Chapter 5
Chapter Five
HUNTER
Icould feel the heat even from yards away.
It penetrated my clothes and stung at my skin like thousands of angry wasps.
The putrid smoke filled my lungs, the heavy musky scent choking out everything else.
All I could smell was death and destruction.
I stood there helpless, my chest in a vise grip as I watched the flames rise higher, the angry yellow and orange lashing up at the dark sky above.
The fire was a living, breathing thing, destroying the structure it like it was the enemy. Panic froze me to the spot, refusing to release me from its snare as I stared on, devastation eating away at me like the fire was eating everything before me.
Move, Hunter, the voice inside my head screamed. There’s still time. You can get them out. But you have to fucking move!
My feet came unglued, taking me closer, but the heat was overwhelming, hissing and spitting furiously.
The closer I got, the worse my skin sizzled until I was forced to stop again.
Tears of powerlessness poured from my eyes, the heat from the fire drying them into tight, salty tracks before they could make it all the way down my cheeks.
Then I heard it. “Bubby!” A voice, so scared, so tiny and innocent, that would haunt me for the rest of my life. “Bubby, where are you? Help me. Please!”
I shot awake to the voice ringing in my ears and the acrid smell of the fire in my lungs.
The words became an echo that lingered before finally fading into silence.
I pulled in a deep breath, the smoke and fire replaced with the salty tang of the sweat that coated my skin.
My heart jackhammered against my breastbone, and despite the clamminess covering my body, I could swear I still felt the blistering flames on my flesh.
I flung the covers aside, feeling too constricted as I forced myself to calm my frantic breathing.
I dropped my head back, thumping it against the wooden surface of the headboard once I was able to fill my lungs.
I squeezed my eyes closed and reached up to pinch the bridge of my nose as the lingering effects of the nightmare slowly loosened their crippling hold on me.
It had been a while since one of my nightmares was so bad it woke me up in the midst of a full-blown panic attack.
Those horrible dreams were a regular occurrence for me, given the real horrors I’d lived through.
As sad as it was to admit, I’d grown used to them.
Usually, I was better at shaking off the effects, but that wasn’t the case tonight.
I was off my game, and there could only be one reason why.
That kiss with Serenity.
It had been fucking with my head since the moment my brain engaged enough to realize what the hell I’d been doing and put a stop to it.
I let out a sigh and shifted, throwing my legs over the side of the bed. I braced my elbows on my knees and scrubbed at my face and head, trying to scrub away the memory of that goddamn kiss. But it just wasn’t happening.
I couldn’t remember the last time, if ever, a kiss had gripped me so tightly and refused to let go.
I hadn’t been lying when I said I wasn’t the man for her.
I couldn’t give her what she wanted, but that didn’t mean one single kiss with Serenity hadn’t rattled me so intensely that I was still feeling the vibrations all these hours later.
I’d fucked up tonight. I’d known it as it was happening, but it was as if I’d been standing outside my body, watching it happen and unable to do anything to stop it. I’d lowered my guard just enough for Serenity Ryan to sneak in while I wasn’t looking.
If ever there was a woman who was off-limits, it was Serenity.
Not only did I work with her sister, but Stella was marrying one of my Alpha Omega brothers.
That made Stella Ryan family, and by association, Serenity as well.
I had a reputation for being a man who’d never settle down, so if West thought for even a second that I was fucking around with his soon-to-be sister-in-law, he’d skin my ass alive.
And I’d deserve it.
A glance at the glowing white numbers on my alarm clock showed it was barely four in the morning, but after that nightmare, I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d be getting back to sleep.
With a weary sigh, I reached down and massaged the spot on my left leg where it had been amputated years ago, all thanks to an RPG in the middle of the desert in Afghanistan.
The prosthetic leg I used was second nature by now, but even after all these years, the phantom pain was still there, aching and throbbing in a limb I no longer had.
That horrible day was just one of the causes of those nightmares that would plague me for the rest of my life.
Just like the nightmares, I pushed the pain to the back of my mind as I rolled the liner over my residual limb before sliding the prosthesis into place.
I moved through my house, autopilot guiding my way, until I got to the kitchen and flipped the switch for the overhead lights.
I headed directly to the coffee maker and set it to brew, then turned to rest my hips against the edge of the counter as I waited.
Something shimmery from the corner of my eye caught my attention, and I knew exactly what it was before I even turned to look. The invitation that had been slowly torturing me sat in the same place on my kitchen island that it had been in since I first opened it weeks ago.
The gold foil embossing caught beneath the pendant lights hanging above the island, sparkling happily while just the reminder of that goddamn piece of cardstock felt like a fist to the chest.
There was no fucking reason for that invitation to still be sitting where it was other than I must have had a masochistic streak a mile long.
I already had every single word of that swirly, delicate font carved into my brain.
I’d told myself a million times to just throw the fucker away, but I couldn’t make myself do it.
Like every time I entered the kitchen, I moved over to it and read it again and again, twisting that knife in my gut just a little bit deeper.
Because you have shared in our lives
with your friendship and love, we,
Vera Moss
And
Oliver James
Request the honor of your presence at our wedding . . .
