Her Husband's Army Buddy (McLeod Security Book 1)

by Doris O'Connor

  Press charges against Zane. What the ever-loving fuck? Sean wouldn't have blamed his buddy if he'd finished him off for having hurt his wife like that, and as for Sandy…

  Fuck, those bruises.

  He was a fucking liability, and the minute these bloody medics declared him fit enough to leave, he'd walk and never look back. He studiously ignored the ache in his chest the mere thought of walking away from Zane and Sandy caused, and concentrated on breathing instead.

  One breath at time. He could do this. They deserved much better than the damaged goods he represented, and fuck … if Zane hadn't stopped him, he could have killed her.

  The image of sweet little Sandy popped in his mind, and he groaned out loud. At least the hospital had respected his instructions to keep both Sandy and Zane far away from him.

  He couldn't cope with another scene like the one he'd woken up to earlier today. Or was that yesterday? Time lost all meaning when you lay in one of these fucking beds, and your brain didn't seem to want to work.

  Over the roaring in his ears, he picked up the sound of the door opening again. With it came a waft of expensive perfume, which intrigued him enough to open his eyes.

  He didn't recognize the curvy brunette that entered the room, but the steely determination in her eyes set him immediately on alert.

  "What is all this nonsense about not allowing Sandy and Zane to see you, Manson? Jeez, I've met a few stubborn Doms in my time, but you take that to a whole new level."

  She crossed her arms under her chest, causing the crisp business suit she wore to strain against the buttons and tapped her foot.

  "Well, explain yourself, Manson."

  Sean pushed himself up into a half sitting position, and cursed under his breath, but he was so not going to be dictated to by a pint-sized bundle of curves with a Mistress complex, it seemed.

  "Who the fuck do you think you are?"

  "Rhonda Booker, and as of this morning your psychologist, so you better start talking, so we can get this stubborn ass of yours walking in the right direction for once."

  Sean shook his head and swallowed a wince as his brain sent shockwaves of pain down his body.

  “I don’t have a fucking shrink, nor do I need one.” His growled reply had absolutely no effect on the damn woman. She simply smiled and fixed him with a stare that would have made a lesser man squirm in his seat, or bed, as the case might be. A grim smile kicked up his lips at his thought processes, and the unwanted intruder narrowed her eyes, and stepped closer.

  In another life he’d have thought her beautiful, if far too bossy for his liking, but right now he just wanted to get rid of her.

  “Yes, Zane thought you might say that, hence he’s paying my exorbitant fees to talk some sense into you.”

  “Fuck this shit.” His shouted expletives hung in the space between them as he saw red. Any other woman would have had the good sense to back away, but not this one. She laughed—laughed for fuck’s sake—perched her backside on the side of his bed, and got right in his face.

  “Swearing like that in my presence would earn you a sore ass, if I wasn’t here in a professional capacity that is.”

  She winked at his sharp intake of breath to that statement and tapped his nose, as though he wasn’t a grown ass man who could lay her flat in one minute, concussion or not.

  He chose to ignore that little voice in his ear that he would never lay a hand on a woman without her consent, let alone a fellow dominant. Unless he was out of it in a nightmare flashback of course and that was woman was Sandy.

  Fuck!

  “Now, that we got this straightened out, care to tell me why you think you don’t need a ‘shrink’?” She mimed quotation marks around that word. “I’d have thought you could come up with a better insult than that by the way. Then again, Zane did hit you pretty hard. Doesn’t seem to have knocked any sense into that thick skull, though, has it? More’s the pity.”

  Sean glared at her as best he could, considering there seemed to be two of her waving around in front of his face at the moment.

  “You don’t know the first thing about me.” He closed his eyes against the wave of dizziness that assaulted him and cursed his weakness all over again.

  “I know the type. You ex specials are all the same. Not that I blame you. It comes with the training, I get that, but you’re on Civvie street now, and you’ll have to adjust. That’s why I’m here. To help you do that. Not right now, though. Go and rest.” Her cool fingers on his shoulders dug in as he resisted.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Manson. You want to get out of here, don’t you?” she asked, as she pushed harder. He went with the motion, and the dizziness passed as his head connected with the pillow. Horizontal he could do it seemed. Some progress at last.

