Words meant to be a lighthearted dance between flippant and playful dragged heavily across my dry tongue. “I am not looking to get married, Khalaf.”
He laughed in earnest. “Oh my darling girl, you are much too beautiful for that.” His eyes crinkled again as his voice dipped seductively low. “But a mistress?” He made a low, humming sound as if in delight. “A man should be so lucky. Come. I will feed you, and you will tell me everything you desire. Then, maybe, if you are a good girl, I will take you with me on my next business trip.”
Still feeling like I was being watched, taken off guard by Khalaf’s presence, my instincts begging me to look toward the suited man but circumstances forcing me not to, I merely nodded at Khalaf.
“Good,” he murmured, taking my reaction as consent. “Then it is settled.” He turned in the direction of where the suited man had been standing. “Let us make fate happy.”
The aisle now void of those muscular thighs in fine wool crepe, an overwhelming sense of loss I couldn’t explain settled in deep. My choices stripped long before this evening, I followed Khalaf and his cologne, but as we turned the corner on the last aisle, an entirely different kind of fate mocked me.
A masculine scent ghosted across my senses like a memory.
Cold wind and sharp angles.
It filled my head, and the reaction was instant. Regret mixed with a longing I kept buried deep, and I desperately inhaled.
The scent was already gone.
Seven Years Ago
Adam
“This is so fucking fucked,” Zulu muttered.
I didn’t say anything. I straightened the sleeves of my full-dress uniform in a useless attempt to cover the bruising on my left hand. The laceration on my cheek, I couldn’t do anything about.
I raised my right fist to knock.
“Wait,” Zulu clipped.
I glanced at him.
Same dress uniform, similar cuts and bruises, the rage and defeat in his eyes mirroring my own, Zulu looked beat to hell. “You promised him.”
I knew what I’d promised Petty Officer Second Class William “Billy” Nilsen. I knew exactly what I’d said before his last mission, what I said to him before every mission. It was a version of the same thing I’d promised before we’d enlisted.
Three days ago, my fist had bumped his and I’d given him the words I never thought I’d have to follow through on. “I promise I’ll take care of her if you kick your last door down.”
Billy had held my stare like he always had and given me the same response he always did. “You better, or I’ll come back and beat your ass before kicking your ass.”
Trying to block the memory, I glanced at Zane. “I know exactly what I promised him.” But that didn’t alter what we had to do right now.
“We both told him we’d take care of her.” Zane jabbed a finger toward the front door of the house I knew better than my own growing up. “We knock now, it’s bullshit.”
“I know,” I reiterated.
“Telling her he’s dead, then turning around to catch transport in twenty-eight minutes isn’t fucking taking care of her.”
Anger, rash and instant, exploded on the only damn friend I had left in this world. “What do you want me to do?” I demanded in a furious whisper. “Call it in and tell them to send someone she doesn’t know to do the next-of-kin notification? He was our brother,” I spat.
“She’s eighteen,” he spat right back in a hushed tone, just as angry.
“I fucking know how old she is, goddamn it.” I was acutely aware of how old my dead best friend’s sister was. She was eighteen going on thirty, because being raised by a widowed father who was a vice admiral in the Navy and having your only sibling become a SEAL before you were a teen didn’t leave room for a childhood, let alone innocence. Add in the fact that her father was already six feet under thanks to a fucking aneurism last year, and I didn’t want to knock on this door.
Fuck, I didn’t want to knock.
I didn’t want to break the heart of the only woman who’d ever looked at me like I made the sun set and rise. Except she wasn’t a woman when she used to look at me like that. She’d been a child with pigtails and skinny legs and more smile than common sense.
I was the latchkey kid from the wrong side of the tracks with dirty clothes, worn-through shoes and anger always lurking beneath the surface. But her five-year-old self took one look at me the day her brother dragged me home like a stray, and she’d smiled ear to ear.
That was the beginning of the crack in the wall around my sixteen-year-old heart.
Thirteen years later and I was about to destroy her world.
Orphan her.
Make her feel more alone than I did the first day I laid eyes on her.
I didn’t want to fucking knock.
But I had to, and I only had a few minutes to do it. Zane and I needed to get our asses back downrange and catch the motherfuckers who’d done this, but first I needed to do the right thing and let her hear the news from someone she knew. Then I needed to get my head on straight and finish the mission.
I didn’t have time to stand on a doorstep I’d crossed more than the cracked pavement leading up to the dump of a house I’d grown up in. I was wasting precious time I could be with her. Doing what, I didn’t fucking know.
Holding her.
The same way I’d held her last year after her father’s funeral once everyone had gone home. Billy had taken a bottle of Jack and disappeared into the backyard, and she’d been standing in the middle of the kitchen looking at all the food. Then she’d burst into tears, and I didn’t think.
I was on her faster than I had a right to be. My arms were pulling her against my chest, and my lips were on the top of her head, telling her bullshit lies about how everything would be okay.
It hadn’t been the first time I’d hugged her or kissed away her tears like I was her blood brother.
But it was the first time I’d felt the curve of her hips and the swell of her breasts and smelled the perfume she’d taken to wearing that wasn’t anything like the strawberry shampoo she’d used as a kid, because at seventeen she wasn’t a kid anymore.
She’d had the curves of a woman, and fuck, had I noticed.
I’d noticed so goddamn hard, I wouldn’t even admit to myself the reasons why I hadn’t touched another woman since that day.
My head fucked, anger warring with grief, I glanced at Zane. “Her age doesn’t change what we need to do.”
“We’ll be back in a week,” he argued. “Hell, a few days if the intel this time isn’t fucked.”
“Will we?” I could be standing on his parents’ doorstep next week in my service dress blues.
Zane snorted. “Don’t go fucking soft on me now. You know exactly what I’m saying. She’s got no one. In a week, we can come back and one of us can stay with her. Billy would be pissed as hell about this. You fucking know it.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” I lied. My best friend would be more than pissed. His sister was his world. Despite the string of ever-present nannies because their father had hardly been around, Billy’d taken on the majority of the responsibility of raising her since losing their mother when he was thirteen and she was two. In the past twenty-eight hours, I’d thought more than once that some cosmic bullshit had intervened and taken his life first. Had she gone before him, Billy wouldn’t have handled it. At all. “I know he wouldn’t have wanted her to be notified from anyone other than us.” I also knew Zane was right.