Chapter Fifteen
M y name wasn’t P reston .
I wasn’t a man.
I wasn’t control.
I wasn’t dominance.
I was need.
Soft flesh. Hot mouth. Supple body.
This was what drove men to war.
A slave to her taste, drunk off her need, desperation grew.
I could fuck her against the wall and she’d willingly submit.
The air moved, an engine droned outside and a gear shifted into park.
My hand still on her throat, I pulled back.
“When?” I demanded.
Breathless and so beautiful, it was disorienting to look at her, she blinked. “What?”
“When did you stop liking daisies?”
The flush in her cheeks drained as her expression hardened. I’d never known another woman who wore her temper so well.
“Seriously?” she snapped. “You’re strangling my neck after sticking your tongue down my throat and you’re worried about a fucking flower?”
She had a mouth like a Marine but lips like a siren. “You can breathe fine.” I knew what I was doing. “And I never worry.” There was no percentage in it. Observe, calculate, then move—forward or retreat. Apprehension, concern, fear, those got you killed or, worse, complacent.
She tried to shove my hand away. “Then what do you care what I like?”
I cared.
Not letting go of her throat, touching the exact spot on the left side of her ass, I let her know how much. “Daisy. White. One-and-a-half-inch circumference.” I leaned closer. Her desire mixed with her scent and assaulted me. “Answer my question.”
Every muscle in her body froze. “How do you know I have a tattoo?”
I heard a car door open and close.
“I know everything about you, Kyrie Eleison Asher, born February eleventh in Rapid City, South Dakota. You have thirteen freckles on your right shoulder, the dark brown of your hair shines with gold in the sunlight, your double Ds are real, you’re five foot two inches, you weigh one hundred and twenty-seven pounds and your eyes aren’t brown or hazel, they’re dark amber rimmed in deep blue.” Dropping my hand, I stepped back. “The daisy is your only tattoo. You blame yourself for your son’s hearing loss. You have two thousand, one hundred and fifty-three dollars in your bank account, but the eleven hundred dollar mortgage payment is three days past due. You’ve gone on four dates with three men in four and a half years but never went home with any of them, and you pretend not to see my car every night you work the late shift.”
I also knew something that wasn’t just about her.
I dropped my voice. “We’re not going to be doing this distance between us much longer.”
“ Jesus fucking Christ ,” she whispered.
“Walk to the kitchen,” I ordered. “They’re back.”
She sucked in a breath and her gaze drifted. “This is what my mother meant.”
Her words were spoken as if to herself, but still I asked because everything about her intrigued me. “About?”
Her chest moved with an inhale then she shook her head as if to clear it. When she looked up at me, her temper was replaced with sadness. “You’re fucked-up, Preston. You know that, don’t you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Literally every person I know is fucked-up, some way, somehow. I don’t even know what normal is. But you only get one shot in this lifetime.” She held her finger up and stared at me. “One.”
I had four bullet wounds that said otherwise.
Her arms crossed protectively around her. “So why not pick your favorite train wreck and just roll with it?”
“You’re not a train wreck.” Yes, I bought her coffees and food at the café and watched out for her safety late at night. Yes, she was a single mother. Yes, she lived hand to mouth. But she wasn’t a train wreck. She was strong, determined and resilient.
Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I wasn’t speaking about myself.” Scurrying around me as if I were contagious, she went to the kitchen sink and turned the water on.
I was standing in the shadows in the living room when Ty walked in carrying her son.
Like an animal, the boy smelled me before he saw me. His head whipped around and he struggled in Ty’s arms to get down.
“Whoa, buddy, take it easy.” Ty set him down. “Merc! I’m leaving your keys on the bookshelf. You’re all gassed up.”
The boy ran to me, his hands moving furiously. Preston. Preston. Preston.
Ty’s gaze snapped to me, and his expression turned murderous as his nephew put his small arms around my leg. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
I didn’t meet Ty’s gaze. I didn’t look at the woman in the kitchen who’d just insinuated I was a train wreck. I didn’t scan the house and count objects and make mental notes of their locations.
I knelt.
And I signed. Hello.
The boy smiled. I had candy with Uncle Ty at the gas station.
I’m glad, I replied.
Are you staying to play Monopoly?
“Since when do you play fucking board games with him?” Ty demanded.
I ignored him and replied to the boy. Not tonight. Maybe another time.
A shy smile spread across his face, and I stood. Counting the steps to the front door and scanning the living room’s worn furniture, I walked past Ty. “I need your help.”
“The fuck you do.” Narrowing his eyes, he glared at me. “Find someone else.”
Lowering my voice, I spared him a glance. “Would you prefer I ask your sister?” I wouldn’t. But he didn’t know that. I needed him outside to have this conversation.
“Motherfucker,” he muttered, turning toward his nephew. “Brush your teeth and don’t give your mother any hassle tonight at bedtime.” He picked the boy up and hugged him before setting him back down. “Love you, little man. See you soon.”
