Chapter Fourteen
Tanner wanted to kick his own ass. He’d just experienced the greatest night of his entire life—bar none—and now he had made Bree feel like she’d done something wrong.
He looked down into her green eyes that seemed so wary and guarded now. He would go the rest of his life making sure he never put that look in her eyes again.
He was thirty-three years old and hadn’t lived like a monk. He knew what had just happened between him and Bree in the last few hours had been special. It had been the type of connection many people searched for their whole lives, but few ever found.
Tanner wanted to spend the rest of his life getting to know all the nooks and crannies of this woman’s body. Find every single place his lips could touch that made her gasp, sigh or moan. And then stick around those places until she was calling out his name.
But he couldn’t do that until she knew the truth.
“I suffer from night terrors. Sometimes I wake up and think I’m trapped in a situation somewhere else, and I come out swinging.”
He knew enough about Bree to know that cutting right to the heart of it was the best way to communicate with her. She was never going to be one for subtlety or sugarcoating.
Even now he could see her mind trying to turn over the facts and put them in their proper place. “You were afraid you would hurt me.”
He smiled. Of course she came to the correct assumption immediately.
She was brilliant. But then his smile faded.
He trailed the back of his knuckles down her cheek.
“Yes. You’ve already been through so much violence, freckles, I didn’t want to add to your burden.
I couldn’t stand the thought that I could hurt you coming out of my nightmares and make you afraid of me. ”
She sighed and nodded. “We’ll come back to that. Can you tell me specifically what causes the night terrors, or is it something more general?”
He could almost see her mentally making a checklist of things to research.
A slight shiver shook her frame, since she was nearly naked in the cold living room.
He reached down and snagged the blanket off the couch, wrapping it around her.
Then he picked her up, blanket and all, and sat down with her in his lap.
He needed her to be close just as much as he wanted to be close to her.
“It’s PTSD from an undercover case gone impossibly wrong three years ago.”
She listened in intense Bree fashion as he explained about the Viper Syndicate.
How he’d been discovered as undercover, and Nate Fletcher and Alex Peterson had also been with him.
He left out a lot of the gory details of his physical beating and torture.
She didn’t need to know that. She’d lived through enough of her own horrific violence.
But telling her about how it all ended? The nightmares that still plagued him? That, he owed her.
“They were trying to force me to tell them if I was working with someone else. I figured there was no way I was walking out of there alive, so I might as well not take down two other good men with me.”
He felt her arms wrap around him through the blanket. He tucked her head more firmly under his chin and forced himself to tell the rest of the story.
“SWAT raided the building and spooked the Vipers. They killed the first officer, Alex Peterson, immediately.” He sucked in a breath. “I broke the noose around my neck and was diving for the guy about to execute Nate Fletcher, but I was too late.”
She sat quietly for a long time, her arms wrapped around him like she would fight anything or anyone that dared to want to harm him. “The night terrors... What are they about mostly? Being strangled? Being helpless?”
Tanner closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of her. She understood. Maybe more than anybody else he’d ever talked to about this, because of her own experiences. She’d probably suffered from night terrors herself after what she’d been through.
“All of it. The pain, the fear, but mostly my inability to save Nate. If I had just broken that noose sooner. Just found the strength to do that, it might’ve been enough. A young man with his whole life in front of him might still be here.”
“Or you might have died right along with him. It’s like what you told me about what Michael Jeter did to my mother.
We can only make the best choices we have in the circumstances we are in.
” She rubbed her chin against his chest. “I know that doesn’t make it any easier to take.
But I know if you could go back right now and save Fletcher’s life, even at the cost of your own, you would do it. There’s something to be said for that.”
How many times had Dr. Michalski tried to tell him the same thing? That Tanner had done the best he could in the situation he was in. That maybe he could’ve broken that rope around his neck sooner, but there was no guarantee it would’ve made any difference whatsoever.
Tanner didn’t blame the SWAT team for not coming in two minutes earlier, so why was it okay to blame himself?
He understood that; he really did. But at the end of the day, like Ryan Fletcher had pointed out, Nate wasn’t around to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday this year.
“The night terrors have been worse this week because of my frustration about the murders and being suspended,” he said. “Believe me, I wanted to be with you in every way a man can be with a woman, but I don’t want to hurt you further.”
She nodded and let out a breath. “I know I’m not good with emotional stuff. I’m never going to be good with emotional stuff.”
“Freckles—”
She kissed his chest. “No, let me finish.”
He shut up and kept his arms around her. “I’m not good at the emotional stuff, but I’m not weak, Tanner. My past may have been brutal, but it made me strong. I know you and I haven’t really talked about exactly where we are going with our relationship.”
He wanted to stop right there. Wanted to explain to her that, especially after earlier tonight, he was all in.
All. In.
There was nothing he wanted more than to spend the rest of his life with this woman.
But he was older than her by nearly a decade.
He had seen and done so much more than she’d been able to do, living on the run most of her life.
He was willing to take however long she needed—to wait forever—for her to feel ready to start a life with him.
“You’ve been so patient with me,” she continued. “Taking things slow and going at a pace I’m comfortable with. And I so appreciate your willingness to do that.”
Now he had to stop her. “Because you’re worth it.” He kissed the top of her head. He meant every word.
She squeezed him then moved back so they could look eye to eye. “It means the world that you think so. And I feel the same. But if we are ever going to go forward as a true couple, you’ve got to know that I don’t break. At least, not very easily.”
She was right, of course. He’d been doing them both a disservice by hiding this from her. Keeping it a secret had forced him to carry too much and insulted her by implying she wasn’t strong enough to help lift his burden.
He reached down and framed her face with both hands. “I’ve never thought you anything but incredibly strong. But what I did was downright stupid, and you’re right to call me on it.”
The tiniest of smiles lit up her face. “I don’t get to do that with you very often, Captain Dempsey. You’re a pretty smart guy. But I want to help you. We can work out your triggers together. And hell, if I take a shot to the jaw from you in the middle of a night terror, you’ll just owe me one.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You mean you’ll want a return shot to my jaw?”
“No. But after the last few hours, I can think of many different ways for you to work off any guilt. And we haven’t even gotten to the really interesting stuff yet. Imagine what I can come up with once you teach me how sex really works.”
She shifted so she was straddling his lap. There was nothing separating them but the thin blanket.
She grinned, and that beautiful smile was all woman. Tanner felt his heart tumble over into an abyss he knew he was never coming back from.
He gave her his own smile. “You know, for someone who feels like she doesn’t know how to say the right things, you do a pretty damn good job.”
Because she had. Just by being Bree, she had shifted some of the weight he carried. Helped disseminate it more evenly between the two of them.
They were a team. And he was head-over-ass in love with this woman.
“Good. You won’t break me, Tanner. I promise.”
He kissed her. He meant it to be a kiss of reverence and thanks. But it soon turned into something much more passionate.
“I think we better head back to the bedroom and practice some of those apology moves, just in case you need them. Especially the ones that involve you kissing right here.” She pointed to the spot on the side of her neck just below her ear.
“I’ve created a monster.”
Wrapping his hands under her hips, he stood and carried her back into the bedroom. He’d be kissing her there and a lot of other places. And when they fell asleep afterward, he’d be right there by her side, where he belonged.