by LJ Evans
Nash was eyeing me, concern spelled out on his face in a way I wasn’t used to. I wanted to hate that it was him seeing me like this―weak, yet again―but I was too fatigued, too sore, too drained to work up enough energy to actually hate.
He shut off the water and brought a towel over.
“Can you stand?” he asked.
I nodded, eyes shutting, but didn’t move.
“Don’t fall asleep there,” he said.
I was already halfway to sleep. He pulled me up by my arms, and my body was bare to him once more, showing all the pieces of me, including some from the inside I was wearing like a cloak at the moment.
I steadied myself on his shoulders while he ran the towel over every part of me, gently, carefully. When he stood back up, he swallowed hard.
“Can you get my pajamas from my suitcase?” I asked.
“It’s in your room. I’ll get it for you later. Let me get you one of my T-shirts for now. Will you be okay if I let you go?”
But as soon as his arms left my waist, I wobbled. So tired.
He scooped me up again, carrying me out to the single queen-sized bed in the hotel room. He swept back the covers and set me down. I curled up. I heard him unzipping the military duffel I’d seen him with, and he came back, but my eyes were already shut. I was already drifting off.
“Sit up, Athena, so we can get this on you.” I didn’t budge. I certainly didn’t feel like Athena. And that was the last thought in my head as I fell asleep.
Nash
DREAM
“And all these sorrows I have seen,
They lead me to believe,
That everything's a mess.”
Performed by Imagine Dragons
Written by Grant / Reynolds / Sermon / Mckee / Platzman
She’d fallen asleep without a stitch of clothing, but I wasn’t going to be an ass and wake her up. Not after everything she’d just gone through in the last ninety minutes. Instead, I pulled the sheet up over her, tucking it in around her, and then sat in the chair at the desk, watching her sleep. Watching her breath as it went in and out.
She’d been embarrassed. There was no reason. Hell, I’d been as sick as her out both ends so many times from alcohol that I probably couldn’t count them. We’d worked hard, played hard, and partied hard in Silver Squadron. It took a hell of a lot to get me to the throwing up stage now as my body was used to it in a way my liver probably wouldn’t like someday. Dani getting sick because she’d gotten food poisoning or had a stomach bug or whatever was nothing to be ashamed of.
If the food had been the cause, I wanted every damn person at the restaurant to feel as miserable as they’d made her feel. I knew this wasn’t a normal reaction. I hadn’t had this strong of a reaction to anyone in my entire life. Dani did it to me. She pulled my trajectory until I couldn’t find up or down or out. Someone easily could have taken me out several times today when my head had been full of her. My head and my heart. The damn charcoaled muscle, which barely could beat for the people I considered family, had been beating for weeks at her siren call.
I watched over her for several hours while she slept as the late morning shifted into late afternoon. Sitting still wasn’t an issue for me. I’d spent hours in the same position, waiting for a target to come into view on multiple occasions. I’d been places where I hadn’t been able to move more than a toe or finger without giving my cover away. Watching Dani breathe was like a gift compared to those times. A moment I would never have again. So I took it with both hands, memorizing the parts of her visible over the sheet as well as the curves underneath it.
The room had started to shift into the autumn afternoon shadows by the time she shifted back to life. The only light we’d turned on was the one in the bathroom, and it barely shed its beam into the room as Dani’s eyes slowly opened, meeting mine.
“Have you been sitting there the whole time?” Her voice was dry, throaty.
I took the ginger ale out of the ice bucket, poured some in a glass, and put it on the table next to the T-shirt I’d left for her on the nightstand. At first, she didn’t reach for it; she just lay there. Eventually, she moved slowly, as if she was trying out her muscles. When she finally sat, the sheet fell away, leaving her beautifully toned skin on display. Her breasts with their rosy pink tips. The waist that curved in over hips before widening out to her gorgeous ass. She was perfect. Everything which called to me about a woman, I found in her. Gentle curves, smart brain, sharp mouth.
