by AliyahBurke
Across from him, at the other end of the table, stood the woman of his dreams. She looked worried. As he ran his gaze over her he noticed a few changes.
First and foremost was her dress; it was now cut off at mid-thigh, showing off long, smooth legs. She still wore her heels and he could see she favored her left leg, for her weight was centered on her right. Her hair was in disarray and she nodded to something that the other man was saying to her.
“If you are sure, Hank. I want to be able to tell Seth and Violet that they don’t have to worry. I will leave my cell phone number along with my home phone. Call me if there is any change in him. Please.” Every syllable she spoke was husky and it struck Brandt as it always did. Low and in his groin.
“All right, Serenity. I will, I have both of your numbers already. He is going under now, talk to him so he doesn’t fight it. You know how Seth’s dogs are.”
The man’s voice was a rich timbre that Brandt knew would seduce a woman if he so chose. That, along with the fact the man said he already had both her numbers, made him angry and jealous.
“Easy, Irk. Come on, boy, it’s okay. I’m here. Just relax.” As she spoke to him softly a vet tech came in the room, shouldering aside Brandt.
“We are ready, Dr. Kline.”
“Very good, Trish. He’s almost under.” She left silently and walked back to the surgery room.
“I think he is okay now, Hank,” Serenity said.
“Good. Go home and get some rest. I will call as soon as we are done with the surgery.” He put his hand on her shoulder and arched a brow in Brandt’s direction in silent question.
“I have to go now, Irk, but you are in the best hands. Hank will take care of you. I will be back later. I love you, stay with us.” Serenity placed a kiss on his furry head and stepped back.
Chapter Eighteen
With a small but worried smile, she gestured for him to precede her out the door and into the hall. They stood in silence as Irk was wheeled past them, down the hall and into the surgery room.
“I’m glad it isn’t Jax or Hella lying there,” Brandt said softly.
“Both of them are doing fine. Besides, they are at home,” Serenity responded without thinking.
“I knew it.” He reached out and grabbed her arm, his hold so hard she knew she would bruise. “You are Raven.” Brandt propelled her out of the building and into the darkened street. “Damn you! Tell me what the hell is going on,” he growled.
“I have to get home.” Damn it all, she had blown it. Told him who she was for real, now he knew.
“Fine, I will take you. But you will tell me what is going on. No more games, no more lies. Let’s go.” She was put in the passenger side of his car and he slid behind the driver’s seat. “Where do I go?” His tone was sharp and full of anger.
Grudgingly, Serenity gave him directions. While part of her was thrilled he was going to be alone with her again, most of her was dreading the confrontation they were going to have.
There was no noise in the car as he drove to her home except for her few words of directions. The tension was so thick it could have been cut with a plastic knife.
He parked before her cabin and she heard him take several deep breaths. He got out and opened her door, gripping her arm as he steered them both up the steps. She opened the screen door and walked in ahead of him. Both Jax and Hella were there and they swarmed Brandt with tails wagging.
A smile crossed his face as he began to pet both dogs. Jax only stayed for a little bit, choosing to be near his mistress, but Hella remained at his side.
Serenity looked at the man in his Armani tuxedo. Tall and imposing, he stood in her living room taking up what little room there was. His face was full of well-deserved anger at her, but still he looked so good. Her dreams just didn’t do him any justice.
“Well? I think I deserve an explanation.” Long, lethal strides brought him closer to her and for some reason the majority of her thoughts were on how his body made hers feel. “No lies. I want the truth.”
“Fine.” She was resigned to her fate. “Let’s walk.”
“Excuse me?”
“I take the dogs for a walk on the beach every night, so let’s go.”
“In this?” He arched his eyebrow at her as he gestured to his suit.
She swallowed her retort and shrugged.
“I don’t have any clothes that you could wear. Take off your shoes and roll up the pants. The choice is yours. I am going for a walk.” She moved past him and he removed his shoes in record time, rolled up his pant legs, and was following her down the porch steps before she even reached the steps to the beach.
The dogs ran ahead, playing in the surf and running fast and hard. The two humans walked in silence for a bit.
He reached out, grabbed her arm, and spun her to face him. The sky was full of stars and the sliver of moon that was overhead didn’t give them much light. Not that it mattered, she could see him perfectly clear.
“Stop stalling.” He was livid.
“Very well, ask your questions.”
“Who are you?”
Serenity removed herself from his grasp. With a heavy sigh, she reached up to her neck and rubbed it with both hands. Then she sighed again and answered him. “My name…my real name is Serenity Chandi Walker.”
“Who is Raven Dare?”
“Raven Dare was a persona created by me, for me, when I was on assignment. She doesn’t exist except in my head and on paper. Well, now she is dead and I—as Serenity—can get on with my life.”
“Why the big deception?”
Serenity began to walk and when Brandt fell into step beside her she spoke again. “Look, I don’t know how much you remember from our short time together.”
He remained silent.
