MILITARY ROMANCE: The War Within Himself (Alpha Bad Boy Marine Army Seal) (Contemporary Military Suspense & Thriller Romance)

by Claire Branson

  “Get back,” he said, turning back to the controls.

  Keira glowered at him. She had just slapped him. By the rules of kidnapping, he should have issued a swift and harsh retaliation by then, but he just seemed preoccupied by the controls. “No. You have to take me back.”

  He glanced at her for a short moment. “I don’t have to do anything,” he said, before turning his attention back to the panel.

  Keira examined him, taking note of everything from his dark, shoulder-length hair to the olive skin that matched hers. His brows furrowed as he continued to mutter, staring intently at everything in front of him. He jabbed his finger at a green button. Then he froze and, thinking better of it, tried something else.

  Keira peered out of the windshield. She had been out on the Pacific more times than she could count, but she could not recognize the island they were zooming toward. “Where are we?”

  “That is of no concern to you.”

  This answer tugged at her nerves. “Yes, it fucking is.”

  When he didn’t respond, she realized that it was highly likely he didn’t know what he was doing at all. “Do you even know how to fly this?” As the obvious answer occurred to her, she clicked her seat belt, her heart pounding against her chest.

  He glowered at her.

  Keira’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of his violet eyes.

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you humans.”

  Keira cocked her head to one side. “Humans? What does that mean? Who are you?”

  Again, he didn’t respond, but kept his gazed trained straight ahead.

  Keira glanced at the windshield once more. They had dropped in altitude as they raced toward the island. One more look at the man tugging at random controls told her that she needed to act fast if she wanted to survive this. With a racing heart, she glanced over at her side of the helicopter-like aircraft. She spotted a joystick just between her legs and instinctively pulled.

  “Something’s wrong with the wiring!” the man yelled.

  “What did you do?” Keira couldn’t help the shrillness in her voice.

  “I don’t have time for your questions.”

  “Just pull on your joystick! We have to get this thing back upright.”

  But he wouldn’t follow her instructions. “Don’t you think I already tried that?”

  “What the hell is this thing?” She had to yell over the warning sirens. The screech cut at her eardrums.

  “I don’t have time for your questions!”

  “Because you’re too busy crashing a helicopter!”

  He cocked his head to one side. “A what?”

  Just as he said this, the aircraft tipped, its nose heading straight for the water. Keira watched him cut the engine, listening for the sad silence that followed. Sirens no longer filled the cockpit, and the only sound that could be heard was that of the aircraft itself, slicing through the air.

  “Oh my God,” Keira whispered as she grabbed on to the seat with her right hand and the hook of the door with her left. Her entire body had been pressed against the taught belt, the weight of the copter pressing down on her. “I don’t wanna die. I really don’t wanna die.” But the deep blue ocean had occupied her entire field of vision.

  It’s gonna be okay.

  She was a lifeguard. She could handle this. She saw land in the near distance. She could swim if it came to that. She was not letting herself go out like this. So she sucked in buckets of air and squeezed her eyes shut.

  When the copter broke the surface, her entire body lurched forward. Her hands flew to her face, cushioning the impact. Her head spun, her brain rattling around inside it as they fell farther and farther under water.

  Don’t panic.

  She unhooked her seat belt as soon as she could and faced the door. Her baseline knowledge of physics told her the water would rush in as soon as she tried to open it, but she braced herself, because she would die otherwise.

  Their oxygen supply seeped through the creases as water rose up to her waist. She had no time, but when she looked back, her captor sat stupidly in his chair, his head hanging over the control panel and a stream of blood dripping from his forehead.

  He would die here if she didn’t do something.

  But he had kidnapped her. What if he planned to kill her?

  The water had risen halfway up her chest. With every second she contemplated, he grew closer and closer to death. She knew she had to do it. Her heart wouldn’t let her just leave him there. As she unhooked his seat belt and hooked her arm around his torso, using the water to keep him afloat, she told herself that if he was planning to kill her, that plan would have surely changed.

  She convinced herself she would be able to talk him out of it.

  With that, she heaved the door open. Water rushed in, just like she had expected. The force of it pushed her right back into the aircraft. She kept her chest tight and the breath in but relaxed her every other muscle. This was her element.

  As soon as she could see again, she pulled him out of the aircraft and just started swimming. His dense body posed a challenge, but it was nothing like the fat women or chubby grandmothers she had had to rescue in the past.

  She ignored the ache in her muscles and the burn in her chest as she propelled the both of them closer and closer to shore. Just when she thought she couldn’t do it anymore, just when the beginning of the thought of abandonment crossed her mind, she saw real light.

  Her head broke the surface with a painful splash. Her jaw swung open, letting in tons of air. She saved her smile for later and worked on getting him to shore. She swam for what felt like decades, the shore seemingly moments away at times, but eons away at others.

  Sweat covered her whole body, mixing with the salty water by the time her foot found sand. Her muscles had stopped sending pain signals to her brain, her whole body falling silent to the strain.

  His frame dropped onto the wet sand, as lifeless as ever.

