Cowboy SEAL Redemption

by Nicole Helm

  Lucky for the jerk-off, Jack was too drunk to feel like fighting. “Yeah, maybe I do. If you think a woman needs a ‘firm hand,’ you probably need your hands broken.”

  The guy bristled even more, getting to his feet. “Oh, and who’s going to stop me? You?”

  Jack got to his feet. Slowly, enjoying the way the guy’s belligerent stance slumped as Jack stared down at him. “Maybe me. Maybe her. Life is full of surprises that way.”

  The guy tried to square his shoulders, looked around at his buddies for support, but they were looking anywhere but at him or Jack.

  “Which one’s the one with the problem?” Jack demanded, pointing his finger at the group.

  The men all looked around, clearly no one wanting to volunteer. A few of the guys pointed at a gangly, younger guy in the back though.

  “You. What’s the deal?”

  “N-nothing. Nothing’s the deal,” he squeaked. “Everything’s good.”

  “He’s pissed his baby mama wants him to help out around the house,” one of the older men said with a laugh.

  Jack shook his head. “What the hell is wrong with you? Do some dishes. Clean a bathroom. Firm hand, please. Put in your fifty-fifty.”

  The young kid puffed out his chest. “I work all day. Hard.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure being pregnant’s a real walk in the park. You planning on taking care of your kid?”

  He bristled, all moral outrage. “Of course I am.”

  “Then take care of the woman who’s doing all the work. Listen to this guy,” Jack said, jabbing a thumb toward the original jerk-off. “You’ll both get your asses handed to you by somebody one way or another.” He turned back to the bar and tapped his glass on the surface. “Another one.”

  There were mutters from the group, but Jack didn’t exactly care. He’d said his piece, and he just hoped that young kid had the good sense to listen to him over the jerk-off leader of his group.

  “Last call, gentlemen,” Rose said, refilling Jack’s glass.

  There was a lot of grumbling and tossing bills on the counter before the men headed out.

  “Good riddance,” Jack muttered.

  “That was quite a show,” Rose said, leaning her elbows on the bar as she studied him.

  Jack shrugged, sipping his drink. “Can’t stand that kind of blustering crap. My sister had a boyfriend like that. Firm hand.” He made a scoffing noise. “I took him hunting once. Left him in the woods.” Jack grinned at the memory. “He suddenly wasn’t so keen on being a jerk to my sister.”

  “Go ahead and head out, Tonya,” Rose said without taking her gaze off his. “I’ve got it from here.”

  Tonya eyed Jack suspiciously. “You sure about that, boss?”

  Rose winked. “Positive. Don’t forget to empty the tip jar.”

  Tonya rolled her eyes. “Half those tips are yours. Rightfully. Pete’s doing a lot better. I don’t need the extra—”

  “Proprietor doesn’t get tips, Tonya. If Pete’s on the mend, take the money and buy yourself something pretty.”

  The woman sighed, but she took the entire wad of ones out of the tip jar. “Sometimes I think you’re too nice for your own good.” Tonya glared at Jack again. “If you lay one hand on her, I’ll personally castrate you.”

  Jack gave the woman a little salute, which only caused Tonya to scowl deeper. But she walked out the front door of the bar, Rose following and locking up behind her.

  “How’m I going to get out of here?” Jack asked.

  “There’s a back way. Which is where my car is. The car I will be driving you home in as soon as I close up.”

  “Gabe can come get me.”

  “No worries. I’ve got somewhere to be that’s not too far from your guys’ place. What are you calling it now?”

  “Revival Ranch.” Jack looked bitterly at his new drink. “Some joke.”

  “You consider revival a joke?”

  “Some things don’t revive, Rosie.” He tried to mimic one of her sharp smiles.

  “Since you’re drunk, I won’t kill you for calling me Rosie. Consider that your one and only pass.”

  Jack grinned, this time for real. He didn’t know another woman like her—all sharp edges and threats, and yet she’d tried to get him laid and she was going to drive him home. Rose was one of those… Oh, what were they called? Two opposing forces existing as one.

  He leaned forward on the bar, watching her while she efficiently cleaned and organized all her bottles and glasses and rags. “You know, I was telling myself that I should have some… What d’you call it? Restraint? Then I got to thinking I’m not good at anything anymore, so why not get really good at drinking?”

  “Because you don’t want to be a useless alcoholic. You’ve got friends and a job and a pretty decent place to live. So suck it up, Jacky Jack.”

  Anger, vile and heavy, bubbled up inside him. “I have a permanent limp, a quarter of my body is a giant scar that, oh yeah, I got watching my friend die. I have to look my nephew in his little baby face in a few weeks, and when I do, I have to pretend I’m not thinking about the fact that my brother fucked my fiancée. It’s all been taken away. All of it. My pain-free existence. My friend. My future marriage. My future kids. My farm. It’s either dead or all theirs now. So tell me, Rose, what right do you have to tell me to suck it up?”

  “My dad used to beat the hell out of me when I’d lose a poker game for him, whether it was my fault or not.”

  Even with the liquor and anger flowing like hot lava through his veins, those words landed like an icy blow, but she kept going.