“Remember I told you I was more than just a bodyguard? I am also a person who would be sent into a situation in which someone needed to be taken out. Permanently.” There was a small pause as she gave time for what she was saying to sink in. “That was also part of my training. I kill, that is what I was trained to do, an assassin or mercenary. And I do it very well.”
She stopped, then started again and was moving in a very agitated motion.
“Maybe I should just start at the beginning. Bear with me, I have never told anyone this before, not all of it anyway, so it will take me a bit.” Serenity collapsed onto the warm, silken sand and Brandt did the same and sat beside her.
“My mother died when I was very young. I lived on the streets and joined a gang. I was young and needed the protection, for what they could offer me. That’s where I learned how to drive, in street racing. I loved the rush, the speed. Well, I am getting off track. I also learned how to fight—street fighting anyway, and the rudiments of martial arts—one of the members knew it and took it upon himself to teach me. I learned quickly and became more and more of a problem for the authorities.
“I met Seth one day in juvie. He had been sent down from Child Services. He was my new foster parent, or at least that was what I was told. I was eleven and the best damn street racer we had in our gang. Tall for my age and very well developed, I looked much older than I was.
“Well, my choices were to stay in juvie or go with Seth. So I did, went with Seth, that is. He encouraged me and I excelled. Found and learned to use my photographic memory. When I graduated high school I immediately joined the Marines. I was seventeen at the time. That was where I first met Dylan, Talon, and some of the others that I worked with in Dylan’s company.”
For a moment, she fell silent as she gathered her thoughts. The smell of the ocean helped calm her. But at the same time it gave her the answer, or one of them at least, about where she wanted to stay. She needed to go home.
“Anyway, I did my first tour. Or my first three years. I learned fast and moved up the ranks. I immediately re-upped and that was when I began my descent into the dark side. Was put into a Special Forces team. Marine Force Recon.”
“What do you mean?�
� He shifted on the sand. “I’ve heard they are some of the toughest.”
“On my second enlistment, our team was sent into Africa. We were supposed to stop ethnic cleansing. Well, the official report was we were going to give aid to those in need.
“For any person it is hard to watch, but for a young black woman—well, for me anyway—it changed me. To be witness to such senseless murders and mutilations of people who look just like you. I know with any race it would be very hard, but of the same race…there is just something about it, I am not sure how to explain it. I became cold and distant. Emotionless. I changed. I had to or I wouldn’t have been able to do my job. And sometimes that job meant killing an eight, ten, or twelve-year-old child with an AK-47, who would have killed me without a moment’s hesitation. If they could hold a gun they would use it, and there was no reasoning with them. It was kill or be killed for them as well.
“One day we were in our helicopter flying a mission into the middle of the damn jungle. A malfunction of some kind happened and we went down. I fell into a deep river. Fast moving, and when I got out I didn’t know who I was. I barely made it out of the water alive.
“I was in there for two years. Lost and alone in the jungle for a good chunk of that time. During that time, I learned to move quietly, kill without reservation, and how to slow my breathing and my blood flow. My senses became enhanced, that was the only reason I survived. I can see, hear, and smell better than just about anyone. My touch and taste is much more sensitive as well.
“I learned to move in total silence, and the true art of camouflage. I studied the predators in the jungle and copied them. I was on my own for a little over a year before I found a village that allowed me to stay.
“I got my memory back of who I was one day when I came upon a village, which was a little way off from the one I was staying at, and found rebel troops mutilating women and children. The troops had been at it all day for there was a pile of dead bodies behind one of the huts.
“They were raping the women and children and using them to practice their knife wielding abilities. I was floored by my anger and disgust at them. Everything came back in a rush, my training and my mission—to stop the rebels—and after the rebels died, I left the village and began to find my way out of the jungle. For I knew I had to let someone know I was alive.”
“Holy fuck. Didn’t you know who you were from your uniform?”
“By the time I made it out of that river, I was covered in blood and not much else. Sharp rocks had torn away both my clothes and skin. Until I found the village I was really only in animal skins. It was kill or be killed out there and I chose to survive, so I killed.”
* * * *
Brandt thought about her life compared to his. He had been without his father, but his mother had plenty of money, so he went to private schools and never had to want for anything. He became a playboy, and was right up until the day Raven—Serenity—walked into his life.
How could she have gone through what she did? Maybe that was why she created this other person. It had to be the reason for no one was willingly that emotionless about killing.
* * * *
“After I got out, I called my CO and they sent a plane for me. I was the last one to make it out, most had been rescued and one had died in the crash. I was done. I finished out my last ten months in the Corps and didn’t reenlist. Barely with any time in-between, Dylan came to find me and ask for my assistance.
“I was to be a bodyguard/assassin. He had read my file and found the experiences that I had in the jungle would be good for him and his company. Well, the ones that they learned about in my debriefing. I had done things in that jungle that will haunt me forever and yet, at the same time, it gave me the ability to do what needed to be done for the job. It gave me an edge that even Dylan doesn’t know about. My heightened senses. One of the reasons I was the best.”
She paused and trailed her fingers through the sand and watched her dogs as she found a way to continue.
