by Dee Tenorio
Yes, she would. He did. Every goddamned day.
She sighed as if she’d heard him. “Some days, I swear I’m getting through to you. Then things like this happen—”
This being her asking about his time in ForceRecon/MARSOC. Tell me what it was like in Afghanistan was how she put her question. “These things wouldn’t happen if you’d stop pushing.”
“Oh, like I was the one who pushed you on Saturday?”
Fuck. He should have seen this coming. “I was doing my job.”
“Your job is not to knock the shit out of the people you arrest!”
No, it wasn’t. But no one could claim it didn’t work.
“Did you even feel better after?”
Better wasn’t the word. He could breathe after. Something he hadn’t been able to do when he got circled by five guys on Saturday, a fact she didn’t seem to be taking into account. Once that choking sense of the world closing in on him had set in, the panic went off and he was back in that last battlefield, fighting for his life while the sun burned everything to dust. Most of the time, he could keep that feeling at bay. Most of the time, he stayed in white-knuckled control. If she thought he enjoyed losing it, she was out of her damn mind.
“I’m not saying you have to tell me the scary stuff,” she continued. “Shit, start with the weather.”
Oh, sure, the easy stuff…
“Anything. Little things that don’t matter. Because pretending the last ten years of your life didn’t happen sure as shit isn’t working for you!”
He bristled, the muscles in his neck tight, his hands balled up under his folded arms. “Fifteen.”
“What?” Her reply was still a loud yell, softened at the end only when she realized he wasn’t arguing with her.
“Years. Fifteen years. Not ten.” His throat threatened to close on him, but the words managed to get out.
She blinked—she couldn’t be any more surprised than he was—but got her bearings pretty quick. “You were a baby when you signed up.”
He thought back, remembering himself as he’d walked with his father into the meeting with the recruiter. So proud of himself, that everything he’d been working for, dreaming of, was finally about to begin. Failure never even crossed his mind. “You couldn’t have told me that back then.”
She smiled. “No one could tell me much of anything when I was eighteen, either.”
“Not even your parole officer?”
“Ha. Ha. The Ice Man joketh.” But she laughed and added slyly, “Not even him.”
It was bizarre for him to feel the urge to smile at the memory. Feeling his father’s pride like a mantle as they shook hands before he left home for boot camp. Those times were untainted in his mind and as a result, he’d nearly forgotten about them. His mother’s care package of food for the bus trip from Seattle down to San Diego. Sandwiches. He closed his eyes, tension slipping the smallest bit from his shoulders. Two ham, one turkey. And a tin full of two dozen chocolate chip cookies for his sweet tooth.
“That all seems like a million years ago.”
She leaned back, sunlight peeking through the leaves above her. “Can I ask you a question, without you biting my head off? Nothing about your experiences, I promise.”
He thought about it, weighing what she could possibly ask. “All right.”
“What made you want to join the Marines? Why not the Army or the Navy?”
He stared at her. That wasn’t at all what he’d expected. “There was never anything else for me.”
“What do you mean?”
Just that. It hadn’t been so much a choice as knowing exactly where he belonged and being willing to prove it. “You can’t just join the Marines. People fail basic training all the time. You have to earn it. Become one. Be worthy of it.”
And that was the crux of his problem. He wasn’t worthy, not anymore.
“They are the first to arrive and the last to leave any conflict. Every conflict. I admired that. Wanted to be that for people who needed me. The honor they have, the code…” Honor, Courage, Commitment. Never give up, never give in. It had defined his life, his being, for so long. Even now, his way a vague path he could barely traverse, he held onto the tenants he’d been taught. They were all that held him together. “It’s who I always wanted to be.”
Who he wished he still was.
Her inscrutable look slowly turned into a patient smile, as if he’d done something right. “Then you’re a lucky guy. Most folks have no idea who they want to be, especially when they get lost.”
