by Angel Payne
Her friend looked down fast and toed the carpet. “Uh, yeah. About that…”
Rayna wheeled on her. “Sage!”
The woman shot her bridal-manicured hands into the air. “They’ve been calling every half hour! What was I supposed to say?”
Before Rayna could pound her friend with another word of castigation, more wild male energy burst through the door. She inhaled hard and braced herself. The seven warriors watched their legion double as her brothers poured into the room.
Arah got to her first. “Thank fuck,” he muttered, yanking her off her feet in a crushing hug. The others piled on top of him, gripping her from four different directions to make sure she was all right. They were all there—minus one.
“Hey,” she muttered after shying away from Jenner and his fish stink. “Where’s Trevor?”
Her brothers shared a significant smile. They peeled back so she got a clear look across the room.
Shit.
Trev was in the kitchen facing off against Zeke.
She smacked Jenner and Arah at the same time. “Are you freaking insane? I’m sure Sage told you they’re planning a wedding here, assholes.” She pushed them back so she could start stalking across the living room at her brother and her—
Damn. What did she call Zeke now?
It didn’t matter. If Trevor laid one hand on Z and screwed up these memories for Sage and Garrett, she swore he was getting deleted off her phone, locked out of her house, and blacklisted from—
She stopped in her tracks. She was too stunned to move. She blinked hard. Then again.
Sure enough, Trevor hauled Zeke into a huge hug.
There was too much chaos in the room for her to catch everything Trev said, though she caught the more emphatic snippets, such as “saved her goddamn life” and “we all owe you, man,” and something about keeping Z in a lifetime stock of his beer of choice.
Rayna shook her head, so tempted to indulge a full laugh. But if that happened, she knew the tears would come next. Fate had a crappy sense of humor sometimes. The very day Z earned Trevor’s confidence was the day he didn’t need it anymore.
She turned back toward her other brothers, who were still bunched together and smirking like a home transformation team getting ready to spring the Big Reveal on her. “What the hell are you mouth breathers up to now?”
Dallas flashed his sideways grin, putting her senses on higher alert. “If we said we have a bigger surprise, would you believe us?”
She folded her arms. “Define ‘surprise.’ You guys have used that term for everything from trying to pierce my ears yourselves to inviting yourself along on prom night.”
Dallas scowled. “Prom night was fun.”
“Both junior and senior year?”
It was the retort that pushed at Rayna’s lips, only she got beaten out on uttering it by a saucy, slight-accented voice from somewhere behind Arah. A woman’s voice.
She gasped. It wasn’t just any woman.
“Oh, shit!”
She shoved her brothers from the front while they got jostled apart from the back. When a distinct pair of dark indigo eyes came into view, topping an infectious smile that was surrounded by a luxurious forest of dark brown hair, she let out a scream worthy of a fifteen-year-old. Ava did the exact same. They dived into each other’s arms and shrieked some more.
That lasted for all of ten seconds.
Their cries were turned into stunned yelps as they were yanked apart with militaristic force. The qualifier was spot-on, since the force was Ethan Archer. He body-slammed Ava until she tumbled back onto the couch. Ethan followed her trajectory, though the mound of tulle into which they fell turned everything into the consistency of a water slide. The two of them disappeared onto the floor and under the fabric as all seven of her brothers and Zeke looked on with a smorgasbord of stunned laughter.
“Nice work, Archer!” Z called. “You got her!”
Rayna didn’t bother shooting him a glare. “Ava?” she yelled. She paddled through the fabric, instantly worried when she didn’t feel her cousin fishing from the other direction. “Ava, are you—” She froze after lifting a wad of the gold pile to discover where her cousin and the soldier had landed. “Oh my!”
Ava had landed on her back. Ethan wound up pretty much on top of her. Though he braced himself on both elbows, their noses and mouths practically touched. They both breathed hard, looking like they’d enjoy nothing better than getting sealed back inside their golden cocoon.
Envy stabbed in. Twenty-four hours ago, Rayna was sure she gazed at Z like that.
