Saved

by Angel Payne

  “And God? Well, in my mind, God had thrown me away, too. He’d intended to take everyone in that explosion but got his hands full with the load, so he asked himself, which one could he do without for a few more years? Certainly not Mason, who had a wife and two kids at home. And not Searle, who spent her free time on base taking care of the stray dogs in the neighborhood. Looked like it was my pathetic ass.”

  Garrett clenched his jaw. The heat engulfed him once more. He didn’t want this. He didn’t want to be listening to every word from Wyatt’s mouth and admitting the same damn thoughts had relentlessly drilled his own mind over the last year. He sure as hell didn’t want to accept the conclusion to which Wyatt had led them both, and he fought the mental shitbath of putting it into words. But somebody had to be the voice of this truth. He had to be that person.

  “But you didn’t tell anyone, because that’s not what Special Forces does, right?”

  Wyatt said nothing. He didn’t have to. The gripping fist in Garrett’s gut confirmed he’d already hit the bull’s-eye. He closed his eyes, trying to process the blow like he had a thousand times before—and failing, just like he had a thousand times before.

  “We take the pain, don’t we, Uncle? That’s what we’re trained best for. We take it through boot camp, through Assessment and Selection, through Final Qualification, through every op in every shithole they can throw us into. Then when the agony attacks and the spool starts unraveling, we search the database in our heads, certain we missed the training about this shit—because surely they didn’t just leave it out of the curriculum.”

  “And God forbid that we ask anyone what page it’s on.” Wyatt flung his own empty bottle into the trash can. “Even when the book is open and in front of us.”

  Garrett stared down the neck of his beer bottle. He wasn’t certain what to say to that or how to say it if he did know. Just two hours ago, he’d vowed to Sage that he’d never turn into the man who’d crushed so many fantasies of his youth. But this twist on things was…bizarre. Wyatt himself was telling him exactly how to keep that promise.

  It was an act of bravery that hauled the fist from Garrett’s stomach up into his throat. The man could’ve laid down his life for Garrett and had an easier time of it than the gut spill. Opening one’s heart to another human being was one of the first behaviors they pounded out of a guy in Basic, let alone what he went through on the way to Special Forces.

  “I saw the book, Garrett,” Wyatt continued. “And I saw you, okay? You need to know that. I saw everything—all the havoc my asshole act wreaked on you. I just didn’t…” He leaned forward to brace his elbows on his knees. His shoulders slumped. “I didn’t know how to climb off that damn pedestal you had me on. I’m…I’m not sure I wanted to. After all, I helped you build the thing. And I’m sorry for all of it, Garrett. I’m so goddamn sorry.”

  The knuckles at Garrett’s throat grew brass battering rings. Thank fuck his soul knew what to do with them too. The pain barely made breathing possible, let alone speaking. Why was this moment such a torment? He’d wanted nothing more than this from Wyatt for so long, words that had hammered out the beginnings of a bridge between them once again. But it had been so long since he’d believed this could happen… He’d filled in the cracks in his spirit with the no-fuss mortar that let in no more light and let out no more feeling. He liked it so much that he piled on years’ worth of the gunk, letting it harden into layers of a warrior they called the Hawk. The guy with the surprise claws. The indispensable killer.

  If he believed Wyatt’s words, he’d have to tear off all that mortar. He’d have to look at the cracks again. He’d have to feel them again.

  “Fuck.” He finished his beer in one chug. “Why?” he finally growled at his uncle. “Why are you doing this now?”

  Wyatt tilted his head again. A broad smile spread across his lips. “Josie’s pregnant.”

  Garrett gawked. Wyatt chuckled. “Yeah, that was my reaction at first too. We’re not exactly youngsters, and this was a surprise. A pretty awesome one.” The smile faded, but the gentle lines remained on the man’s face. “After the shock wore off, I realized that I couldn’t think of being a proper father to this kid until I set things right by you. When we heard about the miracle of you finding Sage, I knew I’d been given a perfect chance to do that.”

