Kneel Down

by Chelle Bliss

  But I wasn’t looking to fuck Gin. I was looking to get her forgiveness. I just wished to God I could remember everything I’d done to warrant me needing to ask for it. A bullet to the gut and a three-hour surgery sort of messed me around. That shit made my head fuzzy, and I had no real memory of what happened. There’d been a fight, a bloody one from what Kane told me, then bullets flying, then me hopped up on morphine. But hell if I could remember anything from the day I left the set the Friday before until the morning after my surgery. Short-term memory loss they called it. Something to do with a bad reaction to the anesthesia. Go figure.

  “There isn’t anything to say.” She sounded tired, like the shitshow that had been our lives for weeks now was one she just couldn’t handle anymore. She seemed to like her anger. Seemed like it kept her company better than I ever had. “Doesn’t matter, does it? You saying that shit. You saying that shit to her. She was your wife.” She looked at me then, her face twisted into tight lines and hard points. “When it comes down to it, Trudy is the one you married. That doesn’t die easy.”

  “It does when she did her best to kill it every day.” I got closer, holding up my hands when she jerked back. I held my breath, hoping my attempt at surrender kept her calm enough not to bolt on me. Gin did that when she’d crossed the “Motherfucker, I’m gonna cut you” level and hopped right into the “You are dead to me” zone. Breathing helped. At least, it helped settle the tension between us before I continued. “You know better than to think I’d still want her, that I want anyone but…”

  She waited. Took her turn at controlled breathing. I saw the question as it worked between her eyes. Gin needed me to admit the thing… I just couldn’t. She wanted me to say the words I hadn’t been able to utter to a soul since my cheating ex-wife had ripped them from my heart.

  “You know…” I rubbed my neck, hating that everything I wanted to say got clogged in my chest, like something pushed it further and further into my stomach the longer I stood there searching for words I couldn’t make come out of my mouth. “I’m…sorry, Gin. I just…”

  The words died right there, somewhere between the frozen stare she gave me and the breath she held as she waited for me to finish speaking. But I couldn’t. Nothing would come. Things got twisted inside me when I thought about her in any way that wasn’t friendly. I squashed what I wanted because I knew anything else would end badly. It always did.

  Just then, I wanted her to reach inside me and extract the words. I needed a little help, but I knew she’d probably gotten sick of helping me figure out how to navigate my fucked-up life. Just then, I think my best friend gave up on me.

  Gin shook her head, temper firing back up until her cheeks were nearly the same color red as all that wild, ginger hair that circled her head like a mane.

  “You can take your apologies and shove them right up your narrow behind!”

  The woman wasn’t kidding. Cheeks brightening, I knew Gin meant business.

  She was off the balcony and down the hall before I could catch the door. I angled around it and went after her, waving off Kane and the others. I needed her to hear me out. I needed Gin to understand why I couldn’t say the only thing that mattered to her.

  But I came to her room just as she slammed the door, the wood vibrating in the frame, slapping against my nose. That was proof enough of the business my Gingerbread meant.

  I’d wait her out. She’d come around. She had to. No one knew me better than Gin. She knew the fucked-up shit I went through with Trudy and how saying those words wasn’t as easy as it once was.

  1

  Dale

  Present Day Seattle

  Kane was the storm. At least, he had been. But then the storm Kane had been petered out any time Kit got too near him.

  She was the storm chaser and had caught him completely.

  Looking at him now, that stupid smile stretching over his mug, I figured the storm would only show itself when she wasn’t around or when Kane wasn’t in the middle of celebrating his pending ball and chain… Scratch that.

  Kit wasn’t like Trudy.

  Let’s see… The phrase, I supposed, would be pending nuptials.

  Despite it being my third glass, the whiskey in my hand burned all the way down when I drank deep. I avoided Kit and the makeup women who swarmed around her, ogling her ring and the flowers for the wedding she and Kane would host in a few days.

  I never liked crowds much. Liked wearing a sports jacket even less, but there I stood, shoulder against a column that separated the back of the bar from the dance floor, sipping on my whiskey and hiding like an asshole because I didn’t want to be here.

