by Angel Payne
She returned a quiet smile. “For me? Yes.” She tucked her legs beneath her as she came close and curled to his side. She let her hand continue down, swirling around the continuing persecution of his erection. “But for you? No.” Her hold tightened. “Let Gia help you, soldier.” She swung over to straddle his lap. “I really do want to help…”
Garrett braced light hands to her rib cage. “I know you do, sweetie. Thank you, but…no. You’re beautiful, but—”
Gia stopped him with a finger against his lips. “It’s ay-okay, sugar.” She giggled after deliberately throwing the endearment back at him. “I understand.” She gave him one more fast kiss before scooting off his knees. “I hope things will work out for you and your Sage.”
He fought to summon a smile at that. Instead, he scrubbed his stubble and chose another battle, the one to silence his brain’s teasing sing-song of nooot fuck-ing liiikely, nooot fuck-ing liiikely…
With a weighted sigh, he scooped up his clothes. The brunette’s satin robe hung against the back of the bedroom door. As he helped her into it, he asked, “Gia, you got a shower around here?”
“Sure thing. But I’m telling you right now honey, the ‘hot’ don’t work so good.”
He snorted. “Right now, I’m not interested in the ‘hot.’”
Chapter Six
Sage gave as many details as she could to Rayna, though she deliberately glossed over the grittier stuff. Hell, how did one talk to their friend, even after what they’d been through together, about feeling the way she did from Garrett’s behavior? Hey, Ray, I know you were pinned in that cave and had your body altered against your will, but can I tell you about how wet I got when my fiancé held me down and smacked my pussy? Did I mention how it made me think of nothing but begging him to tie me up, to drive into me until I couldn’t think anymore?
Of course, that turned things weird when she got to the part about Garrett’s invasion-of-the-body-snatchers exit. Luckily, Rayna wasn’t able to ask too many questions by that point, because Sage turned back into a mess of sobs again. True to form, her friend held her through every tear. It was easy to feel the trembles in Ray’s own frame too. Both of them needed only one hand to count how many times they’d allowed themselves emotions like this during those months when survival was more important than feelings, when breaking down simply hadn’t been an option. Maybe they needed to make up for lost time now.
Lost time.
The words jolted her like sunlight breaking through clouds.
Lost time.
She gasped from the revelation. Damn it, why hadn’t she seen it? Garrett had gone through a year of hell, too. He’d endured her funeral, for God’s sake. While she’d assumed he was alive—no, somehow she’d known it—and clutched to the hope of that to keep herself going every day, he’d been learning to live without her. No wonder he’d gawked at her like she was a zombie. Maybe to him, she still was.
Oddly, that thought gave her a surge of hope as Rayna walked her back to the room. It was almost lunch time, but she declined her friend’s invitation to the cafeteria. Her eyes were swollen from crying and heavy as bricks with exhaustion. The second her head hit the pillow, she plummeted into sleep.
Though a bomb could’ve hit the embassy and not roused her, she felt Garrett’s presence the second he got back. Her eyes flew open. Her senses were instantly alert to his every sound, not that he made a lot of those. She listened to the rasps of his boot laces, the clunks of the dog tags he’d tied to them, the thuds of the shoes hitting the floor. After a few seconds, she expected to hear the sough of his pants coming off. He always stripped them off after his boots. At least a year ago, he did. And hell, did she love it.
Against the backs of her eyelids, she hit the play button on a beautiful scene of him peeling off his bottoms after a day at the base. She stood at the door like she always did, openly ogling as his powerful thighs and calves got bared then breaking into a grin as he’d turn, his erection a bold silhouette against his briefs. Many times, he’d follow that by crooking his finger, beckoning her to come to him. Or sometimes he’d pace over and get her for himself, blue flames filling his gaze as he exposed his intent for her evening’s “appetizer.”
A light touch at her forehead jerked her from the fantasy.
She popped open her eyes. Garrett was just a breath away, on his haunches, gazing at her. His hand hovered near her temple, his fingers wrapped in a strand of her hair.
