Chapter Ninety-Eight
Georgia
C oming here was stupid.
Staying and telling myself it was only to get a good night’s sleep was even stupider.
But going downstairs when I heard the shower, trying to tiptoe into his bedroom like a deranged stalker-voyeur—that had been emotional suicide and dignity murder.
I’d also been lying to myself.
I wasn’t landing.
I was drifting with no end in sight, and he was so set in his ways, he was an immovable object.
He had a house and land.
I had a Jeep.
He was a decorated war hero, mercenary, pilot, problem solver, killer, warrior, man, and a dominant force of nature who fucked like his next breath may be his last.
He was also untouchable.
Emotionally, mentally, physically.
He didn’t even kiss.
And I’d still come here.
Like an idiot.
“ Oh my God .” Muttering to myself, I rushed up the stairs and grabbed my shit.
I was back downstairs, purse shouldered, boots in hand, reaching for the door handle in what I thought was the empty entryway when he scared the crap out of me.
“Do you know what a lioness doesn’t do?”
Spinning around, my hands—and subsequently my boots because I was still gripping them—went to my chest. “Oh my God, stop doing that! That’s not normal. Normal people don’t just appear out of nowhere and make no sound!”
Shirtless, in sweats, his giant cock outlined like an Arizona Iced Tea can, he moved unnaturally slow for him as he took my Uggs. “A lioness doesn’t retreat.” He set the boots down, aligning them perfectly without even looking at them because his focus was on me.
All on me.
“I’m not a lioness,” I argued.
“You’re a five-foot force of nature.” With the same exaggerated slowness, he took my purse from my shoulder. “You’re also used to retreating…. Same as me.” With his penetrating stare holding me captive, he symbolically set my bag on the entryway table.
Forcing myself to look away, my gaze landed on my threadbare purse splayed out on his expensive gray-washed oak console table.
It was like a trompe l’oeil painting of opposites—sturdy and strong against frayed chaos, but he was wrong. “You never retreat.”
“Gloves off?”
I looked back at him, and almost wished I hadn’t. “What?”
“Combat honesty, woman.”
“I’m not sure I understand what that means.” But it sounded like someone wanting to tell you that you were about to experience horrific, unimaginable, gruesome pain—right before it got worse.
“Unfiltered truth, no matter how FUBAR.”
And I was right. There was only one thing that could be worse. “You want that from me?”
“Not until you hear me out.”
My stomach lurched, and my chest seized up. I didn’t want this. Despite my earlier argument about emotions, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to know the deep, dark thoughts that occupied his mind. That felt intrusive. And wrong. And like I would be ruining a huge part of what made him… well, him. Actually, the entire part. This man was half asshole, half hardheaded, and all warrior.
“I don’t want your feelings,” I blurted out like a five-year-old.
“I said truth, woman.”
There was a difference? “I think this is a bad idea.” I’d never unsee what happened in my basement. I knew what he was. I knew what he was capable of—he’d been living rent free in my head for two years—but most of all, I remembered the alley behind that bar.
“You scared?”
Yep. “Nope.”
“You wanna try that again?”
“Terrified.”
He tipped his chin, then his gaze drifted for a moment. When he looked back at me, I knew I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear.
“You snuck into my bedroom while I was showering like you were aiming for roleplay. I won’t fuck you without consent. Rape fantasy, dub con, non con, BDSM, roleplay—all off the table. I also won’t fuck you if you’ve been with another man since I saw you last.”
Humiliation flared hot and choking at the same time my heart took a punishing blow from his raw display of jealousy stated so openly. “Is that why you think I came here?” Was this warrior capable of even thinking the word love?
“I think a lot of shit, Georgia.”
Why was he calling me that? “Like what?”
“I’m too goddamn old for you, too jaded, and too impatient to properly deal with your trauma. I’d fuck you over listening to your shit. You drive me fucking insane. That mouth on you doesn’t know when to quit. And I selfishly want your lips wrapped around my cock when you’ve probably been forced to suck dick, and have shit in your head over it.”
My mouth opened, but for once, nothing came out.
“I also think you’re infatuated with me because I had the uniform. You never had a father figure give a damn about you, and I represent both authority and paternal protectiveness.”
“Authority,” I managed to rasp because I couldn’t say the other thing he’d mentioned—not even in my head.
“You crave it. Same as my dominance.”
“You’re an ass.”
“Yes, I am.”
“So you have no feelings for me.” I couldn’t breathe.
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, you just said I was fucked-up.” I’d never felt so small in my life. Or so seen.
“You are.”
Now I felt smaller. “So are you.” With the emotional quotient of a child, I threw the hurtful words right back at him, but it didn’t matter. It never would because I couldn’t hurt him like that. You couldn’t hurt someone who didn’t think or feel like a normal person. But I also didn’t think he was being as honest as he claimed. “Except I think you’re lying about what you said earlier about relationships. I think that’s just a convenient excuse for you.”
