It's Always Been You

by Jessica Scott

  * * *

  Ben couldn’t remember a time when he’d been more off kilter than he was at that moment. He was used to sniping at the uptight dickheads he worked around whenever he got the chance but Olivia Hale took uptight to a whole new level.

  He hadn’t realized she was going to be overseeing his work. He’d seen the previous commanders have a hard enough time dealing with the battalion executive officer and the operations officers. Now he had to watch his back with the lawyer, too?

  She had no real authority but she had access to the boss and that gave her power. Power he was confident she would use. She seemed so serious, so driven. He watched her fiddling with the lid of her water bottle. He still didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know how to bridge the chasm he was at least partially responsible for and ask for help. Because God knew he was going to need it.

  Olivia Hale was a woman who wore the word cause tattooed on her forehead.

  He didn’t do causes. But he didn’t do command, either, and look how that had turned out. Goddamn it, why couldn’t Gilliad find someone else for this job?

  He was going to be working with Olivia Hale, and he’d have to be dead not to be intrigued by a woman like her. A woman who was reserved. Withdrawn. Not cold.

  And that made him curious. Deeply so. She wore the rules and regulations like a shield.

  And seeing how Ben felt about the rules and regulations, that didn’t exactly set them up to be buddies.

  But right then? He had the strange and sudden urge to know if she ever laughed. Something dark simmered in his belly. Something deeply inappropriate at work. But that didn’t stop him from noticing her dark hair tied up neatly at the base of her neck. He blamed his interest on lack of sleep. There was no way he could be attracted to someone as… driven as Olivia was.

  He had no idea what to say. What to ask for from the lawyer who would now be responsible for keeping his ass walking the straight and narrow. He didn’t want the job. He didn’t want anything to do with sending soldiers on missions approved by commanders too removed from the fight to care about the kids on the front line. He’d kick a door in any day of the week with his old team. But that was a world of difference away from being a commander ordering said door to be kicked in.

  Now he was judge, jury, and executioner over men he’d served with. A power he didn’t want and a power he’d done his best to avoid.

  “Fuck,” he muttered.

  Olivia raised one eyebrow. “Yes, that about sums things up,” she said dryly. She slid a packet toward him. “Here’s the paperwork on Escoberra, opening the investigation at Child Protective Services.”

  Ben leaned forward, wishing he had something to do with his hands. He closed his eyes, seeing Carmen kneeling in front of her husband. “There’s no way Escoberra did this. He’d never hurt his kid.”

  “The initial report says otherwise,” Olivia said cautiously.

  He looked up at her, barely reining in his temper. “The initial report is wrong. First reports often are. He’s a goddamned warrior and a damn fine senior NCO.”

  The muscles in her neck tightened. Oh yes, Olivia Hale had a temper. “Rank shouldn’t matter,” Olivia said quietly.

  “You’re a major.” Ben’s smile was merciless. “You should’ve been around long enough to know better.”

  “Rank matters more than it should.”

  Ben leaned forward, bracing his elbows on the table. “Maybe, maybe not. But rank matters less than the fact that Escoberra didn’t do this. He wouldn’t.” He met her gaze.

  Olivia pinned him with a hard look. “You’re awful certain about a situation when you weren’t there.”

  “I know my NCO.” At least he had, once upon a time. But the war and different missions and a hundred unsaid things had drifted between them. And Ben had let the drift widen until he could no longer see across the chasm.

  “How close to Escoberra would you say you are, Captain Teague? Close enough that it’s going to keep you from doing your duty?”

  Ben looked away, down at his hands. Not as close as he should be. The distance had grown over the last couple of years. They’d been at opposite ends of the city on this last deployment.

  Ben looked at her then and carefully chose his words. “The only people who care about the separation between officer and enlisted are people who’ve never bled together.” He glanced at her empty right shoulder. “The rank on your chest doesn’t matter.”

