by Christa Wick
Right—stupid me. She was young enough—inexperienced enough—that a crush on a man was serious. Still, I hadn't seen this coming. Lacey was sweet on me and I had been oblivious to the development. And I didn't want her affection. It was hard enough keeping my distance from her lush form thinking the attraction was one-sided.
She sucked a long, ragged breath in before more words exploded from her mouth—words that sent me reeling to the far end of the couch.
"I just want one night with you, Wake," she said, tears running hot down her pale cheeks. "While I can still see something, before I face the possibility of nothing but darkness in front of me if I ever take a lover. After that, I can have my surgery."
I've been tortured, beaten, had molten lead push its way through my stomach before. And all of that hurt less than what this beautiful, fragile girl was telling me.
"Sex isn't going to happen between us, Lacey." I tried to make the words come out softly, but my panic turned them into a bark. I would have to talk to Austin in the morning—if not tonight after she went to bed. He would have to find someone else to watch her. A few weeks or a month and she would forget she ever liked me and then she would be free to decide on the surgery with a clear head.
I could read the hurt in her expression, the instant retreat. Her chin lifted with a defiant pride for a brief second, but then dropped and all I could see in the way she held herself was pain and defeat.
"I guess I'm as ugly as everybody says," she said, her voice so muted that she was probably talking to herself. "But I thought you could see past that."
"Who the fuck said you’re ugly?" A vein throbbed along my temple at the thought of someone telling this sweet, giving woman that she was anything less than beautiful. "Your mother wouldn't know real beauty if—"
She stopped me with a shake of her head.
Damn it, she was going to defend that bitch Amanda Long again.
"It's not just her." She rubbed at her cheeks with both hands, erasing the tears only to have more leak from her eyes. "People think blind means deaf, too. They shout at me—have a seat, dear, I'll tell Mr. Long that you're here, would you like a drink?"
She swiped at her face again, her fast, jerky movements revealing an anger her calm voice had masked. "They shout at me and then they talk about me without even bothering to whisper."
I catalogued the secretaries and receptionists that had cycled through Austin's office while his regular executive assistant was in Texas helping her daughter recover from a rough labor and the arrival of triplets. I had a pretty good idea which set of ignorant bitches had done this.
"Fat," she whispered. "Moon faced, pasty, a dull expression—"
"That's enough," I bit out.
She flinched and I wanted to punch myself in the face.
I moved along the couch until we were about a foot apart. I didn't trust myself to touch her, not when she was hurting like this and all I wanted to do was make the pain stop. But if I touched her, I would fuck things up even worse, replacing a pain that would fade with a memory that would haunt both of us for a long time.
"They talk about you, too," she said, her shoulders slumping and her arms circling herself in a solitary hug. "Riding the Wake, they call it."
Suddenly, punching myself in the face didn't seem like punishment enough.
I'd fucked more than a few among Austin's apparently chatty staff—hell, I'd fucked one in the supply closet just down the hall from his office.
But I hadn't touched a single woman since being assigned to Lacey.
"I'm a dog," I admitted. "A piece of shit who doesn't deserve your affection. And that's exactly why I'm telling you 'no,' Lace. And, baby, you have to believe me when I say that you are beautiful...desirable."
I sucked a breath in and held it before I went too far with my praise. Either she wouldn't believe me or she would use it as ammunition against my rejecting the chance to spend the night in her bed and between her legs.
Don't think about her bed or her legs, asshole.
"So, do you see why you cannot base your decision on me?" I risked touching her by trying to slide my hand over hers, but she pulled back.
She stumbled upward, arms wild and disoriented. She stepped forward, hitting her shin hard against the coffee table. That was my fault—I had upset her worse than she was before. All her precision, all her years of navigating by memory and light touches were lost in a storm of raw emotions.
I stood, tried to capture her arm, but she shoved at me.
"Don't! You've made it clear you don't want to touch me—"
"Lacey!" I growled at her the same way I'd growl at a junior member of my team who was about to lose his shit and get himself, or someone else, killed. "I will not let you throw a fit and hurt yourself. You want to be pissed, fine, you deserve to be pissed, but you can't try to bulldoze your way through the house."
My second attempt to snag her arm was successful. She fought me. I dug my fingers in, the pad of my thumb and index finger hitting the pressure points on her elbow. My grip wasn't hard enough to damage her flesh, but the temporary pain on those two sensitive areas was enough to calm most people down.
It worked. She grew still and quiet except for harsh breathing. A dozen angry puffs and then she ground out a few words. "I'm going to my room."
"Which way is it?" I asked with no intention of letting her go until I knew she could safely reach her destination.
Uncertainty clouded her features for a second. Her free arm searched slowly at her side until she found the armrest of the couch. She lifted a finger and pointed dead center of the hallway.
"Fine," I relented. "But tomorrow you are talking to Austin about what happens after your surgery and then you are going to make your decision—without any reference to…us. Agreed?"
Eyes closed, she offered a curt nod then jerked her elbow from my grip.
