Reckless: A Bad Boyz Anthology

by Anthology

  As she grinded into me, I unfastened the clip on the front of her bra, freeing her luscious breasts, and I was halfway to getting her shirt off when she stopped me.

  Breathing heavily, she patted both hands on my chest. “Dillon, go to the car and get my suitcase. You deploy in a week. Now is not the time to be reckless.”

  I took several ragged breaths, my forehead pressed against hers. Oh fuck—goddamn fucking diaphragm. I tried to remember if I had a rubber in my wallet, then recalled with a vivid clarity that ratcheted me up further the fast fuck we’d had the night before in an elevator of the casino on the way to our hotel room. I hadn’t had a condom then, and damn it, she hadn’t stopped then.

  I roamed her neck with my kisses. “I’ll be careful. I promise. Don’t make me wait. I’ve been aching for you since we left the chapel.”

  She arched a brow. “We’ve been reckless enough this weekend, don’t you think? Unless, of course, you mean to get me pregnant our first night married.”

  I hadn’t really thought about it; right now I didn’t care.

  “I’m willing to double down if you are,” I groaned.

  She laughed, but nothing. Legs not opening, arms not wrapped, kisses not returned.

  Fuck.

  Groaning, she wiggled from beneath me and rose from the bed. “I’ll get the bag. You probably shouldn’t go out front and let the neighbors see you looking like that.” She stared pointedly at the erection in my pants.

  I turned on the bed, watching her go. “Fuck the diaphragm. Come back. Stay.”

  At the bedroom door, Rachel turned, her black hair settling around her glowing face in a way that made even a second waiting to be buried in her painful. “Don’t go anywhere. I expect you to make this the most memorable night we’ve ever had together.”

  “It’s already been the most memorable night for me.”

  It was the truth, and whether we made love or just did nothing more than lie holding each other, this day had already surpassed anything I’d ever known with her and there was no place to go from perfect.

  The way she looked at me I knew I’d remember forever. “We are finally married. This is our wedding night. You are not getting out of that bed until it’s time to take you to the airport. I don’t want to pass on a moment of you I can have until the Army takes you from me again.”

  Fuck, you had to marry a girl who said shit like that before you took off for another nine months overseas, and that incredible creature was my wife. Everything I felt for her amplified tenfold.

  “No one is ever going to take me from you, baby.”

  “They better not,” she said, and a touch of strain and sadness edged her voice though she fought not to let it. “You’re my everything, Dillon. Don’t ever forget that.”

  I knew what she was thinking without asking. She hadn’t asked me not to reenlist, but I knew she didn’t want me to. And she’d been gently prodding me about the job Graham wanted to discuss with me. To line up something for us on the off chance civilian life was in the cards for us soon.

  “You’re my everything, too, Rachel.” It was the truth. She was my best friend. My lover. At last my wife. And in that moment, my duty was crystal clear. It was time for her to have a few things her way.

  “God, I love you,” I murmured, struggling against the sensations roiling through me. “I won’t reenlist when my time is up. I’m tired of leaving you, baby.”

  She brushed at her happy tears. “Hold that thought, soldier.” And she quickly rushed from the bedroom.

  I was lying on the bed, shooting off a text to Graham about getting together the next day to talk employment opportunities, when the hairs on my arms stood up and goose bumps ran my flesh.

  Instinct kicked off the alarms in my head. I grabbed my gun from the nightstand and went from the bed to hole up at the door. The scene that greeted me sent a chill through my veins. That flash of internal warning was immediately lost in a fast moving reality. I made a quick surveillance of the room. One, two, three intruders. Heavily armed. Rachel clutched against a thug by the door.

  Rapidly I ticked off each threat, and the pros and cons of action. If Rachel hadn’t been smack-dab in the center of it I would have charged in without hesitation. I didn’t doubt I could take them all out before they knew what hit them.

  Her captor roughly yanked her hair, making her scream out. Decision made. I took a deep breath, action plan fully formed in my head.

