Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
GRACE
Something in Bones forever dared me to defy him.
Even when we were cooperating, it wasn’t about working together—it was about doing it his way.
He set my body on fire, but never let me touch him.
The stroke of his fingers could drive me to orgasm over and over, but not once did his lips even so much as brush mine.
Did I ask them to train me? To teach me? To help me help them? Yes, I had. But I didn’t sign up to be in the military and I sure as shit didn’t promise to obey every single order. That was what Bones did—he commanded.
He didn’t ask. He didn’t suggest. He said jump and expected my ass to be in the air when I asked how high. After the past few weeks of bending over backwards to be “good,” I was done.
Done waiting.
Done pretending.
Done playing nice.
Of course, when he wanted to know what would I do if he dragged me off my feet and put his face in mine?
I did exactly what I would do. I kissed him before I could talk myself out of it.
The flex of his fingers around my biceps kept my arms trapped at my sides, but I made the most out of crashing my mouth against his.
The contact was a shock—sharp, electric, like stepping off a ledge and realizing too late you meant to fall. For a second, he didn’t move, and my stomach sank. Had I made a mistake? But I didn’t pull back. I pressed in harder, demanding a response.
I had to know and he could at least—but then he kissed me back and everything just snapped.
Anger and desire surged up, hot and tangled.
I bit at his lip; he squeezed my arms. It wasn’t romantic.
It was messy, furious. A clash of pride and pain and everything we’d left unsaid.
I wanted to bruise him with it. I wanted him to feel how long I’d held it in.
His hands gripped tighter, his breath rough, matching mine beat for beat.
But something shifted—somewhere between the fury and the fire.
The kiss deepened, turned hungry, almost desperate.
I wanted to slide my fingers into his hair while his hands roamed over me, but I couldn’t move.
We were trapped in this moment, with our mouths feasting on each other.
Wildfire consumed the anger and irritation.
I drowned in the want of him, and it cut all the safeties.
I devoured him—or maybe he devoured me. The whole world narrowed to where we connected. We thrust our tongues against each other’s in an infuriating duel. Suddenly, he jerked his head back to stare at me. His pupils were huge, and his breathing as ragged as my own.
That was something.
“What the hell was that?” he growled in a harsh voice.
Oh, there he was. Snarly Boney Boy doused the incendiary moment with the cold reality.
“That—” I said, licking my lips, savoring the taste of him that already had me addicted, “was a distraction.” I slammed my knee into his crotch—just like he’d demanded.
Shock rippled over his face, swiftly followed by pain. His hands spasmed and opened. I dropped to my feet even as he went down, gasping.
Still panting, I put my hands on my hips and met the blazing storm in his eyes. “That’s how I do it—anyway. So what’s my next lesson?”
Coughing once, Bones continued to glare at me. “Dollface, you ever kiss another guy like that when he’s attacking you, I’ll kill him and spank you.”
A little shiver went through me. That was hot. “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”
Irritation still raged in his eyes as he straightened. A part of me wanted to apologize, but I bit my tongue.
“Grace…”
“Don’t you ‘Grace,’ me,” I said, wagging a finger at him. “You said the objective was to kick you in the balls. I did it. How I do it is my business.”
“So throwing yourself at a guy is how you do it?”
I shrugged, then folded my arms to contain the sudden trembling rioting through me.
“It was how I survived being taken.” I wouldn’t apologize for that.
“I’m not a six-foot-four badass who can kill someone with my pinky.
If kissing someone means they stop hurting me, then I’ll kiss them.
If fucking them means I don’t get beaten and raped, then I’ll do that too.
All I have to do is survive. You don’t get to judge me for how I do it. ”
His frown deepened. “That was—” He cut himself off abruptly, slicing a hand through the air. “Time out. I need clarification.” The emotions simmering in his stormy gaze decried the sudden calmness in his expression.
“I’m listening.” My pulse continued to race as I went hot, then cold, then hot again.
“Did you have to do that when you were taken?” He held up a hand before I could answer. “Did you have to have sex with those men to prevent them from raping you?”
“If I did?” I couldn’t quite quell the defensiveness. From soul-searing kiss to wild agitation, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep going. As it was, I backed up a step before I even realized I was moving.
“Dollface,” Bones said, his rough voice softening. “I’m not angry with you.”
I swallowed hard, fighting to strangle the freefall of anxiety ripping through me. “Then why do you want to know?”
