“I see.”
The wooden answer snagged his attention. Distance covered her eyes and her face held no hint of her thoughts. But he didn’t need a hint. He knew her inside and out, and his words had hurt her. Nice move, asshole. “Angelina, I didn’t mean—”
She held up her hand. “No, don’t,” she said. “You don’t need to explain yourself to me. You made my place in your life abundantly clear more than fifteen years ago, which is why you have no place in mine now.”
“You think I wanted to let you go? All I ever wanted, from the first moment I saw you, was to make you mine and keep you with me.”
She let out a sarcastic huff and crossed her arms over her chest. “You didn’t want it enough, or you never would have broken things off.”
“You’re wrong. I loved you too much to let you waste your life waiting for me. I knew it would be years before I came back to the civilian life, and I also knew that I’d return a different man than the one you fell in love with…if I came back at all.”
He heard Angie’s sharp inhale, then nothing. No rush of released air or sounds of her breathing. Dozer was ready to reach out and shake her to make sure she was okay when she finally exhaled and spoke, her tone defeated. “I mourned you, you know. Not right away. For a year, I kept thinking you’d realize what a mistake you made and you’d show up to take me in your arms and promise to never push me away again.”
Damn, she was killing him. He didn’t think a night had passed that first year that he didn’t dream of the same thing. It’d been harder than he ever imagined to stay away from her after he got out of basic training.
“That year took a toll on me. So much hoping and waiting, it wore me down so much that my mother finally intervened. She forced me to realize I was holding onto something that no longer existed. That what we had was gone forever, and I wouldn’t be able to move on until I accepted it, mourned the loss, and found closure.”
“Sounds like you pretended I was dead. Wishful thinking?” His words had a sharp edge he regretted. He had no right to be angry with her, but the idea that she made herself forget him pissed him off.
“Even if it was, you don’t have the right to judge me for it. We each handled things in our own way. You ran away from my love, and eventually, I accepted that and moved on just as you did. End of story.”
Rage bubbled beneath the surface like a hot spring preparing to erupt into a geyser. Rage that deserved to be directed at himself rather than the innocent beauty in front of him. “You want that to be the end of the story so badly? Fine.” He slapped his palms together like the covers of a book. “It’s done. Consider it ended.”
Angie studied him through narrowed eyes. “Really. Just like that?” She sounded like she expected the other shoe to drop at any second. There’s my smart angel.
“Just like that. You’re right,” he said casually, “it was a long time ago. We’re different people now. Time to close up that part of our lives and move on.”
A flash of disappointment sparked in her golden-brown eyes before disappearing just as quickly, but not before Dozer saw it and held onto it for all he was worth. “Exactly,” she agreed. “We need to move on. Finally, you’re seeing reason.”
Dozer altered his position to slowly maneuver her back against the side of the shed. It took her a second to realize his movements weren’t random. When she looked up at him with questions in her eyes, his only response was the predatory gaze he kept leveled on her as he advanced.
“Gav—Dozer, w-what are you doing?”
Goddamn it, it pissed him off that she corrected herself from calling him by his given name. He hadn’t let anyone other than his mom and sister use it since he left Angie. It hadn’t seemed right. In the army, people only addressed each other by their last names, call signs, or ranks, and after becoming a different man from when he’d been with Angelina, it made sense to leave the name he’d gone by back then in the past with the rest of it.
But hearing anything other than “Gavin” come from her sweet lips was like acid dripping into his ears. He’d let it go this time. As much as he hated it, it wasn’t mission one right now. “Doing like you said. I’m moving on.”
Her back hit the shed. Her only option for escape was to go around him, and if she took the slightest step in either direction, he’d let her go. This wasn’t about trapping, tricking, or manipulating. It was about proving to her that she wasn’t as done with him as she thought or claimed.
“Moving on to what?”
Mouth curling into a wicked grin, he said, “Our sequel.”
“You’re crazy, you know that?” she whispered.
