by Misty Evans
“He’s not here any longer and you still have his clothes. If you’d thrown him out, I’m guessing the clothes would have gone with him or been burned.” He continued to pet Pepper, the dog leaning into his leg as if offering support. “Then, this morning, you said nothing happened with that guy, but it sounded cliché, and I guess I was already entrenched in my normal mode of operation, so I had a hard time believing you.”
“Your normal mode of operation?”
He made eye contact, wondering if she was analyzing him or asking out of politeness. “I don’t let myself get involved with anyone, anymore. I keep people at a safe distance, even friends.”
“So they won’t hurt you?”
“So I don’t hurt them.”
“And how do you imagine you would hurt me by being my friend?”
“My track record at keeping people safe is abysmal, and if I get emotionally attached in any way, well, the odds of me successfully protecting you go down even farther. I need to be clear-headed and detached so I don’t let emotions interfere with your safety.”
She was quiet for a long moment, her attention falling on Pepper and the way he was petting the dog. “You’ve been a bodyguard before?”
“Not in the strict sense of the word, but…”
His throat shut down, pressure forcing it closed.
“But you felt intrinsically responsible for someone and that person got hurt?”
Was he really doing this? He scanned her face, saw the neutrality in it. Her eyes slowly came back to his, and he nodded. “My brother. He…died.”
“You believe it was somehow your fault.”
Another nod. “It was.”
She tilted her head. “How so?”
His guts crawled. The story ate at him, night and day, always there, hovering.
“Mac is—was—is my twin. Older by a minute.”
His sweat turned cold as the image of Mac’s face swam in front of his eyes. The look of relief on that face he had known so well. “Mac was a Green Beret. His squad got ambushed in a showdown between some local gangs in a Yemen border town. I was nearby in Saudi Arabia on an intelligence mission with another Special Forces group and we got the SOS Mac sent out.”
“You went in to rescue him,” Emma said, softly. Her voice barely penetrated his memories. “But something went wrong.”
Mitch could still feel the brotherly slap Mac had given him right before Mitch had told him to haul his injured ass over to the rundown building nearby while Mitch covered him with gunfire. “I had analyzed the situation and ran best-case scenarios on the way there—that was my job. It was a ground fight, and there were only a dozen or so shooters. Once my team arrived, we split up. Me and three other guys went to get Mac’s men into a nearby building, stabilize the injured men, and the second group would concentrate on taking out the gang members.”
“Mac didn’t make it to the building?”
“He made it.” Mitch’s ears rang with the distinctive sound of a fighter jet bearing down on them. His knees shook from the way the earth trembled when the bomb hit the building…
A fireball erupted. “No!” Mitch yelled.
“Mitch?”
Suddenly, his ass was on the floor and stars danced on the edge of his vision.
“Mitch, look at me.” Emma was suddenly in front of him, her hands on his shoulders as she shook him. “You’re here, in my office. You’re not in Yemen. Look at me. You’re safe.”
A warm, rough tongue licked his face, causing him to refocus and shake off the sticky cobwebs of memory. He blinked, concentrating on the smooth skin and tiny freckles dotting Emma’s face.
His tongue felt thick, his face hot. He hadn’t had an episode in months, and here he was, getting sucked into the past and nearly blacking out. “Oh, fuck.”
Emma shooed Pepper back and checked the pulse in his wrist.
He snorted derisively and yanked it away. “Sorry, I have these flashbacks and then I… I’m okay, really.”
Her countenance said she thought differently, but she didn’t argue. She sat facing him and petted Pepper, who crawled halfway into her lap. “What happened? To your brother?”
Mitch ran a hand over his face, through his hair. For a minute, he couldn’t speak. Emma didn’t say anything, patiently waiting for him to get his shit together.
“I was laying down cover with the other two guys in my group. All of Mac’s men made it to the building and then… The building was bombed.”
“Bombed?” Her shock was evident. “By one of the gangs?”
