Tessa knew the words she had to say. She would break him even more, but she couldn’t do it quite yet, not without milking him for everything she could. “So where are you now? What is your life like?” She needed to know him.
“I work on a spaceship. I used to be the head of sanitation.” He let out a dry laugh. “Imagine that: bestselling author, the head of sanitation. Anyway, I controlled waste on the ship. So the commander tasked me with destroying it now that we have a settlement on Earth.”
Tessa’s eyes flashed wide. She couldn’t believe her ears. A settlement for people like her? Her heart throbbed with satisfaction. She had been right to believe. There was a place for her. Now all she needed was his help. “So you’re on the ship right now?”
He nodded, absentmindedly wrapping his arm around her torso.
She couldn’t deny how natural it felt. She could feel herself melting into him, but she had to stop. If she ever wanted to meet this man in real life, she would have to fight for him. One last fight. One more time.
“I’m flying it into the sun.”
Tessa’s heart dropped. Suddenly all of her hopes and all of her dreams fell right into the pit of her stomach. That was the heat. It was becoming more and more unbearable. And now, now that she was paying attention, she was sure she heard screaming coming from the other end. His end. A man was yelling at him.
Tessa didn’t need to know specifics to understand that she was running out of time.
“No. No. Listen, you…what’s your name?”
“Jrym.” He wasn’t even looking at her anymore.
She could feel him slipping through her fingers. She couldn’t let him die, wouldn’t see him go. “Wait. Jrym, you can’t do this.”
“Why? Because the voice in my head is telling me not to?”
“Who told you to do it in the first place? Voices in your head.”
“What? Are you trying to change my mind? Because it won’t work. I have given my share. I have built the new Kahara. I won’t be alive anymore.”
Tears poured out of Tessa’s eyes. “You. Can’t. Do. This.”
He pressed his palm to her face.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
His hand shook. “I’ve already decided.”
She knew what to say. She had to say it. She was in his head. She just had to move one or two things around. “You can’t do this. You can’t let them get to me. You can’t let me die inside.”
He looked at her. That had gotten his attention. “I’m not letting anyone die.”
Tessa gulped. Her whole body was covered, filled, flooded with devotion. She wouldn’t see him go. She had visions of the two of them in this magical Kaharan settlement together. She imagined a whole different life for herself, and now for him too.
“You’re letting yourself die, and me too. I followed your call out into the middle of nowhere. I believed in you. If you don’t come save me, if you don’t find me, I’ll never survive. One day these tests, they’ll go too far. You are killing me.” She rested her hand on his chest, her whole body shaking because she knew this had to work, because she couldn’t do it without him. “Just like your niece. Just like your whole family.” The words oozed from her mouth, the vilest of poisons.
He threw her off himself and stood up, looking away from her as his choked breathes echoed off the walls.
Oh no.
Tessa went after him anyway. “I won’t let you do this, Jrym. I believe in you!”
He turned on her, his eyes wild like fire. “You want me for yourself!”
Tessa gasped. She had done it. “You can’t deny me.”
He huffed and huffed and ran toward that heavy door—desperate movements.
As he wrapped his hands around the lever, Tessa caught up with him. “I’m out there. Just come to me! Leave all of your unhappiness behind. Come to me! We could start a whole new life. You can forget you ever wanted to end it.” She had to dig so deep into herself that she reached a place she promised herself she would never visit, a place she had locked up because she had to survive. Because she couldn’t break.
“If you don’t come for me, no one will.” Her sobs were weak, defeated. “They’ll just take me back inside. The way they guard me, I’m sure that no one even knows I exist…except for you. If you don’t want me, I don’t know what I’d do.”
His face crumpled as he looked into her eyes. “I want you.”
Tessa huffed out a breath of relief as he rested his chin on the top of her head.
“For some insane reason I want you more than anyone else.”
“So stop this. Find me.”
But he slowly shook his head.
“Why?” Tessa cried.
“Because I’m done with living and nothing can change that.” With that, he yanked open the door and disappeared outside.
Without thinking, Tessa ran out after him only to find a fire raging through the building.
Chapter Six
Jrym’s eyes flashed open to a control board and scalding heat.
“Jrym! Come on! We’re far too close! If you’re not here in the next thirty seconds, I will have to disengage without you!”
Anxiety spilled out all around him. His own sweat blinded him. He glared at the gauge. It was broken. It wouldn’t tell him where he was. But when he glanced through the windshield, he realized he didn’t need it to. All he could see was the super star.
“Autopilot, Jrym. Come on! I can’t live with myself if I let you go like this!”
“What have I done?” Jrym felt a tinge of regret. That beautiful woman. She was gone. He would die in minutes without ever having met her.
“JRYM!” And, what’s worse, she needed him. She had pled for him and he had turned his back. He was disgusted with himself, but what could he do?
***
Tessa sobbed as quietly as she could into the night. That had been her chance, her very last chance, and she had blown it. Now he was gone, millions of miles away. Now she had no one coming to save her. Now she had no future.