She covered the pain with sardonicism. “Sergeant Ethan Archer, may I introduce Ms. Ava Chestain?”
Ethan’s black lashes lowered as he took in Ava’s face. “Ava,” he echoed. “That’s really pret—” He huffed and then coughed. “Wait. Chestain?”
Trevor scooted closer. “She’s our cousin, man.”
Ethan snapped his gaze back. Ava beamed a gorgeous smile. “That’s me. Cousin Ava. Nice to meet you.”
Ethan glowered. “I thought you were a terrorist.”
Ava bit her lip. Her hand fell to the bulge of Ethan’s bicep. “Not a terrorist.” She practically whispered it.
“No. Definitely not.” Ethan’s answer was just as intimate.
“You two going to get a room?” Trevor interjected.
“Just not the guest room.” Zeke added it with a smirk in his tone and on his lips—while his eyes latched again to Rayna. He was back to staring with that golden fire that made her long for nobody and nothing but him. Half of her yearned to toss the tulle back on top of her cousin, grab his hand, and head straight for the spare room he’d mentioned. The other half was tempted to heave the entire ball at him before strangling him with it.
In the end, she decided on door number three. The frustration, fury, and helpless angst exit.
With a heave, she dumped the tulle mound back across the couch. With another thrust, she got back to her feet and dashed out the slider. Somehow, she got out a believable excuse about needing to get some fresh air. The pretext seemed to stick with everyone, even Trevor.
Everyone except Zeke. Of course.
He caught up to her as she hit the packed dirt path that ran around the lake. “Bird? You okay?”
She didn’t break her pace. “Stop that.”
“What?”
“You know what!” Everything darkened as they clanged through a gate in order to leave the condo complex and enter the woods. “You don’t get to call me that anymore. You don’t get to call me anything anymore, except my damn name.”
“But I’ve been calling you that for months. Why—”
“Because nothing’s the same.” She flung the words like whip cracks as she halted and turned on him. “Nothing will be the same.”
Damn it. Fresh air, her ass. The wind soughed through the trees and lifted his thick hair from his rugged face—and goaded the edges of her self-control. She had to purposefully drag in air in order to keep speaking. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “but you don’t get the Friend Zone back, Z.”
The words clearly tore into him—and her, too. Sudden and stinging as a fall into ice, the tears came and fell. Her words fell out on ragged chokes. “You don’t get to call me ‘bird’ without me wanting to fall to your feet. You don’t get to call me ‘honey’ without me craving to give you my wrists. You don’t even get to laugh at the damn radio without me wishing your lips were against my ear as you do.” She whirled, unable to keep looking at the tormented crevices that formed around his eyes, at the corners of his full lips. “And you don’t get to keep sneaking those looks at me!”
She heard him take a step. “What’re you—”
“Stop! You know exactly what I’m talking about! Those—those stares. The ones you level when you don’t think I’m watching. The ones you steal at me when you don’t think your soul’s listening, either. But goddamnit, Zeke, it’s listening, all right. I know it because I have to stare back, and
I have to endure looking all the way down inside you again. And when I do, I hate you even more because it’s so golden and…and…giving…and breathtaking…and the only one who doesn’t see any of that is you!”
At some point, she wheeled back toward him. He didn’t try to get any closer and actually reminded her of one of the trees that surrounded them, rooted in place but rocking in the wind. “I never wanted to hurt you, Rayna.” His voice sounded like shredded bark. “Goddamnit. I’m trying like hell not to hurt you.”
She swayed now, too. “I know.”
“When I get back in a few months, this will all be better.”
“Bullshit.” She shot him a bitter laugh. “Sir.”
“Z!” Garrett’s bellow shot through the woods. “Dude, you out here? Let’s get started on this list, man!”
After a long second, Z called, “Yeah. Give me five, would ya?”
Garrett didn’t respond. The silence spoke his friend’s impatience loud enough. Rayna kicked the ground, making messy divots of mud and leaves. She only stopped when Zeke threaded the ends of his fingers through the tips of hers and squeezed. She clenched every muscle in her body to avoid tugging herself into him, begging him to reconsider, telling him they could take this a day at a time, that this was worth trying for…worth fighting for.
