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“I’ll be back this evening,” he told her, moving into the kitchen behind her.
“Do you have more mercenaries to kill?” she snorted, crossing her arms over her breasts and leaning against the counter as she watched him.
His lips quirked, a shadow of amusement touching his gaze.
“You don’t sound nearly as offended as you should, sugar,” he drawled.
Poppy shrugged. She could be pragmatic when she had to be. “I trust they were really bad men.”
She’d met one of them, and everything inside her had recoiled.
“They were,” he confirmed.
He stood in the center of her kitchen like a damned conquering warrior or something. Blue jeans and biker boots, and a T-shirt that stretched across that wide-assed chest of his.
“You should be fucking illegal,” she muttered, looking back to the coffeepot. “That aside. It’s not the fact that they’re dead, Jack, or how bad they may have been.” She turned back to him after activating the coffee maker. “It’s the cost to you that I worry about. To your soul. Because you’re a good man. A damned good man, and I can’t see how it could not affect you.”
Jack stared back at her, shocked.
Hell, he could deal with her inability to handle the idea of the kill. He could deal with her being unable to understand that need for that kill. But neither bothered her. It was him and the effect on him that worried her.
Damn. He swore something melted in his chest. Right there in the center where he had once sworn he didn’t have a heart. Where countless military doctors had assured him no heart resided. He felt that nonexistent heart melt.
“Poppy, those weren’t men.” Frowning back at her, in discomfort, Jack scratched at an itch that wasn’t really there along his neck. “Those were monsters. A man doesn’t feel guilty for taking out the monsters of the world. It’s a woman’s job to regret the need for it, maybe. But it’s my job to do it.”
She kept looking at him with those sad green eyes, her hair a riot of curls around her face, her expression so concerned he had no idea how to deal with it. Hell. It wasn’t the first time she’d left him feeling like this. It probably wouldn’t be the last time. That feeling that someone deeply, genuinely cared about the man he was inside.
He knew women liked him. Knew he had a body, at the moment, that made them salivate to say that he belonged to them. Like a trophy. And that was how he’d often felt when taking a lover. Like a trophy to be acquired until the next one came along.
But no one other than Poppy had ever made him feel like she viewed him from the inside out, rather than seeing the outside only.
“Yes, men like that are monsters,” she agreed. “But even monster slayers have nightmares, Jack.”
Hell, she was serious. And he had no idea how to combat that.
“My nightmares have nothing to do with anything I’ve done as an adult,” he assured her, stepping across the room to where he could cup her shoulders in his hands, feel her flesh against his. “Poppy, I could bathe in the blood of anyone that dared to attempt to hurt you and step out of it feeling good about myself and what I’d done.”
“Jack…” She shook her head, clearly doubting him.
“Do you know there’s more than one military doctor out there that considers me a sociopath?” He stepped away from her, watching as her eyes widened in surprise at his statement.
“Excuse me?” Disbelief filled her words, and she gave a short laugh. “A what?”
“More than one,” he repeated, nodding as he leaned against the center island, surprised that he felt uncomfortable, even nervous, revealing that to her. “Antisocial personality disorder and a complete lack of empathy. According to them my strengths lie in the fact that I have a clear understanding of right and wrong and seem determined to adhere to it. But they’re wrong about that.”
“They’re wrong about quite a bit,” she argued. “That’s bullshit, Jack.”
He shook his head. “No, baby, it’s not.” And he could admit that to her. “You’re the difference here. You always have been. The night I killed Toby Bridger, I lost my ability to give a fuck in most cases. But not my ability to understand empathy, or to feel love. Because you see, earlier that day, I saw that there was more than just evil in the world. You and your parents showed me more than I could ever explain to you. A far different world than I believed existed. One far different from the one I lived in.”
He’d learned lessons that day that only in the past few weeks had he realized he’d learned.
That dinner recently at her parents’ house, when he’d faced not just her parents but all her siblings and their children, he’d slowly begun realizing the impact those few hours in her parents’ home when he was fourteen had had on him.
All because of one little girl. A girl who was a woman now. And that woman could make his heart melt with the simplest of ways.
“So, trust me, Poppy,” he said when she didn’t speak. “I will cut the head from any monster that even considers hurting you or yours. And I will never lose a moment’s sleep over it.”
She still didn’t say anything, but the tears that began gathering in her eyes actually had the power to terrify him. Until she all but ran to him and threw her arms around his neck, holding tight to him.