“In an interrogation, I can hear a person’s heartbeat and when it accelerates. I can hear the rapid breathing and smell the sweat before it shows up on their face. I can hear people approaching me long before I should be able to. It is like the sounds of the world are amplified just for me, so I can do what I need to. I don’t get surprised. The wind flowing over a trip wire to me sounds loud. If there was an explosive by a door rigged to go off, I could smell it or even hear the ticking of the timer. I was a killer or bodyguard with an edge.
“However, in that mode I was not Serenity. As Serenity I’m a happy person. I love life and laughter. But to do what was expected of me, I had to dig for the darkness that the jungle brought out. The side I tried so hard to forget. So, Raven Dare was born. For about five years I took dangerous assignments. Got a lot of money and built my dream home. Left Dylan’s business and retired, had been retired for about two years. Until you.”
“What do you mean, until me?”
“Dylan had to hunt me down. I never told him where I was and the last time I had seen him he was lying unconscious on the floor. Seth had told him, I found out later. I had left because it was becoming too hard for me to distinguish between Raven and Serenity, still is some days now, that and some other reason. Anyway, I went back for one more assignment. You. You pretty much know the rest.
“Doc also found out where I lived and burned down my home. Everything I had he took from me. So all I did, everyone I killed on an order, was all for nothing. I have nothing left. Nothing to show. Except my dogs.”
The damn broke and her body shook with silent sobs. Brandt slid his body behind hers on the sand and moved her back to his chest. She accepted his strength and leaned into him.
“Well,” he began. “I still don’t truly understand why you lied to me. I’m still angry and hurt by it. In a way, I do. You had to keep the lives separate so people wouldn’t come after Serenity. I thought I was different.
“Do you have any idea how I felt when I read the article about your death?”
His arms tightened around her, surrounding her with the smell of man, the smell of Brandt.
“No. I guess I don’t.” Could it be a sin to feel this secure in his arms? Did it mean she wanted to be protected for once in her life?
“I went to your funeral. I felt like I had lost the other half of my soul. I loved you.”
Loved. As in past tense.
“For what it’s worth, I am truly sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was getting harder and harder for me to separate the two. I don’t like living in such darkness, it had begun to overwhelm my soul. I need to be able to have a night’s sleep where I don’t wake up covered in sweat from nightmares. Nightmares of what I have become.” Brandt tried to break in and say something but she didn’t stop talking, effectively silencing him.
“I needed a chance to just be Serenity, no one else. A chance to find out what I want to do. I am almost thirty and I’m just lost. I have no direction, no anything.
“Well, that is not true. I have a bum leg. Scars all over my body and a permanently altered voice. But other than that, I have no home anymore. I don’t really know what I am going to do with the rest of my life. So I came down here. To find myself. And to heal. Well, I am pretty much healed, I just don’t know what to do with my life.”
“You were pretty hurt back there, weren’t you?”
There was no reason to pretend that she didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Tom said I was lucky to still be alive.”
“Tom?”
“The doctor.”
“Oh, the one that gave you his cell number. I remember him.”
“That’s the one. He always took care of me when I got hurt. Tom is a good man.”
“He seemed to be interested in you in an unprofessional way, if you ask me,” Brandt ground out.
Chapter Nineteen
Serenity laughed. That simple act felt so good, especially with him. “
You are a strange man, Brandt Fowler. So, tell me. Did I answer your questions well enough?”
Brandt put his head down by hers. Put their faces cheek to cheek. Silken skin to skin with early morning stubble.
Her dogs were sleeping beside them and the tide had risen to almost reach their feet. Time had flown by.
“The sun is coming up,” he spoke in her ear, low and deep.
“I know. I have to get back to the house. Hank will have left a message for me. I hope.” She moved to get up and he restrained her. “Let me go, Ice.”
That just slipped out. She hadn’t meant to call him that.
“I don’t know if I can ever do that, sweetling.” His words were low, like a rich, warm brandy.
Brandt released her but his eyes never left her body as she rose to her feet, her insides a quivering mass at that one word, sweetling. God, how she wanted to wake up next to him every morning.
After she had regained her feet he found his. Jax and Hella had gotten up as well and they headed up the steps to toward the house, leaving the humans to follow at their own pace.
The next words that came out of Brandt’s mouth made Serenity’s insides melt. “I asked you a question last night, Serenity Walker. I would have my answer now.”
Yes. Yes. Yes. I love you, Brandt Fowler. Once again there was no reason to pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about. “I’m sorry. You don’t know me except as Raven. Besides, I am not sure I am ready to get married.”
Instead of being angry as she had believed he would be, Brandt just smiled. A predator’s smile. A smile that made her wonder what scheme he was hatching in that brain of his. What was being planned behind those ultramarine eyes?
“So there is nothing between the two of you? You and that Chris guy? At all?”
“No. Nothing. I am not dating. Like I said before, I came down here to find myself. Find out about me. That doesn’t leave me time to deal with the mess of dating.”
“Why do you consider dating to be a mess?”