Once a Marine, always a Marine. That’s what his drill sergeants told him. For them, for the men he’d fought with, it was true. For him, it was an unattainable goal. Realizing it made all the anger rush through him in a hot, bitter wave.
“What would you know about being lost?” Her life hadn’t been easy, but he doubted she knew what it was like to lose her connection to everything and everyone. She couldn’t understand what it was like to not even know who she was supposed to be anymore.
“I watched my father be lost for years,” she answered softly. “Those are my only memories of him. He was a kind man. A wonderful, broken man, and he loved me more than anything. But there was this part of him I couldn’t reach. This…pain I could never save him from.”
But she’d wanted to. Cade could see the longing no poker face could hide. Just the sight of it tore whole swaths of the cotton from his mind. He recognized that longing. Knew it to the pits of his being.
“Then suddenly he was gone and I was left with Red Dog.”
He didn’t need empathy to imagine what that must have been like. A girl and a murderer, tied together by blood and law.
“I was the lost one, then. Angry at my father, angry at my uncle, angry at everyone and everything because there was no way out and no one would help me. They just hated me for belonging to him. So I hurt myself over and over again trying to find someplace to belong. Some way I could be myself and not be so fucking afraid all the time.”
“Did you?”
She nodded, the slightest dip of her chin. “It took a long time, but…I realized if I kept going the way I was, I’d end up exactly like my dad. Or worse, like Red Dog. No soul, no heart, nothing worth living for. If nothing else, I didn’t want that.”
“Is that what you’re trying to do here? All these visits? All your talk about therapy? You’re trying to save me?” He shouldn’t have been shocked. He hadn’t believed her Let’s-Be-Friends bullshit in the first place. Somehow, he felt the sting of disappointment anyway.
Her slim brow rose. “You think it’s too late for redemption?”
The verbal dodge just irritated him. “I don’t have the first clue what that word means. And I’m not going to find out, either.” Blood never washed away, and his hands were covered in it.
“You’re not missing much,” she conceded in that offhand way of hers that never failed to throw him off. “I’m not trying to save you. I’m the last person to try to save anyone. But you can’t blame a girl for hoping you’ll want to save yourself, can you?”
He wanted to have an answer for her, one that would make her leave him alone and stop pouring salt in his wounds. Until he realized he couldn’t find it. Or maybe this was just one of those times that there wasn’t one.
…
He should have known from the look on her face when she came over the top of the grassy knoll that he was in for trouble. Four months of her random visits had given him plenty of time to memorize every one of her expressions, and this one was decidedly impish.
Still, he nearly choked when she poked disinterestedly at her salad and asked, “So what’s your favorite sexual position?”
“Trina, goddamn it—”
“Don’t get your skivvies in a twist, it was just a question.”
“It’s none of your damn business.” It was no one’s business. Least of all hers.
“Well, I’ll tell you mine.”
“Don’t.” Gritting his teeth wasn’t going to cut
it if she insisted on pushing this topic.
“Ass up. Gets me every time.”
Cade covered his eyes with his hand and dragged his palm down his face so hard it hurt. Nope, not enough to get that mental picture out of his head. Maybe if he slapped himself…
“Doesn’t matter if I’m standing up, or on my knees or flat on my stomach—though, oh my God, that one is my absolute favorite—they all work for me. Three pumps, maybe four—”
“Trina!” He looked over at the woman lying back on her towel, staring up at the canopy of leaves overhead, her hips moving suggestively from side to side. “Why are you telling me this?”
And for the love of God, why wouldn’t she stop?
“You don’t want to know?”
Of course he wanted to know, damn it. That was the problem. From day one of these odd little lunch dates, he’d wanted to know more about her. Why else would he sit and listen as she told her felon-tastic childhood stories? While she talked so much she made his entire head ache. And damn, but the woman could prod with her questions and her jokes. Her attempts to hit on him. And just when he’d be ready to explode and tell her to get the hell away, she’d disappear for days at a time. Making him miss her enough to be excited when she came back.