  “It’s a few hours out of your life,” Kane had promised the night he’d hemmed and hawed before he sacked up enough to ask me to stand up for him at his wedding. Didn’t get the big job. That would be on Kiel, Kane’s brother, thank Christ. But I still had to stand up at that altar, looking like an asshole while Kane and Kit grinned and carried on like idiots as some preacher made them promise their “I dos” would be “I always dos.”

  The looking like a schmuck in my jacket was one thing. Standing up there trying not to grumble too much was another. But the damn trot back down the aisle…with Gin on my arm…was something altogether different.

  “Not gonna happen,” I’d told Kit when she’d gone all sweet eyes and dimpled smiles on me a few weeks back on set. She’d just laid down the hammer—told me who she’d paired me up with for the monkey show of a wedding.

  “Please, Dale?” Another eye blink, and the woman went on with her explanation. “Gin’s been so busy with the new set in Portland, so she couldn’t be my maid of honor. Since Cara and Kiel are living here again and Cara’s all pregnant and idle, well, she agreed to do it for me. It’s just a matter of convenience, and you and Gin…”

  The glare I shot her way at least kept Kit from blinking those doe eyes at me again.

  “Well. It would mean an awful lot to Kane and me if you could play nice and just walk Gin up and down the aisle. Two times, that’s it.” She’d tilted her head, and the sweet smile I figured had caught Kane’s attention years back started to work on me. “You were friends, and we’re all supposed to be real live grown-ups here, aren’t we?”

  Kit didn’t laugh outright when I grunted, holding back a comment about how un-adult-like it was to let your best friend walk right out of your life when you couldn’t muster the stones to ask her to stay. One widening grin over Kit’s pretty face and I got why Kane was so sprung over her.

  “Shit,” I’d said, head shaking when Kit let loose a sound I’d heard only come from females before. “I can be an adult.”

  “I bet you can!” Whether Kit believed me, I never found out. One non-answer that she took for a yes and the woman skipped away from me, heading straight for Kane across the set.

  I’d agreed to the stand-in, but that didn’t mean I was anywhere close to being ready to see Gin again.

  Hell, for a SEAL I was acting like a chickenshit.

  Tonight would be some sort of reception for the incoming wedding party. Then there was a big rehearsal dinner tomorrow. It was a fucking miracle the way Kit wrangled everyone, but even the thunder of activity surrounding me and the swirl of laughter and music filling the small bar as we waited for whatever we were supposed to be waiting for did nothing to distract me.

  Not when the door opened and Gin stood there, the light behind her pumping through the dark club, curving around her like a spotlight, making her look like she glowed.

  Holy fucking hell.

  That couldn’t be her.

  That wasn’t my flannel-shirt-and-Levi’s-wearing friend. It wasn’t the woman who’d get filthy with me running trails up Mount Rainier or tearing down old barns for scrap when the opportunity came our way. My Gin slung back beers at Lucky’s on dollar night and ate burgers and fries with her elbows on the table and her hair pulled back in a sloppy, all over the place bun.

  The Gin I’d been missing for a year
was absolutely beautiful, something I’d have to be blind and ignorant not to notice no matter what she wore, but hell. I’d never seen her looking like she did now. The woman standing in the doorway was someone else entirely—all curves and wildness, hair like a damn sunset in the middle of autumn, a riot of golds and auburn, complementing her pale, perfect skin.

  Did my best not to watch her too closely.

  Failed miserably.

  She walked through the door wearing a dress. A damn, honest-to-God, not-at-all-jeans dress. Never seen that before on Gin. Couldn’t say I hated it in the least.

  It was black, fit her like a second skin at the top, cut a little low, but flared out around her curvy hips. My mouth watered just looking at her. I downed what was left of my whiskey to keep the hunger I felt working up in me at bay.

  “Hey, man, can you help me with the chairs in the back?” Kiel asked, nudging me when I went on watching Gin as she walked through the door and made a beeline for Kit. “Dale?” he asked, punching my shoulder when I ignored him.