  As I entered the hallway, out of the corner of my eye I saw the butt of a gun closing in on my head before it crashed into my temple. My body gave way beneath me. I was on the ground, enveloped in the pain of an unending stream of punches and kicks. Then darkness…

  I don’t know how long the beating rendered me unconscious, but the next thing I knew I was coming awake in a cold, small space. My pain-dulled brain fought to focus. The breathing beside me was Rachel. My legs and arms were bound. There was something—duct tape?—across my eyes. The smell of cedar chips—we were trapped inside the low, dark wood closet near the living room.

  I struggled to lift my head.

  “Oh God, Dillon,” Rachel whispered anxiously. “Thank God you’re alive. Tell me you’re OK?”

  “I’m fine, baby,” I lied, struggling not to overtly wince from what felt like cracked ribs as I maneuvered upright into a sitting position.

  My head throbbed, every inch of me felt sore and diminished from their beating, but it didn’t feel like anything other than the ribs had been broken thus far.

  “Did they hurt you?” I whispered in agony.

  “No, Dillon. No. Roughed me up a little. Dragged me through the house making me give them our car keys and cash, then shoved me in here. Nothing else.”

  “How long have I been out?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe an hour.”

  Fuck, an hour. “Are you tied up and blindfolded, too?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  Fuck.

  “Don’t move,” I ordered. “Let me find you. I’m going to get us back to back. Untie you. Then I want you to untie my hands, then you free your feet then eyes. Are we clear?”

  I could hear her fear in the rapid intakes of air.

  “Baby, are we clear?” I asked as I carefully navigated the tight space, slugging through the pain, until I at last found my back against hers then her bound wrists. “Rachel—”

  She sniffed and said, “I untie your hands, then my feet and eyes.”

  “Good girl,” I said soothingly as I slowly worked the ropes around her arms. The awkward positioning of my hands meant I failed, so I adjusted and tried again. Patience, Dillon. Rushing will make this harder. Work the knot, then the problem. “How many are there? I counted five before I passed out.”

  I felt her nod. “Five.”

  “Where were they before they locked you in here with me?”

  “They’ve barricaded themselves in the living room. Pushed junk up against the doors and windows. They’re escapees from the prison in Folsom. There’s a manhunt.”

  That news hit me like a freight train going full speed—barricaded? This home invasion wasn’t a robbery. It kicked up the danger tenfold—but my cool, calm head expertly cultivated after years of combat thankfully didn’t desert me.

  “What kind of weapons did you see?”

  I could hear her choking back tears of fright, trying to maintain control. “I counted five hand guns. Three semiautomatic rifles. Fully loaded vests. Where did they get all that, Dillon? It’s like they’re prepared for war—”

  “Shush, Rachel. It’s going to be OK.” I silenced her because her voice betrayed she was starting to lose it and I didn’t want her to focus on the threat, only on me. The rope started to loosen. “I’ve almost got you untied. Remember, baby, my hands, your feet then your eyes. What are you going to do? Say it back to me.”

  “Hands. Feet then eyes,” she repeated.

  In a second she was free and her body turned toward me so she could begin to undo my binds.r />
  “Good girl, Rachel. You’re doing so well. We’ll be out of here safe soon. The second my hands are free, I want you to go as far back into the closet as you can. Curl in a ball covering your head in the farthest corner against the wall behind me.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked fearfully.

  “Only what I have to, baby. Stay put until it’s over.”

  “No,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “Maybe we should just stay in here. Do what they want until it’s over. I don’t want you—”

  “Okay, baby. Okay. Calm down. I won’t do anything,” I lied, but sitting out this fight just wasn’t possible. Rachel had told me enough to know these guys had nothing to lose. Killing us was in the mix. The only thing not set in stone was when and if we’d let them.

  “Promise me, Dillon, that you won’t do anything rash.”

  “I promise. Just concentrate and get my hands free.”