Him. Who didn’t miss anyone.
“We’re not talking about sex,” he told her through his teeth. Again. She brought it up so much it was starting to be all he could think about whenever he saw her.
“If we can’t talk about it, can we at least have it?” She flipped over onto her stomach, a neat little movement that didn’t even ripple her towel. “You’ve been holding out on me for months now.”
“Don’t you think about anything else?”
“Not since you moved to town,” she grumbled, dropping her forehead on her hands.
“Well, try.”
She responded only by lifting her middle fingers in twin salute.
His sentiments exactly. “Things okay at the bar?”
“I come here so I can not think about the bar,” she answered, still facedown.
“You come here to drive me insane.”
She lifted her head, finally smiling. “Nah, that’s just a bonus.”
The woman made no damn sense. Lately, she’d even started showing up at his house. His house. In the middle of the night, wheedling for a safe place to crash despite having her own damn house a hell of a lot closer to her bar. Needing a quick patch-up from a run-in at work or dinner or something or nothing. The one place in this town where he was supposed to be able to get away from everyone and everything and she was there. All the time. The biggest miracle? He hardly cared.
Because, somehow, he’d started looking forward to seeing her.
Listening to her low, husky laugh. Seeing those long, long legs stretched out in front of her, utterly comfortable next to him. Hearing her stories of stealing bikes in her teen years, which she claimed she’d done to justify the judgment of the townspeople, who lumped her crimes with her uncle’s. The worst part was the way she smiled when she told him these things. As if he were important to her. As if his opinion on her past mattered. Every time she did that, it was like the god damned sky cracked open and the fucking sun poured down on him.
Sun that didn’t hurt.
He hated it. Hated how much he’d come to depend on her face. Her voice. Even her unvarnished—and largely unwanted—advice. He needed her now. Just the sound of her breathing next to him, if only for a stolen hour. She steadied him for the hours when she wasn’t there. The uncertainty he felt around her might as well have been acid in his veins, but somehow…he’d become addicted to the burn.
It was a weakness she took advantage of at every chance. Gently—sometimes, not so gently—tugging the cotton from his mind, dragging the numbness away layer by agonizing layer. And he’d been letting her. Letting her dig out tiny pieces of his past, just to keep her with him another minute longer.
Nothing about his missions, because he’d rather rip out his own tongue than relive any of that, but she’d managed to weasel some less destructive memories from him. Rank and unit, a few training stories, the size of spiders he’d seen in the Helmand Province and his undying appreciation for hedgehogs as a result. He’d even told her about his cabin, buried in the mountains of Warrick, just to find out what she thought about fishing. As if he’d ever ask her there. As if she’d ever say yes.
But sometimes, especially in the nights when she crawled onto his bed as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to do, the words actually found their way to his lips.
And got no farther.
…
Katrina rubbed her eyes with the heel of one hand, twisting her key in the lock to the bar with the other. Six thirty was too damn early to be coming back to the bar, but there was too much to do. She’d slept at Cade’s again—where she was starting to worry she might be growing her virginity back—which made it so much harder to wake up. He had a way of getting her to actually relax and rest, but he had an early shift and she had paperwork to do. She’d put it off as long as she could. Definitely longer than she should. Her monthly appointment with Red Dog—AKA, check in with her superiors—was coming, which meant a long drive and a hell of a lot of demands for results she couldn’t pull out of her ass. Cade still didn’t know about those meetings, but there were a lot of things Cade didn’t know about.
Her deal with Shana.
Her deal with Frank, to spy on him.
Her wiretap on Frank’s phone line.
Her ten-year career with the Drug Enforcement Administration.
That was the secret that cut like glass in her throat every time she swallowed it. But as long as he thought of her as a convict, a bartender attached to his enemy, he kept those walls of suspicion around himself. Kept her at arm’s length. It stung, but it also kept him safe. Gave her a chance to protect him—
“Have a nice night?”