  “Yeah,” I finally said, dropping off my empty glass on the counter of the bar where I stood.

  “What are you…” Kiel stopped, the humor lifting in his tone as he turned to stare across the room.

  Gin stood between Kit and Kiel’s wife, Cara.

  “Damn,” he said. “She cleans up well.”

  I answered with a grunt, figuring anything I said, Kiel would use to twist into an insult. I followed the asshole to the back of the bar, nodding to a few of the bartenders and waitstaff as they moved stacks of chairs into the room.

  “No response?” Kiel asked, picking up one of the chairs among the stack lining the brick wall at the back of the bar. I didn’t much care for his stupid smirk or the way he looked at my face like he expected me to yell at him. “See, Dale, that’s what I like about you.” I gave him nothing as he went on, a stupid laugh making his voice lift an octave. “No bullshit professions. No real insults except for the constant scowl that twists up your ugly mug.” His smile widened when I grabbed a chair and unfolded it with too much force before I moved it next to the one Kiel had just placed at an empty table. “No, no, seriously,” he went on, ignoring the glare I gave him. “You go all stoic and silent. Not many people do that when they’re irritated, and I gotta say, man, you always seem to be irritated.”

  “You ’bout done?”

  “Fucking with you?” He stopped, holding a chair in his hands when I grabbed another one from the stack. “Fuck no.”

  I shoved a metal chair under the table before I walked away, leaving Kiel to handle his shit on his own.

  “Come on, man, I was just…”

  “Lay off,” Kane said, waving his kid brother back as he walked into the room.

  He followed me to stand in front of the windows that ran the length of the back. Good view out this way, showing off Seattle around us and in the distance, the stretch of Mount Rainier.

  It was those peaks I focused on as Kane stood next to me, offering me a refill of my whiskey. “Figured you were sticking to Jack since we’re here for the week and don’t have to drive back to the set.”

  I gave him a nod of thanks, then grabbed the glass. I ignored the laughter coming from Kiel as he and a skeleton crew of waitstaff finished unfolding the chairs. We both turned, glancing at Kiel behind us before the activity outside those windows caught our attention again.

  “It’d be better if we were back on set.”

  “It can wait.” Kane took a sip from his beer, his attention on the cityscape. “So can that bougie mansion in Tacoma.”

  “You don’t like this season’s shoot?”

  “Not really,” he admitted, turning to glance around the room. Kane let a slow smile move over his mouth when he spotted Kit, shooting her a nod before he went back to his beer. “Gotta make the studio happy.”

  “They pay the bills.”

  There was a small buzz working in the back of my head. I didn’t want to be a full-on drunk while Gin was here, while Kane and Kit expected me not to be an embarrassment at least, so I took up slow sips, doing more holding of my Jack than actual drinking.

  “Better than a real job,” Kane offered, looking down at me when I only nodded. “You cool?” He didn’t seem to like my shrug, gave me a tight frown, but he didn’t comment until my cell started vibrating. “That’s been happening a lot,” he said, moving his head to my jacket when another text alert sounded.

  I pulled it out long enough to set the ringer to vibrate.

  “You got something brewing?”

  I flicked a glance at him but didn’t offer more than that in explanation. Truth of it was that something was brewing, but it wasn’t a damn thing I’d share with Kane. Or anyone, for that matter.

  It had been a good two weeks that my cell had gone off while we were filming or working on the reno of the Tacoma mansion. I ignored them all, because there wasn’t a damn thing I’d do for Tony.

  My kid brother had been a pain in my ass for most of my life. At least since my birth mother landed in prison for good and I got sent to my father and the family he had built with Nita, my stepmom. I’d been thirteen and a skinny white kid from East Texas living in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans with my father and his new family. It was hell, fighting kids who didn’t much appreciate or understand why my dad was white and Nita and my little brother and sister weren’t. Kids can be fucking cruel. All the fights I got into defending my family, defending my place in that family, toughened me up. That neighborhood, that life we lived, did nothing for my kid brother. Tony had been coddled by our parents. I guess by me, too. I took the big-brother bullshit a little too seriously. Still, no way I was going to keep at that shit, no matter how many times he blew up my cell.