  “I don’t need your help,” he grumbled.

  Again, with one of those irritating laughs.

  “Of course not, attempting to choke your lover to death when you wake up is perfectly normal behavior.”

  Remorse seized Sean the minute she uttered those words, making breathing difficult as his chest tightened in a ball of churning emotion. He screwed his eyes shut. Not that it helped. The sight of the bruises on Sandy’s throat would haunt him forever. While he couldn’t remember the details, he remembered the nightmare all too well. He’d been back in his last fucking mission, locked in a hand-to-hand combat fight to the death. His team and he had walked right into a fucking trap. A lot of good men had been lost that day, and the few that had made it out…

  He shut down that thought process, shoving the associated pain, misery, and guilt back into the box it belonged. That wasn’t his life anymore. He was better off being away from that shit, even though it seemed determined to follow him.

  “Fuck you, shrink.”

  “No thank you, you’re not my type. Besides, my boy is rather possessive of me, and the only bruises I want to see on his body are mine. Not the ones he would gain trying to knock your beef on the ground.”

  A laugh bubbled up from Sean’s throat, almost against his will. When he opened his eyes, it was to see Rhonda grin down at him.

  “Thought that would get your attention. Seriously, though, I am here to help. PTSD is my specialty, and before you balk at that label, what would you say to one of your men who was battling the demons you are, on a daily basis?”

  Sean grunted. Dammit, she had him there.

  “Exactly. You’d tell him it’s nothing to be ashamed of and you’d insist he’d seek help, right?”

  Sean didn’t bother to answer that, and Rhonda sighed.

  “Let me guess, you refused the counselling the army provided on discharge, right?”

  He attempted a shrug and swallowed his grunt of pain.

  “Thought so. Well, that isn’t an option anymore.”

  “It is, if I simply walk away. I’m not putting Sandy and Zane at risk.”

  Rhonda sighed and flicked her long hair over her shoulder.

  “And that would help, how? Don’t you think you hurt them enough? Sandy in particular?”

  She let that statement hang in the room and simply stared him down, until he felt like squirming. This bird would do well in an interrogation for sure. Balls of steel, if she had any.

  “They’re better off without me.”

  “Bull-crap, and you know that. Look, I’ve known Sandy and Zane for the last three years. My boy is Zane’s oldest friend, Jack.” She laughed as recognition no doubt showed in his face. “Yeah, I see you get me now. Know this, soldier, there is no way on God’s earth that I’m going to let you walk away from them without fixing this. What happened was an unfortunate by-product of your issues, but we can work on that. Neither Sandy nor Zane blame you. If anything, Zane blames himself, and—”

  “Not his fault at all.” Sean interrupted her, earning himself the disapproving arch of one elegant eyebrow.

  “Quite. In any case, I’ve referred him to one of my colleagues to talk this over, if he needs to, but Zane isn’t the probl
em here. You are.” She tapped one perfectly manicured red tipped index finger into his chest. “Walking away from the two people who love you would be an insane move, and you know that.”

  Sean tried to depute that ridiculous notion, but his throat wouldn’t work. The nonsensical croak he managed to produce caused Rhonda to hold a glass of water to his lips. He gratefully sucked up a few sips of the tepid liquid through the plastic straw and tried again.

  “Who said anything about love? We had sex, that’s all.” The lie stuck in his throat, and Rhonda fixed him with what undoubtedly was her Domme look. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and it took every ounce of his training to keep his expression neutral.

  “Even if that was true for you, and I don’t know you well enough to assess the accuracy of that statement, it was certainly much more for Sandy and Zane. Jack told me the tales about you and him. And how he ended it all when he met Sandy. He left the service, you stayed, and that should have been it, but it wasn’t, was it? He never stopped loving you.”