  The second I could move my arms, I ripped off my blindfold and went to work on the bonds around my ankles. I could feel Rachel moving beside me, but she hadn’t taken position deep inside the closet like I asked her.

  Once free, I turned toward her.

  “Please, Rachel. Go back against the wall.”

  She was huddled up against me like a frightened deer in the road, wide-eyed with terror and unable to move.

  I closed my hands on her cheeks. “Baby, nothing is going to happen to me. This is what I do—”

  Loud screams drowned out my words as things moved in horrifying succession all at once: the door opening, light flooding in, a nearly disabling blow against the back of my head, a hand closing around Rachel’s hair before cruelly ripping her from the closet and me.

  I fought my assailant, trying to scramble to reach Rachel. “Don’t hurt her,” I screamed as the vision of her being jerked like a rag doll across the room shredded my control.

  I was almost to her when there was a loud boom as something rammed the front door. Motion in every direction with an explosion of guns. Bullets. Screaming. My training was to keep down and take cover. My heart made me fight through the injury-induced fog, the desperation to get to Rachel the only thought to claim me.

  A bullet hit me in the head as the room was flooded with the heavily armed police SWAT team in full assault mode in my home. My vision started to fade and grow cloudy. The last thing I saw was Rachel fall to the floor, her long black hair streaming behind her to settle like a blanket over her face. Her body was lifeless.

  Chapter Nine

  Sacramento, the present…

  WE MADE THE short drive back to the condo. It took only ten minutes but it felt like hours, sitting in the passenger seat, silent like Graham, the delay to dig into the things racing through my head nearly unendurable.

  Inside my living room, I dropped down heavily in a chair, feeling numb like a sleepwalker, and yet mentally awake and clear as I hadn’t been for years.

  I felt different, even with all the shit roiling through me, calm and ready for whatever else was out there I didn’t know yet. Strange, I should have been freaking out, but I wasn’t.

  “You hanging in there, buddy?”

  I jerked my face up—I’d been staring at the carpet without knowing it—and Graham was sitting on the sofa waiting patiently as ever.

  Exhaling heavily, I leaned back in my chair. I had so many questions, some missing gaps here and there. What I believed to be the history of my life sure as fuck no longer fit together, and I wasn’t sure where I should begin.

  Maybe it didn’t matter.

  “How long was I in the hospital?” I decided to lead with.

  Graham pursed his lips. “A little over a year. Catatonic the first six months after the incident. You came out of the fog once, saw Rachel standing in the hospital room, and completely lost it. You thought you had seen Rachel die. Then nothing for five months. After that you were in and out mentally another six months. Slowly you started to recover bits and pieces of your memory. But it was jumbled. And the part where the home invasion happened never came back. ”

  Fuck, a year.

  I didn’t remember it being that long. In my head it was a few weeks, nothing more, but Jesus Christ, if I’d been in the hospital a year…oh God, I’d constructed a false narrative and timeline for my life. Rachel, Graham, and Zac had known—holy fucking shit, even Alan Manzone had been part of the deception to protect my fragile reality and hold on to my sanity—and not once had anyone told me otherwise.

  I hadn’t worked security for five years.

  The best I could reconstruct was a timeline of three.

  One year of hospital.

  Then the next year—oh God, it had passed here, in the condo with Graham taking care of me. Therapy sessions three times a week with Zac, in-home nursing care, heavily medicated—no wonder it had been so easy to lose all that time and believe what I wanted to believe—brief interaction with Rachel, but pretty much held up here for a year.

  Fuck!

  “You all have been living a fiction with me for five years,” I said, overwhelmed. “Why didn’t you or Doc just tell me the truth?”

  Graham’s shoulders squared and he lifted his chin. “Every soldier comes home in his own time whether his body is there or not.”

  Oh fuck. Not that.

  “Once I was steady again you should have told me everything. Not left me out there, wandering alone, in a fog.”

  His eyes never wavered from mine.