I watched her walk away, her shoulders back, her chin up, angry but carrying her pride with her. She would be okay, I assured myself. I would talk to her in the morning, after I worked through the best way to soften the harsh words I had spoken tonight.
Returning to the cold comfort of the couch, I buried my head in my hands and tried to figure out just how in the hell I could fix what I had broken.
5
A rough hand on my shoulder jerked me awake.
I looked up from where I slumped on the couch to find one hell of a pissed off billionaire glaring down at me, muscles bunching beneath his expensive dinner jacket. His bedraggled tie looked like he had tried to rip it off with the idea of using it to hang me from the tallest tree on his estate.
Sighing, I straightened in my seat. Austin was a former "18A"—a Special Forces officer with active missions. He'd been my team leader for a year before he resigned his commission to run the company after his father's death. So, the man had the access code to the front door, stealth skills, and I had already kicked myself enough that day to feel any guilt over him sneaking up on me in his own guesthouse.
I looked at my watch. Less than ninety minutes had passed between Lacey leaving the room and Austin waking me.
He bent over the back of the couch, his forearms bracing his big body. A watch that cost more than most people's cars flashed at me with the light from the table lamp. When he spoke, his voice rumbled hard enough to lift the hairs on the back of my neck.
"You want to tell me why a girl who could probably find at least one kind thing to say about Hitler doesn't want you on her security team anymore?"
"Not my place to say," I answered. Even though I had planned on quitting the assignment the following morning, it still cut that Lacey wanted me gone. It wasn't my poor feelings that were the casualty—it was the realization that I had hurt her so badly that she had taken the very uncharacteristic step of complaining.
"Not even to defend yourself?" he huffed.
I ran my hands together then placed each palm down against my thighs. "I don't need words to defend myself."
A bar
ely veiled threat probably wasn't the wisest career move, but it was time for a change anyway. I had gotten sloppy watching Lacey, probably even before that. It's bad form to get friendly with the client you were being paid to protect. With Austin, it had started out that way because of our prior history.
With Lacey, it was unforgivable, but at least no one had died from my lack of professionalism.
Yeah, it was time for a change, even if I didn't have my next move figured out.
"Besides," I said, smoothing my hands down my jeans. "I quit."
"Don't be an idiot." Austin slid over the back of the couch to land next to me, his movements slow and unthreatening. One of his giant mitts came up to latch around the back of my neck and squeeze lightly in a show of dominance.
I was too tired to take insult, and him going all alpha dog on me wouldn't change my mind.
"She texted me," he explained and gave another squeeze. "Wouldn't reply to my text back or attempted calls and didn't say why, just to please remove you from the team and that she didn't really need anyone to watch her beyond a driver. So, tell me what happened."
I shook my head. Lacey would be mortified if I told Austin that she'd asked me to spend the night in her bed doing anything and everything other than sleeping. I had embarrassed her already by rejecting her. I wouldn't make it worse.
This time, the sigh was his.
"Let me guess, she finally admitted she had a crush on you."
I turned my head to find the smug bastard grinning at me. How the hell had he seen it when I hadn't? Had she told him or otherwise hinted sometime earlier?
"And you told her nothing could happen..." He pulled his hand away, his brows knitting in confusion. "Why? I know she's not your usual type of female, but you're never going to marry any of the women you've fucked in the past."
"I'm never going to marry, period." I twisted out of the hold he had around my neck, my elbow lightly raised to ward off any further attempt to secure me, and then I stood. I swiped my palms down the side of my jeans then realized just how clammy my skin was.
Why? This would either blow over with Austin or it wouldn't. I'd lost a lot of friends over the years, some in combat, some afterwards when they couldn't leave the war behind. Some just faded from my life as they went back to their families or forged new families. One day or another—one way or another—I'd lose Austin as well. Nothing to do about that but keep on.
So why the clammy hands and racing heart?
He shook his head, stared at the floor for a second then nailed me with those ruthless eyes of his. "It's okay to fall in love, Wake."
Right—love.
I dismissed the possibility with a rough swallow and stared at him.
"This is about Pike, isn't it?" he asked.
Pike was a ghost and he'd made more ghosts in the minutes before he had died. Nothing to do with life was about Pike—only death.
With no furniture close to me, I sat down on the floor before I passed out.
My heart knocked against the back of my ribcage, the sound growing louder and sharper until it sounded like mortar fire. I could almost see Pike frozen in the middle of a dusty, debris-filled street in Mosul.
I promised her I would come back...
I shook my head, dislodging the vision. "Fuck Pike."
Austin wiped at his face. He hadn't been there. His father had already died and the Army had released him to come home and run the family fortune, which had been small enough back then that his dad had been willing to let him play hero.
"Look, even Gina thinks you're a decent, respectable human being when you've got Lacey by your side. So don't try to sell me on you not having any feelings for her."
I shifted from sitting on the floor to laying on it, my kidneys aching with the need to take a long piss. I ran my fingers through my hair, trying to avoid answering or even thinking about what Austin had just said.
"I can't do my job if I have feelings for her." I dragged my fingers along my forehead, down the sides, the tension beneath the surface of my face unrelenting.