“Because you’re hurting.” The gentleness in those three words cut the ground out from underneath me.
“I’m fine.” I didn’t want to focus on what hurt or why it would. At his skeptical look, I lifted my shoulders in a shrug that I just wasn’t feeling. “I’m fine. I didn’t get beaten or raped. Is it my favorite memory? No. But I made it in one piece.”
The ground beneath my feet continued to shift as he took a step closer. Before I could stop myself, I backed up to keep the distance between us.
“You’re not okay.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I shook my head. “Look, you wanted to do some self-defense. So let’s do self-defense.”
His brows drew together as he studied me. I had no idea what he was looking for, but I lifted my chin even as my heart thumped more painfully.
“Come here,” he said in a deceptively soft voice. Before I could argue that he was giving me another order, he added, “Please.”
Everything in me just—stopped. Like a game on freeze-frame. Then, as if he’d just turned the right piece in some knock-off Tetris mobile game, all the rows beneath my feet just broke apart and crumbled.
My feet were moving before I even registered making a decision. This time when I crashed into him, Bones wrapped his arms around me and held me tight.
The bare skin of his chest was hot as fire under my palms as I slid my hands up to wrap around his neck. A part of me wanted to run the other way, but the rest of me just held on.
“I’m fine,” I repeated in a horrible, wobbling tone as my jaw trembled. The shaking hit me next, my teeth clicking and tears filming over my vision. “I’m fine.”
“You’re fine,” he repeated, all but cradling me as I clung to him. I did not want to cry. But the damn tears wouldn’t stop sliding down my face.
One of my shoes slipped off as he moved, but then he was sitting down and I was in his lap. My nose had started to run even as the tears wouldn’t stop. He shifted me around like I was a doll, and then began to rub my back in slow, even circles.
I had no idea how long we sat there. Bones murmured a lot of soft words, but they all bled together into just this low hum. If not for the faint vibration of his chest, I wouldn’t even have realized he was still speaking.
Swallowing hard around a lump, I tried to pull back and stop. But Bones kept his arms around me and then pressed my cheek back to his shoulder.
“I can’t seem to stop,” I hiccupped.
“I’m not going to melt,” he continued in that same gentle voice. “I’m not that sweet.”
Surprise arrowed through the misery. “You’re not?”
“Not according to the chaos pixie who keeps turning everything upside down in my life, no.”
Oh. I sniffled, trying to reconcile which of the guys he was talking about. But no, he wouldn’t call them that. Even as I tried to sort it out, the awful hiccups kept jerking little pops of sound out of me.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” I knuckled away some of the tears as I leaned back to look at him.
That earned me a bland look as I blinked trying to focus my sore eyes. For once, I was really glad I’d skipped any kind of makeup today. Because in addition to a shiny, drippy nose, I’d have runny mascara or something to go with it.
“Apparently not,” he said slowly and I frowned.
“Apparently—” Squeezing my eyes shut, I sniffled again but when I opened my eyes he was still there and his bland expression had given way to something more incredulous. “I just—who is the manic pixie?”
“Chaos pixie,” he corrected even as one corner of his mouth kicked up. Then with callused fingers, he gently traced away some of the tears still tracking down my face.
“Right—oh.” Then it hit me. “You think I’m a chaos pixie?”
“Think?” He shook his head. “I know you are.”
I sniffled again. “I really hate crying.”
“It looked like so much fun, too.” The deadpan response had me smiling, a little. “The shiny nose—it’s very attractive.”
Even if the tears were still leaking a little, I stared at him in actual disbelief. “Really?”
“On you?” He nodded. “You’re always attractive. Though, I would prefer you didn’t hurt to do it.”
“I’m not hurting.” No sooner did I say it than he raised his eyebrows. “Fine. I have to be fine. I can’t—”
One ragged breath.
Two ragged breaths.
Then…
“I did it to survive. If I break up about it now, then I’m admitting I let them hurt me. That I hurt me to do it. I—just did it so I could make it out the other side.” I licked my lips, this time just tasting the salt from my tears.
“Doing something to survive doesn’t mean remembering it won’t hurt.” The even tone held not one ounce of judgment. He’d actually moved one of his hands to my lower back and traced light circles with his thumb against my skin.
It grounded me.
“Doesn’t mean you don’t get to hurt over it either.” Another gentle caress of his fingers against my cheek to wipe away more tears. “Hurting tells us we’re alive. Even when we aren’t sure we deserve to be.”