Wow. He’d gotten really good at the sneaky thing. Fantasy or not, he hadn’t made a single noise in crossing the whole room.
After getting over her initial shock, she gazed at him. The sight of him was heaven.
Then hell.
“Hey.” His rasp matched his appearance. Rough. Tangled. Tired. And more than a little guilty. That remorse seemed to deepen, digging into the creases at the corners of his eyes, as he watched her reaction. Clearly, he recognized that she caught every tiny sign of what he’d been doing in the last two hours. The kiss stings on his lips. The fingernail tracks on his neck. The lingering reek of cheap perfume on his skin, despite the fresh tang soap from a recent shower.
She rolled onto her back and squeezed her eyes shut. Like that was going to cut out the humiliation and agony. Nausea assaulted her thankfully empty stomach. And yeah, the darkness made everything worse. Much worse. Her stupid imagination was stuck on the freeze-frame of him from the bedroom back home, beckoning to her. Still wanting her.
She shook her head, emitting a bitter laugh. The embassy honchos who’d greeted them had talked about medals waiting stateside for her and Rayna. She had a good idea of what they could put on hers. For bravery, valor, persistence of will, and enduring a fatal strike to her heart after her rescue, the country thanks Sergeant Weston for keeping her stupidity at bay long enough not to embarrass us all…
“I’m such an idiot.” She slammed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
“Sage.”
“No. Don’t. Please don’t, Garrett. Can’t you leave me with a shred of dignity here?”
“Sage.”
“I get it, okay? My body isn’t what it once was. I don’t fire your chamber anymore. Done. Let’s move on.”
“Sage, damn it!” The bed sagged with his weight. He leaned over her. Hell, even in her fury, her body woke up to his nearness, his heat, that intangible, spiritual zipper that refastened every cell inside her to him again. She really hated that connection right now, especially as he grated, “It’s not what you think, okay?”
She spat out another angry laugh. “Seriously? You’re going with that one? I’ve been on the run in Africa for the last year and that’s old even for me, buddy.”
He pressed closer. “I’m sorry that you think—”
“Shit. That one, too?”
“Are you going to listen to me?”
“No,” she snapped, “because there’s nothing for you to say. There’s nothing you have to explain, all right? You thought I was dead. You moved on. I understand. So at least you tried, and thank you, but—”
Suddenly, he’d plunged his hand into her hair, clawing her scalp, forcing her head toward him. His stare was waiting for hers with such enflamed intensity, she felt sucked into an incinerator.
“The fuck I moved on!” It seethed from his locked teeth. He dragged a trembling thumb across her cheek. “My life stopped the second I walked into your parents’ living room and saw the chaplain sitting there.” He stopped, his chest pressing against the confines of his T-shirt with his hard breaths. “I couldn’t move, Sage. I didn’t move.” He shook his head. “I could only move again when the rage set in. It sucked, but at least it filled the goddamn crater inside, after they told me you were—” He cleared his throat with a ragged cough. “After they told me you were gone. But at least I could function again. At least I could think again—if that’s what you could call it.
“I started with Franz first. Yeah, I woke up my commanding officer in the middle of the night at his house, d
emanding that we scramble a team and head for Botswana to try and find you. Maybe I knew even then that you really weren’t dead. I just felt like we had to try.” He dropped his hand, pulling her own into it as he did. “He let me bawl like an infant on his couch, but he still told me no. All those fuckers shut me down at every turn.”
“Shit.” As it came out beneath her breath, fresh tears brimmed. She wrapped her other hand over his, loving him with new depths of her soul. “Baby, I’m sorry.”
He lifted his face again, his lips twitching as if a smile brewed there. It never materialized. The cobalt smoke had returned to his gaze, thicker than Sage had ever seen it. “Well, I wasn’t sorry.” He said it with leaden determination. “I left sorry behind when I left Franz’s house that night. Something took the place of it, for good.”
“Something like what?” she asked softly.
