BAD BOY ROMANCE: DIESEL: Contemporary Bad Boy Biker MC Romance (Box Set) (New Adult Sports Romance Short Stories Boxset) (124 page)

Chapter 4

Reid

The Ranger code is absolute. It’s not just something we know, it’s something we live, something we feel. I know who I am and what it is that I do. I know what it means to be a ranger. In a way, it makes it easier. I don’t get scared when I’m in the idle of hell, because hell is what I signed up for. I’m an elite soldier. My country expects more of me than of any other soldier, but the real reason why we push so hard, why we run so far and wide, is because as a Ranger
I
expect more of me.

I never fail my team, my pack. And they will never fail me. I do everything in my power to keep alert and strong, so that when they need me I am there. The world knows that I am specially selected and well trained. I am neat and upright, polite and respectful, an example. I meet the enemies of my country with energy and valour, and I will fight to the death for what is right, for freedom and peace and prosperity.

I am an army Ranger.

Then why did the look on Allegra’s face make me feel so guilty about who I was? When I was away from home I could shake it all off. I could be who I was without feeling like I was compromising myself, without feeling like by being the best version of myself for my country, I was becoming the worst version of myself for Allegra.

She didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve the months alone, and the husband I was when I was home, torn between the love of my life and the pack that courses through my blood. And god, I’d strangled her. I couldn’t get the look on her face out of my head. I was haunted day and night by death and violence, destruction and pain followed me everywhere. But the look on her face was what nearly knocked me down.

She loved me, and I still couldn’t understand why. I loved her so much it hurt, and still I couldn’t be what she needed me to be. It would have been easier for her to be with someone else, someone that was home all the time, someone that would be there for her, talk to her, share who they were with her. Someone that wasn’t a monster.

I sat in the woods against a tree, hugging myself. I’d shed my clothes and changed just as soon as I’d gotten over that wall, the fire inside me so hot it had threatened to consume me. I’d run until the flame had burned down to a glowing ember, under being human wasn’t dangerous anymore. Now I was shivering in the cold, naked and vulnerable.

I hadn’t felt that kind of rage in a very long time. I hadn’t ever lost control like that. If I lost it at home where it was safe, what did that say about my abilities in the battle field?

But I knew the answer to that. On the battle field I was allowed to be who I was. I was chosen as a ranger because of the wolf inside of me, because I was able to do the country good by being what I was.

At home I had to keep it in. I had to control it, be stronger, be better. Be human. At home the pressure was on, worse than in any line of fire. At home I was a monster.

I needed to talk to her. I knew that. I knew I needed to tell her at least something of what I was struggling with, even if I couldn’t tell her what I was in the army. She deserved that, and I knew she would be able to help me, be there for me, if she knew what I was. If she knew just a little bit about what it was like to look someone in the eye and shoot them. If she knew what it was to take lives for the sake of peace. It didn’t matter in the end who was on whose side they were, they were people. Living, breathing, thinking, loving people.

But I was scared. As a wolf I was already a monster. I was fighting so hard to be more human with the wolf inside of me I was losing it already. How was I going to explain to her that a lot of my job had to do with cold-blooded killing? That I couldn’t just choose to be compassionate, because if they didn’t die someone else would? How was she going to forgive me for who I was if I couldn’t even forgive myself?

But I needed her, and the more I pulled away from her the more I was losing her. So I got up dusted the bits of bark that stuck to my bare legs off, and started walking toward the place where I’d hidden the boxer shorts I’d run out of the house with. I wandered into the base with just my underwear, and I got a funny look for some of the guards on patrol, but when I saluted them they saluted back. Everything was fine as long as we followed protocol.

Allegra was in the kitchen. She wore a silk night gown and a matching robe. I couldn’t remember if she’d had it before I’d left, or if this was new. I leaned against the doorpost and watched her cook. She was making pancakes, and everything she did was like a dance. Elegant and precise. Graceful. When she looked up and noticed me in the door of the kitchen her body jerked lightly, an expression of surprise flickering over her face before it fell blank again and her eyes were guarded.