  “He should have forgotten about me. He and Sandy were perfectly happy before I sought him out. I never meant to come between that, and fuck.”

  “Yes, quite. Well, having spoken to Sandy at length, and having been her friend, I would dispute that. I can say that much without giving away confidences.” She smiled grimly at his sharp intake of breath in response to that statement. “It was her idea to invite you to dinner. To meet you, and to see who had her husband so enthralled. What happened after… Well, let me just say that. There is only one other man who causes that look in her eyes when she talks about him, and that’s Zane.”

  She got up and put the glass back on the side table.

  “Think about that, soldier, and get your head out of your ass. I’ll be in touch when you’ve been released so that we can arrange some sessions to make a start on helping you let go of your other demons. Oh, and one other thing.” She looked back at him, one hand poised on the door handle. “If you walk away from this chance at happiness, you’re nothing but a gutless coward, despite the recommendations you left the service with.” She paused and grinned. “Yeah, I looked you up, soldier. And before you spout any of that love at first sight doesn’t exist nonsense.” She raised up her left hand, and her engagement ring sparkled in the light. “I knew from the minute Jack walked into the room that he was mine. Took him a few days to accept, but then he is a man and you lot tend to think with your gonads.” She winked, and before he could even blink she was gone.

  It left Sean with a lot to process over the next forty-eight hours the medics insisted on keeping him in for observation, but, eventually he knew what he had to do. Any other option hurt too much.

  ****

  Sandy threw her pen down and rubbed her stinging eyes. Try as she might she simply couldn’t concentrate on the notebooks in front of her. Her year two class’s handwriting was difficult enough to decipher, especially this particular six-year-old’s. What he lacked in skills he made up for in enthusiasm. Unfortunately, it didn’t lend itself to being legible. Let alone when her mind was elsewhere. Namely with a stubborn ass of man in a hospital bed across town. She’d been refused entry to his room every time she tried, had only been able to hand over the clothing he’d left at her home that fateful night. Had that really only been five days ago?

  She had taken some comfort from washing his stuff and dropping it ‘round, even though Zane had told her not to bother. It was one of the rare moments she’d dug her heels in with her husband and Dom.

  “I don’t care if he doesn’t want to see me. I’m still going to try, and you can’t stop me.”

  It was testament to how much that night weighed on her Sir’s mind that he’d let her get away with that outburst. Ordinarily speaking, she would have earned herself a sore ass for speaking to him like that. Not this time. Zane had sighed, scrubbed a hand over his face, and gone out the door to work. If she’d thought he’d worked long hours before, she hadn’t seen anything yet. He typically left at the crack of dawn and didn’t return until late in the evening.

  Sandy could have easily resented his actions, had she not understood the reason for them. Work had always been Zane’s solace when something bothered him. Deeply hurt by Sean’s refusal to see him, and troubled by the guilt he carried over his perceived part of both Sandy and Sean getting hurt, he did the only thing he could do. Bury himself in work.

  No matter how many times she told him it wasn’t his fault, it made no difference. There was a distance between them. A Sean-shaped hole that only the man himself could fill.

  With that unsettling thought she got up to make herself a coffee. The maker was halfway through his process when a taxi pulled up outside the house. She tore her eyes away from Sean’s motorbike—a permanent reminder of the man himself—as though they needed that, and the milk carton she’d taken out of the fridge slipped from her hands. Milk splattered over her socks, and up the side of the cabinet, but she hardly noticed the mess, because the man who slowly unfolded his large frame out of the taxi was Sean.

  He grimaced as he straightened as though he was still in pain, and then stood regarding the house through narrowed eyes, as though he was debating something with himself. Sandy drank in the sight of him and sighed. The stay in hospital had done nothing to quell his raw sex appeal, and her stomach flipped over when he picked up the duffle bag she’d used to bring in his clothes. He hadn’t shaved, the days’ old stubble on his strong jaw giving him that dangerous look. Even the white patch still covering his stitches couldn’t detract from that.