  Her throat moved as she swallowed. He could almost see her pulse hammering against her throat. “You’re talking about ignoring regulations that are the foundation of our service.” She pinned him with a hard look. “Are you telling me the rules don’t matter?”

  Ben met her gaze clearly, refusing to back down. “They don’t.”

  * * *

  There was more to this story but Olivia had no idea what it was. Watching him right then, she caught a glimpse of the man she’d seen just a hint of at the hospital that morning. A man who’d been to war and back again and come home changed.

  Because the man in front of her was tense, had been ever since the subject of Escoberra had come up. “How can you protect a man who put his daughter in the hospital?” she asked softly.

  “He didn’t do it. You don’t know him.” Teague’s expression shuttered closed.

  “You can’t be friends with your men,” she said quietly.

  “I know that,” he snapped. He sighed and dragged his hand over his mouth. “So what do I do?”

  She sighed heavily. “We talked about this at the hospital this morning. You flag him until the CPS investigation is complete. You give him a no-contact order and put him in the barracks and you get him to mental health to get checked out.”

  He ground his teeth but wrote silently. His neck was tight. The veins on the back of his hands stood out in stark contrast against his skin.

  He shifted then and looked up. Their gazes collided. Silence hung in the air, thick and filled with stubborn anger. Time slowed. His throat moved and he swallowed.

  Olivia blinked and the spell was broken, if it had ever even been there to begin with. “I know this is going to be difficult,” she said quietly.

  “Thanks,” he said. He reached for the packet and put it to one side. Something snapped between them and he was back to business, the tension gone. “Okay, what’s next?”

  She took a deep breath. “The clear-cut misconduct. The drinking and driving, the article fifteens for minor offenses. You can get a big chunk of these knocked out within a week, a month tops, then focus on the more serious incidents.”

  Ben frowned across the desk at her. “How many serious incidents am I dealing with?”

  “You don’t know?”

  He shook his head and angled his chair so he was leaning across the table and angled the files so he could see them better. “I haven’t even been to my new office yet and supposedly, I’m without a first sergeant.”

  She lifted her gaze to meet his. “Alone and unafraid, huh?”

  He offered a cocky half grin and for a moment, the lines on his face relaxed and she caught a glimpse of the man beneath the tired warrior. There was so much more to this man than the tired warrior sitting across from her. “Something like that.”

  Olivia looked away. The first packet was heavy in her hand. “The quick summary is that you have five drinking and driving, two assaults, three hot urinalysis tests and five soldiers caught with other intoxicating substances.”

  “Define ‘other intoxicating substances’? What the hell does that mean?”

  “Huffing, spice, bath salts.”

  “Bath salts? What the hell are bath salts?”

  Olivia pulled out her phone and pulled up a website explaining the drug. “They’re really new but we’re starting to see more of them. They’re meant to be a synthetic drug that mimics cocaine and ecstasy but they’re really bad stuff. Some of it is variants of plant food.”

  Ben reached for her phone and angled it so he could see. His hand
was big and rough against hers. Hot where their skin met. If he noticed, he didn’t give any indication. “Plant food?”

  Olivia tried to ignore how his hand felt against hers. Because, oh yes, she’d noticed. Heat spread across her skin, sliding up her forearm and tingling down her spine. “Soldiers will smoke anything these days,” she said quietly.

  “Why?”

  “That’s a whole ’nother discussion,” she said, easing her hand out of his. “The short version is that intoxicating substances are prohibited by regulation and I advise you to do two things with these kids: send a strong message that this behavior won’t be tolerated but also enroll them into drug abuse counseling to send a message that you’ll help those who want it.”

  Ben studied the paperwork in front of him. Tormented emotions flickered over his face and it was everything she could do not to ask him what was on his mind. She didn’t have time or reason to go crawling around Ben Teague’s head but that didn’t stop the want pulsing warmly over her skin.