He shook his head. Salt had found her way into the group hug and settled with her head in his lap. He stroked her head and tried to breathe. “The Yemeni government claimed they had intel that the gangs were involved with the Taliban and were rioting. They believed the building was a hideout, so they bombed it without verifying there were no military ops going on in the area.”
She continued petting the Lab, her face clouded with a mix of emotions. He waited for her to tell him it wasn’t his fault. Instead, she asked, “Do you have these flashbacks often? The blackouts?”
Thank God, no. “Not as often anymore.”
“How long has it been since your brother died?”
A creeping relief stole over him when she didn’t offer platitudes or arguments about where the responsibility for his twin’s death lay. “Five years. Today.”
Christmas Eve. The most awful time of the year.
Emma nodded. “Pretty impressive.”
“Excuse me?”
“The twin connection runs as deep as any I’ve encountered. Five years of anger, grief, and blame and no therapy? You know how to bury things deep in order to keep functioning, Agent Holden.”
She didn’t know the half of it. “I don’t remember what happened afterward. They say I blacked out from the concussion caused by the explosion, and I ended up with some shrapnel in my chest, but I don’t think it was any of that. I felt like…” The clamp in his chest turned, cranking his heart down another inch. “I felt like I exploded along with that fucking building.”
“Your twin died in front of your eyes. You blacked out from the shock it had on your system—physical, emotional, mental. You couldn’t process it. You’re suppressing the emotions, which is what rises up and knocks you on your ass when you recall what happened. You’re caught between a rock and a hard place, Mitch. If you let yourself remember the incident, it overwhelms your system like it did on that day, and everything shuts down. Unfortunately, suppressing those emotions keeps you from processing that day and moving on with your life.”
He tried for a lighthearted tone. “Let me guess, I need therapy.”
She smiled, but it was full of pain. “Don’t we all?”
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Everyone told me it wasn’t my fault, that I shouldn’t blame myself, but I’m the one who devised the plan. I’m the one who calculated the risk and sent Mac and his men into that deathtrap.”
Silence descended. Was she waiting for him to continue? Was she analyzing what he’d already said?
The clock on the wall ticked quietly and Mitch felt the clamp on his heart releasing pressure. His hand was buried in Salt’s fur and her eyes were closed as she drifted to sleep, head still on his lap.
“How many times afterwards,” Emma said softly, “did you consider ending your own life?”
Good God, how did she know that?
“Four.” The word spilled out, easy and sweet on his tongue. Salt whined in her sleep. He stroked her side, watching her chest rise and fall with her breathing. “Every Christmas. All I can do is think about Mac. The flashbacks, the memories, they make me wish I’d died with him. I usually bury myself in alcohol. Last night, that shirt… Well, it made me remember how my mother has all of Mac’s shirts, and today, I realized I’m fucking jealous of my dead brother because she still worships him and ignores me.”
Emma’s lips pursed for a moment and Mitch’s gaze couldn’t help but zero in on them.
So smooth, so full.
He felt warm all over. His fingers itched to reach out and touch her grounding presence.
“And this Christmas?” she asked. “Do you wish you were dead?”
Those hazel green eyes of hers were sad, but there was something else flaring in them. Hope? Yearning? He couldn’t tell, but it tugged at his gut, made his chest expand, his blood pulse thick in his veins.
For the first time in a long while, he didn’t want a drink or the sour oblivion that came from too many of them. He didn’t want to collapse in a drunken heap, hoping he never woke up.
“Not this year,” he admitted. His voice was ragged with grief, but he met her steady gaze head on. “This year, I want to live.”
Chapter Eleven
Oh, this man. He was killing her.
Emma sat, heart thudding, as Mitch’s eyes darkened with desire.
With life.
He wanted to live. Because of her?
A part of her knew his grief was simply running its course. Most people went through the five stages of grief in a year. For someone like Mitch, a man who’d lost his twin brother and blamed himself for it, five years wasn’t outside of the normal parameters.
