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“What would you do?” she asked, her eyes twinkling with tears and hope.
She lifted her palm, slowly bringing her fingertips to the side of my face, tracing the scar that ran from below my eye to disappear into my beard. The hairs at the back of my neck stood on end at her touch, featherlight and barely there, as I widened my stance and craned my neck to drop my forehead to hers.
She held my gaze and flattened her palm on my cheek, covering the evidence that I’d once protected her. Before I knew her name. Before I knewher. And she had to know now that there was nothing I wouldn’t do. I’d mark my entire body if I had to. I’d lay down my life. I’d run to hell on my bare feet, harness the Devil, and force him to kneel in submission. All to be certain that the bogeyman she knew and feared never laid a hand on her or her son again.
But my tongue failed me now as she held me captive within her bejeweled eyes. I was rendered stupid and useless with the softness of her palm soothing the hardened, jagged edges of my heart, and all I could utter in reply was, “Everything.”
Her mouth moved to mine as quickly as mine went to hers. A passionate rush of energy, forcing our bodies to converge in a frantic coupling of lips, opening on contact to coax tongues from their hiding places. I tasted her mouth, and she tasted mine, both of us savoring every moment with sharp inhales and choked whimpers. She hooked her arms around my neck, and I took my hands to her waist, digging my fingers into her flesh and biting her bottom lip to ward off the temptation to go further, to do more than just kiss.
“Soldier.” My name was spoken breathlessly, almost as a sigh.
Nobody had ever uttered my name that way before. Nobody had ever said it as if it were the most cherished, most precious word to ever exist in the English language, and I wanted to wrap it up in a neat little bow to save for always.
I moved my lips to her jaw, then her neck, where I inhaled the scent of freshness and purity and warmth. A soothing blend that reminded me of childhood and sunshine and all the things I’d been missing for so long. I wrapped my arms around her, burying my nose in the crook of her neck as a consuming need to get lost in this emotion crashed against me.All of a sudden, all at once, she became everything I had lost and needed so desperately that I could hardly breathe, and now, with her in my arms, I released a deflating exhale, afraid to ever let her go again.
“Soldier,” she repeated in a tone that matched her scent. Comforting and consoling. She weaved her fingers through my hair, cupping the back of my neck. “God … why do I feel like I’ve needed this for so long?”
“I know I have,” I replied, not giving a shit about how stupid I must look. Six foot seven and tucked around this woman who was well over a foot shorter.
She sighed into my shoulder. “I … I need to tell you something.”
The sound of her voice …
It was reluctant and regretful, and that wasn’t at all what I wanted to hear. Not when I was ready to bare my soul for her to steal and use at her will.
I swallowed in preparation as I stood up straight and took a step back, moving my hands from her waist to her shoulders. I didn’t say anything; I just waited for what suddenly seemed like the end of the world to come tumbling down around me.
Life always did have a way of taking away the good things the very moment I’d gotten a taste.
Ray moved her hands to my chest and pressed them over my thundering heart, now more alive than ever. She stared ahead, watching every rise and fall of my chest, before asking, “Do you remember that night we first met?”
“Of course.”
“You made me promise I would never go back to The Pit.”
“I know.”
“And I kept that promise”—she dragged her eyes from my chest to pin me with her tormented gaze—“but you forgot that I still lived in that town.”
If she couldn’t hear my heart before, there was no way she didn’tnow. My jaw clenched tightly against my grinding teeth as I looked down at her, immediately terrified of whatever was going to come next in this part of her life’s story.
“I think it probably pissed them off—”
“Who’s them?” I managed to mutter.
“Seth, his friends … you know, Levi—”
The sound that rumbled from deep within my chest rivaled a growl as I tore my eyes from hers to stare at the ceiling. “Fucking Levi …”
“Yeah, um … they didn’t like you, Soldier.”
“No shit.”
“No,” she said, harsh and frantic. “Theyreallydidn’t like you. They didn’t like you getting in the way, stealing their business, interfering with the stuff that didn’t concern you, and when you stopped Seth from, um”—her breath shuddered—“doing what he was going to do …”
I could still hear her screams. I could still see her struggling against that tree. The look of panic and blind desperation in her eyes. The way she had feared me, even after I got her away from him, the way she thought I wanted her for myself. Like something to own and break.
I saw that fear alive in her eyes now. But it wasn’t aimed at me despite the way she looked ahead at her hands against my chest.
