by S A Gardner
God.
Oh God.
Oh my God.
For long, shearing moments, there was nothing but our strident breathing as our gazes stuck together on a mess of molten guilt and horror and self-loathing.
This was what he lived with. What he believed he’d done.
“I still didn’t hate myself fully then.”
There was more?
I shouldn’t be listening. I owed Jake and the others my stamina. This was appalling, undermining. Crippling. And history. I’d let it prey on me when the here-and-now had taken its dues, had been dealt with.
I tried to heave up to my feet, but his hands clasped my arms. He was bound on sharing his torment to its last drop.
“I drove to Mel’s funeral after I testified against you, and all I could think of was that you had gone out of my life. I hated myself when I stood over her grave, and mourned losing you.”
Thirty-Seven
I recoiled inside and out, felt things tearing inside me.
Images of the tough, vivacious Melissa splintered through me like the fragmenting mine had through my patients’ bodies.
Mel. Gone. Sacrificed for me. Then not even mourned as she deserved. I hadn’t mourned her enough, either.
No wonder he hated both of us.
Now I always would, too.
The only mitigation here was that he’d always treated her with impeccable attentiveness, affection and respect. I’d seen it. She’d died believing in his love. I said so.
An ugly, bitter laugh, furious and scathing, tore out of his guts. “Really? A smart woman like her—any woman would have known how I felt.”
“I didn’t.”
“Didn’t you?” His probing eyes forced a stark self-confrontation on me.
Did I?
“I didn’t,” I insisted, my voice shaking with the expanding shockwaves of his revelations. “I was too immersed in experiencing our conflict, in riding the currents between us, in wrestling with my own forbidden desires. I never realized what was going on inside you, and you sure never acted on it in any way. On my part, whatever I felt, you were someone else’s and that was that.”
He leaned closer, cupped my face in his large palm. A wave of unwilling longing rushed to meet his touch, everything inside me surging, demanding him. “So we were commendably righteous. But didn’t life surge into you when you even thought of me? Didn’t you feel capable of anything, didn’t everything and everyone fall out of focus—cease to matter, to exist—when I was around? Didn’t everything recede, diminish, lose color and significance, didn’t life itself dim and dull and drag when I wasn’t?”
Yes, yes. All he said. Exactly that.
Him, too?
God, had we been obvious?
He clearly thought we had been. “I bet you Mel saw it all. Acting on it wasn’t the issue, it was enough that she felt who I really craved. I bet if I’d left her for you, she would have felt rejected and betrayed, but she would have at least had the relief of hating me. Staying with her while I wanted only you, I only made her feel worthless while depriving her of that comfort, that closure. Then I deprived her of her very life. When it came down to a choice between her life, and anybody else’s, including mine, and yours, I chose you. I sacrificed her for you. Then didn’t even have the decency, the humanity to keep her memory alive in my own heart. No matter how hard I tried, that was filled with my obsessions over you.”
Had I ever hated it that I couldn’t read him? Why didn’t I ever count my blessings? Here he was, throwing the whole open book of his inner self and the backlog of every compulsion and desire and regret at me to read.
And Lord—it hurt. Damaged. Another scar, uglier and more devastating than all the rest.
But I had to say something. Something profound to mitigate his searing guilt.
“You must stop thinking you helped me kill Mel or the others.”
All right. Not so profound.
He gave my inept effort to absolve him the deserved ridicule. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll stop right away.”
I tried again, something more coherent this time. “You must. You were right, before you had time to whip yourself over it all with survivor’s guilt. Before you invented new versions of what happened. The blame is fully mine.”
His head shake was final and incontrovertible. Anything I said now would be met with the same dismissal. I needed a more eloquent closing argument.
“Believe me, I never even noticed you looking at me funny.”
Okay. Eloquence seemed to have deserted me. Even plain old verbal competence. They’d been swept away by the burst dam of revelations and recriminations.
“Funny, huh?” An incredulous sound cracked in his chest. “And you never noticed? Are you for real?”
“Don’t underestimate your acting abilities, Damian. I do believe Mel didn’t notice, either. I’d have known if she saw me as a rival. I’m not that vibe handicapped.”
“I wonder. Because I looked—funny, and every other way. And I hungered. How I hungered, Calista. I’ve been starving for you from that first moment. Last night, just now? That’s just a toe-dip in the inferno I want to drag us both into, never to resurface.”
My own hunger thrashed inside the confines of my body, like a chained dragon clawing against the walls of its prison, roaring fire for its mate.
Slipping around me, he wrapped me from behind in mighty, shaking arms. I pressed back into him.
Vital. The word that best described what he was to me.
He buried hot, ragged kisses in my neck and my pulse leapt to smother itself in his seeking. “I can no longer fight it—fight us, Calista. I won’t. There’s no point anymore. I’m already damned, and I want to be damned for taking it all.”
I barely handled my quota of conflict and guilt without his compounding torment. Or his temptation to numb them, by plunging into the very reason behind them and gorging on each other.