“You’re home,” she said softly, her voice a lot gentler than her face looked.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I unfolded my arms and walked to her, wrapping my arms around her waist from behind and pushed my face into her hair dark hair. She stiffened in my arms but she didn’t pull away.

“It’s hard for me to be home,” I tried. Opening up was hard. Even just that one sentence was difficult, but she softened in my arms and turned around.

“It’s still
home
though, right?  I’m still here,” she said and there was hurt on her face. I felt like crap for hurting her. For making her feel like she wasn’t important.

“It will always be home,” I said, and tried to push the thought of my pack out of my mind. “I’ll always come home to you.” That last bit was true, and it was easier for me to say. “We’ve had a rough run. It doesn’t matter how well they train us, or how well we’re briefed before we have to go on a mission, it’s never really enough to help us cope with death and with the violence and horror.”

Her arms finally wrapped around my body, and her skin was warm against my cold body. She put her head against my chest. I’d forgotten how small and delicate she was, how her cheek nestled perfectly between my pecks and her soft body with it’s curves complimented my hard lines.

“I wish they would let you have a different job. Surely they know that werewolves wouldn’t hurt anyone if they had desk jobs?”

I leaned my chin on the top of her head and sighed. They would never allow something like that, but even if they did, I didn’t know that I would take it. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to fit into the real world, the modern world. To have to hide my wolf at home
and
at work. Being in the army was as far from reality and the new era as I could get. There I could still pretend that it was before the invention of electricity and internet.

“They’re scared of us,” I finally said. “We won’t into society.”

And I wouldn’t make it without the pack, I thought silently to myself.

She pulled her head away so she could look at me, and her dark chocolate eyes were liquid and deep.

“What were your nightmares about?” she asked. Such an innocent question. I’d strangled her, frightened her to death and run away. I owed her that.

I closed my eyes for a moment. I saw John, bleeding in a ditch with his arm bent at awkward angles. His eyes were closed and the open wounds weren’t re-healing and closing themselves the way it worked with werewolves. I’d had to re-break his arm in three places when it had started healing so he could use it again. I’d thought I’d lost Charlie, we’d found him much later with silver shrapnel all the way up his leg, his hip, his chest. If it had hit his heart he would have been dead. The enemy had gotten smarter. They’d started working silver into the ammunition. Werewolves and silver just didn’t go together.

I heard the screams. I heard Abdul’s foreign-language pleading with the man that held the gun against Carlos’s head. I had crept up behind the guy and slit his throat. His blood had been on my hands for days, I could smell him, smell his death, even now just thinking about it.

A shudder traveled through my body.

“Just a lot of shooting and running for our lives,” I finally said. I didn’t know if she could cope with a retelling. I didn’t know if I could cope with it. So to distract her and distract me from the gore and the pain and the death, I dipped my head and kissed her.

Her lips were soft and warm against mine, and her eyes widened in surprise before she closed them and I realized with a pang of guilt that this was the first time since I’d been home to kiss her, to be the one to make the move.

Her body softened even more against mine, like she was melting against me. I folded her against me and tried to draw the warmth out of her, the peace and the calm that followed her. It had been like that since I’d met her. She was the opposite of everything in my life. Where my life was wild and merciless and volatile she was calm and stable and compassionate. When I could only smell blood and nothing else, when everything I saw was tinged with fire, she was the cool breeze that reminded me I was human, too. Not just wolf.

Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. Maybe I was going to make it through if I told her who I was. After all, she’d accepted me as a werewolf, a killing thing, an animal.

Why wouldn’t she believe in me when I told her that even as a human the killing didn’t go away anymore? It was a moment of pure calm, bliss, where I realized that the only way I was going to move forward was to let her in so she could move with me.

Chapter 5

Allegra

His body was hard and warm against mine, and for the first time in a long time he was letting me in. He stripped me of my clothes and carried me to the bedroom where he paid special attention to me. It was like he was trying to fix everything that had gone wrong. He traced my neck with one finger and I shuddered, remember his flaming eyes and his otherworldly strength. But then he kissed the skin that hurt, like he was kissing it better. He traced his tongue across my neck and my body opened up for him instead of curling away. His and followed the shape of my body, tracing my outline, and he covered me with his body.

