Hard Way (19 page)

“Let’s not.”

Dash stood up too quickly. It was time to go. Dad the next day. Midnight. Drunk. Sunny. Canada. Fucking. The words were porridge in his head. No telling what was in store for him, but it didn’t involve these two dickheads talking their usual crap.

One was in the ooey-gooey first few months of happiness. The other wouldn’t know commitment if it grabbed him by his Cro-Magnon throat.

In other words, they didn’t know shit about what Dash expected to face when he walked in his front door. A huge, sloshy part of him was pissed it was an issue. He should be able to go home to his wife after a night out with his friends without wondering if she would be there. Without needing to justify blowing off steam.

His job was a pressure cooker.

His marriage.

Fuck, there wasn’t much in his life that didn’t boil him from the inside out. Again, that question came. When? When had solid things disintegrated?

“I’m outta here, pigs.” He threw a wad of bills on the table, which was sticky sloppy with spilled drinks.

Catcalling followed him toward the door, but Dash didn’t stop. He wavered as the bar spun. The cab ride home was a blur. His thoughts were a blur.

Just…
fuck
.

The lights were on, at least. None of the initial gut-punch mystery as to whether she was home. He paid the cabbie and ran a hand over his hair, as if that might make his brain cooperate. Straighten up and fly right.

Not gonna happen.

Sunny opened the front door before he pulled out his keys. Her petite body was framed by light from the living room, leaving her expression obscured by shadow. Her tone of voice, however, left no question as to her mood.

“How many?”

Dash pushed past. “Five. I think. Good ones. Very tasty.”

“You couldn’t have called?”

“Would you have answered?”

She shut the door and locked it, her shoulders rigid tension. “Are you being an ass on purpose? Maybe three weeks pushes your limit on being a decent guy.”

He threw his hands out to the side. “Apparently. About as long as you manage to stay here in town. Fair’s fair.”

“I cannot believe this.” She turned away with an exasperated noise. Her hair was down. She was wearing a set of peach silk pajamas decorated with Indian-inspired embroidery. Her dainty feet were bare, with toenails painted brick red. Despite getting his drunk on, Dash was incapable of shutting out the details that made her Sunny.

His
Sunny.

That same dark, needy urge gathered in his mind, his body. She was his wife, and she’d given him permission. He wanted her at that moment, if only to prove he could still take and have and own. Not much else made sense.

He shed his shoes and unbuttoned his shirt, with the tails pulled out of his trousers. “Come here.”

“Don’t give me that,” she said with pinched lips. “And to think I was trying to give a shit about you and what you might like.”

“What?”

“This, you idiot.” She held out a piece of paper printed from the internet. “Here.”

Dash took it, but the words blurred. He blinked a few times as he forced his eyes and his mind to work together.
Read, damn it.
Some words made it. Air Force. Karate club. Nellis tryouts.

“More about me fighting again?”

“Yes. You need
something
. This…” She waved her hand up and down to gesture to his sloppy posture. He felt the urge to stand up straighter to get rid of the disgust on her face, but it wasn’t worth the effort. “This,” she continued, “is a disgrace. You’re better than this, Dash. You’re better than you’ve been behaving.”

“Dash, eh?” He tossed the paper aside and stalked toward her. A jolt of satisfaction shot down his spine when she backed up a step. “What happened to Liam?”

“You’re Dash when you’re being all dumb as shit. Believe me, right now it fits.”

“I said,
come here
.”

Quicker than his thoughts, he lashed out and grabbed her arms. Sunny yelped, wrenched free. But Dash caught her again. He pinned her against the kitchen island and bent her back against the marble.

She twisted and thrashed, fighting harder than she had since that first day.

“Let go of me.”

“That’s not how it works.” He wedged his thigh between hers and caught a handful of thick, glorious hair.
Let her fight.
He wanted more. Already his prick was a rock and he was greedy beyond reason. “You should know by now, Sunny. The only person I want to take down is you.”

Chapter Eighteen

For an instant, maybe even less than that—for a breath, Sunny thought about letting it happen. Letting Dash take her. With him as drunk as he was, he might hurt her if she gave too much resistance, but she could still let everything else go. Let him fill her however he liked, let him overwhelm her until she didn’t think of anything but him.

Fuck that.

She bent her shoulders toward the counter as Dash zeroed in on her mouth. His gaze was fuzzy. Hazy. He didn’t even notice when she shifted her feet between his.

Yanking up her knees, she jammed straight into the meat of his thighs at the same time that she feinted to the side.

He flinched but didn’t release her shoulders. His grip scrabbled along her skin, fingertips digging painfully into the flesh of her arms. “Goddamn it, Sunny.”

“What?” She flashed out with an open palm. Her fingertips cracked across his jaw. The hit was violent, and she left bright red streaks.

Mostly it made him jerk back far enough that she could duck and execute a two-handed reap, one of her favorite Judo moves. Shoving her shoulder into his stomach, she scooped her hands under his thighs and hauled upward.

Dash went down like a ton of bricks. His hands flew outward against the pale tile. His head bounced off the woven rug that lay before the kitchen sink. The shirt he’d pulled out of his waistband tangled around his lean ribs and the muscles layered there.

She never should’ve have been able to take him down with a move like that. Never. He weighed more than her, and he had skill coming out of his ears.

Or at least he used to.

She shook her head, crossing her arms over her chest. Adrenaline buzzed down her forearms and made her toes curl against the bare, cold tile. “You must be really drunk.”

“I didn’t think I was.” He pushed up on his elbows and lifted his fingertips to one temple. “But, Christ, you rang my bell.”

