by K. A. Linde
I turned back to Vin and saw that he had Cheyenne pressed against the side of the brick fireplace. Their lips were locked, and hands were roaming all over the place.
“So, are you going to come home for the holidays?” Sydney asked Grant. She seemed completely unperturbed by what had happened. “Randy was pissed that you missed Thanksgiving.”
Randy—that name sounds familiar. “Wait, Randy from the pizza place?”
“Uh…yeah,” Sydney said, eyeing me suspiciously. “Duffie’s.”
“Syd…” Grant said softly.
“Why would he be pissed that you missed Thanksgiving?” I asked hesitantly.
Grant just looked down.
Sydney answered for him, “Because Randy’s my dad. Sydney Duffie. Nice to meet you.”
My mouth dropped open as it all came together. Randy was Sydney’s dad. That made Randy…Grant’s uncle. No wonder they had been so accommodating when we were there. We’d had the best seat in the place. Randy had been so happy to see Grant and to see that he had brought a girl to the restaurant. I didn’t know why he hadn’t told me that it was his uncle’s place before this moment.
“You took me to Duffie’s and didn’t tell me that it was your uncle’s place?”
“Whoa! You took the chick home?” Sydney asked.
“Sydney,” Grant snapped, shaking his head.
“Um…what am I missing?” I asked.
“I know you said she didn’t know, Grant, but—”
“Sydney!” he practically shouted. He pointed away from him. “Go.”
Sydney rolled her big brown eyes. “Whatever. I’m going to go find Miller.”
I waited until he had calmed down a bit before speaking. “What don’t I know?”
“Ari, I can’t…” He took a deep breath. “There are some things that you don’t know about me.”
I nodded. There was a lot that he didn’t know about me. “I want to know though.”
“You might have a different impression about me.” He looked completely torn.
I wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t want to tell me or because he really wanted to tell me.
“How could I have a different impression about you?”
He shook his head and glanced away from me. “I don’t really talk about it. The guys don’t even know. Well, they know some of it but not all of it.”
“The guys don’t know?” I was shocked.
They were his best friends. He’d known them since middle school. What could he tell me that he hadn’t even told them?
“Yeah.”
“Does this have something to do with your family?”
The last time he’d brought up his dad, he had completely clammed up, and now, Sydney had just been talking about his uncle. I didn’t know what it was, but I could piece together some context clues.
His eyes stared down at me in utter shock. “How…”
“Good guess.” I gently laced our fingers together.
His brow furrowed, and he looked like he was warring with himself. I’d never seen him look so…vulnerable.
“You can trust me,” I whispered.
His lips fell on top of mine, and the noise from the lodge and all the people in it disappeared.
“You know there’s never been anyone else like you in my life, Ari.”
My heart thudded in my chest. “I feel the same way.”
At that moment, the first band of the night started up onstage, and the crowd gravitated toward them.
“Come with me,” he said.
Then, he led me out of the ski lodge.
I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. I’d never fucking told anyone about this. I never fucking talked about it. I never even discussed it with the people who knew, like Sydney.
I didn’t touch those memories. They were the motherfucking crux of my emotionless existence. They ate at my very being and reminded me how much of a worthless piece of shit I was.
So, I tried everything to get rid of them.
I tried to outrun them.
I tried to drown them in booze, music, and sex.
I use any and everything to force them down deeper and deeper within me.
When that stuff had stopped working, I would fucking knock the memories upside the head with the flat side of a shovel, dig the memories’ graves with it, and bury them six feet under.
Ari was the only thing that had ever made me simply forget without trying, without self-medicating, without riding out a high. Now, I was going to take my only hope of forgetting and tell her what had happened?
She was the last person I wanted to know about it. I didn’t want to see the fear or pity or sorrow in her eyes. I didn’t want to get that from her. Maybe I should turn it around and just try to fuck her.
No. Fuck.
I didn’t fucking know.
So, I just kept my damn mouth shut as I guided her back to my room. We’d splurged on a suite so that we would all have more space and our own rooms. I left Ari in the living room to find some liquor in the mini bar. I poured myself whiskey on the rocks and her a glass of wine. She took it graciously, but I could tell that curiosity was burning a hole through her.
Even though she didn’t touch her drink, I took a long sip of the whiskey, letting the burning sensation spread through my stomach. I nodded my head toward the far wall, walked her over to the door, and opened it into the master suite. Her eyes widened, taking in the luxurious surroundings. I’d claimed the best room. It was lush with a massive bed, Jacuzzi tub, walk-in shower, and the best view of the mountains.
I’d thought I’d be fucking her here tonight, not telling her about my past. I guessed she deserved to know the kind of person she was going to give herself to—that was, if she even wanted me afterward.
“Grant,” she whispered.
I glanced up at her and tried to push down my rising desire at seeing her gorgeous body here in my suite, standing by my bed. It was a defense mechanism. I just wanted to bury myself in her and forget everything.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
I sighed and made up my mind. “Yes, I do.”