"Irrelevant—you just said you quit," he chuckled, his amusement at my predicament loud enough that I worried Lacey, with her sensitive ears, might hear the sound even if she was sleeping.
And I doubted she was sleeping.
He stood, walked over to where I rested on the floor and gave my hip a sharp nudge with the tip of his dress shoes. "I'm not doing anything about this tonight. I don't want to have to do anything about it tomorrow, either. So get your shit fixed before I have to kick your ass for making her cry."
With that, he left.
6
I stayed on the floor another half hour until my kidneys and bladder got the best of me.
I walked down the hall to my room, moving slow and listening for any sounds coming from behind Lacey's door.
The house had two bathrooms. One was en-suite in the master that Lacey stayed in. The other had three doors and opened onto the other two bedrooms and the hall. I snagged a pair of boxers and track pants from my dresser and went into the second bathroom.
I stripped all the way down, emptied my bladder then stepped beneath the shower head, the water on full blast and as hot as it would run without blistering my skin. I turned my face up, the sides of my nostrils pinching tight to keep the water out as I thought about what had just happened with Austin.
Apparently, my boss and friend not only approved of something happening between me and Lacey, he had been trying to herd me into it. Why else had he thrown us together in near isolation these last two weeks since the termination of the live-in aide? He knew as well as I did that an overworked bodyguard was a significant risk. And in the four months I'd been watching over Lacey, there had been other members of the security team relieving me two days a week and four hours a day when I didn't have the full day off.
They had all disappeared with the aide.
I hadn't complained, of course. Still, it seemed like he had ulterior motives for withdrawing resources he could easily afford and keeping himself absent, too.
With a short snarl, I swiped the bottle of body wash off the shower shelf and lathered up. No one likes being manipulated, me least of all. Isolation, her tears, that soft, luscious body...
I switched the water to as cold as it would go and rinsed the soap off. Out of the shower, I grabbed a towel, my gaze on the mirror as I dried my body. Three inches to the side of my actual belly button was what looked like a second navel—a scar from the bullet I had taken in the gut ten minutes after Pike literally lost his head.
Pinned behind a vehicle, I wasn't the only one injured among my team. The team leader was dead and I cradled a dying Jonah Frank in my arms. He had his hand wrapped around his St. Christopher's medallion. Deeply religious, it had freaked the kid out the first time we drove through the city in which he would eventually die. Mosul, home of the Tomb of Jonah, both the one that the whale swallowed and the Missouri farm boy that died in my arms because Pike had lost his shit, lost his focus because of fear he would never see his wife again.
Pike—breaking his promise to her and to our team.
Turning from the mirror, I tossed the towel over the top frame of the shower and slid into my boxers and the track pants. Back in my room, I sat on the bed and looked at the closet door. My luggage was inside. I figured I had two choices. I could pack my bags and go, informing the gatehouse guard on my way out to send someone to watch Lacey.
Or I could stay and give Lacey what she wanted.
But only for one night.
7
A soft knock at Lacey's bedroom door went unanswered. I knocked again, a little louder, and called her name. I doubted she was asleep, which meant she was hiding. Instead of knocking again, I pushed the door inward and stepped into the room.
She had left the curtains open. A full moon lit the curves of her body. I followed the sensual hills and valleys up to where they disappeared beneath the pillow that covered her head. She had an arm over the pillow, huggin
g it to her face.
Distracted by the intimacy of being in her room at night, I had missed the subtle way her body jerked. Seeing the repeating movement at last, I realized she had the pillow over her head to muffle the sound of crying.
For a moment, I almost chickened out and retreated before she could discern my presence. I was certain that giving her what she wanted would eventually result in more tears. Having her heart broken by what she thought was an unrequited crush would be a shorter hurt.
I approached the bed, my footsteps slow and dragging. What I was doing was wrong, but everyone else around me seemed to think it was right. And I wanted it, really, really wanted it. Even knowing her body was wracked by tears because of me, my own flesh responded to the idea of what might come next.
My hand brushed softly over her hip. She froze for a second but she was too deep into crying to not shatter with another outburst. Wrapping my hand around her wrist, I slowly drew her arm away from the pillow. She resisted and folded her arm tight against her chest when I released my hold.
I lifted the pillow. She turned her face into the mattress, the blond hair wet and stuck to her cheek. On her side, facing the window, she had her knees bent. I tucked myself into the hollow they formed. My hand securing the dip in her waist, I rested my upper chest and head against her. She hadn't stopped crying, but I could tell she was struggling to do so.
She held her breath until another sob broke through. She sucked in air and trapped it in her lungs until the process repeated. More than two hours had passed since she left the living room and it killed me to think she might have been like this the entire time.
"Lace, it's been two hours," I said, my tone gentle and concerned. "You're going to make yourself sick if you keep it up."
She was already doomed to wake up with one hell of a headache.
Trying to escape contact with me, she jerked her body toward the center of the bed. Fine with me—I stretched out behind her, pulled the blanket over me and drew the hair away from her neck. I pressed my face in the hollow between her head and shoulder then draped my arm over hers, my hand seeking the one she had pressed to her chest.