  Garrett narrowed his gaze. Wyatt had never been this open with him, even on those blissful deployment breaks, and yet an undertone still clung to the man’s voice, a layer of mortar he wasn’t peeling off. He issued his reply with an air of careful casual. “A perfect chance, eh? Now how did you figure that?”

  Another low laugh rumbled from the man. “Son, if burying your woman didn’t deplete the control spool, getting her back surely fucked the thing to hell.” Wyatt’s gaze darkened by a couple of shades. “Like I’ve been saying in my not-so-elegant way, I’ve been there. Maybe not the exact miles your boots have gone, but close enough, Garrett. Close enough.”

  Garrett pulled in a deep breath and gazed across the water. The sky was turning lavender now. He thought about getting up and flipping on some lights, but the darkness felt better. It helped hide things like falling chunks of emotional cement.

  “I’m fine.” He forced confidence to the words. “Sage and I…we’re fine.”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  The man’s snicker was unsettling. Screw that. Enraging filled the bill better. “What now?” Garrett barked.

  “Nothing, son. Not a damn thing.”

  “Why don’t I believe you?”

  “Probably the same reason I don’t believe you.” He shook his head. “But you go ahead, Garrett. Keep up with the ‘we’re fine’ line. But repeating it a thousand more times won’t make it true.”

  Garrett chucked his new empty at the trash can. Incomplete pass. The bottle shattered on the patio stones. Perfect. “Fuck. Off.”

  “Check,” the man replied. “I’ll do that. And you keep up with your ‘fine’ thing. Ordering your woman around like she’s on some weird probation but giving her little reason to feel connected or safe in the prison you’ve confined her in—her own home, at that. Jo and I didn’t notice all the tear streaks on her face when we got here, either. Of course, I won’t bring up how you barely touch her—”

  “Shut up.” Garrett surged to his feet. A bitter laugh exploded from him. “You have a couple of big ones in that nut sack, Uncle. Did you really come here to call my shit about ‘connection’? I’d laugh, but I’m too busy getting over the shock.”

  Wyatt tipped back and touched a finger to his lips again. “Don’t forget the energy suck of keeping all those kinky fantasies under control.”

  Garrett froze. The action reflected exactly what the man had done to every blood cell in his body. He glared at Wyatt, but damn it, his uncle’s face was mostly draped in shadows due to the twilight.

  Everything save his eyes.

  Finally, Garrett managed to choke out, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Wyatt. Fuck. Wyatt.

  The fucker made him wait through another tortuous silence. The only thing about Wyatt that moved were the flames in his eyes, billowed into a full bonfire now. Ironic, that. The fire didn’t do a damn thing for Garrett’s frozen bloodstream. This royally sucked.

  “Garrett…I know you were there.” The man finally shifted. As he leaned forward to his knees again, he let out a rough cough. “That night, in the barn…when you saw Josie and me—”

  “Fuck.” Garrett clawed at his hair and spun away.

  “It wasn’t like I had an ear peeled for you, son. You scrambled outta there with the grace of an ox on an ice rink. Man, I sure hope they gave you dance lessons in training.”

  “I can’t believe you’re trying to joke about this.” He veered around and rushed at his uncle. “No, what I really can’t believe is how you never, in twelve years, chose to really grow a pair and talk to me about it!”

  “Right. And that’s such a great conversation starte
r for post-Drooley Sunday brunch. ‘Hey, Garrett, did I ever tell you how your Aunt Josie saved our marriage by suggesting I tie her down, flog her, and then fuck her until she screamed through four climaxes? Oh, and pass the coleslaw, buddy. Thanks.’”

  “You lived next door, Wyatt.” He spread his arms. “I was fifty steps away!”

  “You were also a goddamn pup.”

  “No.” He swept an arm back and stabbed a finger at the man. “That’s what you wanted me to be. That’s what you saw because of the fucking pedestal you couldn’t climb down from. I was a young man. And”—he watched his finger shake—“I was confused.” More mortar tumbled off his heart, this time in chunks. It hurt. Holy hell, it hurt. “I was so fucking confused.”