“I can tell that you’re beating yourself up about it. I just didn’t want you to think that you had to do anything just because Sydney had slipped and mentioned it.”
Fuck. This woman. She was too good to me
“Just take a seat,” I told her. If I’m going to do this, then I need to do it now.
“Okay,” she said softly, hoisting herself up onto the bed with her feet dangling.
I paced back and forth, not sure where to start.
Here goes nothing.
“I grew up as a military brat. Born in Knoxville and moved all over the country for the next eight years before we landed at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia.”
“I thought you grew up down the shore?” Ari asked.
“I’ll get to that.” I ran a hand back through my hair and started pacing again. “My dad…well, I’m still not sure what he did for the Army. He was gone a lot, so my mom basically raised me. He had been deployed overseas and one day, when he came back, and he was different. I was only nine years old, so my mom didn’t give me any details.”
Ari wrung her hands in her lap. Her face was a mask of concern. “Did something happen to him overseas that made him different?”
“Yeah. He set a house on fire, but they hadn’t gotten all the civilians out. He could still hear their screams when he went to sleep.”
Ari’s hands flew to her mouth. Her face was stricken. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry yet,” I said grimly. “My dad insisted that he didn’t need to see any doctors. He just needed some fresh air to clear his head. He retired from the Army, moved us back to Knoxville, and spent the next year skinning squirrels alive in the woods.”
She flinched at my brusque tone.
I wished there were another way to tell this story. I wished there wasn’t a story.
My hands w
ere trembling, and I fought for control. I was going to need it. I gulped and continued, “I regularly woke up to my dad’s screams in the middle of the night. Even though my mom was working two jobs to try to make ends meet while taking care of me, she told me not to worry about the screams and to just stay in my room.”
I turned my back on Ari, breathing heavily. My heart felt like I’d dropped it into a blender and set it on high. I couldn’t keep it together, and I remembered exactly why I’d never told anyone else. I had to peel back layer after layer just to force the story out.
“Grant,” Ari said, hopping off the bed and wrapping her arms around me from behind. “You don’t have to tell me the rest.”
She was trying to protect me from my own memories.
But I had to continue.
“One night, I awoke to my mom’s screams. I didn’t have any rules against checking on my mom, so I made my way down the hall. My dad had pulled a gun on her, and she was begging him to come back to her. She just kept yelling, ‘Come back to me, Mike.’”
My throat seized as a vision of my mother cowering on the opposite wall hit me like an arrow to the heart. I could still see my father standing threateningly next to the dresser, telling her that he couldn’t save her, that he hadn’t been able to get her out. I imagined my ten-year-old eyes growing wider and wider, knowing what I was seeing but not believing that it was happening.
“I ran out to cover my mom, not wanting anyone to get hurt, but all I did was startle my dad. He freaked and fired without warning. I ducked, trying to pull my mom down with me, but she was already gone.”
Ari gasped behind me, and in that second, I was glad that she couldn’t see the tears welling up my eyes.
“He shot her in the chest twice.”
“Oh, Grant, I’m so sorry,” she whispered, coming around to my front and holding me tight to her.
“The gunshots broke my dad out of his stupor. He saw my mom dead, and he blamed me.”
“What?” Ari asked, pulling back to look at me.
“If I hadn’t jumped in the way, it would have been like every other nightmare. Nothing would have happened.”
“You don’t know that!”
“She’s gone! It doesn’t matter!” I roared.
She shrank back, and I immediately regretted taking my anger out on her.
“I’m sorry, Ari.”
“It’s okay. What happened to your dad?”
“He pistol-whipped me, and I blacked out. The neighbors had heard the gunshots though, and they called the cops. I was taken to the hospital, and my dad was taken to jail. He got an attorney to claim that he had PTSD, so instead of first-degree murder, his sentence was reduced to manslaughter with the option for parole. I moved in with my aunt and uncle on my mom’s side, the Duffies.”
“So, the dog tags,” Ari said, holding them out from herself. “They belonged to your dad?”
“Yeah.”
“How could you wear them all the time?” she asked.
“I told you once, they remind me of the man I want to be. And I want to be nothing like my father.”
“You’re nothing like him,” she told me simply.
“How do you know?”
“I’ve seen the man you hide from the rest of the world. You would never be careless with your family. You love them fiercely, even the ones who aren’t blood.”
I said the words that I’d been holding back for years, the words I believed to my very core, “I could have saved her.”
“You were ten years old. You should have never been in the position to have to save her. It’s not your fault.”
I wanted to believe those words so badly. But thirteen years of convincing myself of the opposite just wouldn’t go away.
I could have saved her. I’d never forgive myself. I’d never forgive him.
Whatever I’d thought Grant was going to tell me…was nothing compared to what he’d just revealed. We all had skeletons in our closet, but this wasn’t a skeleton. This was a body bag and a twenty-plus-year jail sentence. This was uprooting his entire existence to move in with his aunt and uncle. This was thirteen years of guilt weighing down on his shoulders.
