She stilled. “Yes. No. I mean”—she paused, but the glimmer turning her eyes the color of whiskey over ice told him she wasn’t backing down, regardless of the flush climbing over her cheeks—“Believe me, I want to break this case. But I’ve been thinking about it nonstop for nearly two weeks straight, and I’ll be thinking about it first thing tomorrow morning, too. I just need…something else right now. So yeah. Tell me something about you.”
For a second, Kellan paused. He knew he should pop off with something like his favorite baseball team or where he’d spend his next vacation if money were no object. Those were the easy things, the things they’d stuck to before now, and she’d had a hell of a long day. But something about the way she was looking at him, the warmth of her closeness and the at-odds combination of strength and need buried deep in her stare, made the truth launch past his lips.
“When I was deployed, I saw a lot of things that make it hard to sleep at night.”
Isabella’s brows lifted. “I’m sure you did,” she said slowly. “Two tours in the Middle East couldn’t have been easy.”
“No,” Kellan agreed. “I learned pretty quickly how to stuff everything down.” It had been as basic a survival skill as keeping your head on a swivel and having your M9 ready on the fly.
“So why did you choose such a high-pressure job when you got out of the Army?” Isabella asked. “That can’t be easy, either.”
“Because it’s not like I could’ve become an accountant,” Kellan said. “No disrespect to number-crunchers—they’re smart as hell in ways I’m not. But that’s just it. I’m not like that.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” she said, a frown shaping her pretty mouth. But God, even though he knew he shouldn’t, Kellan wanted to explain it to her.
As dangerous as it was to show her the boxes where he kept every last thing that could make him vulnerable or weak, he couldn’t deny the simple fact that he wanted to let her in.
“My dad died when I was twenty-one, after being sick for over a year.”
Isabella stilled, but only for a breath before shifting on the couch cushions to brush her hand over his forearm. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks.” Kellan waited for the loss to sink hooks into his chest and paralyze him like it had in those early months before he’d learned to pack it away, but funny, it didn’t.
So he kept talking. “It was just him and me and Kylie, so we were close. He worked a lot, trying to support us on his own. When he was diagnosed with lung cancer, I did my best to take care of him and Kylie, but he got really sick, really fast, and…”
“You were twenty-one,” she whispered. Her fingers tightened on his forearm, and fuck, the warmth felt so much better than it should.
He swallowed past the dryness in his throat. “After he died, I didn’t really know how to handle all the emotions that went with losing him, you know? I was pissed and hurt and about a thousand other things that messed with my head. Kylie and I were close, but she needed stability I couldn’t give her. She had a friend whose parents agreed to let her live with them for two years until she turned eighteen. I needed something to get me right side up.”
Isabella paused, her expression letting him know she’d connected the dots a second later. “So you enlisted.”
“Yeah. At first I hated the Army.” Okay, so it was an understatement. He’d survived basic training by equal amounts pure luck and sheer, screw-you grit. “I haven’t always been so great at being told what to do.”
“I can empathize,” she said on a soft puff of laughter. “Let’s just say my first few weeks at the police academy were a bit of a challenge.”
At that, Kellan had to laugh too. “Eventually, though, I learned how to push back on everything inside my head. I packed down my feelings and focused on what was in front of me. My training showed me what I was good at, and it wasn’t long before I knew I wanted to be a Ranger.” Now his laughter disappeared. “But there were parts of being a Ranger that came with a price.”
“You had an aptitude for sniper skills.”
Ah. Of course Isabella would know you don’t choose becoming a sniper; it chooses you. Or more specifically, the Army chooses you for the job based on a whole battery of skills and training, and hell if Kellan hadn’t had the perfect cocktail on his resume.
“I did,” he said. “Which means I saw a lot of things no one should have to see.” Those were the things he’d kept locked up the tightest. The boxes he feared the most. “Have you ever killed anyone in the line of duty, Isabella?”
A pop of surprise flashed in her eyes, there then gone before she shook her head. “I’ve fired my weapon a bunch of times on the job. Three hits, all clean. But none of those people died, no.”
“You’d think it’d be cut and dried, you know. And in a way, it is. You’re trained to assess threats. To protect and defend. To act.” Even now, he couldn’t so much as hit the head in the Crooked Angel without scanning the bar three times for potential danger. “So that’s what you do. You calculate. You eliminate threats. You pull the trigger to keep yourself alive.”