I tried to pull away. “You said it would jeopardize the mission…”
His arms wouldn’t let me go, turned me, enveloped me. “I take it all back. We’re professional enough not to let it. As for fearing for you and having that affecting my judgment, this had always and will always remain the same whether we’re lovers or not.”
“So we might as well be, huh?”
“Yes.” The sexy hiss vibrated against my lips, rippled out through me, destroying all obstacles inside me in its path.
This was exquisite. The sheer level of pleasure we generated between us by just a touch.
Why was I resisting this again?
Ah, yes, just about all the reasons I ever had, multiplied by a hundred. Plus Jake.
Feeling as if I’d be biting into my own heart, denying it its foremost desire, I bit his lip. In response, he crushed me harder to him, deepened the kiss. I bit harder and he groaned and transferred his abused lips to my neck.
I gasped, desire ripping fault lines through me. “You first tell me it was just a night of solace and mind-blowing sex—and a mistake. Then you tell me it wasn’t, was just an aperitif in some hellish, eternal feast that you want to be a regular thing. How about you wait a bit until you change your mind again and come up with a third option? Like forgetting all this, and resuming our old status quo?”
“Your third option isn’t even worth a comment.” He nipped where my neck flowed into my shoulder, before bathing it in melting licks that had my arousal soaking my panties. “And this isn’t a ‘thing,’ and you know it.”
“Do I?”
He finally raised his head, took me by my shoulders, his eyes serious, pledging. My heart did a backward somersault in my chest.
“Not for me. I don’t do ‘things.’ I never did.”
Never? Did that mean in the past years he didn’t…?
Oh, shut up.
It was none of my business what he did or didn’t do in the years apart, when he wasn’t mine.
But he’d just said he’d always been that.
So did I eve
n want him to be mine?
His fingers tightened, dipping into the aching muscles of my shoulders, digging assuagement into them. “Hell, I don’t have time or a place in my kind of life for anything at all. But you…”
“You’d make time and place for me?”
“I don’t have a choice here, Calista. I never needed anything or anybody. You, I need to breathe, to be.”
So simple. So sledgehammer sincere.
Had I ever fumed over his being a reticent ass, wished he’d be more communicative? Now I had to pull him back before he communicated my psyche into so much powder.
Crazy lust, even love, was one thing. But need? And need of that caliber? We were talking another dimension here.
Could I afford need that total? Could he? Investing almost all of our beings into the other and going perpetually nuts anticipating loss and dreading devastation?
Which brought me back to the much-debated, never-satisfied question.
“What are you doing in this kind of life at all, Damian?”
He blinked then burst into an incredulous laugh. “Is this your roundabout way of avoiding the subject? Of telling me to take a hike?”
“You think I’d tell you to take a hike indirectly?”
His laugh became approving. “Touché. And good. Because I won’t. Never again. So—why I’m in this life.” He shrugged, mischief making him even more edible. “The reason is simple, generic even. It’s because of my father.”
Finally. He’d tell me about his origin story.
When moments passed and he didn’t say another word, I poked my fingers like a knife between his ribs. “You damn well are going to elaborate on that.”
“You sure that’s the right time for my origin story?”
Hell. What was with it with those two men reading my mind down to the word? Was I that transparent, that predictable?
He gathered me into his body again. Oh, no. He wasn’t distracting me. This was my chance, at last, to find something out about him. I stamped my foot on top of his.
His growl was arousal and amusement made sound. “Fine. I’ll tell you after you say yes.”
“You’ll tell me or you’ll never hear that word from me every again.”
“What kind of threat is that? When I never heard that word from you?”
I dug my nail-less fingers in his triceps. “Damian.”
“Hold your scalpels, Doc. You don’t have to excise the truth out of me. I’ll donate it.”
He’d really tell me? I’d find out what made him tick?
That face I could stare at till my dying breath settled into that enigmatic mask again. Whoa. Seemed this was doing to be heavy if he’d deployed his stealth mode.
His voice was devoid of inflections, too. “My father was a Colombian drug lord. And before you search your database for him, De Luna is one of my mother’s maiden names. She had an affair with him while working as an interpreter for one of his legit business in the US. Then she discovered the truth about him and reported him. He fled but she was already pregnant with me. She was in witness protection when she had me, thought he’d never find us. He did, had his men abduct me when I was three, took me to him in Colombia where he proceeded to mold me in his image, turning me into a weapon he’d wield against all who ever crossed him, starting by my mother. I experienced every depravity and learned everything about termination growing up in my old man’s version of hell. Whatever you heard or saw, in the media or firsthand, about Colombia and its drug cartels, it’s the PG-13 version. Then at fifteen, I managed to escape him and returned to the States. All I wanted ever since was to put monstrous scum like him out of business. Out of this world.”
Then he stopped talking.
When I could finally activate my vocal controls, I wheezed, “You’re kidding me, right?”
“Would I dare kid you?”
I stared at him. And stared at him.
He was telling me the truth.
So that was his story. Impossible to imagine. The terror he must have experienced being snatched from his mother’s arms. The desperation and oppression of becoming a hostage among monsters, the subject of his father’s morbid plans and ground zero for his depraved upbringing.