  From behind us in the center of the bar, Kit’s loud, exuberant laugh rang out. I followed Kane’s gaze as he looked over his shoulder, staring at her again. There was something moving between them. Something that looked a lot like silent nagging. I recognized the subtle lift of her chin as she watched Kane and how he sucked at trying not to be obvious when he nodded a return.

  The big man turned back, taking a long, slow pull of his beer before he cleared his throat. I wondered how long it had taken Kit to wrestle the storm Kane had been. Had it happened the second they’d been together? Or was it something she’d managed in the quiet, day-to-day while the rest of us lived our lives and ignored the specifics of Kit and Kane becoming a couple?

  Whatever Kit’s power, she wielded it then, making Kane fall in line with barely a twist of her head.

  But that asshole took his time getting out whatever info Kit wanted him to relate.

  “Listen, man…” he started, scratching the damp label on the neck of his bottle with his thumbnail. “Kit wanted me to… That is…”

  I didn’t much care about making people comfortable. Wasn’t much the type to extract information when it got stuck in someone’s throat. That wasn’t going to change no matter how long it took Kane to organize his thoughts, string them into syllables, and push out the words those sounds became.

  I had all night.

  “I mean, you know how shit went crazy with Kiel and Cara’s family with that asshole stalking her, you getting hurt, and then Gin leaving…”

  I held the glass to my mouth, pausing to watch him over the rim. Had that bastard gone soft in the head? “I got a vague recollection.”

  My memory had gotten away from me, thanks to the anesthesia from the surgery, but I got the gist. That bastard stalking Cara attacked, pulled out a gun, and I took one in the gut.

  Then, and only Christ knows why the hell I’d ever do this shit, Trudy had shown at the hospital, and I’d called her baby right in front of Gin. Repeatedly. I might not remember what happened exactly, but the fog was still lifting. Bits of it came back to me here and there, but fuck’s sake, Kane was a dumbass if he thought I’d forget why Gin took off a few weeks after the shooting.

  Kane’s irritation seemed to bubble to the surfa
ce as he watched me sip my Jack long enough that he blew out a breath and scrubbed his face.

  Figured I’d cut the man some slack. “Shit, man, just get it out.”

  “All right,” he finally said, downing what remained of his beer before he turned to face me. “Gin’s here.”

  I let my glance shoot across the bar, but I didn’t linger on the sight of her. She chatted with Kit and the makeup women with a giant smile on her face. “Spotted that.”

  “She’s…not alone.”

  That had my attention snapping back to Kane. But I had skills. I knew how to control my reaction. How to stay calm. How to funnel whatever bullshit I felt deep down.

  Kane focused on me, eyes narrowed, mouth set into a tight expression that wasn’t a smile. I got that he was hazarding a guess at how I’d react but didn’t know what to make of how I went silent.

  The whiskey didn’t burn this time when I drank, pulling in twice the amount I had with my last sip. I needed it. It kept my jaw from working and the low, irritated grunt right in the center of my throat where it belonged. Inhaling, I shrugged, a stupid, half-assed attempt at indifference I was pretty sure Kane wouldn’t buy.

  “No need to walk on eggshells.” When he remained quiet, I turned, narrowing my eyes as I scanned the crowd again. “Okay. So? Who’s…”

  “Um…Carelli. Johnny Carelli.”

  Kane couldn’t see my face, something I was glad of. Carelli’s name garnered the same reaction now as it had the day Kit told me about Gin’s new gig.

  Irritation.

  Eyes slipping closed, I kept a tight hold on that threatening grunt, looking over the crowd and spotting that asshole as he relaxed against the bar. He leaned on an elbow, head tilted as he held court. Kit seemed oblivious to whatever the hell he said, but the makeup women, Neva and Lexi, were like groupies ready to throw their thongs right at his face.