“You going to be okay?” he finally whispered.
She forced in a lungful of the icy air. Gave him a shaky nod. “I’ll make it work, Sergeant,” she told him. “That’s what you guys do against the bad guys, right?”
He chuckled quietly and pressed his lips to her knuckles. “Exactly.”
“Okay, then.”
She just had to pretend the bad guys were her own heart and spirit. For forty-eighty more hours, she was officially at war with herself.
Chapter Twenty-One
Z needed a beer. Or twelve. Actually, he needed it an hour ago—at the moment he’d forced his legs to walk from those woods, away from Rayna. But hell, he really needed them now. After nine slices of wedding cake, he was fucking ready.
Only now, there was a hefty line at the dry-cleaning shop.
After he growled for the fifth time, Garrett backhanded him in the chest. “Chill, assface. What is your goddamn problem?”
“Oh, I dunno,” he drawled. “Maybe I’ve got diabetes now. Seriously, Hawk. Eight different flavors? What the hell is lavender buttercream? Apple tiramisu? Cake is chocolate, man. Frosting is white. The roses are yellow, and—”
“Goldenrod.”
“What?”
“The roses are goldenrod, you cretin. They have to match the napkins.”
He would’ve laughed, but his shock eclipsed even that. “You are beyond pussy-whipped. I can’t even figure it out. What’s the term for what you are?”
“In love.”
He fell into silence. He wasn’t arguing with that one. Hell, he didn’t want to. “Well played, fucker,” he muttered, grinning at the look of total serenity on Garrett’s face. “Well played.”
As his friend took a second to preen, the line moved forward at last. Two girls moved in behind them, giggling openly. Zeke attempted to ignore their high-pitched titters, but they were gaping right at him. He got in a surreptitious peek at his reflection in the shop’s glass front. Aside from the fact that his hair was way too long due to his cover on the Korean mission, nothing was out of place.
The girls laughed again. He rolled his eyes behind his sunglasses. Fuck. Nearly thirty years old, and he felt like a farty old man.
“Um…excuse me?” One of the girls, a little blonde in a tank top that exposed more than it covered, looked up at him with little bats of her lashes. “Can I ask you something?”
Zeke gave her a polite smile. Though he and Garrett were wearing civvies, they carried their dress blues on hangers over their shoulders, which meant they were representing the army as if they stood here in full work attire and boots. “Sure thing, miss.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s almost three thirty.”
The second girl, probably a little older, wore too much eye makeup and an inch of lip gloss that reminded him of the damn lavender cake. “Ohmygawd, he thought we were asking him for the time,” she said. “Ohmygawd, that’s so humble.” She twirled her hair around a purple fingernail. “And hot.”
Z frowned. “Pardon me?”
The little blonde let out a sigh. “Um, I think what we’re trying to say is…um, you are Zeke Hayes, right?”
“You totally are,” the brunette insisted. “I mean, come on, Jade, look at him!” She gingerly poked his arm. “Ohmygawd, your muscles are way huger in person. And so hard.”
He shot a gape at Garrett. His friend was already wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. He was getting no fucking help there.
“What you did to those two creepazoids on Saturday night was amazing,” Jade gushed. “When we saw you on the news, we were so proud to be Seattleites, just like you. I called my stepsister in Omaha and totally bragged that you’re from Lewis-McChord. Your woman is so lucky. Do you think I could have her cell? I want to find a guy just like you, Zeke. Could she give me pointers on how to do it?”
“Uh, listen… She’s not—”
My woman. The conclusion clung to the inside of his mind tighter than the inside of his mouth. The syllables wrapped themselves through the rest of him, too, ribbons that twirled through every nerve and muscle and breath…that were all imprinted with Rayna. Her bright beauty. Her cinnamon scent. Her husky laugh. Her pure, sweet passion. She was wound so deeply into him…
And now you’re going to have to cut those ribbons out, man. Every single one of them. Soon, goddamnit.