  Lordy me, she was a hopeless case, and, surely, she should rot in hell for having these thoughts about him when Zane wasn’t here? Before she could come up with any conclusion to her convoluted thought processes, his loud rap on the door summoned her. Grimacing at the mess at her feet, she hastily pulled off her ruined socks, and hurried to the front door. A quick look at her disheveled appearance in the hallway mirror made her run her hand through her long auburn hair in a vain effort to tame the bird’s nest impression she had going on. Nothing at all she could do about the shapeless joggers she was wearing and the equally old but comfortable oversized t-shirt, which tended to slip off her shoulders, or her bra-less state and the make-up free face.

  Open the door already before he changes his mind.

  With that internal pep talk she yanked the door open and fixed a smile on her face only to see Sean’s departing back.

  “Wait, I’m here. Don’t go.”

  Her breath stalled in her lungs when he turned slowly and smiled.

  “I was just going to get the bike. I—”

  “No, you can’t.” Sandy stormed out of her door and grabbed his arm before she’d even stopped interrupting him. “You can’t ride a bike with your head injury. They must have told you that, and, oh for goodness’ sakes, come in.”

  When he didn’t respond to her insistent tug, she looked up at him and promptly lost herself in the tender expression in his blue eyes.

  “Zane must be slacking if he lets you get away with being this bossy, little one.”

  Oh, my goodness, the intonation he put on those last two words. Every submissive cell in her body sighed, and she dropped her gaze to the floor.

  “Please, Sir, come in.”

  His sharp intake of breath meant she had to look up at him. Conflicting emotions chased each other across his face, before he smiled and nodded.

  “As you ask me so nicely.” He seemed to notice her bare feet and the milk which was slowly seeping into the bottom of her joggers and frowned. “What on earth happened to you?”

  “Oh, it was nothing. I just dropped the milk, that’s all. I, erm, best go and clear that up.”

  Sandy dashed back into the kitchen, all too aware of Sean’s gaze on her butt as he followed. Just like that they were back to the sizzling sexual awareness that had existed between them from the minute they’d met. Only this time round it was ten times more potent because she knew what he looked like naked. Remember
ed all too well what his large, calloused hands felt like sliding over her naked skin, and the skill of his lips and tongue on her sensitive parts.

  “Jesus, let me help.”

  Sean’s exclamation as he took in the mess she’d left behind in the kitchen made her turn and bump into him. She hadn’t realized he was that close and made a grab for his shoulders to steady herself as her feet slipped on the messy floor. Her breasts made contact with his hard chest, and, groaning, Sean grasped handfuls of her ass and lifted her as effortlessly as though she wasn’t far too heavy, and he hadn’t just come out of hospital.

  “Don’t. Put me down. Your head?”

  “Will be fine, stop fussing, woman.” He deposited her on the kitchen counter and stepped between her splayed legs when she wouldn’t let go of him. His gaze dropped to her throats where purple marks remained. It was just as well it was half-term and she wasn’t at school or she would have had to wear polo necks all week.

  His jaw tightened, and she held her breath when he slid one hand up to her throat and caressed the marks. Her heart rate went into overdrive, as his gaze connected with hers. So much hurt and regret in those amazing blue eyes of his. An echo of her emotions ever since it happened.

  “I’m so sorry. That will never happen again. I’m getting help. I’ve got several sessions scheduled with Rhonda already.”

  His hoarse promise meant she had to blink away tears, and he swore softly when he noticed.

  Sandy had to clear her throat several times to get the words out she needed to say to clear the air.

  “I know, she told me, and it’s okay, truly. It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  The slow, almost absent-minded motion of his thumb across her throat stopped, and he cupped her face instead, and leaned his forehead on hers. So close, they were breathing each other’s air, yet so far away at the same time. Sandy wanted nothing more than to breach the distance between them, to show him in the most direct way that it truly was okay. That she trusted him with her body, and her heart. The realization how much she’d missed him hit her hard. It shouldn’t be possible to feel this much this quickly, but it had been just the same when she’d met Zane.