It was also impossible to comprehend the difference between our childhoods. Mine had been idyllic. A model family, everything a girl could want, safety, stability. While his had been horrific, bathed in brutality and atrocity. We couldn’t have had more diametrically different formative years.
How weird was it that our paths ended up intersecting, and he was now proposing merging them, and our destinies?
I shook my head, groped for something light. “You had to go have an origin story to make mine look disgustingly oblivious and privileged, huh?”
“Yeah. It was all meant to top you.” I poked him and he dragged me roughly into his embrace. “Now I want to do so, literally.”
He pushed me back on the mattress, covered me, devoured me until I forgot everything. Again.
Not good, these total amnesia attacks.
I thrashed beneath him until I made him un-fuse our bodies, turn on his back and take me on top of him.
“I have more questions.” At his exasperated groan, I bit the fingers trying to drag me back into a drowning kiss. “You thought after all these years you’d answer one question and I’d be satisfied?”
“I’ll satisfy you. I’ll give you total, repeated satisfaction, until you weep. Or lose consciousness. Or both.”
Oh, yes, please, please.
Smacking myself mentally and his hands away before I tore him out of his clothes and rode him until I knocked myself out again, I sat up, straddling him, holding him down.
“No, you don’t. It’s still Q&A time. Like how did you stop being a SEAL?”
His hands dug into the quivering flesh of my butt, pressed me down into his erection as he thrust up, his lips stiffening at my answering grind, twitching at my curiosity. I’d never displayed it before, and now it all but snapped its insatiable jaws at him.
“If you’re intimating I was kicked out, sorry to disappoint you. I left. I wanted to be a decision maker not just—pardon the pun—the executioner, of others’ will and rules.”
So I’d had it all wrong again. And it made him ever more intriguing and complex and exciting.
Now to wrap up with one last thing, what I thought I’d known the answer to. Now I realized I could have always been totally wrong. He’d tell me the truth now.
“And you went all out to punish me after Sudan, to make me pay for the feelings you can’t control? The guilt?”
His tongue skimmed his lips, tracing the imprints of my earlier sensual abuse, his eyes blazing with pleasure. I waited for the responding surge in my sex to abate, for him to justify the actions that had changed my life.
He finally exhaled. “Believe it or not, no. Not in the least. You had to be stopped. You were out of control, drunk on your newfound power, and fast becoming an extremist. I wasn’t waiting until you ended up mad or dead, or at best behind bars.”
He’d been protecting me? Had it all been about that to him?
Though it made sense, now I knew how he’d always felt about me, one thing didn’t sit straight. “You could have removed me from the field, took away temptation and risk. Why have my medical license revoked, too?”
“I believed only the most severe blow could hope to jar you off the course I knew you’d hurtle on otherwise. Mel and the others or not, I would have done anything to put you out of action until you found your brakes.”
I believed him. That he’d acted in what he’d believed to be my and others’ best interest.
I had to be honest, too. “For what it’s worth, I think you did achieve your goal. I don’t know if you agree, but I hope I have the whatever-the-cost persona under control.”
His eyes sobered, lit with another sort of fire. Dangerous, vicious. “It all depends, if you’ve told Constantine anything.”
Suspicion surfaced, cr
ystallized in a heartbeat.
I spilled off him, rose to my knees to glare down at him. “Are we having this ‘talk’ now only because of Jake’s sudden reappearance?”
Next moment, I reminded myself I had a clueless gene, and should stop with the projections. I expected an instant denial. I got a sigh and an admission.
“It did jolt me into doing this straightaway, instead of tomorrow.”
Staking his claim first? Making sure I didn’t sleep on the idea that he’d cut me loose, and I was free to jump whichever way?
Not sure I liked that.
Not sure of something else, too. “So you always believed the blood of Mel and the others is equally on your hands, making you my accomplice. What makes you that now?”
“If you tell Jake about our plans and he leaks info, we end up with a deadly situation. I do anything to save you, even if people get killed, history repeats itself.”
That was it? “I don’t need you to save me, Damian. Also thanks to you in big part, I developed brakes. And then Jake wouldn’t ‘leak info.’ He’s anything but stupid. In fact, he probably has an IQ equaling our collective ones.” That got me a spectacular snort. “Well, it’s a fact. The guy has smarts off the charts. You’ve read his file and know he’s a genius. Or at least he was, before all this happened to him. I don’t think I have a word for what he is now.”
“How fortunate for all of us Neanderthals to have such an evolved specimen around.”
Okay. That was jealousy. On many levels. Man to man. Male to male. Males over a female—me. And it was stupid.
But since Damian was anything but stupid himself, what was this really about?
“Did you tell him anything?” he persisted.
“You asked me not to, said to trust you.”
A look I could only describe as adoring wonder spread over his gorgeous face. “And you did. Calista, amor…”
Then he was drowning me in another exercise in abandon. I sank for a while, under the stun-gun effect of his passion. And the way he’d said amor, now I knew it wasn’t just an endearment, but a statement of fact.
Only the need for an answer made me jerk out of my surrender to our perfection.