  “And when I helped him win the poker game?” She shrugged, as if recounting a story that wasn’t a damn tragedy. “He’d beat the hell out of my sisters and my mom in front of me. I’ve survived hell, Mr. Navy SEAL. Just like you. So maybe consider that not everyone has some amazing, wonderful life just because yours sucks.”

  Jack swallowed at the wave of guilty nausea flowing upward. He definitely did not take a sip of his last drink. “I’m sorry,” he managed to say. Even though “sorry” didn’t begin to cut it.

  “Yeah, well, so am I. But I’m alive, and I’m making something out of it, so it’s time for you to do the same. Now, what’s your problem with women? You seem to have more sense about them than any of that group talking about firm hands.”

  “Did you tell me that horrible childhood story so I’d tell you what my deal with women is?”

  “No, and if I could go back, I’d tape my mouth shut before I yapped all that crap. But I can’t, so I’ll use it. What’s the deal?”

  Either he was drunk enough to be stupid, or he was guilty enough to be stupid, or he was just Jack enough to be stupid. When he opened his mouth, the truth tumbled out. “Madison was the only woman I’ve ever done anything with.”

  “And when you say anything, you mean sex?”

  “I mean everything. My mom and her mom were best friends growing up, and they had us a month apart. It was known from the very beginning Madison and I belonged together. Jack and Madison would grow up, get married, run the farm. I never questioned it. She was always going to be my wife. She’s the only woman I’ve ever kissed, the only woman I ever took out on a date.”

  He scraped his palm against the beard he needed to shave off before his mother showed up. “I don’t know how to talk to women. I don’t know how to flirt or hook up. I never had to know. She was always there, and we just accepted that we were each other’s future.”

  He laughed bitterly, twisting the still-full glass on the bar back and forth. “So I’m sitting there at your damn bar table with this woman you’ve thrown me at, who is very much not the woman I spent most of my life thinking I’d marry, and I don’t know what to say. Or what to do. I just don’t know.”

  He didn’t dare look at her. He didn’t want to see pity or disgust or
whatever Rose would feel in the face of those pathetic admissions. He didn’t want to know what the woman who’d been beaten by her father thought of his pathetic, small-town problems.

  He firmed his grip on his glass, ready to raise it to his lips and drain it, but Rose put her hand over his from across the bar.

  “How long has it been now? Since you found out about it?”

  “Almost two years.”

  “Okay. Two years. You had your two years to wallow, and now, guess what? It’s over. She did something shitty. They both did something really shitty to you. But it’s been two years, and they have moved on with their lives, and now it’s your turn. That’s your revenge. That’s how you get back at them. You rebuild your life. And no, it’s not the life it was supposed to be—I get that. And I get that it’s hard, but it’s time to change. Which means you don’t drink at my bar anymore. I’m not serving you.”

  He met her fierce, dark gaze, and he didn’t know what to say. There was nothing but pain and confusion swallowing him, and all he really wanted to do was lay his head on the bar and cry like a baby.

  He didn’t.

  “I’ll text Gabe to come pick me up.”

  “No. I’m going to take you home.”

  “Why?” Alex and Gabe came at him like this sometimes. There’d been arguments. Becca joined in sometimes. Everyone seemed to think he needed to move forward.

  But no one, not one of them, was telling him how to do it. Except Rose Rogers. Why her, of all people?

  “Because, whether I like it or not, my lot in life seems to be wanting to help people. You might not want help, but you need it, and you made the mistake of letting me see it. So I’m going to help you.”

  “Whether I want it or not?”

  “Damn straight, baby.” She slapped the bar. “Sit tight.”

  And what else was there to do when someone who seemed to know how to live this life was telling him to do something?

  So he sat tight.

  * * *

  Rose glanced at the man in her passenger seat. He was staring morosely out the window, and her heart did that annoying thing she wished she could eradicate.

  She’d told him about her crappy childhood, and he hadn’t recoiled. Oh, he’d looked damn sorry, but not disgusted. Not afraid to touch all that mess.

  And she was a mess of all those mistakes she’d made, all the ways her parents’ vices were stamped into her bones. She was the worst of both of them, and she had no business wanting to help a former Navy SEAL who’d been betrayed by the woman he loved.

  When she got to the turnoff that would take her up to Revival Ranch, where she could drop Jack safely off with his friends, she didn’t stop. She didn’t slow down. She kept driving.

  “Where are you going?” Jack asked as she missed the turn. “You’re supposed to turn there.”

  Yes, she was, but she’d felt Jack’s bone-deep despair. She’d seen that hopelessness in her own reflection, and no one else she’d encountered had ever made her feel like this.

  Then he’d had to go and give those guys a lecture on firm hands and fifty-fifty and told that story of messing with the boyfriend who was mean to his sister. She hadn’t grown up knowing men like him existed, but she was slowly learning there were good people out there. There was no doubt in her mind Jack was a good, upstanding, honest, trustworthy person.

  Didn’t mean what she was about to do was smart, but she was doing it anyway. “I want to show you something first.”

  “This better not be pity sex, because that’s just stomping on my pride, and I’d have to say no.”

