“I started with Franz first. Yeah, I woke up my commanding officer in the middle of the night at his house, demanding that we scramble a team and head for Botswana to try to find you. Maybe I knew even then that you really weren’t dead. I just felt like we had to try.” He dropped his hand, pulling hers into it. “He let me bawl like an infant on his couch, but he still told me no. All those fuckers shut me down at every turn.”
“Shit.” As it came out beneath her breath, fresh tears brimmed. She wrapped her other hand over his, loving him with new depths of her soul. “Baby, I’m sorry.”
He lifted his face again. His lips twitched, as if a smile brewed there. It never materialized. The cobalt smoke had returned to his gaze, thicker than she’d ever seen it. “Well, I wasn’t sorry.” He said it with leaden determination. “I left sorry behind when I left Franz’s house that night. Something took the place of it, for good.”
“Something like what?” she asked softly.
He stiffened. “I don’t know.” His lips compressed. In the silence of his contemplation, a breeze fluttered the curtains across the room, throwing a shaft of afternoon sun at him. For a moment, the anguish of his face was edged with light. The glow kissed the moisture at the ends of his hair, fringed his tawny lashes. The sight made her want to stop time, though her soul filled with crushing sorrow. Even the light from the galaxy’s most powerful fireball couldn’t penetrate the shadows in his eyes.
And she doubted she ever could again, either.
“Sage, it was something…dark, okay? Something hard and savage and vicious.” He jutted his jaw, and his free hand fisted tight. “But it kept me going, at least. It kept me alive.”
She looked away, trying to let his words sink in completely. Something on the nightstand glinted in the late afternoon sunlight. It hadn’t been there when she’d taken a drink of water prior to falling asleep. Somehow, she already knew what it was. The gold band was as magical as the day they’d picked it up from the jeweler. She held up the ring at an angle in order to check the inside. As she hoped, the inscription was there. She read it through a haze of tears.
My hero.
Even engraved on the inside of his wedding ring, the words had always been a lighthearted tease between them, a fun reminder of what he’d done to get her attention that first night in Tacoma. Okay, “fun” probably wasn’t the best phrasing on that. He’d come out of the brawl with a busted lip, a black eye, and nasty cuts on his knuckles, though the bawling-out she gave him in the tavern’s kitchen afterward was certainly as painful. At the end of the night, they’d exchanged phone numbers. Along with his digits, he’d written, Garrett Hawkins: Your on-call hero.
She’d given him the words just ten hours ago, in King’s Quonset hut. When she had, the meaning of the syllables changed forever. They weren’t just stamped on her heart. They were branded in her soul.
“Whatever that force was,” she murmured to him now, “I’m thankful for it.”
Garrett pushed her hand away. Heaved to his feet again. “No,” he snapped. “Not whatever it was. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Sage. This shit, it hasn’t left me. Finding you didn’t dynamite my mental warehouse on it.” He went to the window. With a violent whoosh, he shoved aside the drapes and locked his hands against both sides of the frame. “If anything, it’s worse. After you—well, after you were gone, I used it like coffee, just to get up in the morning. After I returned to action, it helped shut off everything except for the missions.” He grunted, and his shoulders slumped. “Fuck. Franz was never happier. I turned into a perfect machine, became his number-one go-to guy besides Z. We were pretty much the dynamic duo of the First SF Group, turnin’ and burnin’ the bad guys as fast as we could find them.”
Sage turned to look more directly at him. “So you concentrated on doing your job better. And it sounds like you did.”
He didn’t return her scrutiny. In his profile, she watched a hundred feelings launch emotional grenades at each other before they exploded through his fist. Beneath his blow, splinters flew off the wooden window frame.
“Do you understand what I’m saying? I concentrated on getting revenge for your life by taking as many as I legally could.” He rotated his head back toward her. His nostrils puffed like a bull with his hard breaths. “My soul took a swan dive into despair, and I dragged as many others into the ocean as I could. And now, even though you’re back, I can’t figure out how to climb out.” He shoved back from the window. “Shit!”
Sage scrambled across the bed but stopped when her surge made him jerk back. “It’s okay.” Fresh tears stung her dry lips. “I understand. It’s okay. Let me help.”
“You can’t help!” The boom of it visibly shook the thin curtains. “Don’t you fucking see? I tried it, Sage. Just getting near you. I tried. I wanted to just love you, and I ended up—” He searched the room, his gaze desperate and agonized. “I ended up doing what I did.”
Sage sat back on her heels. “Oh, hell. Do you think I’m nine, Garrett? I guarantee you, I’m not. And I’m very aware of what it was.”
“That doesn’t change—”
“Sexual domination.”
She couldn’t think of any other way to get through to him. From the jump of his brows and the tighter tension in his body, it looked like she’d succeeded. With the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
“Look,” she stammered on, twisting her hands in her lap, “I know we’ve never discussed it before, but—”
“Damn straight we’ve never discussed it.” He stomped back to the window.
“Maybe we should.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t.” His shoulders tested the limits of his T-shirt again. “Maybe we absolutely won’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not that guy, okay?”
She lifted a tiny smile. “Maybe now you are. Hmm. Sir Garrett. It has a nice—”
“Stop.” He spun back toward her. Despair no longer filled his stare. In every inch of his eyes was the deep, unblinking blue of a very pissed-off animal. “There’s nothing remotely nice about it. Don’t say it again. Ever.”
She spread her hands. “Garrett—”
“I’m not doing this, Sage. Not now, and not with you. That part of me isn’t for you.”
She rose to her knees. Fine. He wanted to play king of the damn jungle? She could do jungle. She had been for a year. “Not good enough, Sergeant. Why, damn it?”
His glower intensified. “Are you fucking kidding me? Fine. Because I happen to love you, remember? Men don’t do shit like that to the women they love!”
“Even if the woman likes it?”
He halted as if he’d walked into a sword. The anger and confusion on his face declared war on each other. “I’m throwing the bullshit flag on your ass, Sage Weston. No sane woman can actually admit to—”
“What?” The sword had climbed into his gaze, and she met it head-on, molding it into the steel resolution beneath her own posture. “To what, Garrett? To letting you take charge of me? To letting you command me, control me and—gasp!—be stronger than me, after I endured a whole damn year of having to do that for myself every damn day?” When he did nothing but park himself into a stubborn pose, she thrust her chin out. “Yeah, I guess that makes me insane.”
A minute of thick silence passed. Neither of them moved. At last, Garrett closed the two steps back to the bed. After a moment, he sat again. Sage kept still, consciously ordering herself not to dive for his lap, curl herself around him, and not move for hours. Couldn’t he feel it too? Couldn’t he sense how much she needed him? Could he really have stopped caring completely?
The question finished invading her mind about the moment he reached for her hands again.