Unless…
With a start, she realized that there were moments in that dream when she felt she was looking at him from the inside out, when she felt all that warmth while he talked about the fire. Oh, and the actual fire. She wasn’t in his dreams. She was with him. In his head. They weren’t communicating. She had unwittingly used her powers to seek him out. So she squeezed her eyes shut and tried again.
***
“Jrym!” she yelled at the top of her lungs as she raced through the seared halls of that office building. Since he had disappeared, she’d have to follow her intuition to get to him. But she knew he was in there somewhere. She ran up the stairs, floor after floor after floor, looking for him, begging for him, until finally there he was, standing and facing the window, flames licking everything around him.
He turned as if he had been waiting for her, a strange smile in his eye.
She didn’t hesitate. She had no idea how much time she had left as it was. In any moment he could vanish. So she crossed the flames for him and clutched his shoulders, a forcing him to look at her.
“Stay with me.”
“It’s too late.”
“No.” She had to blink away the sweat running down her eyebrow. Her skin throbbed and pinched from the heat. “I will not let you say that to me.”
He tried to look away from her scalding gaze, but she wouldn’t let him. She took his face in both of her hands, because she refused to let him go. Then an urge overtook her until it was the only thing she could think to do. She hopped up to her tiptoes and pressed her lips against his.
She didn’t know what to expect. She had never done this kind of thing before.
But as soon as he melted into her, his hands searching her from the inside out, his lips dancing with hers, his tongue jutting into her mouth, as soon as her body responded and he lit her on fire the way that those flames could never do, she knew she had made the right choice.
***
Jr
ym lunged toward the abort button with everything in him. That was it. She was it. He felt the spaceship power down, but they were still hurling toward the sun. “Alec!” he roared. “I’m coming!”
He sprinted down the melted halls of that ship, thoughts bouncing around in his head. Where had this woman come from? A creature so powerful she could make him feel this way. It was like they were destined to find each other, destined to bond. Suddenly madness was not the only option. Suddenly he wasn’t alone. Suddenly he had sprung back from the dead and into the world of the living.
Tessa. Oh powerful Tessa. She had saved him from himself, from eternal fire. Now he had to find her, because for the first time he saw a future for himself, a future with her.
Epilogue.
Tessa was exhausted. She had spent the better part of her first night in the real world sending mental signals to Jrym, but now she could feel him close by. Real close. She could feel the rustle in the wind, the disturbance of the grass.
No.
She could see it. A light beamed from the stars.
But then there was the rustle of the men looking for her on the ground. They wouldn’t yell for her. No. That would startle her. They had thought that much through. But the rustling was more than enough to spook her.
But that light…
“Climb down.”
It was Jrym’s voice in her head.
She followed his instructions, nothing but complete trust in him. As her feet hit the cool mud, she felt strong hands wrap around her waist. She peered through the darkness at that body, at Jrym disguised as a security guard.
Even in the shadows she could see that he was smiling. Not a cynical smile, not an insulting one, a real one.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, relief drowning her. “Oh God. You came.”
He chuckled into her ear. “If we’re going to be real Kaharans, you’re gonna have to stop saying that.”
Tessa smirked. “Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.”
He shook her playfully, planting a kiss on her forehead.
She had to stifle her giggles.
“Come on,” he said. “I need to finish this extraction.”
With that, he took her away.
THE END
Military & Soldier Collection
SEALed by my Stepbrother
A Military Romance
Chapter 1
Ana thought of Dante when she was alone at night and when she looked over at their daughter sleeping next to her. She was five now, which made him gone for almost six years. They had cut ties before he had left to join the Navy. He didn’t want anything holding him back to the small town that he came from. Ana had agreed, agreeing to anything to make him happy. She loved him more than life, but she knew that he had to go, never being happy in a place as small as Orson. It was too small for him and so was she, as a small town girl.
But it had not ended the way she had thought it would. She had been pregnant, but with his real feelings clear, she never called him. Ana figured that Dante didn’t want to know, so she quit school her senior year and got a job to support them both. She got a lot of help from her mother and then, her mother’s new boyfriend the last couple of years, had stepped in, in some capacity for a male role model. Even after a couple of years of them dating, she didn’t know too much about Jeffrey’s other family. She knew he had some older kids, one about her age that was in the military. It never occurred to her that it might be Dante he was talking about. How could she have known? Things like that don’t happen for no reason.
It was when she saw a photo he flashed from his wallet. It was a picture of Dante his last year of high school. He was a year older than her and had graduated the year before. Her heart raced and she held her daughter, their daughter closer to his chest. “I can’t wait for you to meet him Ana. I think you guys will get along good. Don’t you remember him from school?”
“Yea, but he was older, so it was just in passing. I think everyone made comments that he should’ve tried to keep going in football.”