  Keira huffed out a breath. “Okay.” The cut on his forehead looked like nothing more than a surface wound, even though his still frame was none too encouraging.

  She decided to suck it up and take her stance over him.

  Thirty compressions and she was already out of breath.

  Two breaths.

  She hung over his face, the need to keep him alive overriding any kind of shame or shyness. So she pulled his mouth open and pressed her lips against his. The soft skin stood as a contradiction to everything she had learned about him in their short interaction.

  As she kneeled over him, her hands saving him, his body still, she couldn’t help but find him vulnerable in a way that didn’t make her feel like she had power over him.

  Her whole body curled at the sensation of their touch, thus she nearly forgot what she was doing in the first place. She delivered the breaths and dragged herself up.

  Thirty compressions.

  Twenty-four.

  Twenty-five.

  Twenty…

  His back arched as his jaw swung open. But before he could take a breath, water spilled from his lips. Keira rushed to his other side and turned him over, allowing the water to spill out of his mouth and not back into his throat.

  A wave of relief washed over her.

  Chapter Four

  Keira awoke to the sound of her own stomach growling. Her eyes flashed open to the sight of the sun hanging low in the sky…and her captor standing just on the edge of the shore. She gazed at his body, silhouetted by the light and breaking up the image of the waves.

  As she sat up, her head ringing and her body burning in protest, she realized she was lost. They were stuck on that island where no one else knew they had come. She put herself on her feet. There were ways to get attention. She told herself a boat would come. It had to.

  But first, she needed to find out where she was.

  She approached the man with cautious steps, part of her wildly thinking he would hurt her right then and there. “Hey,” she said with a d
ry mouth.

  He looked down at her, his violet eyes, empty. “Who are you?”

  Keira grimaced. “You kidnapped me. I could be asking you the same question.”

  His brow furrowed. “I kidnapped you?”

  Keira scanned him from head to toe, her mind empty of what to say next. “Are you playing stupid?”

  “I have no knowledge of what you speak.”

  Keira’s lips folded into a frown. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I can’t remember why I’m here.”

  Keira’s eyes flashed wide. “What?” she whispered.

  He faced her with big, earnest eyes. “Will you tell me why I am here?”

  Keira stepped away from him. This was just perfect. She had been flown to a remote island in the middle of the ocean and was now stuck there with a kidnapper and potential almost-murderer who couldn’t remember a thing. “I don’t fucking know!”

  He shook his head, as if to clear it of something, and then walked toward the wooded area beyond the shore.

  Keira followed him. “Well, do you remember your name even?”

  “Garthen. Garthen Vell. I remember my name. I know who I am, I just…” He stopped to give her another look. He narrowed his eyes at her, leaning in.

  Keira didn’t know how to feel about the proximity.

  “You look like…are you a Kaharan?”

  “A what?” she asked, making no apologies about the aggression in her voice.

  But he just gave a quick shake of his head. “I think I heard a pond a little inward.”

  “A pond? How can you hear anything over the ocean?” But even as she asked the question, she had a feeling she already knew the answer.

  He stopped in his tracks, raising his eyebrow. “Are you going to follow me to food or simply argue about it?”

  Keira narrowed her eyes at him. Something about the way he spoke to her annoyed her and excited her at the same time. Yet, sure enough, after a mere fifteen minutes of hiking through the woods, she could hear the running water herself. She let out a gasp at the sight of the clear creek, the water barely deep enough to cover the rocks and the orange, blue and silver fish rushing along with the current.

  Garthen barely missed a step as he peeled his shirt off over his head and stepped in.

  “Wait! I don’t know—”

  “Are you coming or not?” he asked, his eyes commanding that she follow him.

  She took her first step without even thinking about it. When she slipped out of her damp shorts and tank top, there was no wondering what it all meant, no thinking about anything, because if she let her mind wander she would be right back on that beach, soaking in the fact that she was lost.

  No.

  Now, the only thing that matter was food.

  His gaze lingered on her body a little too long before he turned back to the pond.

  Keira didn’t have a choice but to just watch what he was doing and hope that she could just follow suit, but the speed with which he jabbed his hand into the river and withdrew a flopping fish made the whole process go right over her head.

  The last thing she wanted was to come off as a needy girl, so she just dove in. Fish after fish slipped through her fingers. Meanwhile, he had gathered four or five on them all on his own. She stood upright, her bra-covered chest rising and falling with her every breath.

  Garthen took one look at her and chuckled, the sound of his dark laugh ringing through the late afternoon.

  Keira wanted to be annoyed at him for this, but something about the twinkle in his eye made her forget everything that had brought her to that place.

  She laughed with him, a sound, a sensation, conceived in the pit of her belly and rumbling through her throat in that kind of ghoulish manner only her best friends saw.

  “You can have some of these,” he said, gesturing at the fish.

  Keira let out a sigh of relief. “Oh thank God.”

  He extended a hand to her, helping out of the pond and onto level, dry land. “You saved my life.” She almost felt a glimmer of the gratitude stirring up inside him, but she had not held on to him long enough to tell.

