Blade (The Alpha Elite #11)

Chapter Forty-Five

Juniper

I should’ve just named him Dominant Asshole in my contacts.

Except he wasn’t an asshole.

Abrasive? Yes. Dominant in a completely mess-my-head-up sort of way? One thousand percent. But asshole? I tried to think.

Rude, blunt, aggressive, opinionated, grunt-y….

I couldn’t think of anything he’d ever said or texted that had actually warranted him earning an asshole moniker. I mean, he was, or rather, he seemed like he was. Just not really to me. He swore more than the SEAL, he sounded angrier, but he was also… nicer. Almost as if he cared.

And that thought was the dam breaker on the emotions I was holding back.

A big fat tear landed on my cell. Then, as if the universe was messing with me, the phone lit up with an incoming call.

Blade scrolled across the screen.

I didn’t even pretend to play it cool.

I answered immediately.

Whooshing wind still sounded in the background, and he spoke before I could say anything. “Don’t fucking hang up on me. I’m not running. I’m walking. Expediently. Why the fuck did you assume I was ignoring you?”

For no good reason, the single tear became a million.

Then I was full-blown, snot-ugly, soak-my-face crying.

His voice barked through the line. “Tell me what’s wrong. Right fucking now .”

I cried harder.

“Woman,” he growled.

“N-nothing.” Oh God . How did I let this go?

“ Woman ,” he warned again threateningly.

Choking down a sob, I swiped at my face. “I-I swear.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered. Then his tone came down by only a millimeter, but it was enough that I heard the difference. “What’s going on?”

I closed my eyes against the new torrent of tears, and tried to rein in my already raspy voice. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

For three heart-stopping seconds, he didn’t reply.

Then he simply said, “Copy.”

My chest hurt. “I have to go.”

“Not until you stop crying.”

Oh God . Why did this hurt so much? “I don’t have anything to say.”

“You don’t have to fucking talk.”

And that was what I meant. Asshole, but kinda sweet too—in an aggressively dominant, overbearing sort of way, but still. He wasn’t letting me hang up because I was upset, and no one had ever done that for me. Ever.

Sniffling, I swiped at my face, but then I was talking when I’d just said I had nothing to say, because that was the other thing about this man. Something about him kept ramming into my walls. “What does walking expediently even mean?” A visual hit my brain, and my mouth was moving. “Oh no. Are you one of those people with ski poles who, like, power marches or hikes?” I’d seen a group of senior citizens doing that a few times down by the beach. “How old are you?”

He didn’t reply.

I pressed the phone closer to my ear as if it would make a difference. “Why aren’t you saying anything?” I’d spent years having that kind of weapon used against me. That, and about a dozen other psychotic, narcissistic, sociopathic things that I had to learn weren’t a reflection of me, but they’d left scars. I knew I talked too much. I knew I had no filter sometimes. I knew I’d made shit choices, but shutting someone out wasn’t a psychosis I weaponized.

“I’m processing.”

“What’s there to process?” More stupid, nervous words spilled out. “That you’re a runner or grandfather old or both, and I’m fat and it’ll never work, so let’s call the whole thing off? In fact, never mind, that wasn’t a question. I’m sorry. I’m just—”

“Not a fucking grandfather, and nowhere close to being one. What’d I say about that fat bullshit?”

I exhaled and tried to fight it, but it was pointless.

Falling right back down his rabbit hole of dominance, I did what I’d been doing since the first time he’d used that tone with me.

I listened.

Then I mentally ran through everything he’d said on the subject matter.

Don’t pull that derogatory fat bullshit with me. If you don’t have any self-control, then lose that fucking word from your vocabulary. Don’t use it. Don’t say it. Don’t put yourself down . And lastly, Don’t piss me off .

The tears came back, and I was done embarrassing myself for one evening. “I’m going to hang up now, and since I’m warning you, it doesn’t count as actually hanging up.” I’d barely pulled the cell away from my ear when he lowered his voice, but not so much that I didn’t hear his implicit threat.

“Test me.”

The full-body tingle came back—on steroids.

Slow, like he could hear my movements or see me, I brought the phone back to my ear.

“Go ahead, woman,” he warned. “Fucking test me.”

My mouth suddenly dry, my nipples all at once hard, a low throb started between my legs. “And you’ll what?” I managed barely above a whisper. What did military men do? “Make me do soldier drills?” Not that I knew for sure if he was or had been in the military, but he sounded exactly like he had.

Low and lethal, his growl came through the line. “I’m not fucking Army.”

I said it before I could retract it. “I hope not, because that’d be a lot of soldiers to fuck.”

“You trying to piss me off?” A car door slammed.

“Grammar matters.” It didn’t—not with him. I knew exactly what he’d meant, and I liked how he spoke. I more than liked it, actually. Except I wasn’t admitting that to myself, and this entire conversation felt like it was him scoring and me losing, even though I knew it wasn’t a game. This man was incapable of playing games. But it still felt like I was on the zero-point scoreboard of life, and he’d already left the arena victorious.

“Ignoring that comment. You wanna know what I was processing?”

“No.” Not if it was humiliating.

“What had you spun up to the fucking point you bypassed your usual word vomit and went straight to tears. You’ve got more attitude than that. You hung up on me.”

I jumped into the pool of defensiveness. “I do not always word vomit, and you were ignoring me.”