The boy went to his mother’s side.
Mercy turned the water off and looked at me, then her brother. Worry spread across her face. “You going out of town again?”
“Don’t start that with me right now,” Ty snapped in warning.
My fists clenched, but my voice came out controlled. “You’re lucky to have someone who cares for you.”
His angry glare snapped to me, but he didn’t say anything more to his sister. “Let’s go.”
I signed goodbye to the boy and glanced at his mother.
Her gaze fell to my lips before she looked back up.
I tipped my chin and walked out.
Ty closed her front door behind him then unleashed seven-year-old anger on me. “I fucking saw that.”
“Saw what?” Four more cars were parked in the street from when I arrived. A neighbor walked her dog.
“You make eye contact with my sister,” he accused. “A lot.”
“I make eye contact with you.” He was one of the few people I did bother to look at.
“Don’t bullshit me. You came to her house, Nash is familiar with you, and you fucking look at her.” Stopping in front of my rental, he leveled me with a look. “I warned you to stay away from her. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
I counted the number of minutes since I’d put the blonde in the back of the SUV. I had time before rigor mortis set in. Two obstacles into one. I was doing this now. “How long is the statute of limitation?” It was a rhetorical question.
“Seven years. Don’t pull that change of subject shit with me, you know damn well what we’re talking….” He trailed off as it hit him. “Jesus fucking Christ.” He rubbed a hand over his face.
“I didn’t kill Sam Rollins,” I reminded him.
“Watch it,” Ty growled.
“Have you forgiven yourself?”
His face contorted in anger, and his right index finger gave a telltale twitch. “This isn’t on me. You let him die,” he bit out, enunciating each word.
“I didn’t plant that IED.” Facts were facts. A neighbor pulled a garbage can to the curb. A dog barked three times. I scanned for black motorcycles without license plates.
Ty’s fist clenched, his jaw ticked and his nostrils flared. One step and he was in my face, reliving the past. “You let him bleed out,” he seethed.
Corporal Sam Rollins had asked me to. “The IED blew his legs off.” Both of them. “There was nothing I could do.” There might have been something I could have done. I’ll never know. But it wasn’t just his legs. He saw it. I saw it. And in that moment, Rollins knew. No man wanted to live through that kind of injury. He asked me to let him go, and I did.
Seven years ago.
Glaring at me, Ty still hadn’t forgiven me. He hadn’t forgiven himself.
I stared back. “Would you have wanted to live with what he would’ve been facing?”
Ty didn’t drop it. He never dropped it. “He could’ve been a father.”
“I could’ve been a father.” But unlike Rollins, I’d backed off seven years ago. Mercy had been vulnerable. She deserved more than seventeen minutes with a Marine on leave. I’d honored Ty’s request. Rollins hadn’t. “That night changed all our lives.” He knew why. He’d figured out that night something had happened between Rollins and his sister. Ty had been pissed as hell but Rollins never copped to it, and the next day Ty didn’t bring it up, but he gave Rollins the silent treatment. A week later he was still giving him the silent treatment when Rollins offered to switch seats with him on patrol.
“She’s my sister.” Losing steam, Ty only emphasized the my.
“She’s her own woman.” She always had been. Which was why I was obsessed with her.
Ty’s shoulders straightened and his attitude flipped on a dime. “Is that why you’re really here?” he asked casually.
The front door to the house opened an inch.
I didn’t answer.
“It’s been seven years since you, me and Rollins took that leave and came here for the weekend.” Ty paused as his throat moved with a swallow and his trigger finger thumped against his thigh in a three-beat pattern. “A week later the IED hit our Humvee and Rollins was dead.”
Rollins had inadvertently saved Ty’s life that day when he’d switched positions with him and gotten behind the wheel. Ty took the front passenger seat. I was the gunner, scanning every inch of terrain and potential murder hole location I could see, but I hadn’t been watching the road immediately in front of us.
The left front of the hummer hit the IED and it blew out the driver door and Rollins’s legs. The vehicle rolled, and Rollins was thrown from the hummer. Ty had slumped against his seat belt, unconscious with a head injury, and I’d managed to get out of the vehicle. I got one tourniquet on one of the stumps that used to be Rollins’s leg before he’d grabbed my wrist and told me to let him bleed out. I’d ignored him until he forced me to look at what was left of his body.
I would never forget his last words to me.
Goddamn it, Vos, look at me ! I’m not gonna ever walk or fuck again. You put another tourniquet on me and I’ll fucking shoot you. Let me go, you prick, let me go.
I’d done as Rollins had asked.
I’d honored his last wish.
But when Ty had come to and saw me kneeling over Rollins’s body doing nothing, he’d made assumptions. I’d never corrected him because I didn’t have to. I’d made the right decision in letting Rollins go, but I’d fucked everything else up to that point.
From that day forward, I watched the road ahead. Religiously.
I didn’t miss crucial details anymore.
And I wasn’t missing any now.
The front door opened another inch.