“Do you know the divorce rate for SEALs?”
“You’re not a SEAL anymore.” And I hated how my heart leapt at the thought of the M word.
Ignoring my statement, he answered his own question. “Over ninety percent.”
“Then it’s a good thing you’re not proposing.”
“Not marriage.”
The sudden lump in my throat prevented me from humiliating myself further with a reply.
“You hearing me now, woman?”
Like a fool, I nodded.
“Have you fucked anyone since I was inside you?”
I shook my head.
“Good. You, me, the cabin. One month.”
Speechless, I stared.
“No bullshit,” he added.
I found my voice. And my anger. And hope and lust and craving and my poor, battered heart and a head full of insecurity disguised as hate. “Just vanilla fucking and cock sucking?”
“Nothing vanilla about me, woman.”
“Just your patented I-am-a-man-and-I-don’t-do-love-I-only-fuck routine.”
“If you’re incapable of leaving the bullshit at the door, then this isn’t happening.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Did I have a lapse in brainwaves and forget I agreed to this?”
He turned toward the door.
Shit.
Shit.
Closing my eyes, eating my embarrassment and humiliation and every other crap emotion, I tried to do what he asked. “Combat honesty.” Oh God . Please don’t reject me again. “I’m sorry.”
He paused.
I said it. “Please don’t leave me again.” The words, the vulnerability, the overwhelming panic at the thought of him leaving, my heart threatened to stop. “It hurts when you walk away from me. You, specifically.”
He turned around, and that piercing stare landed on me, but he didn’t speak.
He waited.
“You’re right. About the uniform, the authority, the dominance, all of it. But what you’re not right about, or what I think you were inferring, is that you could be substituted for anyone else with those… traits.” I glanced down, just for a moment, to get my bearings because I needed to say this right. I looked back up. “It’s you, Blade. It’s been you since you drove on the curb, threw open your door, and ordered me to get in. And I know what you told me then about here and now. I know that I agreed to it. But when I woke up, and you were gone, it hurt in ways I wasn’t prepared to think about. Since I didn’t want to relive that hurt all over again, I thought leaving the hotel in Detroit before you could leave me would make it so I avoided that, but it didn’t. Then you gave me all those words on my porch, showed me a side of you I didn’t know existed, and minutes later retracted it all by putting me on a plane and telling me to go live my life. I wasn’t just hurt. I had whiplash.”
He stepped toward me.
I held up my hand. “Now you’re only offering a month, and I get that it’s more than you’ve probably ever offered any woman, but it still has an expiration date. And while it’s probably a good idea given our personalities and history, it feels like another pile of hurt but so much worse, because if I stay, I’ll forever know what it’s like to have had that month.”
“You think it would hurt worse if I were active duty and left on deployment?”
My heart collapsed, and he saw it.
He didn’t back down. “I told you I would retire. I put that offer on the table for you. I won’t go back on my word on that subject. Taking a month off to spend it with you here at the cabin is more time than I’ve ever taken. But my definition of retirement doesn’t mean I’ll stop working permanently. You were right when you said I’ll never stop being a warrior. I can stop actively taking assignments. I can promise you a month. But if Alpha calls, if he needs me, I’m going in to work.”
“Work,” I whispered, wondering how he could call it that.
“AES,” he added.
“I knew what you meant.”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me for the discrepancy between the shit I said to you at your house and the actions I took putting you on that plane. I was pissed you’d walked out on me. I was trying to reassure you that I had no intention of leaving without you, which I didn’t. But I also wasn’t taking into consideration that you’d never had choices, let alone freedom. I was trying to give you that without me breathing down your neck. I told myself if you showed back up, if you walked into AES, then I’d be free to make a move. This is my move, woman. One month, to start.”
My brain heard to start , but my heart heard I wasn’t good enough for more. “A month of noncommitted fucking and dick sucking is a start?”
He didn’t so much as blink at my hurt-infused sarcasm. “I didn’t say noncommitted. I’m it for you, woman. And make no mistake, you’re it for me. I’m committed. Full throttle. I expect the same from you. Nonnegotiable. And yes, one month to start. Enough time to get on each other’s nerves. Also enough time to work through any shit that may come up. But understand, a month is not my endgame with you.”
I closed my eyes against the sudden onslaught of a new kind of hurt. One that was spelled H-O-P-E. “You’ve never even kissed me.”
“Stay, and I will.”
Tears fell, and I opened my eyes. “Do you even like kissing?”
“Stay,” he repeated. Except this time, while he said it with both dominance and command, he also said it with a yearning so deep, I would’ve had to be deaf and blind not to hear and see it.
“You want me to stay.”
The warrior tipped his chin.