  He dropped his arm. He let his gaze follow that direction too. Wyatt’s continuous regard still weighed on him like a wool blanket. The guy picked now to fork over his undivided attention?

  At last, his uncle gave a low sigh. “Yeah,” he murmured. “I was confused too.”

  Garrett nodded tightly. This transparency had taken twelve years to come, but the man was giving it his all and a little more. On any mission, that was all you could ask of someone.

  Garrett turned up the gas-fed flames beneath the rocks in the fire pit. Zeke would be bringing the women home soon, and he knew Sage would be chilled. Her endurance against the Puget Sound moisture had been whittled away by a year in the wild. He paced across the patio and glanced through the living room toward the front door, half from the hope she’d be coming through it and half to buy some time to form a clear thought.

  No-go on the Sage appearance. But he did connect with the curiosity that burned at him from Wyatt’s confession. He sat again, voicing his question with more than a little amazement.

  “So that’s really what happened? Josie was the one who—who saved your marriage?”

  Wyatt gave back a slow, sure smile. “Damn straight she did.”

  “By offering herself to you.” Garrett felt his brows crunching in incredulity. “By asking you to…”

  “Be her Dominant. Yes.”

  Garrett emulated his uncle’s pose, settling elbows on his knees. “With all respect, sir, that’s not the first thing wives usually bring up as a quick fix-it for matrimonial woes.”

  “Oh, we were way past the easy repairs, Garrett.” The man’s grin twisted into an uneasy grimace. “Your dad and I started scouting bachelor apartments for me. I even thought of going back into the big green government machine as a trainer, maybe a desk jockey somewhere.”

  “That would’ve killed you.”

  “I was half dead anyway.” As the man peered into the flames, Garrett noticed things on Wyatt’s face that had never been there before. Deeper grooves around his mouth. Gray tinges in his beard and hair. A well-earned wisdom in his eyes. “My spool was at its end,” the man went on. “I wasn’t super soldier anymore. I wasn’t super anything anymore. And when Josie first talked to me about the lifestyle, I have to admit that I wondered who she was and what she’d done with my wife. Turned out she’d been in some online support groups and made a friend who swore to her that BDSM was better than Xanax and a hell of a lot more satisfying.” With that assertion, his lips curved up again. This time, the expression came with a wicked twist. “Turned out she was right.”

  Garrett snorted. This still felt like some strange fourth dimension where nothing was real. “So…what happened then? You just took her to the barn one night and—”

  “Shit, no. There were conversations. Lots of them. I had to be convinced I had my real wife, remember?” A soft chuckle vibrated the man. “But I’ll never forget the first night that beautiful woman kneeled at my feet and surrendered herself fully to me. It was a gift, Garrett. A treasure for which I’m grateful every day.”

  They were words for a song lyric. That was all great and dandy. But nobody was paging Springsteen here. Wasn’t Wyatt leaving out a huge chunk of the debrief? Garrett shifted restlessly. “Okay, that’s fine and fantastic—for you. But what about her? What does Josie get out of all this? Is she really doing this and—”

  “Enjoying it?” Wyatt laughed with heartier emphasis. “Ohhh, yeah.” He sobered fast. “Think about it for a second, would you? Wrap your head around what a soldier’s woman has to go through. When the plumbing busts, we’re not there. When there’s a scary noise at night, we’re not there. And during the shittiest times, when the hormones rage, we’re still not there. Now multiply that by months, by years. When you ask her to hand over everything to you, you’re offering to set her free from all that crap, if only for a little while. The decisions are suddenly not hers to make. The control is gone. The pressure is gone. And she feels completely safe about letting it go, because the man she loves is the one who’s taking care of it.”

  Garrett pushed back his hair again. He stared at the fire, wondering if the flames had sprouted an invisible fire bolt and thrown it into his brain.

  “Shit,” he blurted. “Holy shit.”

  The pictures Wyatt had just painted were the frustrations of a regular battalion wife. But Sage was no normal anything. It was why he’d fallen in love with her inside a month. It was why he’d gotten his ring on her finger as fast as he could. It was why his soul had never truly believed she’d died—and true to her no-normal self, she’d proved him totally right. But in doing that, had he ceased to see her as a real woman with real passions, fears, and insecurities? When she’d begged him to control her, had his soul insisted on worshipping her instead of loving her, of meeting her deepest needs? He’d practiced plenty in the art of pedestal-building, hadn’t he?