“Fuck you, Dash.” She couldn’t help but spit the words out. They’d been burning the inside of her mouth for the past ten minutes. “I sat here and I worried and I was thinking about you—”

“And I wasn’t thinking about you?” His eyes narrowed, and the line of his red-streaked jaw turned as brittle as a shard of ice.

“You have a funny way of showing it.”

“I just tried to show it and you knocked the wind out of me.” He sat up fully. His stomach clenched into boxes of taut muscle.

She wanted to sink her nails into the perfectly balanced streaks of his pecs. Then scratch.

“You don’t get to use that against me.” She held back her shudder with pure force of will. “What we’re doing…the crap we’ve gotten into… There’s no leeway there, Dash. No place to use it in real anger or to avoid the important stuff.”

He scrubbed long, elegant fingers through his short hair. His still drink-bleary eyes blinked. “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing? Avoiding?”

A rubbery feeling attacked her knees. Her hips sank back against the edge of the slate-topped counter. Something lodged in her throat with sharp claws and a desperate edge. “No. Fuck. Probably.”

“Hell, did you just admit I was right about something?”

She let herself sink even farther, down to the floor. Her back pushed against the cabinets, and the coolness of the wood seeped through her pajamas. With her knees folded up to her chest, she wrapped her arms around her thighs. “I hate this version of you. I hate when you’re not you.”

“Why do you get to dictate who I am and who I’m not?” They sat with an ocean of tile separating them, and yet if they’d really wanted to, they could reach out to touch.

Neither of them did. Sunny tucked tighter in on herself. “I’m not trying to dictate anything to you. You’re lost. You’ve been lost for a long, long time.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re a robot. You go to work and you come home and you have nights out with your buddies, but nothing real.”

“Why isn’t that enough? Seems like a good life to most people.” He dug his heels into the floor and let his wrists dangle between his knees. The look he shot out from under his glowering brow had all sorts of attitude. She was almost happy to see it. At least it was genuine, without him fucking her raw.

“Yeah, maybe. For most people.” She rolled her eyes. “But when have you ever been most people? That was what I loved about you. How you were something like ten degrees
above
everyone else I met. I could have married some other pre-law guy. Or pre-med, or shit, I could have found myself some hot contractor. I didn’t. I wanted you. The badass in the Air Force Academy who was going to be a fighter pilot.”

“I knew it,” he said with a weary smile. “You only wanted me for my uniform.”

“Back to the jokes again.”

“Can’t help it. You know what my dad’s like.”

She nodded, because she did know. The few times she’d met him, Gene had been bluff. More than bluff. Nearly robotic in his precision, and he’d never managed to connect with Liam on a level beyond work and the military. They’d talked missions and specs and war stories. The only chance Liam ever seemed to have of getting past that was cracking jokes. Sometimes he could make Gene laugh—right before Gene asked when Liam was going to make rank next.

That didn’t make her feel any less tired. Her bones were sinking into the tile. Sinking, sinking, sunken. She’d dropped somewhere along the way, where she hid all the soft and vulnerable places inside herself. Because he’d either be
not here
or even when he was in their home, he’d be…absent.

“What do you see? For you? The future?”

“I’ll fly ’til I die.”

That quickly, she was overtaken by the image of his plane spiraling and crashing. There’d be fire. Fragments of metal and glass.

She crammed her fists under her thighs to hide them against the tile. Her back cracked on a shiver. “That’s not a
want
. Not a dream. That’s fatalism.”

He got up, and for a second she thought she’d lost him completely. That he’d checked out of the conversation and was about to leave the room. He only took a glass from the cabinet and filled it from the water pitcher on the counter.

“I’ve told you before what I want.”

“You have not,” she said automatically. She lifted a hand to silence herself, even though he still hadn’t turned around. “Wait. I mean I don’t remember you saying anything like that. Please? Tell me again?”

“I want kids. With you, of course.” He turned around then, leaning against the counter. He was so tall that the bottom of his ass barely grazed the edge of the slate.

She stood up, mostly as a cover for the sudden shot of nerves shoving her heart into her throat. “You’re joking. That’s your biggest goal? Something
I’ll
have to do the work for? What about karate?”

“Jesus Christ, Sunny,” he growled. “What the hell is with you and karate? Are you getting some kickback if you get me to fight?” His voice dropped an extra octave. “Does it make your panties wet?”

She slowly gripped the saltshaker before her brain kicked into gear. She didn’t throw it. Her arm shook with holding it down. Not appropriate. No matter how much she wanted to chuck it at him. Even knocking him to the ground wasn’t enough compensation for that comment.

“Just stop it! I like
doing
it, but I won’t have you sidestepping by taking us down to that level. I won’t stand for it.”

“Fine. Fine.” He put the glass of water down and lifted both hands, palms out. “But seriously, what is it with you and me fighting again? Karate? I don’t get it.”

“Don’t you remember how you felt? You used to burn with something. You got so damn pumped up before every tournament. So excited. And yes, the only time I’ve seen even a hint of that level of excitement about you lately is when you’re zip tying me to your fucking trunk.”

His eyes narrowed and he walked close enough for her to smell whiskey. She ought to be disgusted. Instead, combined with the open shirt and bare, smooth skin with a dusting of chest hair, she was turned on. Her breasts swelled and tightened until her nipples tingled.

Carefully, she leaned back to trap her hands between her ass and the wooden cabinet door. “Answer me, Dash.”

He hemmed her in with an arm on either side. She saw need in his eyes, but there was something else. Something beneath that. She didn’t have a name for it, but oddly, strangely…she had hope. She had a tiny, shimmering idea that she was getting through to him. That maybe she’d crack that shell.

The one a wife should have already been under.

She touched the barest tips of her fingers to his jaw. A slight scruff bristled there. She wasn’t going to ask again. Wasn’t going to beg.