“You’re right about that.” Dozer leaned forward enough to brace his hands on either side of her head. Her scent, spicy and exotic, just like her, hit him with a barrage of memories of all the nights he’d buried his face in her neck while holding her close. “Because ever since I saw you at the station, I’ve been slowly going out of my mind. I remember everything, Angel. How you taste, the little sighs you make when I close my lips over the pulse point in your neck, every curve of that luscious body, and the way it arches into me when I suck those dark nipples into my mouth.”
It didn’t matter how many years had passed. Dozer still knew how to read Angelina de la Vega. Pupils dilated, heartbeat rapid, shallow breaths through parted lips. His girl was turned on as fuck.
“You’re not playing fair,” she said, swallowing thickly.
“All is fair in love and war, baby. And this?” His eyes dropped to feast on the vision of her glossy lips before lifting to pin her with his hungry gaze. “This is both.”
In perfect sync, they crashed together, ravaging each other with tongues, teeth, and hands. More than a decade of built-up longing and desire swelled and broke through the years of separation. Dozer grabbed her under the ass and lifted. Angie instinctively wrapped her legs around his waist, lining up her sex with the erection he’d been carrying around ever since he’d seen her a week ago.
“Gavin.”
Fuck yes. Her whisper of his given name was like an answered prayer. “Right here, Angel,” he ground out between kisses. “Not going anywhere.”
His body pinned hers against the shed, freeing his hands to sink into her hair. Thick and heavy, it felt like silk on his skin as he held her head and angled it to take the kiss deeper. Nails scraped the back of his neck. Barely a notch on the general pain scale, but powerful as hell in the pleasure/pain category. The tingles burned down his spine and into his balls.
Dozer couldn’t remember needing anything as badly as this woman. Claiming her as his once and for all. Marking her so that every man who came near would know she belonged to a strong male they didn’t want to fuck with.
She was his. Always had been, always would be.
The bright lights of a car turning onto their street swung over them like a prison spotlight. An RPG could blow up the shed behind them and Dozer wouldn’t have given a shit, but the brief interruption startled Angie enough that she pulled back.
Realization of what they’d done, what they might’ve ended up doing had that car not come, filled her eyes. “Oh God, what are we doing?”
“Ang—”
“Put me down, please,” she said, her pitch climbing. Slowly, he lowered her to the ground, but he didn’t take his hands from the curves of her hips. “Thank you. I have to go.”
“No, you don’t. You’re overthinking this, Angel. Focus on how great it felt to be like that with each other again. The chemistry between us is still off the fucking charts.”
“I’d be a fool to argue that point after what just happened. But chemistry is all we have left, and that’s not good enough, not for me.” She moved around him, and he turned to watch her take careful steps backward. “There’s no sequel for us. The faster you accept that, the better off we’ll be. Good-bye, Dozer.”
Forcing himself to stay rooted to his position, Dozer watched as she spun on her heel and started to walk back to the house with
her arms wrapped around her middle, like she was trying to hold herself together, trying to prevent everything from breaking apart, and it fucking killed him. Because he was the one who’d been holding the sledgehammer.
Chapter Fifteen
The small bathroom was so thick with steam, he could barely see the white marble vanity as he stepped out of the shower. Typically, Erik preferred his bathing water on the cooler side—especially after a hard tour at the firehouse—but this time he cranked that fucking handle all the way over, hoping to burn away the memories as sure as the water scalded his skin. Even then, he’d had to scrub himself three times before the grime and grit of the desert no longer covered his body and the smell of soap finally replaced the stench of blood in his nostrils. Then he’d braced his hands on the tiled wall and didn’t move a muscle until the water sluicing over him had turned frigid.
Jazz and Harley were gone. The sharp loss continued to slice through his heart, the pain as fresh now as the day it happened. It was Erik’s fault his men had returned home in caskets draped in the flag of their country. Not the enemy’s fault. Not friendly fire’s. Not an accident’s.