No wonder he had hidden this from the rest of the world. Yet, I couldn’t imagine hiding this, being all alone in my grief, not having anyone to lean on. The fact that he was as normal and stable as he appeared was a miracle. Experiencing something like this could have done a lot worse to him than turning him into a callous playboy.
I felt a newfound respect for Grant blossoming. He’d survived so much, and while it was clear he was still in pain from it, he had risen above what had happened to him. He had friends who would kill for him, a younger cousin who adored him, and legions of adoring fans.
And he was here…with me.
“So, that’s my story,” he said. His eyes looked off in the distance as if he was still lost in that tragic night.
“You made it through a lot and without any help. I mean, you didn’t even go to therapy or anything, right?”
Grant scoffed. “Therapy was the bottom of a bottle and a warm pussy.”
“That sounds like you. How did you survive when you were a kid though?”
“My guitar. It saw me through all the hard times,” he told me. “My guitar and the tags.”
I sighed as he mentioned the dog tags that were still hanging around my neck.
I slowly pulled them over my head. “Grant, I don’t know if I can keep wearing these.”
“What?” He looked astonished that I would even think of taking them off after he’d given them to me.
“I don’t think you or I should have a constant reminder of what happened. I think you should just…let it go.”
I knew it was easy for me to say. I hadn’t been there thirteen years ago. I hadn’t experienced what he had gone through. I had no idea what it would be like to see my mother die right before me, to see my father sent to jail, to feel the guilt that had clearly sunk into Grant at an early age.
“I can’t let it go,” he said the words like an insult. “I…you don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t,” I said, not letting him rile me up for once. “I could never understand. I’m sure few people could understand what you’ve gone through, Grant. But I want to.” I ran my hand up his arm.
“The tags…I know that they should hold the opposite feeling, that I should hate them…hate everything about them. But I don’t. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s a complete contradiction. One part of me knows that they’re not enough to keep me from ending up like him. The other part knows they’re the only link I still have to the only life I’ve ever been happy in. I lost both my parents in the same day. All I can remember is the bad—the memories, the inexplicable fucking horror of what occurred—but sometimes, when I look at them and when I look at you wearing them…I remember those earlier days. I remember when I didn’t feel the pain.”
Grant took the tags I still held in my hands and eased them back over my head. “Every time I see you, Princess, I feel better. Every single day, you push away the pain and the memories. You’re my life raft in an endless ocean. You saved me from drowning. You saved me from myself.”
I stopped breathing and just stared up into the depths of his chocolate orbs. Gold flecks at the center reflected back at me. In that moment, I saw every ounce of sorrow consuming him, but I also felt the warmth directed at me. Grant McDermott was baring his soul.
And the scariest part of it all was that I felt the exact same way. I hadn’t gone through what he had gone through, but Grant had still saved me. I’d thought I was happy becoming the person my parents had always wanted, but I’d never felt passion until Grant. And I’d never forget it.
My lips found his softly. He held me against him and took comfort in what I was giving him. I knew then, trapped in his arms and lost in his kisses, that I wanted this to move forward. I’d held back, wanting to give myself to someone I truly cared about, waiting for the right moment, waiting t
o feel ready. I could never be more ready than at this moment.
I took Grant’s hand and gingerly led him back toward the bed. My heart was hammering in my chest in anticipation, and words were stuck in my throat. He read the questions in my eyes and returned them with a kiss. He effortlessly lifted me onto the bed, and I slid backward while I unbuttoned my cardigan. He smiled as I tossed it to the ground.
Everywhere he touched me was igniting a fire on my skin. I couldn’t get enough of him, yet I was terrified of exposing myself like this. His fingers ran along my stomach, pushing the shirt aside, as he lay kisses across my milky skin. I sucked in at his touches, at his utter adoration of every inch of my imperfect body.
“You’re so beautiful,” he murmured. His tongue teased the edge of my belly button.
“You make me feel beautiful.”
He smiled knowingly up at me and unsnapped the button on my jeans. “You should always feel that way, inside and out.”
I flushed at his compliments. He wasn’t teasing me. He truly thought I was as beautiful as he’d said. Under that gaze, I couldn’t disagree with him.
My jeans followed my cardigan, and Grant’s shirt came off next. I admired his body in a way that I’d never really appreciated. I’d seen it before. I’d run my hands over it, but here in the light…God, he was gorgeous. He was tall and tanned with strong arms and six-pack abs. His tattoos were bold and prominent against his skin. He had those V lines that made girls go crazy, and I suddenly understood why.
His lips traveled to the hem of the lace thong I’d worn especially for this evening. I didn’t have any lingerie—I’d never had use for it before—so this was as good as it would get. Grant didn’t seem to mind. I yelped softly as he nipped at the tender skin before dragging the thong down my hip with his teeth.
My legs trembled softly in anticipation as he eased my legs apart and fluttered his fingers lightly along my inner thighs. I gasped at his warm breath before he experimentally flicked his tongue on my clit. I was so lost in all the emotions swirling between us that I already felt like I was feverish with need for him.