“Shit comes out of your mouth, woman. Not criminalizing it, just stating fact, and I wasn’t ignoring you. Had my hands full. You texted fucking bullshit. I called you back when I wasn’t occupied.”

Had my hands full .

One single sentence and his anger-infused irritation struck like a physical blow. Jealously and the kind of hurt I didn’t want to ever own made me fall dangerously close to a place I never went. “Okay, got it. Message received. You’ve got full hands. I won’t bother you again. You and your anger and your busy hands can all go have a nice life togeth—”

“ Jesus fucking Christ . You think I was fucking someone or angry at you?”

My mouth opened, and my swipe finger hovered, but I froze.

His tone came down about a billion percent. “Let me guess,” he stated tiredly. “Some fucking piece of shit kicked you around, called you fat, and, like a pussy, used anger to manipulate you because he had enough of his own fucked-up bullshit to fill a goddamn C-130.”

The tears came back, with force.

“ Christ ,” he muttered, right before his voice took on a roughness I’d never heard. “Don’t fucking cry again, woman.”

“I didn’t make a sound.” Embarrassment I didn’t want him to hear on a phone call, let alone ever, stretched across every too-soft inch of my body. “I’m not crying.”

He grunted. “Right. And you’re not lying either.” An engine started up. “Where are you?”

“Where are you?” He’d carefully never let one telling detail slip about himself except for the name he’d given me.

“Getting on the road.” He exhaled, but then didn’t say any more.

I could stand silence about as long as I could hold a bag of Lay’s potato chips without opening it. “What kind of a road?”

The sound that came this time was more of a snort. “A long one.”

I imagined him smirking. I imagined a lot of things about him. Did he have full lips? Was he tall? Did he like to drive at night like I did? “What time zone are you in?” Did he smile?

“Why?”

The question was all demand, but I still heard the suspicion underneath his tone. “So I know what kind of road to imagine you driving on. A dusty two-lane paved ribbon to nowhere in the Outback during the middle of the day is totally different from dirt tire tracks in the Alaskan wilderness after sundown.” Not that I’d been to either, but I could imagine. I had Google.

“It’s night,” he stated solemnly.

I glanced at the peek of stars I could see through the drawn curtains as I lay back on the futon. “It’s night here too.”

“I know.”

Abruptly sitting up, I glanced at the door. “How?” Oh God. A possibility I hadn’t considered suddenly seeped into my veins like poison. “Are you a cop?”

“I know what fucking time it is in Florida, woman.”

My breath stuck in my chest. “You didn’t answer my second question.”

“You rarely answer mine.”

Panic started to seep in. “I’m not kidding.” Not on this.

“Not a cop. You got a problem with law enforcement?”

The air left my lungs as if I’d been punched.

Then a cruel memory of another dominant man asking almost the exact same question two years ago surfaced. I didn’t want to compare them, but I couldn’t help it. Since I’d met that SEAL, I’d compared every man to him.

No one had measured up—until now.

Which was more than cruel.

Because if this man was asking this question now, then he wasn’t that SEAL. Which meant the very deep, hidden part of me that’d been living in the fantasy that he was my SEAL needed to surface to reality.

This man was different.

And I needed to find out if he actually knew I was in Florida, or if I’d slipped and said something damning. “I never said I was in Florida.”

“Another question you avoided, and where else besides Florida has ninety-degree heat and humidity in the winter?”

Oh God , I had slipped. I instantly remembered the text about my Uggs, and fear struck. “Cuba, the Bahamas, a bunch of places.” I just couldn’t think of any more because all of a sudden, flight mode had kicked in, and I needed to get out of Reena’s place as soon as possible. Maybe out of the state.

“You ready to cut the bullshit, woman?”

“I—”

“Tell me why you were crying,” he demanded.

All of my anxiety washed away for a single moment, and I inhaled. Then I told him. “My cell phone was bought by someone I don’t know. It’s apparently blocked, but it could be getting tracked by the man who bought it, and for reasons I’d rather not say, I can’t have that. So I need to get rid of it. But I can’t afford another one, and losing my cell means losing contact with you.”

“Understood. Do me a favor?”

I closed my eyes. “What?” It was pointless asking, but I couldn’t stop myself.

“Give me forty-eight hours.”

“Why?” Whatever he had in mind, I couldn’t go from one bought-for-me cell to another.

“You in Florida?”

The question, how he asked it, they were so abrupt, it caught me off guard, and I stupidly answered. “Yes.”

“Miami?”

“What?”

“Not an answer, woman. Are you currently in Miami?”

Panic, fear, alarm, and shivers that had nothing to do with any of those emotions rushed through my bloodstream faster than ten shots of espresso, and I not only sat up, but my feet hit the carpet. “I gotta go.” I stood.

“Sit down.”

The panic grew wings—big, giant, flapping, run-for-your-life wings. “How do you know I’m standing?” I picked up my keys.

“How do you know I’m military?”

“The way you speak.” I stepped into my flip-flops.

“Your sharp inhale and an audible shift in movement.”

I headed toward the front door. “What?”

“How I knew you stood up.”

I looked through the peephole. “I have to go.” The street and side yard were clear.

“You don’t have to go. You’re panicking.”

“I’m not panicking. I just really need to go. Thanks for the call. Night, bye, drive safe, not hanging up on you, just ending the call.”

“Hey—”

I hung up.

Then I snuck out of the house and rushed down the street to my Jeep.

But I stupidly didn’t turn off my cell.