She reached for the T-shirt I’d left and slid it over her head, covering the body I still had burned on my brain. She reached up and undid the band which had been holding her hair back the entire day, and the dark curls rushed down and around her chin, spilling over her breasts hidden beneath my T-shirt.
She ran her fingers through her hair, rubbing over the scalp, and I had to control my body’s reaction to jump over and do it for her. To massage her head and then tilt her long, smooth neck so I could trail kisses along it. I wanted to touch her and kiss her more than I’d wanted much of anything in the last few years. Even before the mission which had cost me everything.
She finally took a sip of the ginger ale and grimaced. “Do we have any water?”
I nodded and pulled a bottle from the hotel minibar. I cracked it open for her, and our fingers collided when I handed it off. She watched me as she took a small sip before putting it on the table.
“I’m not sure I can even put the water in my stomach.”
I nodded.
She curled her legs up and rested her head on her knees like when I’d found her in the shower. Naked, pale, unmoving. It had been terrifying, and there wasn’t much that could terrify me anymore. There’d been another time I’d seen a pale, dark-haired woman who wasn’t moving. It had happened so long ago, and the pain was so piercing it was hard to remember anymore exactly what had happened when I’d found her that way, on the shore with the wind blowing the waves from the small pond onto her feet, the pale-blue nightgown clinging to her frame.
I hadn’t thought of that memory in a long time until seeing Dani in the shower.
Dani rested her head on her knees with her face turned toward me. She closed and then opened her eyes, a small smile quirking at the corner of her lips, and I felt relief wash over me. Relief that she could smile. “You’ve seen me at an awful low, Otter.”
I gave a curt nod. If this was the lowest she ever got, it was a good thing. The other dark-haired woman had been much lower.
“If you tell anyone, I might just have to kill you,” she said quietly but with a portion of her normal fierceness.
I returned her small smile with my own. “That’s the second time you’ve threatened my life today. Should I be worried?”
“Only if you spill the beans on what happened in that restroom.”
“You don’t have anything to be embarrassed about,” I told her.
“Still not a moment I want shared with the world.”
I couldn’t disagree with that.
“I feel like you need to share something completely humiliating about you so we’re even,” she said.
“You already know one of my secrets,” I told her and then regretted it because she went right to our night together. The secret I’d made her keep by forcing her from my bed. Before Dani worked herself up at the thought, I continued, “You’ve seen my hairless chest.”
Her eyes flicked to the black T-shirt I was wearing as part of the uniform for Garner’s company. Her flawlessly shaped brows joined together as she frowned. “What’s so embarrassing about it?”
“Well. It wasn’t always hairless.”
“Oookaaay,” she drew out her response.
I sighed. Was I really going to tell her this story?
“It once actually had quite a lot of hair.”
Her lips curled. “Did you shave your chest, Pretty Boy?”
Relief hit me. If she was feeling good enough to tease, she was coming through it okay.
“Worse.”
“What’s worse?”
“I had it all lasered off when I was nineteen.”
She laughed a soft laugh. “Why would you do that?”
“My sophomore year at Canoe U,” I started, and she snorted at the nickname for the Naval Academy. “I was approached by a woman off-campus who wanted me to do some modeling. Pose for a cadet calendar kind of thing.”
“Oh my God,” Dani said softly, covering her mouth and trying not to laugh, and at that moment, I would have told her a thousand embarrassing things just to keep her smiling and bringing color back into her pale cheeks.
I nodded. “Yep. When she saw my hairy chest at the first session, she handed me a card to a laser hair removal center and told me not to come back until I’d had at least two sessions. As you can imagine, I’d already bragged to a bunch of my pals, including Darren and some female cadets I had the hots for, that I was going to be on the cover of a cadet calendar. There was no way I was going to let a little hair be the reason I came up short.”
She was smiling and chuckling. “How many sessions did it take?”
