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Reese shook his head. “No, I respected the hell out of him, but that’s all it was. So many people used to kiss my ass because of who I was. Even some really powerful people who were just trying to get to you, but he wasn’t like that. When I got deployed, he called me in to meet with him. I thought for sure it was so he could suck up and tell me that he’d take care of me, but he told me that if I was expecting special treatment, I was in for a surprise because I was just another grunt as far as he was concerned. If I wanted to be something more, I’d have to earn it just like everyone else. He was the first person I met who told it like it was, you know?”
I did know. Pierce had often told me when he thought I was making a bad policy decision or told me just to tell someone to fuck off if they didn’t want to support legislation I was trying to get passed. The man would have made a terrible politician, but it was just one more thing I’d loved about him.
“When I walked in on the two of you, it was just a double whammy,” Reese murmured. “My queer-hating dad hiding his love for dick and the one man I’d thought would never put up with that kind of hypocrisy… I just didn’t even know what to do with that,” he admitted. “After that, I just wanted to get as far away from being your kid as I possibly could.”
“I don’t blame you,” I said honestly. “There were times that I wanted to get as far away from me as I could too.”
“I’m sorry about what happened to Colonel St. James,” Reese offered. “I read about it in the paper.”
I nodded.
“You really loved him, didn’t you?”
I managed another nod.
“Why didn’t you come out after you lost him?”
“No point,” I said, my voice thickening with emotion. “I never thought I’d find what I had with him again.”
“But you have?”
I wiped at a stray tear that managed to escape unbidden. “I have.” I drew in some air and said, “We never meant to hurt you, Reese. Gage, he really cares about you and when he invited me and Nash to stay here, it was only so you and I could get a chance to reconnect. It’s my fault that any of it happened. Just… just don’t blame him, okay?”
“I’ve met Gage, Dad. That man doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to.”
I couldn’t deny that.
“Still, it was on me to stop it after it happened, and I didn’t.”
Reese didn’t respond to that and I didn’t push the issue. Instead, I used the fact that he was still even speaking to me to ask one of the many questions I’d been wanting the answer to since I’d lost him so many years earlier. “Reese, what happened after you left the military?”
“I drifted for a while – Europe, mostly. By then, I’d been out of the spotlight long enough that people didn’t recognize me anymore, so it was easy to get lost. When the money ran out, I signed on with a security company that hired ex-military guys to do protection work all over the Middle East. I got mixed up with some guys who weren’t exactly legit. But when I found out they were planning on stealing a cache of weapons by ambushing a military convoy in Afghanistan and then selling the weapons to the highest bidder, I knew I needed to do something. They had someone on the inside to tell them where the convoy would be and when. I sent an anonymous message to the military and told them who the guy was. They forced him to give bad intel to the guys and set a trap for them. It was two brothers who were running the arms ring. One brother was arrested during the attack, the other escaped. He’s the one who put the hit out on me when he realized I was the only one who could’ve turned them in. Ronan told me about the hit, then said he could help me. We set the guy up and one of Ronan’s men took him out before he even got close to me.”
“And the other brother? The one who was arrested?”
“He was wanted by the Iraqi government for his role in an attack on a police station over there, so the U.S. made some kind of deal with them in exchange for a high-value prisoner they wanted.”
I nodded.
“Dad, how did you end up friends with a guy who runs the kind of group that Ronan does?”
I instinctively wanted to hedge around the answer to that particular question, but I knew I couldn’t. I needed to let that one piece of my past go in order to really move forward. I had no clue what the future held for any of us, but if I wanted to have any chance of getting Reese back in my life, I had to show him that I was someone who was worthy of him. And that started by admitting to my weaknesses.