“She’s not what?” Jade queried with wide-eyed hope.
Just not now.
“She’s…erm…not around. Yeah, uh…we’re getting married. I mean, we have friends who’re getting married. She’s busy helping with all the plans. Not here. She’s doing it…uh…somewhere else. I probably need to be getting back, too, and—”
“Could we have your autograph real quick?” Lavender Lipgloss asked it with a sweet grin. She was better at the eye-batting thing than her friend.
Zeke glowered. “What the hell do you want that for?”
Garrett stepped forward. “Sorry, girls. We haven’t given him his medication yet today. Of course you can have his autograph. Got a pen?” He accepted a Sharpie from Jade and then handed it to Z. “Paper?”
“Don’t need any.” The brunette jerked down the neckline of her shirt, exposing half of her full, pale breast. “Just sign right here, Sergeant Hottie.”
To Garrett’s credit, he didn’t spit up any residual cake in laughter. But damn, did his eyes say he wanted to. They glittered with bright blue mirth as his lips twitched, also fighting not to explode with his obvious delight in this ridiculous scene. “Go ahead, Sergeant Hottie.”
Zeke jabbed the pen back into his chest. “No.”
“Huh?” The girl pouted her shiny lips. “Why not?”
“Hawk, I’m not signing that chick’s left headlight.”
“I think these are what you girls might need?”
Magically, a couple of issues of the Stranger materialized in front of the girls. While Z was grateful for something to write on other than their chests, he gawked at the paper’s front page and realized way too late that Garrett was doing the same thing. The alt-culture periodical featured a shot of him from behind in the rain, the blood from the gash in his back running down his back. He looked like some idiot off a comic book, an impression that got driven home by the headline.
Batman Lives.
The mire in his gut stirred into a straight-up case of holy shit when he looked up to thank his savior.
“Luna.”
She looked strange. She looked…normal. Aside from the lavender and silver streaks in her hair, which was pulled back with a nondescript headband, she could’ve been another pretty girl going about her day in this strip mall. She wore normal blue jeans that were topped with a pretty hand-pai
nted T-shirt that he recognized as her own work thanks to the sleeping white cat depicted at the edge of one sleeve. Even her makeup was subdued. And kind of nice.
“Hi, stranger.” She said it with a smile that bordered on nervous.
“Hey,” he managed to stammer. “How did you— I mean what are you—”
“There’s a great art supply place down the street. But I like the barbecue place in here, so I stopped to pick up dinner for later.”
She gave the explanation as he whisked off a couple of signatures for the girls. As he let Jade snap a picture of him and Lipgloss, Garrett shocked the crap out of him by smiling at Luna. Since the second they’d met, the two had been repelling magnets. As soon as they got near each other, their disgust made the earth leave its axis.
“Thanks. Your timing was perfect, Morticia.” Hawk added a wink to the nickname he usually flung at her in dismissive ire.
Maybe the earth’s axis was doomed again, since Luna actually laughed. “Anytime, Cousin It.”
Garrett scratched at his hair, which matched Z’s in the thick-and-styleless department. “Ha-ha. Guess I’ll own that one, at least for another hour. Then it’s all back to a high-and-tight.”
“Getting ready for the big day, huh?” She finished it with another laugh, in response to Garrett’s stunned stare. “You and Sage were the subject of most conversations at the club last night. Congratulations, by the way.”
Hawk’s grin widened. “Thanks.”
Zeke shifted forward. “As much as I hate to rip apart this alternate universe we’ve clearly entered, can I ask for a second with Morticia, Hawk Man?”
“No prob,” his friend returned. “I’ll handle the turn-in while you do that. So hand over the Batsuit, dude. I’ll make sure they remember no starch.”
“Thanks, Alfred.” He gave the uniform to his friend with a satisfyingly harsh shove.
As Garrett chuckled and turned into the shop, Z dug his hands into his back pockets and nudged his head gently toward a little alcove near a door marked Smoothie Bar Employees Only. Luna followed his direction without a word, pressing herself against the wall.