  Rose forced herself to laugh even as the thought of pity sex made her…well, a little hot and bothered, yeah. Jack was gorgeous, and she was on a sex sabbatical and…

  Well, that wasn’t the point. “Baby, if I was offering you any kind of sex, you couldn’t say no. But that’s not what this is.”

  He snorted out something like a laugh, and she drove on, farther out of town and toward her destination.

  Her heart beat unsteadily and it was hard to breathe normally or act like she wasn’t doing something so inherently stupid. Showing him this was like showing him a piece of herself she’d never showed anyone. She even tried not to show it to her sisters, and they meant everything in the world to her.

  She owed them. She owed her sisters her strength and her certainty and her power, and they didn’t need the softer sides of her.

  Jack meant nothing to her, which meant he couldn’t hurt those softer sides, right?

  So she drove to the place no one knew about. Not Delia or Caleb. Not her sisters or her parents or her bartenders. No one knew this little house in the middle of nowhere existed, let alone was hers.

  She’d offer it up as some little slice of peace, and then he could go back to his life feeling lighter. And she’d feel better for having helped him.

  She stopped in front of the dilapidated ranch house that had been built something like a hundred years ago. The majority of the land around it had long been sold off to neighboring ranchers, and the house had gone abandoned and falling apart for decades.

  Last year, Rose had come across it on one of her long drives to clear her head, and something had kept her rooted in front of this falling-apart house. An improbable lilac bush had been blooming by the boarded-up front door, and the sunlight had reflected off the picturesque pond just down the slope of the hill.

  Rose didn’t believe in mystical bullshit, but she hadn’t been able to deny that little frisson of excitement when she’d set eyes on this place. It had taken her two months to track down the owners, another month to strike a deal. It was still unlivable—especially in the winter months—but sometimes in the summer, she could come out here and spend the night if she didn’t mind the mice.

  Eventually she’d fix it up completely, not just the random little repairs she knew how to make. For now, regardless of how ugly it was, it was her escape. Her secret. The bar was her power, and this place was her sanctuary.

  “Did you bring me here to kill me? Because that looks like the only possible thing you’d want to ‘show me’ at this place.”

  “Hey, that’s my baby you’re talking about there. Be careful. And get out.” She slid out of the car herself and took a deep breath of the beautiful Montana summer night. These short stretches of summer weeks, when a person could go outside without a coat, always felt like magic. It was that brief period of time every year when she could pretend she lived somewhere warm and inviting.

  “Seriously. What is this place?” Jack asked, stepping out of the car and looking around the starlight-dappled yard.

  “This is my house,” she said, spreading her arms wide.

  “I thought you lived at the bar?”

  “I do. For now. Once I get this place fixed up and maybe promote Tonya to manager, it’ll be my full-time house.”

  “Why’d you bring me to your house?”

  She ignored that question and walked toward the pond. Jack needed a little recalibration. When you were stuck in a shitty way of thinking, after a bunch of shitty-ass things happened to you, you needed to break free.

  She had no business being the one to offer him a little solace, but she had solace, and growing up in a world empty of it meant she gave it when she could. No matter how often she tried to convince herself she was so much harder than all that.

  She pulled her shirt up and over her head and let it fall to the ground. She didn’t miss the little squeaking sound that came out of Jack’s mouth when she did it, but she kept moving for the pond. Once she reached the bank, she shimmied out of her jeans.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  She turned to face him, putting her back to the water. Moonlight shone on the sharp lines of his face—that perfect nose, high cheekbones, everything about him so angular and masculine, his expression so serious and s
tern. Even across the yard, lit only by the full moon, she could see the emotion in his eyes.

  She’d been a little hard on him back at the bar, talking a little too frankly about Dad’s heavy fists, because this guy had his share of troubles. Even if they weren’t the same, even if they didn’t quite compare. But trouble…oh, she was intimately acquainted with trouble, and what Jack needed was to find himself a little of the right kind.

  That was one thing she had in spades.

  So she flashed a grin and hoped he could see it in what little light they had. And then she jumped backward into the icy-cold water of her pond. No amount of Montana summer sun could warm this up, but it wasn’t the sort of cold that would kill you. It was the kind of cold that reminded you that you were alive.

  That was what Jack needed. She dove deep into the water, reminding herself of that, before coming back up to the surface.

  She stood, letting her toes sink into the dirt, the water lapping at her chin. “Your turn,” she called to him.

  “I am not jumping into a pond. I thought I was the drunk one.”

  “Come on. I promise it will change your life. I bet you’ve never been skinny-dipping.”

  “I am not skinny-dipping. And, just for clarity, you aren’t either. You still have your underwear on.”

  Rose laughed, stepping farther into the center of the pond, where she had to tread water to keep her head above the surface. “Okay, strip down to your skivvies and jump in.”

  “I’m not stripping down to anything.”

  “I thought you had some sense of humor in there. I guess I should’ve brought Gabe.”

  Jack stepped forward with an irritated grunt and pulled his shirt over his head.

  Rose regretted very, very deeply that it was the middle of the night and there was no daylight to see the whole of him. Because what little she could make out was…

  Well.

  “Is that a tattoo?” she called, squinting at the mark on his bicep.