Katrina looked up from pulling her keys out of the door. Frank waited on a barstool, his arm resting casually on the bar itself, his glass full of amber liquid. She bit back a sigh of irritation when she noted the bottle in his hand. Asshole. “What did I tell you about helping yourself to my whiskey?”
“It’s the only thing worth drinking in this whole place.” No, it was the only thing locked up in her desk. He just liked to prove he could get inside her office whenever he wanted. Now she’d have to check to see if he’d found the gun taped behind the center drawer…
She circled the bar, tossing her purse underneath the register. It was always best to keep something solid between her and Frank. He couldn’t slit her throat from this distance. “To what do I owe the…pleasure of your company?”
They didn’t have any illusions between them. The enmity was almost as thick as the resentment. Without her, he’d have full access to everything Red Dog owned. Without him, the world would just be a better place.
“You have anything new on the cop?”
She smirked. “Since yesterday?”
“What? Your pet psycho doesn’t believe in pillow talk?”
Bitter laughter escaped as she crossed her arms. “Yeah, you’re the first thing he thinks about after he comes.” Not that she would know. Unfortunately, her favorite deputy was not the putty in her hands Frank believed. If only.
Frank just stared at her. If there was nothing else to hate about him, that gaze would be it. Lifeless. Like a lizard slowly sizing you up for an evening meal. Slowly. Remorselessly. And he’d just keep staring at her until he got what he wanted. Or tried to kill her for it.
“No,” she finally answered him, because she had too much shit to do to die today. “He didn’t talk about you. He didn’t ask about you. In fact, I’m pretty sure you never crossed his mind once last night.”
“And you?” Frank straightened slowly, threat in every movement. It was all the warning he’d give that she was pushing her luck. “Did you ask him anything?”
Nothing Frank would be interested
in. Frank didn’t care that she’d stroked Cade’s hair off his forehead in the dark, because she knew he was having a nightmare. That Cade had held her hand afterward, gently. Protectively.
He didn’t trust her. Didn’t know her secrets, though she’d found herself revealing parts of her past she’d sworn never to remember. But he held her hand like he was the one protecting her.
Like fuck she’d break that fragile bond for Frank.
“Same thing I always ask for. More.”
The bar wasn’t wide enough, it turned out. Fast as a rattler, he reached for her, his hand closing around her throat and yanking her forward. She couldn’t gasp, couldn’t even grab the edge of the polished wood before her ribs slammed into it. His grip simply tightened, his face in hers, every violent thought in his mind right there in his eyes for her to see.
He held her there, practically suspended, long enough that she’d have no doubt he could snap her neck and not blink. “Your uncle can’t protect you from me, you smart-mouthed bitch. I will end you and that cop you’re screwing the second you stop being useful to me. Understand?”
Her fingers stretched out, the need for oxygen turning the edges of her vision black. She could fight or she could give him what he wanted. Live to fight another day, her self-defense instructors had drilled into her. Lie, maneuver, seduce. Whatever had to be done to get to the next minute alive. She nodded.
He tightened his grip, that cruel smile little more than a garish mask before he let her go.
It took everything she had not to drop to the bar surface and wheeze. She couldn’t help the cough, though, her hand immediately coming up to wipe the feel of his steely fingers away.
Maybe it would be worth it, letting Red Dog come home instead of rotting in the solitary prison cell she’d arranged for him. He might hate her with every fiber of his being—that happened when the kid you raised was the agent who threw your ass in prison for life—but he’d have no compunction about cutting Frank into small pieces and feeding the bastard to the coyotes for daring to touch what belonged to him. He might even let her watch…
“What did he tell you?”
Nothing. Cade never told her anything, but she already knew what was coming next from the sheriff’s department. He’d likely consider her decision a betrayal, and maybe it was, but it kept him alive to fight another day, too. She could only pray this truth was the better of two evils. “They’re going for the Fourth Street house. Probably in the next few hours.”
