by LJ Evans
Malone shook his head. “It wouldn’t have mattered what you gave them. It would never have been enough to people like them.”
“Did they have screwed-up pasts that I should have known about? I would have helped…” Brady’s voice trailed away. As if he could have been able to fix everything had he only known what was driving them.
“Guess what? Some people can have a great childhood and still turn into shitty people who think they deserve something from the world,” the SAC said.
There was nothing on paper to explain it. Neither Fiona nor Tanner had anything in their backgrounds that would have flagged anyone. But as I knew firsthand, greed was enough.
Malone handed Dani her phone which must have been left in the mess next to Fiona’s body.
“Thanks,” she said and then turned to Alice. “Can you book us a flight back to Delaware?”
Alice’s eyes went wide. “Sure. You want to leave tonight or in the morning?”
“Now. As soon as you can get us on a plane.”
“Dani,” I said quietly, wanting her to rest, wanting her to take the time to recover her strength. But she shook her head at me.
“I don’t want to stay. I want to go home. I want to sleep in my own bed.”
♫ ♫ ♫
It was nearly midnight by the time we got back to LAX and were ushered directly to a redeye flight on its way to D.C. We were in first-class seats again, and I wasted no time in pulling her into me. The hooded sweatshirt she wore hid most of the red welt on her neck, but if you knew it was there, like I did, it was obvious. I hated it.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yes,” I told her, and it was true. I was okay. “Let’s just not make a habit of this.”
She tried to chuckle but winced.
“Yeah, I have no desire to repeat it,” she said.
“It was my very worst moment,” I told her, and her body stilled. I’d had lots of terrible moments. Some she knew about, and others she only knew a hint of, but she knew enough to know exactly what it meant for it to have been my worst.
She kissed me and then laid her head down again, a restless slumber finding her. My eyes closed, and I let myself settle into a resting doze. One that would jerk me awake at any threat. One that would have me alert and ready to fight at the smallest, unexpected sound.
♫ ♫ ♫
When we got off the plane and out to baggage claim in the wee hours, Mac and Georgie were waiting for us. I was surprised to see them, but Dani was not, and I wondered when she’d texted them. Mac stepped forward and hugged her so tight I was surprised she didn’t yelp.
“Go with Georgie to the car. Nash and I will get the bags,” Mac said as he turned his eyes to me with a glare.
Dani nodded. Georgie wrapped her in a hug of her own, and then they walked toward the exit, arm in arm.
When I turned from watching Dani to Mac, he punched me in the jaw.
My face and body jerked to the side by the unexpected hit, but I didn’t raise my fist or return the shot. I just stared at him. His eyes were glowering in a way I’d only ever seen Mac once. The time he’d watched me get off a plane with four flag-draped coffins.
“That’s for sleeping with my sister and then letting that bitch near her again.” Mac’s words were full of anger and hurt. I couldn’t defend myself against either emotion. He had a right to them. But I also wasn’t letting her go.
When Mac turned and stormed toward the conveyor belt, I called after him, “I love her.”
He stormed back at me.
“What. Did. You. Say?” The anger was still rippling off him in waves.
“I love her.” And I readied myself for another punch, stance going wide, arms crossed. I wouldn’t stop him. I deserved it. I would punch myself if our roles were reversed. Hell, I wanted to punch myself for all the stupid shit that had happened between us and to her since I’d first accepted her challenge to play poker.
My repeating my admission of love seemed to take the steam out of him. He brushed a hand through his hair, meeting my gaze. “Hell… Does she love you?”
“Yes.”
He still looked like he wanted to kill me. “Jesus. How long has this been going on?”
“Do you really want me to answer that? The hows and whens or whys?”
“No! You’re right. I don’t want the details.” Then he raised a finger at me. “But if you hurt her or let anyone else hurt her ever again, I will come for you in the night.”
Any other time, I would have laughed at him. I would have reminded him that the chance of him ever getting the drop on me would be almost a million to one, but I couldn’t.
Instead, I nodded and said, “I’m going to hold you to it.”
Dani
REMEDY
”When the pain cuts you deep,
When the night keeps you from sleeping.
Just look and you will see,
That I will be your remedy.”
Performed by Adele
Written by Adkins / Tedder
Nash didn’t look happy to find Georgie in the back seat of the SUV with me when he and Mac returned to the car with our bags, but he didn’t object. He climbed into the passenger seat, and Mac pulled out of the garage and out on to the freeway that would take us from Ronald Reagan to Wilmington.
Nash and I hadn’t said much since leaving the theater. We hadn’t said much since leaving L.A. But we’d said the most important things. We loved each other. It seemed like those were the only words that mattered. There was more we needed to say. More things to figure out. But my brain was too exhausted, so it would have to wait.
I felt bone-weary. The rest on the plane had hardly been sleep. It had been filled with people’s hands on me, my neck, my legs. Holding me down and back. Each time I woke, my throat felt like it was closed. Both my neck and throat were still throbbing as were my knuckles underneath the bandage Nash had wrapped around them in the penthouse.
