Before she could help herself, she marched over and jammed a finger in his chest. “Don’t ‘sugar’ me.”
“Fine. But you won’t leave the house again without telling me where you’re going.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me, sug—” He jammed his lips together. “You heard me.”
The last three syllables froze Sage’s pulse. No. Not the words. His inflection on them. Low. Anxious. Ominous. Sage raised her gaze and looked at him. Really looked. As she did, slivers of ice shot through her body. Holy crap. She’d been slammed so senseless by Garrett’s fury, she didn’t have time to breathe and remember one of the most basic rules of psychology, practically a tenet for Army Medical Corps members.
Anger was most often spawned by fear.
He wasn’t mad at her. He was afraid for her. From the staunch set of his shoulders to the pulse hammering in his throat, the truth of it came into glaring focus. He was terrified.
Sage pulled her hand back but didn’t surrender her position. “What’s going on, Garrett?” she asked softly. “What are you not telling me?”
He turned his gaze back to the shore. That didn’t prevent her from watching more smoke drop over his eyes. “Just leave me a note the next time you go swimming.”
She blinked. Well, hell. So much for the whole attempt at understanding the ogre. His fist of a tone became a punch to her gut, twisting around everything there in a mix of dread, fury, and frustration.
“Fine,” she spat back. “And I’ll eat my damn cauliflower too. Thanks, Dad.”
It was more than a snarky comment, and she knew they both knew it. The guy who’d contributed his sperm to create her hadn’t been around for her since a drunken rant after her tenth birthday party. She’d been through enough therapy since then to realize she’d likely never speak the word “dad” with affection in this lifetime. Garrett loved her anyway. At least he used to. She wasn’t so sure what he felt for her anymore.
Remarkably, her little bratty test made the slash of his mouth soften a little. He reached and palmed the back of her head, making her breath catch from the warmth it spread through her. When he pressed his lips to her forehead, she released the breath on a sappy sigh.
“You hate cauliflower,” he whispered.
His steps back up the dock were wide, heavy, and resigned.
Sage yanked the towel tighter as she watched him eat up the distance with his strides, letting an equally long thread of bittersweet emotion wind around her heart. A little smile curled her lips. He really remembered…even all the little stuff. And his whisper, given with such tenderness, told her that more than a few sparks of his old self still burned inside his warrior’s shell.
Those sparks gave her hope. Maybe, if those cinders were mixed with the smokescreen he’d billowed to keep the whole world out, they could kindle into something new, someone new. A Garrett who was burned yet better. Different but stronger.
A man who could handle the woman she’d become.
She realigned her stance and held her head high. Okay, there was hope. Yeah, it was going to take more bratty moves, more pissing him off, and a lot more of staying one step ahead of him, especially to find out what had caused that new fear in his stare and that new coil of tension in his shoulders. But the hope was here. The hope was real.
As she let it fill her heart, she smiled and murmured, “Yeah, dork. You hate cauliflower too.” And as she followed him back up the dock, she deliberately set a slow, thoughtful pace. Plans like this took time and care, especially when it came to an attempt at changing the will of her intractable, adorable fiancé. And despite his every-move-you-make watchfulness, she found it funny that Garrett hadn’t grabbed a huge clue about their new reality. The last year had molded her will into an entity as formidable as his. She would not fail this mission, even if she damn near killed herself in the process.
Chapter Nine
The woman was going to kill him.
If she didn’t take out her own gorgeous ass first.
Garrett shook his head with those thoughts as he got to Gray Airfield and slammed his Sierra hybrid into park. Had it really been only seven days since they’d gotten back from Bangkok? It felt like eight decades.
If murder was her intent, she was hell-bent on robbing him of his sanity first. And no, it didn’t matter that he’d deduced her little plan from the second she’d smiled coyly at Archer during the trip home. It was all pretty transparent, her grand scheme to keep him so busy “protecting her from herself” that he forgot his original monster act on her in Bangkok.
Right.
He would’ve laughed at the ludicrous track of her thinking if he weren’t so hideously aware of the bigger threat that shadowed her each day. Zeke made that official less than ten hours after the first time he’d called. One line of text was all it took to turn Garrett’s cautious trepidation into full-blown paranoia.
Bounty on S and R is at $50K each. Don’t leave her side. I’ve got Rayna. - Z
Garrett had taken the charge as serious as a mission order from the guy. He left the den couch and sleeping-bagged it on the bedroom floor instead from that night on. His ass and the dock got to be good friends during Sage’s morning swims. As for his chaperone duties during any of her off-condo excursions? There was actually an upside to that. He was developing some damn good skills for bodyguard work after he left Special Forces. He couldn’t imagine any spoiled Seattle heiress or Hollywood starlet jacking his blood pressure the way Sage had the last week.
At first, her antics were mildly amusing. Day one, she’d announced she wanted a tattoo. Aside from helping her with the pain by getting her hammered at Scotch & Vine afterward, that went surprisingly well. Days two and three, she’d subjected him to nonstop trips to six different malls, where he’d contemplated a few waterboarding sessions in lieu of holding her bags and following her through every store. Just when he’d thought the torment couldn’t get worse, she’d announced she was going back to the custom lingerie boutique for a fitting on new bras. It’s okay, she’d told the attendant, he’s my fiancé. He can watch. When he’d been able to break away from the torment of watching someone else play with her breasts for a half hour, he’d impaled the minx with a glare that told her payback was a bitch—and somehow, he would make sure that was the case.
Day four didn’t bring him the chance. Nor did day five. She’d learned there was a two-day emergency preparedness drill going on at Tacoma General, and she’d wanted to help by being a fake disaster victim on which the hospital’s staff could practice. Garrett had grudgingly agreed to the choice, figuring King’s street spies would never think to look for her under wound makeup at a major city medical center, though the drill wasn’t the simple roleplay he’d expected, either. She’d left out the part that she’d be constantly sped into and out of the ER, jostled onto stretchers, dropped from stretchers, and gotten her limbs twisted and banged in a variety of ways and the rest of her body jabbed in ways that had Garrett rear off the wall a few times to remind the bozos they were working on an actual person, not their personal version of Fix-Me Barbie.