I laughed. “A fucking lot.”
“As many as it takes,” she almost whispered, and I nodded.
“But after the second session, I was good enough to be oiled and posed.”
“I need living proof of this endeavor,” she said, her smile still in place.
“I’m sure it’s still out there somewhere.”
I had a feeling resourceful Dani was going to turn up with that calendar shortly. She’d hold it over my head the best she could. It was pretty fucking humiliating. One of the instructors at BUD/S had found out somehow in the middle of our training. He’d had photocopies of it placed in and on everything I owned. We even took target practice with it. It had been everywhere. Me, bare to the waist, with a pair of red, white, and blue briefs peeking out of my unzipped cammies. There were a lot of comments made about those briefs during the seven months of BUD/S—hell, some of my brothers had still been making comments about it before our last mission.
“The first time I met you, I thought you could be the poster boy for the SEALs, and now I know it’s the literal truth,” she said, still hiding that sexy smile and laugh behind her hand.
“Nah. The real poster boy was Darren.” My heart stopped and restarted when I said his name. I didn’t say it often. It was off-limits at Tristan’s.
Dani’s smile faded, and I wanted to kick myself, but she didn’t say to stop. She didn’t reject the name like it caused her physical pain.
“He was a golden boy, more Captain America than Iron Man. I think the SEALs are probably closer to Tony Stark than Steve,” she said.
As I let her words settle over me, I realized she was right. Darren had almost been too good for the SEALs. “You know, I never once heard him brag about his grades or his stats or his kills. It’s pretty commonplace for our community to hold themselves up as gods and trash talk everyone else.”
“No, you don’t say?” Dani said sarcastically, and my lips quirked.
“Darren never did. Not once. I would be pissed as hell at someone, cussing them up and down, and he’d just shrug, do his job, and keep going. He was always, one hundred percent of the time, the better human being.”
My emotions threatened to overflow. I got up, grabbed another water, and pounded half of it before I sat back down. She’d adjusted, just a hair, so her chin was now resting on top of her knees, and she was watching me as if she could read my story by searching my skin.
“I didn’t know Darren very well, but I’m pretty sure he’d insist you were a damn good human being yourself.” She said it with such sincerity, such conviction, that it struck at the hard corners of my burnt heart and chipped at them, trying to bring the muscle back to life.
I didn’t say anything; I looked down at the water bottle. It wasn’t true. All I’d wanted my whole damn life was to make sure I was there to keep the people I cared about from dying. Before I had to pull a dark-haired woman in a nightgown from a pond again. And I hadn’t been able to reach Darren in time to do that. If I’d been thirty seconds faster…
I shook my head.
“They don’t give a Silver Star to just anyone, Nash.”
My throat locked up at the mention of the medal I’d never wear. The burn of tears hit my eyes, but I wasn’t going to cry in front of her. Not today. Not ever.
“That star means shit, Dani. They gave me a medal for bringing home my best friend’s body…you get that? His body!”
She got up out of the bed, taking the three steps to reach me in the chair, and placed a hand on my chin, drawing my face upward so I was forced to look into her exquisite face. A face showing empathy and heartache that was directed at me. She was hurting…for me. It stunned me into silence. It was Dani who spoke next.
“You brought home two of your men and yourself alive, and you didn’t leave their bodies behind. You single-handedly held back the enemy so that could happen. That isn’t nothing.”
There was nothing more in her words than what had been said in the press release. It wasn’t top secret like the rest of the mission. Mac hadn’t given her some inside news. What she didn’t know was that I hadn’t even wanted to attend the award ceremony when they’d given me the medal. But Mac had reminded me how disrespectful it would have been to the ones who hadn’t come home if I didn’t show up. It would have disrespected the service they had loved and given their lives for. He’d been right. I didn’t have to wear the damn medal. I didn’t have to be proud of it, but I did have to show up.
What I really would have been proud of was bringing them all home alive.