He needed help in a big way—in regards to his guilt, to his relationship with his mother, and probably to other things she still hadn’t learned about. More help than she could ever give him, especially now since she was falling for him.
Slightly flustered, she felt paralyzed by his eyes. By the fact she was sitting on the floor, pinned down close to him by the dogs, and wanting to do nothing more than crawl into his lap and wipe that desperate misery off his face.
“I don’t know what it is about you,” he said. “You make me want to talk about things I haven’t spoken of to anyone else, ever.”
The sign of a good therapist. “Moving through grief is a very individualized process. Time works wonders, and the brain has lots of coping mechanisms. Not all of them are healthy, but…”
What was she doing? The mechanics of the brain and psychological babble weren’t exactly seductive topics.
And yet, the sexy man in front of her had lust in his eyes and was grinning at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said on an exhale. “Sometimes it’s difficult for me to turn off the psychologist in me.”
“Don’t apologize. You’re good at it.”
She fiddled with Pepper’s ear, feeling the urge to grin back at him. “Very few people find the brain and its inner workings as exciting as I do.”
“You understand me because you’ve been through something similar, haven’t you?”
He knew she had from their previous conversations, yet he was opening the door, inviting her to trust him like he was trusting her.
The sun shone through the picture window, cutting a long rectangle across the floor. Dust motes danced in the sunbeams.
Sitting on the floor made it easier, somehow. As if by lowering herself to the ground with the dogs and the dust, her secrets were both grounded and light as a feather. The heart space where her pain nestled had knocked her down to these very floor boards before. How many nights had she lain in here and cried herself to sleep, the dogs licking at her tears and cuddling their big, warm bodies up to hers?
“It was a child,” she murmured through the old familiar ache. “I lost a baby.”
“Emma.” Her name came out quiet, a holy thing. “I’m so sorry.”
The sympathy in his voice made tears well in her eyes. “I was engaged once. He insisted I quit my job, that it was bad for the baby growing inside me.”
Mitch’s hand crept forward and gently took hers. “What happened?”
A single tear slid down her cheek. “I didn’t listen.” She dashed the wetness away. “I miscarried after one of Chris Goodsman’s fans broke into our home and tried to kill me.”
Mitch’s grip tightened, a protective anger radiating from him. He remained quiet, giving her space to talk more if she wanted to. Quiet, if forceful support, if she didn’t.
I could love him for that.
The thought hit her with the impact of a brick. She started to draw away, wondering what was wrong with her.
Mitch stayed her hand, keeping her close. His grip didn’t tighten farther, he simply held her there, unmoving. “No wonder you understand how I feel. You’re carrying the same kind of emotional shit.”
Emotional shit, yes, indeed. She would always be bogged down with the guilt sticking to her legs like quicksand.
“I guess so.” Staring into his solemn eyes, Emma snaked her free hand out to touch his heart through his shirt. “I have an imaginary ice pick buried right here. You?”
A somber nod. “I know exactly how that feels.”
She didn’t drop her hand. “It doesn’t…hurt as much with you here.”
He caught her gently by the back of her head, drew her face close to his. His breath fell warm on her cheeks, his pupils dilating. “Have you ever wanted something that you knew was wrong, but in some ways, it seemed like the only thing that might save you?”
The eyes might have been a window to the soul, but psychologists knew the pupils—and the way they dilated—were an honest cue to sexual interest.
Her pupils had to be dilated too. She knew exactly what he meant. Her lips trembled. Her hand rubbed over his shirt, feeling the solid wall of his chest under her fingers. She gave him a half-hearted smile. “You think we can save each other?”
His gaze dropped to her lips and she automatically parted them in anticipation. “Seems to me, doctor, that we either work on saving each other or we damn ourselves to another holiday of guilt and self-destruction.”
Could this damaged, heartbroken man help her heal her wounds? Logic said no. Her heart said something else. “Therapy only works for those who want it to,” she warned.
