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“Hooyah.”
It wasn’t until Merrick stood and started to prowl toward me that everything I’d just heard finally registered in my brain. Shaking off the sensual fog that wrapped around me whenever he was near, I held my hands up and took a step back. I could tell by how his hands clenched at his sides and a muscle jumped in his jaw that he didn’t like it, but Merrick gave in to my non-verbal request and abruptly stopped.
A million thoughts whirled around my head, and there were plenty of difficult questions I needed to ask. Things I couldn’t ignore just because I was falling head over heels for the man who’d stolen me from my best friend’s wedding. I believed Merrick when he said that I was safer with him, but I needed more than vague answers if I was really going to give him my heart along with my body.
To get the ball rolling on the conversation that could change the direction of my life, I decided to go with the easiest question first. “Hooyah is a military thing, right? Were you a soldier?”
“Not a soldier, a sailor.” He sighed when my brow wrinkled in confusion since I didn’t understand the difference. “When you’re in the Navy, no matter what your rating is, you’re a sailor.”
He hadn’t really given much away with his answer, and the lack of information frustrated me. “You can’t keep secrets from me forever. Not if you want whatever this thing is between us to work.”
“You’re my woman. That’s what’s between us.” He prowled toward me, and my heart raced at the predatory gleam in his dark eyes. When I tried to back up again, he wrapped his fingers around my wrist and yanked me against his chest. “And that’s never going to fucking change, Audrey.”
I slapped my free hand against his chest. “Then you’d better learn how to share stuff with me, big guy.”
“Dammit,” he groaned, dropping his forehead against mine as he sighed. “I hear what you’re saying, kitten. I’m used to keeping shit close to my chest, and I don’t like the idea of tainting you with the darkness in the secrets I keep. But I’ll share what I can if that’s what you need.”
I felt the weight of his offer deep in my soul, butterflies taking flight in my belly as I began to have hope that this talk would go better than I expected. “What did you do in the Navy?”
“I served on the teams as a SEAL, based out of Coronado.” He led me toward a black leather couch and pulled me onto his lap after he sat down, my butt on his thighs and my legs stretched out on the cushions. His fingers toyed with the ends of my hair as he went into more detail. “I would’ve been happy to serve in the Navy for twenty years and retire with my pension, but my team was betrayed after our last mission a few years ago. Our identities are always supposed to be protected, which is why we can’t share specific details with anyone outside the unit. When we were running a black op with top-secret clearance, the list of people who were in the loop was short as fuck. When our names were leaked to a terrorist organization out for revenge, only so many people could’ve given them the information. While the members of my team scrambled to get their families safe, I started hunting down the bastard who betrayed us.”
Thinking about how easily things could have gone wrong and Merrick could’ve been killed, I had to swallow down the lump in my throat before I could speak. “Did you find him?”
His arms tightened around me as he answered, “Yes, and then I did what I’d been trained to do—eliminate the threat.”
Maybe it made me a bad person, but I couldn’t feel bad about the death of someone who’d put money above the lives of the men he served with and their innocent families. They would’ve been responsible for Merrick’s death if things had gone down differently. But I did worry about what had happened to him. “Did anyone find out what you did?”
“Fuck no, the military had trained me too well. The identity of that bastard’s killer still remains a mystery to this day.” His deep chuckle didn’t hold much humor. “Not that the NCIS team assigned to the case looked into his death too closely. The top brass assumed he was connected to the leak and didn’t want the whole clusterfuck to become public. So they buried that shit deep and didn’t ask questions when I didn’t re-up. I received an honorable discharge instead of a court martial, and the Navy got to keep their dirty little secret.”
“I’m sorry you were put in the position of having to make that decision.” I was glad that he wasn’t rotting in a military prison for what he’d done, but I was also a little pissed that he’d had to give up his military career because of someone else’s greed. “What happened after you left the Navy?”
His hand slid up my back to wrap around the back of my neck, collaring me in place. “I crossed a line that I couldn’t ever come back from when I pulled that trigger, which made it easier for me to accept a position with an outfit who had use for the unique skill set I learned while serving.”
Merrick was surrounded by mystery, but some of the puzzle pieces were falling into place now that he was opening up to me. But I still couldn’t see the whole picture and felt as though I was missing something major—like what he’d been doing in Stacey’s room the day we met. “Did Jonah hire you?”
9
Merrick
“Yes,” I answered quietly. I’d promised not to lie, but I wasn’t sure she was ready to hear the entire truth.
When I didn’t expound on my answer, her brow puckered, and she canted her head to the side. “Why would he do that? Jonah has his own guys all over the world, especially New York.”
“Using them would risk the job being traced back to him.” She pressed her lips into a thin line and narrowed her eyes.
“He didn’t want people to know he was looking into Stacey’s disappearance?”
I sighed and let her go with the exception of her hand. Holding it tight in mine, I led her out to the living room and sat on one of the large, comfortable couches. With one quick, hard tug, she tumbled into my lap, and I shifted her body until she was straddling me. Then I wrapped her in my arms in case she tried to get away.
“I wasn’t hired to find your friend, kitten. That wasn’t the job. Looking into that was strictly a favor from my employer to Jonah.”
“What was the job?”
I held my breath for a moment, knowing this information would decide the course of our lives and possibly change how she looked at me.
I wasn’t ashamed of my choices in life. This was me, and I didn’t have any qualms over that. But she might, and if she couldn’t handle it, I wasn’t sure I had the strength to let her go.
“Barrington,” I finally murmured.