He stiffened. “I don’t know.” His lips compressed. In the silence of his contemplation, a breeze fluttered the curtains across the room, throwing a shaft of afternoon sun at him. For a moment, the anguish of his face was edged with light. The glow kissed the moisture at the ends of his hair and fringed his tawny lashes. The sight made her want to stop time, though her soul filled with crushing sorrow. Even the light from the galaxy’s most powerful fireball couldn’t penetrate the shadows in his eyes.
And she doubted she ever could again, either.
“Sage, it was something…dark, okay? Something hard and savage and vicious.” He jutted his jaw, and his free hand fisted tight. “But it kept me going, at least. It kept me alive.”
She looked away, trying to let his words sink in completely. Something on the nightstand glinted in the late afternoon sunlight. It hadn’t been there when she’d taken a drink of water before falling asleep. Somehow, she knew what it was before she reached for it. The gold band felt as meaningful and magical as the day they’d picked it up from the jeweler. She held up the ring at an angle in order to check the inside. As she hoped, the inscription was there. She read it through a haze of tears.
My Hero.
Even engraved on the inside of his wedding ring, the words had always been a lighthearted tease between them, a fun reminder of what he’d done to get her attention that first night in Tacoma. Okay, “fun” probably wasn’t the best phrasing on that. He’d come out of the brawl with the assholes with a busted lip, a black eye and nasty cuts on his knuckles, though the bawling-out she gave him in the tavern’s kitchen afterward was certainly as painful. At the end of the night, they’d exchanged phone numbers. Along with his digits, he’d written: Garrett Hawkins: Your on-call hero.
She’d given him the words just ten hours ago, in the middle of King’s Quonset hut. When she had, the meaning of the syllables changed forever. They weren’t just stamped on her heart. They were branded in her soul.
“Whatever that force was,” she murmured to him now, “I’m thankful for it.”
Garrett pushed her hand away before heaving to his feet again. “No,” he snapped. “Not whatever it was. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Sage. This shit, it hasn’t left me. Finding you didn’t dynamite my mental warehouse on it.” He’d gotten to the window. With a violent whoosh, he shoved aside the drapes and locked his hands against both sides of the frame. “If anything, it’s worse. After you—well, after you were gone, I used it like coffee, just to get up in the morning. After I returned to action, it helped shut off everything except for the missions.” He grunted, and his shoulders slumped. “Fuck. Franz was never happier. I turned into a perfect machine, became his number one go-to guy besides Z. We were pretty much the dynamic duo of the First SF Group, turnin’ and burnin’ the bad guys as fast as we could find them.”
Sage turned to look more directly at him. “So you concentrated on doing your job better. And it sounds like you did.”
He didn’t return her scrutiny. In his profile, she watched a hundred feelings launch emotional grenades at each other before they all exploded through his fist. A few splinters flew off the wood of the window frame before he said anything again.
“Do you understand what I’m saying? I concentrated on getting revenge for your life by taking as many as I legally could.” He rotated his head back toward her. His lips were a tormented twist, his nostrils puffed like a bull with his hard breaths. “My soul took a swan dive into despair, and I dragged as many others into the ocean as I could. And now, even though you’re back, I can’t figure out how to climb out.” He shoved back from the window. “Shit!”
Sage scrambled across the bed but stopped when her surge made him jerk back. “It’s okay.” Fresh tears stung her dry lips. “I understand. It’s okay. Let me help.”
“You can’t help!” The boom of it visibly shook the thin curtains. “Don’t you fucking see? I tried it, Sage. Just getting near you—I tried. I wanted to just love you, and I ended up—” He searched the room, his gaze desperate and agonized. “I ended up doing what I did.”
Sage sat back on her heels. “Oh, hell. Do you think I’m nine, Garrett? I guarantee you, I’m not. And I’m very aware of what it was.”
“That doesn’t change—”
“Sexual domination.”
She couldn’t think of any other way to get through to him. From the jump of his brows and the tighter tension in his body, it looked like she’d succeeded. With the subtlety of a sledge hammer.
“Look,” she stammered on, twisting her hands in her lap, “I know we’ve never discussed it before, but—”
“Damn straight we’ve never discussed it.” He stomped back to the window.