I wanted to protest, but the last sentence stilled the words on my tongue.
“Survival is hard. Surviving is a little easier, but once you’ve survived, you have time to look back. To question. To wonder. To decide what you could have done, should have done maybe, or would have if you had known everything.”
I didn’t think we were talking about me anymore and I listened. “Hindsight is twenty-twenty and all that.”
“Yes, it is. Because once you’ve survived, you know what happened. You have all the details, not the suppositions or the maybes or even the possibles, you know. But you can’t know until it’s over.”
He rubbed his cheek gently against my forehead. The faintest rasp of his stubble seemed inordinately loud, but I held on fast to the prickly feeling of it.
“I didn’t want to die,” I admitted. “When I woke up in that place, I didn’t want to die.
I didn’t want them to hurt me like they were hurting those other women.
” Each word seemed to break loose from the stone where I’d entombed those memories.
“I didn’t want to think about it. Even when I told you guys about it—”
This wasn’t the first time. I’d danced around it maybe, or rushed past it.
“If you don’t say it out loud, it didn’t happen.” He tilted his head back, watching me from beneath his lashes.
“Maybe,” I said. “I wanted to be tough and strong and just—you know, get through it.”
“You are tough.” Straightforward. Simple. “You’re also strong.”
I sniffled again. “You’re just saying that.”
“Well, you did kick me the balls.”
A smile twitched at the corners of my lips. “You told me too.”
Amusement seemed to stealth into his expression. “I did.”
“So do I pass?”
With care, he traced a finger down the center of my face, then gently touched my nose before he tapped it against my lips. “No.”
I blinked.
“No?”
“No.” He repeated.
Outrage struck a damp spark. “But I did it.”
“Yes, you did. But that wasn’t the lesson.”
I made a face. “Oh.” Then I sighed. “I distracted you.”
“Dollface, you’ve been doing that since you showed up.” The admission seemed like a lot. Then he cupped my cheek and leaned in to press his forehead to mine. “Grace—you are stubborn, infuriating, mercurial, and oftentimes, delightful. I will never judge you for what you did so you survived.”
Relief flooded me.
“Never,” he repeated. “Wounds have to be cleaned out, then stitched closed if we want them to heal. This wound, it’s in there, whether you want to say it is or not.”
I swallowed hard.
“It’s been in your dreams. It’s been pushing you to keep moving. Keep going—always forward. If you sit still for too long, it’s going to catch you.”
I wanted to look away.
I didn’t.
“I haven’t been moving that much.”
“No,” he said. “You’ve been entrenched so we could take care of things. That mission is done, we can move forward again.”
Blowing out a slow breath, I nodded and let my gaze dip to where I was smoothing my hand over the hard packed muscle of his shoulder. There were dips, and dimples in the skin. Scars. Some places were smoother than others.
Burns?
I didn’t want to ask.
“We have the mission specs, we can do a black bag job and scoop up the boss.” He made it sound like we could swing by the grocery store.
“Get ice cream while we’re at it?”
Another flicker of a smile. “If you want.” Then, he tucked a finger beneath my chin and lifted my gaze back up to his. “You want to take this man on. You want to confront him yourself. Your way.”
“Because—-”
“Shh.” He pressed his finger to my lips. “You don’t need to tell me why. I get it. Amorette is your sister. You’ll burn the world down if you have to in order to get her back.”
Yes.
Yes, I would.
I sucked my upper lip between my teeth as he searched my gaze.
“We will help you, but you have to train. I need you to know everything you can do to protect yourself.”
“Except the kissing thing as a distraction?”
“You may kiss him if you wish,” he offered, almost magnanimously. “I will kill him slowly and feed him his own intestines however.”
God, that made me feel—good. Maybe I really was fucked up. “So, maybe a different plan?”
“If you’d like…”
“Bones?”
He just raised his brows.
“Why haven’t you ever kissed me?”
“Because I’m not good enough for you. None of us are.” That was not the answer I expected.
I frowned. “Shouldn’t I get to decide that?”
“No,” he said, not even seeming to hesitate. “We’re all damaged, Grace. All of us. Some of us just hide it better. You deserve better, a lot better.”
Then, paradoxically, he brushed his lips against mine.
“You confuse me.”
That netted me a real smile. “Good. The feeling is mutual.”