His.
His fault that Jazz never made it back to his young wife and the six-month-old son he’d never had the chance to hold. His fault Harley’s parents lost their only son and his fiancée was made a widow before she ever got to call him her husband.
Still dripping, he gripped the edge of the damp counter and hung his head low between his shoulders. He took slow, deep breaths and tried the positive-thinking exercise the major had taught him, running through the list of people and things he was thankful for: his family, the BFD brotherhood, and each of his team brothers.
Then he got to Olivia.
Sweet, funny, smart, sexy Olivia. She was everything he wasn’t. Light, innocent, pure. If any of those had existed in him at one time, they’d been long gone. Since returning from that last tour, where everything had gone so fucking wrong, he’d struggled to keep the darkness pushed down far enough that it couldn’t pierce his consciousness. Tried to keep the faces of his dead brothers out of his dreams and the sound of hundreds of guns from between his ears.
Then he’d met Olivia and everything seemed to change. Before her, he’d never laughed so often, smiled so easily. She made him feel lighter, less burdened. He hadn’t even realized it until one of his recent sessions when Dr. Marion asked him to describe in one word how Olivia made that part of him feel, the part where he kept all of the bad shit in his head. After careful consideration, he’d smiled and answered, “Quiet.”
It was like her presence muted that darkness with her incredible light and let him feel the good stuff that was still left. Around her, he felt almost whole again. Not necessarily the man he once was—war had irreparably obliterated that version of himself—but the man he was capable of being now and the desire to become the man she deserved.
Erik cursed and shook his head. It was a damn good thing being naive didn’t get you killed in the civilian world. He’d actually believed he had a chance at becoming that man. He’d foolishly thought that all it took to quiet his demons was her presence.
Then he came to, huddled on the kitchen floor with Olivia talking him down from the proverbial ledge like a terrified child. If that wasn’t a kick in his fucking balls. When a deadly—or at least formerly deadly—soldier needed his girlfriend to save his ass from a hallucination… Fuck.
Erik was starting to understand why so many servicemen and -women survived the war only to come home and punch their own clocks. If he had more of this shit to look forward to, getting a one-way ticket to eternal damnation would be the lesser of two evils. Because acting like a helpless pussy in front of Olivia? That shit he couldn’t deal with. No goddamn way. Not if something like cheap Walmart noisemakers could convince him he was taking on enemy fire. What if the next time it happened, he grabbed her, thinking he was going hand-to-hand with a Tango, and wrapped his big fingers around her delicate throat?
He saw himself strangling the life from the woman he loved, the horrifying image flickering in his mind like an epileptic premonition. “Oh Christ,” he rasped. It kicked him square in the chest, sucking all the air from his lungs. It roiled in his gut like rancid meat, and he shivered with a cold sweat that defied the humidity in the room.
His stomach cramped, urging him to vomit, and he briefly considered collapsing over the toilet. Maybe the physical purge would do the same for his mind. Then he could drain that bottle of whiskey he noticed on Mr. Jones’s wet bar upstairs and hope to Christ he passed out into a void of nothingness until the morning.
Running the cold water, Erik splashed himself in the face, over his head, and on the back of his neck, trying to eliminate the fevered flash. He dragged in deep breaths through his nose and exhaled through his mouth to fight the waves of nausea rolling through him. Once he got past the worst of it, he shut off the water and lifted his gaze to the steam-covered mirror.
With a quick swipe of his hand, Erik cleared a line of fog and stared into his dark amber eyes, assessing the man reflected there. The man who couldn’t control his own brain, his own reactions. Couldn’t trust himself around anyone who didn’t have the strength and ability to take him down whenever he was too weak to fight against the terrors in his head.
He wanted to shatter the glass with his fists, to reel from the pain and feel the sticky warmth of his blood coating his scarred flesh. He was amped as fuck, every inch of his body battle-hard, like he was fresh off a firefight and riding a mission high.
Weak. Too weak.