  I shifted my gaze away.

  It wasn’t a fair thing to say.

  Graham had stayed at my side—like Rachel—for five years.

  Still, someone should have leveled with me.

  “You’d shut down so completely no one was willing to risk losing you again,” he said in an emotionless, controlled, unapologetic tone. “You had so many triggers, Dillon. We had to let you find your way back on your own. Memory is a dangerous thing. It would either come back or it wouldn’t. We thought it best to wait it out with you.”

  I didn’t know whether I wanted to hug him or punch him. I frowned. “Didn’t any of you ever consider Rachel?”

  His eyes flashed. “Rachel, more than anyone, was positive we shouldn’t push you any faster than you could go on your own. She knew you better than any of us. We deferred to her wishes.”

  My temper spiked. “Why the hell would you do that? And why would you let her?”

  “Because she loves you, Dillon. She was afraid of losing you completely. Those days you were in the hospital, unresponsive, were the darkest in her life. She didn’t want to risk injuring you further. It was her call.”

  A decision that made the future with Rachel impossible. How could we ever be together again after all this? Why would she even want our marriage?

  “What else don’t I know?” I asked.

  “What’s left it’s best you get from Rachel,” Graham stated firmly and evasively.

  I stared at my hands wrapped together almost in a manner for prayer, feeling overwhelmed and not knowing what to do.

  “I can’t do that, Graham. I can’t let Rachel know I’ve remembered and that I love her and that I’m sorry. Not after failing her and everything I’ve done. She won’t ever forgive me and she shouldn’t. I can’t ask her to try.”

  “She doesn’t have to try to forgive you, Dillon,” Graham said sagely. “She’s never left you. For five years she’s waited for you to come back. Isn’t it time to tell her you’re here?”

  It was what I wanted.

  Ached for.

  A lifetime loving Rachel and making up for what I’d put her through. But it was a long shot. Second chances like this existed only in fairy tales.

  Would the woman I love forgive me?

  I prayed to God she would but I was terrified that she wouldn’t. And there were still missing blank spots. Things just beyond my consciousness I wasn’t ready to recall. Parts of me and Rachel still adrift and waiting for me to be strong enough to accept them.

  I hadn’
t told this to Graham yet—that my memory, while nearly fully restored, wasn’t complete—but he was right. I had to face her. Even if it was the catalyst for her at last letting go.

  There was no turning back on this long journey home, no matter where this remaining part led me.

  Rachel deserved closure and happiness.

  With or without me.

  *`~`*

  As I drove across town to Rachel’s bungalow, it was surprisingly easy to dissect the minutes of the past five years into true parts and false memories.

  I’d always believed it was a long journey home from the hospital, in spite of the fact that I couldn’t recall a single detail. Probably because I’d assumed I was at Walter Reed Medical Center on the east coast when Graham collected me to return to California, and logic filled in the blank spots in the time reel of my life in a way that made sense and I could cope with.

  But Sacramento General was less than ten miles from the home I’d shared with Rachel. The chunk of time neatly organized in my head had, in fact, been less than twenty minutes. I wondered what else I’d neatly organized into something that bore no hint of the reality. And it was the remaining blank spots that shadowed my life with Rachel I feared the most.

  What else was left to know?

  I parked in front of her house, noting her car was gone from the driveway. She was still out with Cody and I wasn’t sure if that was better or worse.

  Using the key on my ring, I let myself in and closed the door behind me. The flashing moments of the attack were more horrific now that I was where they had happened, but I didn’t shy away. I let the moments continue until they ended mercifully abruptly in what I assumed was the beating I’d taken pulling me into darkness.

  Mechanically, I made my way through the house, pausing to grab and reclaim rising memories before moving on.

  Pieces shot together into another retrieved section of my history. Graham had brought me here first from the hospital, not to the condo. A movie started to play in my head. That first day home after the attack.

  Me in the kitchen staring at Rachel.

  What was it I’d said?