  “I know this kid,” Ben said quietly. “I served with him downrange last deployment but ever since he’s come home, he’s been nothing but trouble to the old commander. Zittoro has three previous drug charges,” he said.

  “Private Zittoro is a different case. I recommend you separate him from the military under a chapter nine, rehab failure.”

  She heard his quick intake of breath. Saw the conflict flicker over his sharp features.

  He cleared his throat roughly in the awkward silence. “Zittoro… he’s got nowhere to go. He’s got a deadbeat dad and his mom is… well, she’s not winning any parent of the year awards.” His fist clenched on the table in front of her. “If I throw him out of the army, what happens to him? He’s an addict.”

  She flinched at the pain in his words. Ben had only been a commander for a couple of hours but the strain was already obvious in his voice.

  “You can’t save everyone,” she whispered. She waited until his eyes met hers. “You know that, right?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  There was no comfort she could offer. This was the burden of command: to balance the needs of the army over the needs of the individual. A tightrope he had to walk alone.

  All she could do was give him the facts and her opinion. But in that moment, she had the sudden urge to save him from this. “If you keep him, do you have the manpower to keep going to his room and making sure he hasn’t overdosed every night? Do you trust him enough to give him a weapon and believe he’ll do his job?”

  Ben’s throat moved as he swallowed. “Guess not,” he said quietly. He leaned back and it was as if a wall of glass crystallized between them. “What other fun things do you have in there for me?”

  Olivia wasn’t convinced by the sudden shift in Ben’s mood but now wasn’t the time or the place for digging any deeper. She reviewed the rest of the drug packets, watching him tense more with each one. She stopped after the last driving under the influence.

  “Why is this bothering you so much?”

  He offered a half-assed cocky grimace that failed to mimic the smile he was going for. A pretty shitty attempt to cover the darkness twisting beneath the surface. He took a deep breath. “I’m a big boy. I’ll do what has to be done.”

  “I didn’t imply that you wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean it’s not bothering you.”

  He drummed his fingers on the table. “Let’s finish this up. I’ve got to get down to my company and start digging out from the mountain of crap that my predecessor left me.”

  He brushed her off. The action was as insignificant as a paper cut.

  She leaned back and picked up the next packet and wished it didn’t sting like it did. Then she made the mistake of meeting his gaze. There was such a dark lack of hope in his eyes. A bleak resignation to the things he was forced to confront. She almost reached for his hand. It would have been a simple gesture of support. But he looked at her as though a single touch might have shattered him.

  He was not her problem. She didn’t do damaged and introspective.

  Because there were people counting on her not to get distracted.

  But looking at him now, she wondered about the glimpse of the tired warrior she saw behind those tormented brown eyes.

  Chapter Four

  Ben walked into the Bandit company ops—his company—and noticed that everyone stilled as he walked through. No one approached. No one said anything but there was an undercurrent to the watchfulness. Almost as though they were waiting for the other boot to hit the floor.

  This week was one for the record books. An entire battalion’s worth of commanders fired. Soldiers in jail, friends being accused of horrible things.

  Ben didn’t want this job. He never had. He never wanted to balance the scales of his friends’ actions.

  And yet, here he was.

  Good times.

  He stopped in the orderly room. All activity came to a grinding halt.

  “It occurs to me that maybe the company probably should be called to attention?” Ben said. The ops sergeant glanced toward the commander’s office. Lights on. Looked like someone was home—oh joy. The former commander was there.

  “That explains things,” Ben muttered.

  Captain James P. Marshall the Third himself. Ben had to remind himself that Marshall was just another man, and not a good one at that. He was a bully and he was cruel.

  The banality of Marshall’s cruelty, though, had permeated everything around him. None of the higher ups had a clue that Marshall had been poisoning the atmosphere across the entire battalion from the time he’d been a platoon leader through his time as a commander. That alone led Ben to wonder what the environment really was in this battalion for the soldiers who’d had to suffer under the yoke of Marshall’s shitty leadership.