“And do you want it, Emma? Do you want me?”
How could she say no? He’d rekindled a fire inside her that had been cold and dark for two mind-numbing years. “Yes,” she breathed.
He took her lips with a slow, deliberate press of his mouth, his body inching slowly toward her, disturbing Salt. The Lab shifted, as did Pepper, and Emma scooted toward Mitch, meeting him in the middle.
He caught her up in his arms, his mouth demanding on hers. She gave him what he wanted, parting her lips and allowing him access.
The hand behind her head supported her as he deepened the kiss, their tongues dancing. She swept her arms around his neck, dragged her fingers through his short hair.
Her brain yelled for her to stop, to regain her professional composure and put distance between herself and this man who’d swept into her life and turned everything upside down, but the woman in her shoved logic and reasoning out of the way and into a deep, dark hole.
Right now, all she wanted to do was feel loved. Desired.
Safe.
All three existed in Mitch’s arms.
It was a relief to succumb to her baser instincts and crawl into his lap. His hands worked under her shirt, cupping her breasts through her bra. A gasp escaped her lips at the feel of his fingers kneading the sensitive flesh through the fabric, and then slowly teasing the lace back so he could touch her.
“Fuck, Emma,” he whispered, tweaking a nipple between his thumb and index finger. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”
Closing her eyes and arching to give him better access to her breasts, she smiled. “I suppose you’re lucky then. I can be a handful.”
He shoved her shirt out of the way and cupped both breasts fully again, squeezing and massaging them. “Yes, you are, and I love every bit of it.”
She laughed and then gasped as his lips touched the top of one breast. He lifted the nipple and laved it with his tongue, pulling a moan from her.
She hung on, arching higher, loving the increasing manipulation from his mouth. A large bulge pressed against her pelvis where she straddled him. Needing more of him, she swiveled her hips and ground into him.
He moane
d against her skin and satisfaction shot through her. That little bit of power, knowing that she could bring him some pleasure in return, spurred her on.
She reached for his belt, unbuckled it, and was about to start on his zipper when Salt and Pepper both came to attention. A second later, they were up and tearing out of the office and down the stairs.
Mitch broke off from his ministrations to her breasts and looked over his shoulder at where the dogs had disappeared. “Company,” was all he said, his breath sounding like he’d been running a marathon.
Emma knew the feeling. Her breath was coming fast and hard, too, as she lowered her shirt and licked her lips.
Sure enough, a knock sounded on the kitchen door downstairs, setting both dogs off.
As the dogs barked and Emma tried to reengage her brain, Mitch deftly picked her up and untangled himself from her legs. Gaining his feet, he lifted her and set her on the corner of her desk, then adjusted the bulge in his jeans.
“Stay here,” he said, planting a kiss on her forehead. “I’ll see who it is.”
Emma gripped the edge of the desk for balance as his sudden absence left her lightheaded. Her body leaned toward him even as he disappeared out the doorway.
Her lips stung from his kisses, her nipples were still hard from his handiwork. Easing her bra back into place, she couldn’t keep the silly grin off her face.
I think I’m finally ready for therapy.
Mitch stole across the kitchen floor, gun cocked and ready. Salt and Pepper came scrambling up behind him, but he stopped them with a hand gesture.
Well trained, they both sunk to their haunches and waited for his next command.
He didn’t think Goodsman or Brown would walk up to the door and knock, but they were both loony as jaybirds, so he wasn’t taking chances.
A peek out the window showed him a broad man standing on the porch wearing a hat and overalls.
“It’s me, Will,” Emma’s ranch hand called. “Don’t shoot.”
Smart man. Mitch lowered his weapon and opened the back door. “What’s up, Will?”
Will’s eyes were wary as always, skimming over Mitch, then tracking over his shoulder. The Pit-mix sat next to his leg and started wagging her tail when the Labs rushed forward to greet her. “Emma okay?”