The urge to flee was overwhelming. To get away and be by herself. It was so hard to feel like she’d grown so much only to see herself spiral back down into the need to run.
But maybe that would be the best thing. “Look, I should probably go. Maybe stay at my house since everything seems to be working out for you professionally-wise.”
His hands came up to cup her cheeks, tilting her head back until she was forced to look at him. God, looking at him right now was so hard.
“No. No more running. I want you here. I want you with me.”
She sucked in her breath. “I don’t understand.”
He kissed her forehead. “Just give me a chance to explain it to you, and if you still want to leave, then I won’t stop you.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Tanner wanted to kick his own ass. He’d just experienced the greatest night of his entire life—barnone—and now he had made Bree feel like she’d done something wrong.
He looked down into her green eyes that seemed so wary and guarded now. He would go the rest of his life making sure he never put that look in her eyes again.
He was thirty-three years old and hadn’t lived like a monk. He knew what had just happened between him and Bree in the last few hours had been special. It had been the type of connection many people searched for their whole lives, but few ever found.
Tanner wanted to spend the rest of his life getting to know all the nooks and crannies of this woman’s body. Find every single place his lips could touch that made her gasp, sigh or moan. And then stick around those places until she was calling out his name.
But he couldn’t do that until she knew the truth.
“I suffer from night terrors. Sometimes I wake up and think I’m trapped in a situation somewhere else, and I come out swinging.”
He knew enough about Bree to know that cutting right to the heart of it was the best way to communicatewith her. She was never going to be one for subtlety or sugarcoating.
Even now he could see her mind trying to turn over the facts and put them in their proper place. “You were afraid you would hurt me.”
He smiled. Of course she came to the correct assumption immediately. She was brilliant. But then his smile faded. He trailed the back of his knuckles down her cheek. “Yes. You’ve already been through so much violence, freckles, I didn’t want to add to your burden. I couldn’t stand the thought that I could hurt you coming out of my nightmares and make you afraid of me.”
She sighed and nodded. “We’ll come back to that. Can you tell me specifically what causes the night terrors, or is it something more general?”
He could almost see her mentally making a checklist of things to research.
A slight shiver shook her frame, since she was nearly naked in the cold living room. He reached down and snagged the blanket off the couch, wrapping it around her. Then he picked her up, blanket and all, and sat down with her in his lap. Heneededher to be close just as much as hewantedto be close to her.
“It’s PTSD from an undercover case gone impossibly wrong three years ago.”
She listened in intense Bree fashion as he explained about the Viper Syndicate. How he’d been discovered as undercover, and Nate Fletcher and Alex Peterson had also been with him. He left out a lot of the gory details of his physical beating and torture. She didn’t need to know that. She’d lived through enough of her own horrific violence. But telling her about how it all ended? The nightmares that still plagued him? That, he owed her.
“They were trying to force me to tell them if I was working with someone else. I figured there was no way I was walking out of there alive, so I might as well not take down two other good men with me.”
He felt her arms wrap around him through the blanket. He tucked her head more firmly under his chin and forced himself to tell the rest of the story.
“SWAT raided the building and spooked the Vipers. They killed the first officer, Alex Peterson, immediately.” He sucked in a breath. “I broke the noose around my neck and was diving for the guy about to execute Nate Fletcher, but I was too late.”
She sat quietly for a long time, her arms wrapped around him like she would fight anything or anyone that dared to want to harm him. “The night terrors... What are they about mostly? Being strangled? Being helpless?”
Tanner closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of her. She understood. Maybe more than anybody else he’d ever talked to about this, because of her own experiences. She’d probably suffered from night terrors herself after what she’d been through.
“All of it. The pain, the fear, but mostly my inability to save Nate. If I had just broken that noose sooner. Just found the strength to do that, it might’ve been enough. A young man with his whole life in front of him might still be here.”
“Or you might have died right along with him. It’s like what you told me about what Michael Jeter did to my mother. We can only make the best choices we have in the circumstances we are in.” She rubbed her chin against his chest. “I know that doesn’t make it any easier to take. But I know if you could go back right nowand save Fletcher’s life, even at the cost of your own, you would do it. There’s something to be said for that.”
How many times had Dr. Michalski tried to tell him the same thing? That Tanner had done the best he could in the situation he was in. That maybe he could’ve broken that rope around his neck sooner, but there was no guarantee it would’ve made any difference whatsoever.
Tanner didn’t blame the SWAT team for not coming in two minutes earlier, so why was it okay to blame himself?
