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“I see,” I said, nodding, pulling my legs up to sit cross-legged, losing his touch, trying to remind myself why that was a good thing when all I really wanted to do was crawl across the bed to him, wrap around him, kiss him, demand more, demand it all.
But, I tried to convince myself, that was just my sex drive talking, and my loneliness, and my fear. I was just looking for comfort.
I didn’t believe that for a second, but I was trying to.
“I was in the military,” he went on, surprising me. When my head looked up, though, his gaze was on the wall, not on me. I guess I wasn’t the only one who had issues opening up.
“I can tell,” I agreed when he said nothing else. When his gaze went to me, brow lifted, I shrugged. “Your posture. People who were in the military stand a certain way.”
“Fair enough.”
“Were you in for long?”
“Joined up at eighteen. Was there most of my twenties.”
“And you saw things,” I guessed.
“I did things,” he corrected. “Not like Cortez. Not to women,” he specified, voice emphatic, though there was no reason. I would never have thought such a thing of him. “But I hurt men. I killed men. Some who likely didn’t deserve it, who begged me not to, who told me about their wives and children, and how they would starve without them when they felt the muzzle of my gun. I had orders, but it doesn’t make that shit right. It doesn’t take the memories of that away.”
“Is that why you left?”
“You don’t really just leave the military, duchess. At least not the special operations forces.”
“Did you get hurt?”
His lips curved up slightly, but it wasn’t a smile. If anything, it seemed like it was self-deprecating. “I failed my psych eval.”
“Genuinely?” I asked. “Or did you fail on purpose?”
“Guess I was a bit too honest about how I felt about what I was told to do. They don’t like that much honesty. They prefer you bury that shit down, serve your time, go home when your skills are no longer the best, and then implode where they don’t have to give a fuck about you anymore.”
“That’s… dark.”
“It’s honest. Half of the men I worked with ended up eating a bullet or swinging from their ceilings. Of the others, maybe only a handful could go back to their lives, back to their people.”
“You did.”
“I didn’t have people,” he supplied. “To go back to. I had my pops. He was a vet. But he died while I was overseas. Didn’t have anyone else I was close with. Makes it easier. And harder, I guess.”
“How so?” I asked, liking this too much, wanting to keep him talking, needing to know more about him, this enigma of a man.
“Harder because you have no one to keep an eye on you, to give a fuck if you go off the deep end. But easier because you have no one to disappoint, to pretend for. You feel like a dick one day, you can be a dick. Without worrying about hurting someone who loves you.”
“You’re not a dick. What?” I asked when a smile broke across his face, bigger than one I had seen there before.
“Did you actually just say ‘dick’?” He asked, eyes dancing. “Miss Prim and Proper using such filthy language.”
Okay, so I didn’t curse much.
I didn’t curse much because it was base, crass, made me think of my parents, their friends, the shithole I grew up in where people didn’t know basic grammar, who said Intensive purposes instead of Intents and purposes. I didn’t want to sound like them, to let my upbringing show. Not in the world I ended up in. I mean, it’s not to say that wealthy and cultured people never cursed. In fact, from my experience, many did. But I just didn’t ever want to. It wasn’t the image I wanted to project.
I couldn’t remember if I had ever actually uttered the word dick in my life.
Though I had certainly thought it a couple hundred times about some people I had come across.
“I curse sometimes,” I insisted, knowing it was only partly true.
“Just so you know, fiddlesticks doesn’t count as a curse.”
“I’m not an eighty-year-old southern woman,” I said with a smile. “I don’t say fiddlesticks.”
“Fine. Say fuck then.”
“What? Why?”
“To prove a point.”
“That’s silly.”
“Yep. Do it. You can’t, can you?” he asked, lips twitching at my expense.
“Fuck,” I supplied, lifting my chin a little, not wanting to be proven wrong.
“How about shit, bitch, cock, pussy?” He paused, then threw his head back to laugh. “You’re fucking red,” he declared, loving my discomfort way too much.
“Shit, bitch, cock, pussy,” I spat back at him, narrowing my eyes. “Happy?”
“Maybe those weren’t the best choices of words,” he told me, and it was just then that I realized the smile had left his face, and the dancing around his eyes was gone, replaced with something else. Something hotter, making his eyelids heavy.