“Maybe we should.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t.” His shoulders tested the limits of his T-shirt again. “Maybe we absolutely won’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not that guy, okay?”
She lifted a tiny smile. “Maybe now you are. Hmm. Sir Garrett. It has a nice—”
“Stop.” He spun back toward her. Despair no longer filled his stare. In every inch of his eyes was the deep, unblinking blue of a very pissed-off animal. “There’s nothing remotely nice about it. Don’t say it again. Ever.”
She spread her hands, supplicating to him. “Garrett—”
“I’m not doing this, Sage. Not now, and not with you. That part of me isn’t for you.”
She rose to her knees. Fine. He wanted to play king of the damn jungle? She could do jungle. She had been for a year. “Not good enough, Sergeant. Why, damn it?”
His glower intensified. “Are you fucking kidding me? Fine. Because I happen to love you, remember? Men don’t do shit like that to the women they love!”
“Even if the woman likes it?”
He halted as if he’d walked into a sword. His eyebrows plummeted. The anger and confusion on his face declared war on each other. “I’m throwing the bullshit flag on your ass, Sage Weston. No sane woman can actually admit to—”
“What?” The sword had climbed into his gaze and she met it head-on, molding it into the steel resolution beneath her own posture. “To what, Garrett? To letting you take charge of me? To letting you command me, control me and—gasp!—be stronger than me, after I endured a whole damn year of having to do that for myself every damn day?” When he did nothing but park himself into a stubborn pose, she thrust her chin out in rebellious fury. “Yeah, I guess that makes me insane.”
A minute of thick silence passed. Neither of them moved. At last, Garrett closed the two steps back to the bed. He paused another moment, before sitting again. Sage kept still, consciously ordering herself not to dive for his lap, curl herself around him, and not move for hours. Couldn’t he feel it too? Couldn’t he sense how much she needed him? Could he really have stopped caring completely?
The question finished invading her mind about the moment he reached for her hands again.
“Sage, my heart…we could’ve gone into that shithole last night, found bags of diamonds, and I’d have been less knocked on my ass. You are the gift I never expected to find
again. This…you, here…it’s the fulfillment of my craziest, wildest dreams. And yet I got you back here, and I treated you like—” Beneath his breath, he gave himself a filthy verbal flogging. “Don’t you understand?” he finally growled. “Damn it, you should be wrapped in satin, and sleeping on fine linen, and treated like a queen. And all you’ve gotten is—”
“No.” She smashed her hand over his mouth. “I should be wrapped in you. Sleeping next to you.” When his throat constricted on a swallow, the backs of her eyes pricked yet again. When would these stupid tears stop? “You obstinate dork. I don’t want to be your stupid queen under glass, okay? I just want…”
“I know.” He said it after pulling her hand away, though he kept her fingers curled inside his. “And I’m here.” He pulled her knuckles against his lips. “I’m right here, and I’m not going anywhere. You have me here, Sage. Always.”
He released her hand. But the look on his face made Sage push it right back, looping her grip around his neck. She twisted her fingers into his hair, a silent command to keep his gaze locked on her. To the man’s credit, he endured her scrutiny. He smiled, if that’s what the look could be called. Both edges of his mouth wavered as if stabbed into place by dull thumbtacks. It reminded her of the event posters in the mess back on base. Lame messages proclaimed in half-peeling tempura paint.
Her stomach coiled into a tighter knot. Dread needled her whole body.
Damn it. Damn it. Yep, lame message was definitely the case this time.
“I have you,” she echoed, “always. But…not in all ways.” When Garrett rushed his stare back toward the window, she persisted, “I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Sage.” He sighed heavily. “This isn’t up for discussion.”
“Of course it isn’t. You’ve already made up your own ass-backward mind, haven’t you? You still think you’re going to turn into some kind of sadistic beast and hurt me, so you’re just not going to let me in. You’re still going to slink off into your shadows, and fuck another by-the-hour tart because you think I can’t handle your damn ‘shadows.’”