out from under the beer bottle, then sink down to sit on the weathered wooden porch boards with my back against the railing, the leather warm as if it’s alive in my hands.
I flip the cover open with my heart pounding so loud in my ears it’s like a storm inside me.
There’s so much on these pages. So much of his thoughts, so much of his heart.
All the things I’ve been missing, stretching back for years. Every little bit of inner turmoil. All those introspective thoughts swimming in dark, troubled blue eyes. The boy I’d missed is in these pages, laid bare one word at a time.
Until those words turn jagged and dark and angry.
Until I can see him changing line by line.
Until it’s like this other self comes boiling out in black ink. This demon. This poison in his thoughts and in his veins, using him to write its furious words on the page.
I’m skimming my fingers under the lines to keep my place, the sound of my fingertips whispering on the paper, I’m moving so fast – until I get to the last entry.
Harsh, jagged lines, clearly written in anger, jerking up and down in black swoops of ink.