I stopped reading then, that fist in my chest growing tighter and tighter. I knew the date and time of the big day. I knew the address. I’d even looked up the fucking directions. I just had no intention of going.
I couldn’t do it.
It had been bad enough, all those years ago, when I’d silently loved Vera from a distance as she and one of my best friends fell for each other.
Craig Moss wasn’t just a buddy. He was a brother in every sense of the word but blood.
For as long as I could remember, it had been Craig, Glenn Danielson, Bryce Dixon, and me.
We’d gone through training together and were in the same SEAL team.
We’d seen action together, we’d bled together.
That created a bond stronger than everything.
Craig and I had both seen her in that little dive bar in the middle of Nowhere, Arizona that night, but she’d picked him.
And I never said a word. I had resigned myself to never speaking a word of my feelings out loud.
I owed Craig my life, after all. He’d gotten me out of more scrapes than most people would get into in their lifetime.
There wasn’t a single time when he hadn’t had my back, so if he was lucky enough to win a woman as incredible as Vera, I would swallow down the pain, pin a smile on my face, and be happy for my brother that he was living the good life.
However, my leg wasn’t the only thing I’d lost that day in the desert. When the smoke finally cleared and the dust settled, Bryce and I were the only ones who’d made it out of the rubble alive.
Losing Danielson and Moss was more painful than losing any goddamn limb. That was a pain that never went away. It felt like an eternity before I was finally released to go home. My career, the only thing I’d had worth anything, was over. My brothers were in the ground, and my body was ravaged.
By the time I made it to Vera, I was a nothing more than a broken shell of a man, but for all the pain and suffering I’d been dealing with, Vera’s was acutely worse. Where I was a shell of a person, she was barely living.
I did my best to pick up whatever pieces I could, the pieces that shattered when Craig died.
They’d had two small boys. Luke had only been four, Liam just two years old, when their father died, and the fact that they probably wouldn’t have any memories of him, of one of the best men to ever grace the planet, tore at my very soul.
I did what I could for all of them. I was a male figure for the boys, trying my damnedest to teach them all the things I knew Craig had wanted to teach them.
I was a shoulder for Vera to lean on. I was the one who made repairs around her house.
The one who held her as she cried, night after night for what felt like an eternity.
The more time I spent with the Moss family, the more deeply engrained I became until I hadn’t the first clue what my life looked like without them, who I was, or what I was meant to do.
I depended on them more than I should have.
The truth was, I was playing a role that wasn’t mine, wearing a costume that didn’t fit right.
I wasn’t their father. I wasn’t her husband.
As much as those boys had come to mean to me, and as in love with Vera as I was, I knew the stagnant life I’d forced myself into wasn’t fair to any of us.
Even knowing that, I’d been the chump who stayed, year after year, all because of hope.
Hope that was eventually dashed when Vera started to date.
Turned out, she needed me for pretty much every aspect of her life . . . except one.
That had been my breaking point. I’d put in a call to Bryce. That was when he told me about Hope Valley and Alpha Omega. He set up an interview a week later, and two days after that, I was starting over.
The years kept ticking by and I kept waiting for the day when I’d stop wanting her, but it never came.
I’d spent so long trying to get her out of my head anyway I knew how.
I’d drowned myself in work, buried myself in other women, but nothing worked.
There was no one else but her. No matter how I tried to snuff out that need, every time I closed my eyes, it was Vera’s face on the backs of my eyelids.
Until tonight.
With Serenity.
Vera had been the furthest thing from my mind while I had Serenity’s soft, lush curves pressing into me. She’d fit against me perfectly, almost like she’d been made for me. Her skin had been so soft, her hair felt like silk, and she smelled like jasmine.
As I squeezed my eyes closed, there was nothing on the backs of my eyes. There was only the feel of the woman I was holding, the punch of lust her kiss brought on, setting my blood on fire. There was nothing in that moment but her, and it scared the living fuck out of me.
I wasn’t supposed to feel like that. I didn’t have it in me. After all the shit I’d lived through, I wasn’t sure I could ever be the kind of guy any woman needed.
The gurgle of the coffee machine sounded, pulling me from my melancholy.
Shaking off the black cloud I felt hovering over me, I filled a mug and carried it over to the sliding door that led to the deck.
I needed fresh air as badly as I needed caffeine.
My leg cramped up as I lowered myself into one of the Adirondack chairs that looked out at the view that had sold me on this house in the first place.
Normally, staring out at the forest and foothills that butted up to my property helped to calm my frayed nerves on bad days. Unfortunately, the shadows from the dark, moonless night had swallowed them up just then.
It was then that Serenity’s words from earlier penetrated the dull, gray fog in my head.
“You should always make time to look up at the stars.”
I threw back a gulp of coffee and rested my head on the back of my chair so I could stare up at the inky sky.
The inhale I’d just taken got lodged in my throat. She’d been right. Every thought, every worry, that had been plaguing me suddenly seemed so small, so damn trivial, as I focused on those millions and millions of glowing specks of light peppering the sky.
At least for the moment, I was able to let everything else go and think only about the beauty in front of me.
What Serenity Ryan didn’t know was that she’d given me a gift just then. She gave me peace. Unfortunately, I knew I’d never be able to pay that back.