  She nodded. “I did. Yes,” she said as she followed him back through the wood.

  “I was going to drown?”

  Keira was hesitant to jog his memory and whatever of his past intentions came with it, so she settled with, “Basically…”

  “But you pulled me out.”

  There was a softness in his voice she couldn’t believe it could achieve. “Yes. But you give me too much credit. I barely had a choice.”

  The woods began to thin, thus she could see the waves crashing in the distance.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t just leave a person lying there when I can save them. It’s my job.”

  He cocked his head to one side. “Are you a healer?”

  “A healer?” That had to be the millionth strange thing he had said.

  He shook his head as if he meant to clear it and then tried again with, “A doctor, I mean.”

  “No. At least not yet. I’m in medical school.” But when she looked at him again, he stared at her with the kind of intensity that made her feel naked.

  “There’s something familiar about you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He reached out to her, his fingers hovering over her cheek. “You have silver eyes.”

  Keira’s stomach turned. Of course he would want to know about her hideous alien eyes. Everyone did. “I know. I own a mirror, thank you.”

  Garthen seemed to catch that agitation almost immediately. “No. Don’t. It’s beautiful.”

  There was no way this was the same guy that had drugged and kidnapped her. “I don’t think anyone’s ever said that to me and meant it.”

  He shrugged but kept his hand there.

  The anticipation was more than she could bear.

  “I wonder…”

  But Keira wasn’t going to wait. She grabbed his wrist, letting her eyes flicker shut. There it was, another sense that didn’t belong to her. She could feel his heart fluttering in his chest, the goosebumps on his skin and the butterflies in his stomach. But she couldn’t feel any ill intention, any contempt. She glanced at his eyes again. Violet. Could it be a coincidence that they found each other? In that moment, could he feel in her what she felt in him?

  Chapter Five

  The sun rose like it had that morning.

  Garthen stood with the water up to his ankles, the warm waves washing over his calves, and wracked his brains.

  That morning.

  Urgency had propelled one foot in front of the other, but fear slowed his walk to a run, and soon enough he had barged into Aleksey’s room.

  “Come on!”

  He was going to smuggle him out before his parents could send him away to be forgotten forever. Aleksey didn’t protest. He let Garthen lead him out quietly, because even then, as impossible as it was, they both knew they were just choosing one terrible fate over another.

  ***

  Keira ran toward Garthen. Excitement bubbled in the pit of her stomach at the sight of him standing in the ocean. Ever since she had saved him and he had repaid her with fish, she couldn’t help but think that somehow the two of them were in this together.

  “Garthen!”

  He turned. “Do you usually wake this early?”

  Keira raised an eyebrow. “Do you?”

  He scoffed and turned his gaze out to the sunrise. “No. Before the brig and impact, I’d wake up around mid-day.”

  Keira grimaced. “What is impact?”

  He huffed out a quick breath as if he were annoyed with himself. “Think nothing of it.”

  Keira waded out a little farther and then watched him follow her. “Right. Think nothing of it. Like that time you asked if I was a healer, or that time that you called me a human…but like you weren’t one. And something about a Kaharan…” She lifted her arms in exasperation.

  “What was th
at?” he asked. His eyes shifted back and forth. “About a human? When did I say that to you? What was I doing?”

  Keira gulped. This was precisely what she didn’t want to happen. “I don’t remember.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Well maybe I’ll answer your questions if you answer mine.”

  He chuckled at this. “So, you want to bargain now.”

  “You can call it that,” she lied. She couldn’t tell how important keeping his memories from him could possibly be.

  “Then come here,” he said, holding out his hand.

  Keira shot him a confused glance. But, instead of following his orders, she waded deeper into the ocean. She ignored his calls for her to stop until the water had reached her chin. “Why do you want to touch me so bad?”

  He grabbed her before he answered, the movement making her shudder. “I think you know.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, her heart fluttering in excitement. “Can you do it too?” It seemed too odd to be true.

  But before he could answer, she felt something slick, muscular and large brush right past her legs.

  She froze. “Uhm.”

  He caught her change of emotion almost immediately. “What is it…?” But his eyes caught sight of what had touched her.

  Keira’s muscles seized up in fear, her eyes watering in anticipation. “I don’t even wanna look. Please don’t tell me…”

  “That’s a shark…I think.”

  Keira winced at him. “You think?” Sharks weren’t exactly difficult to identify. But just to be sure, she looked over at it herself. A screech leapt from her mouth as her muscles propelled into action, swimming away.

  “Don’t!” Garthen screamed.

  Keira knew he was right; She shouldn’t be making sudden movements. But she was just too afraid. The fin wriggled back and forth at an increasing frequency as it swam toward them. Keira grabbed his arm and tugged. “We have to get out of here!”

  “You won’t out run it.” With that, he slipped a knife out of his belt and went for the shark.

  Keira screamed like a little girl as she watched him half running, half swimming toward the danger to meet it head on. She wrung her hands together as he drove the knife right into the shark’s eye. The swimming slowed to a stop as it just floated there, jerking back and forth.