As if sensing my increased pain, Nash handed me a bottle of ibuprofen he must have retrieved from his bag and the water bottle I thought I’d left behind on the plane. I downed the pain relievers and then looked at all of their quiet faces in the predawn light filtering in the tinted windows. I noticed a red mark on the side of Nash’s chin, and my eyes flicked to my brother’s in the rearview mirror. His face was tight, and I could see the tension in his jawline and shoulders.
“Squirter, please tell me you did not hit Nash.”
Neither one of the men spoke.
“Really?” I said, anger winging through me. “You’re both ridiculous with your male hormones flying about like we live in the prehistoric age. Should I have hit Georgie when I found out she’d slept with you? Or how about when she broke up with you and moved out? Should I have hit her then? Would that have solved anything?”
Georgie snorted a half-laugh, and I knew again why I loved her.
“This is different,” Mac barked.
“How? Tell me how it’s different.”
“Because he let someone get their hands on you. Because he hasn’t once been honest with any of us about his family or his relationships. Because he’s going to go off on every damn mission and leave you sitting here wondering if he’ll ever come home,” Mac said, and pain radiated through me at the truth of his words.
I leaned forward, wrapping my arms around the seat and his chest from behind, giving him the best hug I could while he drove. “He saved my life. I wouldn’t have been able to stop her from choking me if he hadn’t taught me what to do.”
Mac’s eyes turned glossy as I watched his face in the mirror.
“That doesn’t mean you owe him your life like in some damn movie,” Mac said, choking on emotion.
I leaned my head on the back of the headrest, turning my face to look toward Nash, who was staring out the front windshield. Quiet. As if he had no right to interfere in the conversation between my brother and me. As if he deserved the
harsh words.
I sat back, laying my head in Georgie’s lap and falling into another fitful sleep while she ran a hand over my hair. She tried to soothe me every time I startled awake with the feel of a chain sinking into my throat, but the only place I’d felt safe was in Nash’s arms.
♫ ♫ ♫
When I climbed out of the back seat, Mom was already there, hugging me, a little sob coming out of her. I hugged her back as tight as I’d hugged Mac and Georgie at the airport. “I’m okay, Mom,” I said into her shoulder.
The sun had risen, but it was still early, the cold, November air making me shiver in just my yoga pants and sweatshirt. Mom let me go but grabbed my hand as we entered the house with the men trailing behind us with our bags.
“Do you want breakfast?” Mom asked, and I couldn’t help the smile that hit my lips. She was back to trying to feed me. It felt like it had been months since I’d been staying there, with her trying to force food into me, when it had only been weeks. But in those weeks, my world had completely changed.
“I just want to go to bed,” I told her the truth. She nodded, and I started up the stairs. I turned at the top, looking down at my family gathered with Nash in the entryway, their faces somber. “You coming, Pretty Boy?”
Georgie smiled, Mac glowered, and my mom’s mouth dropped. But Nash… Nash’s eyes turned dark, and he followed me up the stairs with our bags.
We went to the room I’d grown up in, and I removed my sweatshirt along with my yoga pants and shoes. Then, I slid into the double-sized bed that had been mine since I was a girl, holding the sheet open for him, my invitation clear.
He removed all his clothes except his boxer briefs before sliding in with me.
He pulled me to him, and I lay my head down on his chest. The tattoos my pillow. The hardened muscles somehow softer and more yielding than you’d expect. He wrapped me in an embrace that felt like coming home even more than walking in the front door had. And finally, I could sleep. I fell into a dreamless state where there were no hands on my neck, no alarm running through my veins. Just peace.
When I came awake, hours later, the entire house felt quiet and still. The sun was pouring through my windows because I hadn’t shut the curtains. I wasn’t sure I’d moved once, because I was still lying half on top of Nash like when I’d fallen asleep. I turned my head to find his eyes open, watching me.
“Did you rest at all?” I asked.
“Some.”
“You can’t remain awake for the rest of our lives. I’m fine. You should have slept.”
“I will, but it’s still too fresh. Right now, it’s helping me to be able to watch you.”
I kissed him. Slowly. Taking my time like he normally did. Slipping a tongue along his mouth and then dancing it away, turning so my body was more on his. So my hands could roam over the wide expanse of his chest, down over the scars that showed his external wounds, over his heart, and down the taut abs to another taut part of him awakened by our kiss and my touch.
He reversed our positions so I was on my back with his hands trailing a hot, sensual trail over my skin and the tiny underwear I’d been wearing for too long now. I undid the bra and flung it out of the bed. Nash’s eyes went dark, hooded, his hand stilling on one breast.
“I want to make love to you. I want to be able to show you with my body the things I’ve been having trouble saying with my words,” he said quietly. “But I’m not sure you’re ready.”
I drew his hand down to my core before saying, “I’ll always be ready for you.”
He groaned as if I’d tortured him, and we lost ourselves in just the pleasure of touch, the ache of desire, and the fulfillment of love. My tired body came alive at his touch, making me feel like I’d been wrong. That everything I’d thought of as reality invading our world was really the dream, and that only this, us together, was the real world.