Weakness only leads to more weakness.
Fuck that shit. He wasn’t about to give those extremist bastards the satisfaction of breaking him. He’d survived their hell over and fucking over again; he’d be damned if he’d lie down on his home turf and let it kill him now. And when he came out on the other side, maybe Olivia would still be there waiting for him.
Then again, maybe not. Now that she’d finally had a relationship after the death of her husband, if Erik wasn’t in the picture anymore, she’d probably move on. Date other men. Men who didn’t have to worry every minute of every day whether something would trigger a debilitating flashback. FUCK!
Erik made the decision right then and there that he’d be on death’s door before he’d accept that he lost her forever because of four fucking letters. PTSD. He didn’t care what he had to do or how many times he had to do it. He’d beat this thing. And then he was coming back to claim Livvie once and for all. If she found someone else in the meantime, he’d fight for her, fight to get her back.
“Erik?” He tensed at the sound of her voice through the bathroom door, every muscle tight enough to make him shake with the exertion. Steeling himself for the conversation to come, he wrapped a towel around his waist, rolled his shoulders in a futile attempt to get them to relax, then walked out of the bathroom…and froze.
The overhead light was off, but a group of pillar candles held dancing flames on the dresser across the room. They provided adequate light to see by as the mirror behind them doubled their efforts. Music—some kind of easy listening shit that doctors’ offices played in their lobbies—piped in from hidden speakers in the corners of the bedroom, and Olivia stood at the foot of the bed, absently wringing her hands in front of her.
Fuck. Either she wanted to teach him how to do meditative yoga or she wanted to set the mood for a slow seduction. Neither option sounded good to him. Not now, when his blood flowed hot. When his head was filled with ghosts. When his muscles literally vibrated from an overdose of testosterone and endorphins, a volatile cocktail he needed to work off in one of two ways: a punishing workout or punishing sex.
He’d be damned if he’d let himself anywhere near her in this manic state.
Olivia took a step toward him, but he held a hand out to halt her. “Don’t.” His voice, low and tight from using every ounce of his restraint, held a bite he hadn’t intended. The hurt and confusion on her face might as well
be a gunshot wound to the gut because if he didn’t fix it, it’d be a slow and painful death. “I’m sorry, I can’t be around anyone right now. I’m not in a good place, and I need time to sort through my shit. Give me the night. We can talk in the morning.”
Her softly arched brows pulled down in a V. “The last thing I plan on doing is leaving you alone tonight,” she said. “We don’t have to make love if you don’t want. We can lie in bed and watch a movie, talk, or just go to sleep. But I won’t leave you.”
He tried like hell to gentle his tone, but every time he opened his mouth, his words dripped with the acid of his shame. “Sorry, sweetheart, but none of those options are going to work for me. Not tonight or any night until I can get my shit together.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Exactly like it sounds, Doc. I’ve been fooling myself, walking around like nothing’s fucking wrong with me. Like I’m on vacation and not suspended from my job for being a goddamn mental case.” His chest heaved with agitation. Fists clenched at his sides, Erik forced the next statement past his lips. “Like I’m good enough to be the man you deserve.”
“Erik, I don’t want to hear you put yourself down like that again, do you hear me?”
Her indignance seemed to strengthen her resolve to fight him on this. Her spine straightened and chin lifted like a woman who expected to be obeyed. He hadn’t noticed her move, but when she rested her hand on his heart, he realized she must have been walking as she spoke. He wanted to place his hand over hers, to pull her against him and wrap her up tight so she couldn’t leave. But he held his position and kept his gaze steely with his shields up.
“You’ve already come so far,” she said, her tone gentler. “You can’t discredit all the hard work you’ve put in just because you had a setback.”
“A setback?” he rumbled. “You make it sound like I forgot to add the eggs in a cookie recipe and have to start over. That’s a setback. I fucking hallucinated, Olivia. I could have seriously hurt you. Hell, I could have killed you.”
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