  She’d needed him. Really needed him.

  And he’d just kept pushing her away.

  Why hadn’t he seen it that way before?

  A breath fell from him that felt like a boulder. Like it did any good. Another stone rolled into place behind it, lodging itself at the base of his throat. “I’ve been such an ass.”

  Wyatt huffed. “Hell. Cut yourself some slack, whelp. You don’t have all the answers.” He flashed a grin Garrett hadn’t seen on his face in over ten years. “That’s my job.”

  Garrett smiled back. It felt good—damn good. He was suddenly soaring at ten thousand feet over the earth again, his pulse pounding as if he were about to toss his ass out of a plane. But this time, he didn’t have a parachute—and didn’t need one. He had wings of revelation. Wings that would carry Sage and him into a future full of illicit, incredible possibilities.

  Fuck. How was he going to keep his hands off her during this impromptu dinner party?

  He indulged an inner smirk as he answered himself.

  He wasn’t taming himself at all. He was going to drag her naughty little ass upstairs, lock them both in the master bathroom, strip her naked from the bottom down, and order her to bite back her screams as he drove into her with every full, throbbing inch of his cock. And she’d control those shrieks while he described every detail of every punishment he was going to give for her little jaunt downtown without his consent.

  He shifted in his seat with a grunt and tried to relax by looking at the lake. The only thing he could think was how dark the waters had gotten now—and how his balls were an even deeper shade of blue.

  He snatched up his phone, getting ready to punch in Zeke’s number. How long could a stupid wine sampling take?

  Perfect timing. The device rang with an incoming call from Z himself. Garrett jabbed a thumb at the green key.

  “Did you forget the access code to our gate again, man?”

  Zeke’s response sounded distracted. “Wh-What?”

  “The gate. It has a code, remember? The code you never remember, assface?”

  The zinger he expected in return from Z never came. In its place were words in a tone he’d heard so rarely from his friend, he could count the occasions on one hand. It was chilled. Choked. Afraid.

  “Hawk.” A rough sigh grated across the line. “Garrett. Fuck. You’d better—”

 
The guy just stopped. He literally couldn’t go on.

  “What?” Garrett barked. “I’d better what, damn it? Zeke, what the hell—”

  “Just get your ass in the car and get down here.” A tormented growl ripped out of him. “Aaaggh! I can’t fucking believe this.”

  “Z. You’re not making sense.” But the second the words spilled from him, instinct clicked into place. A damn few things tore Zeke apart like this. Losing at hockey. Losing a guy on the team. Losing anyone he cared for. Like a certain dark redhead with whom he’d spent nearly every hour of the last ten days.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “Shit.”

  “I only turned for a second. One of those fuckhead fake cops asked me a question, and when I turned, the other one had three goons with him. They were already throwing Rayna into a van.” His growl escalated into a snarl. “Goddamnit!”

  “What about Josie? Did she observe anything?” He fired off the questions as mandates while shutting off the fire pit and then whirling back toward the condo. Wyatt followed, his attention officially engaged the second his woman’s name was mentioned. “And what do you mean, ‘fake cop’?”

  “I mean just that. The bastards were planted there. Goddamnit, there’s no end to the toilets King can send his shit up around here!”

  “That doesn’t add up. He didn’t know Sage was going to end up at Pike Place today.”

  His friend let out a leaden sigh. “Rayna and I made plans for our trip yesterday.”

  That added up. “Fuck.”

  “Yeah. That about says it all.”

  A cobra of terror slithered its way through his chest and sank fangs into the base of his wind pipe. Garrett paced into the kitchen and slammed his fist into a cupboard, answered with the din of shattering glasses from inside. He forced himself to breathe. He forced himself to think. He wasn’t standing here with Sage’s death certificate in his hand again. They had hope. It was only a thread, but he’d take it.