It was a long, long time before we stopped moving again. Bodies sated in a new way. Different from even when we’d made love at the estate. This was full of relief that we were both alive as well as new promises we were making to each other.
“I love you,” he said. It was the second time he’d said the words, and I jerked my eyes up to his face, my heart filling to the brink, as if it might burst with one more breath or one more word. I’d never heard those words from another man. I’d never wanted them. But now, having them from him was the sweetest touch that had ever reached my soul.
He watched my eyes as he continued, “I couldn’t say the words to you before, not because they weren’t true, but because I wasn’t sure how I could back them up with action when everything felt uncertain.”
When I didn’t say anything, he ran a finger along my cheek, resting on my bottom lip. “I realized it wasn’t just Fiona making me feel that way,” he continued.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Loving you means giving up the version of myself I saw in the mirror. The version I thought I’d be until I died either of old age or at the end of a gun.”
The thought of him dying clenched my heart, making it harder to breathe than the injury on my throat, but facing danger was his life. “I don’t want you to change. I fell in love with you just as you are.”
His lips quirked up a little. “I like it when you say it.”
It wasn’t the full smile that caused my entire body to react. The one that turned a hunky calendar model into a breathtaking man. I wanted to see that full, radiant one, so when he leaned in to kiss me, I turned my head slightly and said, “I kind of like it when you say it as well. I wonder who can say it the most in a twenty-four-hour period?”
And there it was, the smile that stopped my heart.
He said, “Challenge accepted.”
And I laughed before I lost myself to his kisses for a few more minutes.
“I love you,” he said, and I stuck out my tongue. “What I meant before you distracted me with I love yous―”
“That doesn’t count.”
He chuckled. “Focus, Athena.”
“Wait. We’re back to Athena?”
The laughter burst out of him, and he rolled onto his back, arms spread out as the beautiful rumble filled the air, taking the heaviness and the pain and everything we’d been through in the last weeks and flinging it into the air. I joined him, laughing, resting my head on his chest so the reverberation filled my whole body with its joy.
Our eyes met, the smiles so much better than the pain.
“Goddess, let me get this out.”
“I’m not stopping you. I love you. Why would I stop you from saying what’s in your heart when I love you so much?”
I showed him three fingers. In one swift move, he tossed me over onto my back again and had my arms pinned above my head with one hand while the other covered my mouth. I was still smiling.
“Jesus. This is important. Let me get it out.” He stared down into my face, and the smile that was making him all but glow started to dim. “How would you feel about me turning in my Trident for good?”
My heart bounced like a tennis ball gone berserk as I finally realized what he was talking about—giving up the layer of him that was all SEAL.
“Are you going to let me answer?” I asked, mumbling into the palm that covered my lips.
He removed his hand, staring into my eyes as if trying to read what I would say before it came out of my mouth. “I don’t want you to give up being a SEAL.” Surprise hit his eyes. “At least, not if you’re giving it up for me.”
He’d loosened his grip on my arms, my words settling into him, and I used the slack just like he’d taught me to, sliding away and off the bed. I stood at the side, a smile on my face. He lay where I left him, his grin back.
“That was pretty good,” he said.
“I love you. I have to―”
He moved so damn fast it was almost inhuman. He wrapped his arms around my waist and had me pinned to the wall, my legs going around him
.
“I feel the need for some rules of engagement, Goddess.”
His lips coasted along mine, sliding over to my ear and then down, grazing the swollen mark with tenderness before trailing farther to my breasts that were still bare and lit up with desire. I gasped when he took one tender tip into his mouth.
“You…can’t set rules…around saying…I love you,” I gasped.
He stopped what he was doing, and my body groaned an objection.
“That didn’t count,” he said.
Then he returned his attention to my breast, and I completely forgot everything I’d been going to say as we lost ourselves again in our skin.
♫ ♫ ♫
Returning to the world of the living was difficult after having his hands bring me up to the skies where I did feel like a goddess. One he worshipped with fingers and a tongue and whispered words.
“Guess what?” he said, lips quirking.
“What?” I asked, trying to get my breath.
“I love you. I love you. I love you,” he said with a huge grin.
The words peeled through me like a bell he was ringing, and while I laughed, the thought of him ringing a bell at all made my smile disappear. I put my hand to his cheek, wanting to make sure he got to say everything he’d wanted to say about his naval career. So he knew I didn’t want him to give it up for me.
“I’m serious, Otter, I don’t want you giving up your career for me.”
He took my hand, kissing the palm. “Before Dr. Inez put me on leave, he asked me what I had to live for, and when I tried to tell him I was in service to our country, he threw our SEAL motto in my face.”
“What an ass,” I blustered, offended on his behalf.
He nodded. “He was. He is. And it did piss me off. But I get it now. This. You. Me. What we are when we’re together. It’s worth anything and everything. I don’t want to spend six months without you. I don’t want to go out on a mission, wondering if I’m ever going to taste you again, see you shudder in joy at my touch, challenge me to some new game with strange rules of engagement.”