  Now? Karma had finally come through for him. Ben might not want to command but damn it, if doing so took Marshall’s power away from him? Oh, it was a beautiful thing. And this was a target of opportunity, one that did wonders for Ben’s shitty mood.

  He walked into what was now his office and there was Marshall sitting behind Ben’s desk. As if he was still in charge.

  “I guess you didn’t get the memo about needing a new job?”

  Marshall looked up, his jaw tense. “I’m here to brief you on the legal stuff.”

  Ben smiled and it lit up the shadows around his heart. He’d been waiting for years for Marshall to get what he deserved, ever since Marshall had tried to get Escoberra and Ben fired after their outpost had been overrun. “So yeah, I’m gonna need you to clear out your desk.” He paused for dramatic effect. “And get the hell out of my company.”

  The words felt strange and foreign on Ben’s tongue. His company. Words he once would have embraced. Words that now tasted bitter.

  But seeing Marshall’s expression twitch made it all better.

  “Do you want to know about these cases or not?”

  “Not really much you can tell me, seeing how you haven’t done jack shit about them.” Ben folded his arms over his chest and leaned against the door. “You know, if it wasn’t for me having to clean up your mess, I would be exceptionally happy that you’ve been relieved.” He rubbed his hand over his jaw. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”

  “You always were a cowboy, Teague. Too idealistic to do what needed to be done. You should have fired Escoberra after your base got blown up, but instead you sacrificed your career for him.”

  “Didn’t make a damn bit of difference, now did it,” Ben said mildly. As badly as he wanted to throw Marshall—physically—from his office, he figured he should probably refrain. Especially after the pissing contest with Major Hale in front of the battalion commander. “Looks like I get a chance to command after all.”

  Marshall snorted. “You’re just going to fuck this up, too. You couldn’t make a hard decision to save your own ass back then; you think you’re going to be able to do this?”

  Ben smiled. “I’ll do a better job t
han you. And I’ll do it without betraying everyone around me to save my own ass.”

  “Mistakes were made on that mission,” Marshall snapped.

  “Indeed they were. And I thought we were supposed to be responsible for our subordinates’ actions?”

  “You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘responsible,’ ” Marshall said quietly.

  “And you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘loyalty.’ ” He brushed a piece of lint from Marshall’s shoulder. “Now, get the fuck out of my office and go mourn the end of your career.”

  Marshall’s smile was ice cold as he stood, an inch from Ben’s face. The peppermint sting of Copenhagen snuff filled Ben’s nose and he fought the urge to gag. “You think this fiasco matters? Do you know who my father is? I’m going to be reassigned to the Infantry Center at Fort Benning and I’ll be commanding a real infantry unit in less than six months and all of this heavy armored Cav bullshit can kiss my ass.”

  Ben patted Marshall’s collar down. “Jimmy, Jimmy, what’s the weather on your world like? Because where I’m standing, you’ve been flagged by division headquarters. That means you’re stuck here at The Great Place until the investigations are complete. Which means that unless you’ve been giving the chief of staff of the army hand jobs in your spare time, you’re not going anywhere until this is over. And these things tend to take a very, very long time.”

  Marshall’s face turned an unhealthy shade of purple. “Fuck you, Teague.”

  “You’re really not my type. Oh, and let’s not forget how many future high-powered officers come out of Cav. You can call it bullshit all day long but your ticket is punched, sport. Daddy can’t save you. You might want to brush up on that résumé. I hear they need check-out boys at Walmart.”

  Marshall’s nostrils flared. He was getting ready to start screaming. Ben could see it in the vein pounding in Marshall’s forehead. Good. It would give him an excuse to throw his sorry ass out of the office.

  “Before you blow a gasket, can I remind you of something?” Ben leaned close, close enough to see the five hairs on the edge of Marshall’s jaw that the other man had missed when he shaved this morning. “You’re in my office now. So get the fuck out.”