The tears burned harder, and I couldn’t do it. I grabbed her hips, closed my eyes, and tucked my forehead against her stomach. Breathing in and out. Trying to find a sense of calm again. The calm I needed whenever I went out on a mission.
She pushed her fingers through the short strands of hair I hadn’t had buzzed in far too long, running them along the back of my neck and my shoulders and returning to my hair. It hadn’t been sensual. Not the words or the touch. But sitting there tucked up against her wearing one of my T-shirts with nothing on underneath it, knowing if I lifted the edge of the shirt just an inch, I’d see her sweet valley… It was going to be my undoing.
I’d forget everything I’d promised myself and Darren. I’d lose myself completely to her earthly force. I was almost ready to jump, anyway. I was almost ready to find out if I could pull her from her nightmares by repeating what we’d done at Tristan’s when my phone rang. It jolted us both from the touch which hadn’t been an embrace and yet was the closest I’d been to another human being in decades.
She backed away, sitting on the edge of the bed, and I pulled the phone from my back pocket. “Yeah?” I grunted into it.
“The front desk got a letter,” Marco said on the other end. “It was from Fiona.”
“What did it say?” I asked, looking over at Dani as she drank slowly from the water bottle.
“It asked if Dani liked the ipecac syrup,” Marco said.
Crap. We’d learned about ipecac syrup in one of the hundreds of hours of training we’d been through. It was, in and of itself, relatively harmless. It would cause vomiting and sometimes diarrhea. In larger doses, it could be fatal.
“She was fucking there?” I was about to lose my shit. I’d been there. I’d been watching the entire fucking place. There hadn’t been one thing that had stuck out. Not one thing. I had the woman’s face memorized. Hair too perfect a shade of red to be real. Dark eyes. Medium height. Small, oval face. It was the eyes you couldn’t really change—not even in a disguise.
I hadn’t seen her.
Self-hate rolled through me. I hadn’t protected Dani at all. You failed once and you got tossed out of almost any training as a SEAL. You had to be perfect. In sniper school, you had to hit ninety percent in impossible situations, or you got tossed out.
I was batting zero for two now with Dani’s safety. I’d let the woman get close enough to place a knife in a chair, and then I’d let her get close enough to drug Dani’s drink. She’d said it tasted funny. That was the fucking ipecac.
But something at the back of my brain was niggling. A sixth sense I’d learned to rely on more than my sight or smell. A sense that was telling me I was missing a piece. A shadow that was looming that I couldn’t quite put into form yet.
“Was there anything else in the note?” I asked.
Marco took a deep breath. “It said, next time, she wouldn’t hold back.”
This was insane. There was no way I could protect them in these situations. Too many openings, too many people. It wasn’t a fucking excuse; I couldn’t make an excuse for not doing my job. But I also knew something had to change. Something drastic. Otherwise, Dani or Brady was going to be seriously hurt, and at this point, the gun was directed at Dani’s head. I wasn’t going to let that happen. I’d stick my dumb, big-ass body in between her and whatever was coming.
“We need to meet. All of us. We’ll be up in the penthouse in ten minutes,” I said curtly.
I hung up and looked at Dani. She was still pale. What she needed was rest.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Fiona was where?”
No hiding anything from Athena. She was too smart, caught on too quickly.
“At the restaurant.”
The hand that held the water bottle fell, tipping and allowing it to spill on the floor. I stepped closer and pulled it from her fingers.
“It isn’t the stomach flu?” Dani asked. “What was it? Is it something…”
She swallowed hard, jumped up, and headed for the bathroom. I followed, but it was all dry heaves now. She had nothing left to give. She sat back on the floor, legs crossed under her, the T-shirt barely covering her bottom.
“It was ipecac syrup,” I said, squatting down next to her. “They used to give it to people who’d swallowed poison as a way to get them to vomit. It isn’t life-threatening.” Unless you’re given too much. But I didn’t tell her that.