“Yes, yes, well after what happened to his mother, there was an anger in him that had to be run through. He is only home for a time, but it has been six long years since I’ve seen him in Orson and I hope I can talk him into staying a little longer. He is only supposed to be home for a couple of weeks. It is just not enough time after so long away.”
She couldn’t agree more, but Ana was more nervous to see him again after all those years. Their parents were getting married the next weekend, just to make it all more unseemly and to make it seem as bad as it really was. He didn’t know of course, she was sure of it. Dante hadn’t been bothered to come home in many years and he had long since forgotten about the girl down the block that he used to fool around with. If only she had been granted the same reprieve to forget about him, maybe she could have moved on in the last few years. Instead, Ana was reminded of him on a daily basis.
“Are you okay dear? You have been really quiet this evening.”
Ana shook her head. “Yeah, I guess I am just tired is all. I have to run to Mary’s for some studying.” Ana started to get up and her mother frowned.
“Well I thought you were going to meet Dante dear?”
“I will be back later mom. Really, we will have plenty of time to get to know each other.”
“Okay. I just want everyone to get along.”
Ana took her daughter’s waiting hand and headed over to her friend’s house. She really didn’t need to study, but she had to get away from all of them. Ana had one last semester in school and she would graduate with her Bachelors. When she dropped out of high school, she thought she would never get to go back, but she found a way and now was almost to the end of the tunnel. Ana knew then that no matter what, she would be able to take care of her daughter. She had no illusions that she would have any help, so her plans were for her to do it all alone.
And she was fine with that, she really was, but the idea of having to be around Dante, left her questioning everything. No one knows who the father of Christine was and Ana didn’t know if she should even say anything to him. If Christine didn’t have the same dark eyes and hair as her father, no one would ever guess. Would he notice that her eyes were the same as the ones he saw in the mirror every morning? Should she say something or just let it go and be however it is going to be?
“Where are we going mommy?”
“We are going to see Mary and Ashlea baby.”
“Yay.”
She fastened her into her seat and Ana started towards her friend’s house on the other side of town. Mary was actually the only person in Orson that knew who Christine’s father was. She was the only person in the world that she trusted to not say anything. She had to tell her the news that she had heard. Dante was going to be back in town that night. It wasn’t just his daughter that he had left, he had left her dying inside and she wasn’t sure if she could stand to be around him again. All the pain of when he left came back three-fold.
They pulled up to the small clapboard house and Christine was out of the car before she could stop her. She was at the door banging before she got her purse out. “I wish I had that kind of energy” She thought to herself.
Mary let her in and she bounded to her daughter’s room. The girls were almost the same age and they even had the same teacher in school, fast friends that were never apart for more than a few hours. It was heartwarming to see their kids playing, as they had when they were girls.
“So I got your text, what’s up? You said you had some big news?”
Ana shook her head and took a sip of the coffee her friend had waiting for her. “So guess who is back in town?”
The blonde-woman shrugged, her short curls bouncing with her uncertainty. “You know I hate that game.”
“And you know I love it. Just give it a shot.”
“I don’t know, Billy?”
Ana sighed. “I forgot how much you suck at it. You ruin it every time.”
“Jeez, this better be good c
ranky ass.”
“I have a right, I swear.”
“Okay, let’s hear it.”
“Dante is back in town.”
“What? How do you know?” Mary sat up in her chair and her eyes widened.
“Because I am supposed to meet him before the wedding.”
“What, why? This doesn’t make any sense.”
“Well Jeffrey is his dad. When we were dating his parent’s had split up and Jeffrey had moved out of the state. Well when his mom got remarried, he moved back, met mom and the rest is history.”
Mary was on the edge of her seat. It was enough drama to keep the masses entertained and she was there in the front row. If only there was popcorn, she thought to herself. “Okay so Christine’s dad is back in town and will soon be your stepbrother?”
“Don’t laugh. It is not funny.”
“I know, but Ana come on. You can either laugh or cry about this. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up.”
“Yeah I know. Such an excitement in my life.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Ana shrugged. “I don’t know. He has changed I hear. Jeffrey says he barely recognized him last time he went to D.C. to visit him. What if he doesn’t remember me?”
“Is that what you are worried about? You guys dated for almost a year. I think he will remember you. I was talking more about Christine. But, I like where your mind is going.”
Ana sighed. “This is a damn mess and I don’t know how to fix it. I can’t tell him or anyone else. He is only supposed to be here for a couple of weeks and then he will be back living his life and won’t even think of me. Just like last time.
***
Chapter 2
Dante did think of his high school sweetheart from time to time. He was her first and he still remembered her face when he had told her that he was leaving and not coming back. She was the only thing he regretted, but even as he drove back to the familiar place that had seemed a cage in his youth, his mind went back to Ana. He wondered if she was still around, figuring that she had moved on. She was probably married with kids, he thought to himself.
MILITARY ROMANCE: The War Within Himself (Alpha Bad Boy Marine Army Seal) (Contemporary Military Suspense & Thriller Romance) Page 88