In the middle of day, with a night hell and trauma behind us, he made love to me and tried to make everything right.

And I believed that this would be a turning point. That now, finally, he’d come home.

I woke up hours later and stretched. My body was stiff and I could feel the places in and on my body where he’d been. I reached my hand out to him, and turned my head, and realized the same time my fingers felt the empty sheets that he was gone again. I turned my head to listen for sounds in the kitchen, anywhere else in the house, but there was nothing. The terrible emptiness that I usually felt after he left pressed down on me like a hand.

I sat up, trying to ignore the hole that had opened up inside of me, and couldn’t. I suddenly felt like crying, tears burning behind my eyes. When he was away I made myself strong. I met the loneliness head on because I was going to win the fight. Even after he’d come back I hadn’t dropped my guard because I knew I’d had to keep my back up.

But now? I’d been stupid enough to let down my guard, to believe that it was going to be alright. His absence now was like a missing limb. And it hurt.

I got up and found clothes, pulling it over my skin, covering up my nakedness. There were times when being naked was glorious, when it felt right. And then there were times that it made me feel vulnerable, even when I was alone. Like now, after he’d left me. After he’d made me believe it was all fixed.

The phone rang and I picked it up. Charlene’s voice sounded hollowing over the receiver.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know. John ran out of here like he was possessed. There’s an issue at the office, someone said they found a spy.”

“What? This is home. They can’t bring work home,” I said and realized how stupid I sounded.

“I know,” Charlene answered quietly.

I ended the conversation and hung up. I wasn’t going to sit at home anymore and wait for him to come home, to make me feel worthy of his attention again. I pulled a light jacket over my t-shirt and stepped into my pumps. I was going to that office, and I was going to demand they let Reid come home because this was his time off.

It was only a five minute drive from the house and I heard the voices from inside before I stepped through the front door of the office building. A small, dull-looking woman sat behind a big desk. Her hair was tucked into a bun in her neck and her glasses looked like they belonged on someone more serious, more sure of herself.

“Where are they?” I asked. She knew who I was. Everyone here knew who I was.

“We’re not allowed to let civilians in,” she said, and sunk in on herself like she was trying to hide behind the big desk.

“I don’t actually care. If your superiors have an issue, you tell them to phone me.” I walked around the desk and through the door behind her where the voices were floating from. The first door was another office, where John was leaning with his hands on a desk, talking loudly to a man behind it that tried in vain to calm him with gentle words. When I walked passed John stopped yelling and swung around to look at me. I stormed past and a moment later he was following me. I bet the man was happy to be rid of him.

“What are you doing here?” John asked.

“I’m here to get Reid,” I said and walked on. “It would do you good to go to Charlene, too. You guys are killing us.”

“This is pack business,” he said. When I flung myself around to look at him, he closed his mouth like he’d said something he wasn’t supposed to.

“Pack business?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him.

He opened and closed his mouth, searching for words and failing to find them. I turned again and followed the sound of Reid’s voice into a room to my left. The room was bare, with four naked walls and a concrete floor. A metal table and chair was in the middle, and it didn’t look like this room belonged in an office building at all. A young man sat on the chair. He had dark skin and black hair, eyes big and terrified. He looked like he couldn’t be older than eighteen. Reid stood in front of him, radiating hatred. It was hot and scalding, and I could feel his power crawling on my skin. His eyes were a light blue, a color I’ve come to fear in the last twenty-four hours.

Abdul, another one of his team that I recognized, stood to the side and babbled fast words in a language I didn’t understand. I guessed that it was the boy’s language, but his eyes were on Reid. If I were him I’d watch Reid too. He looked like he was going to pounce.

I noticed an official in uniform standing in the corner last of all. Why was the man doing nothing? Maybe Reid and his team outranked him. It was strange that no one else was around.

“What’s going on here?” I asked, and it was like all of them just realized I was there after I spoke. Reid turned his head to me, and he breathed in like he was sniffing the air. I wondered if he recognized me at all when his eyes looked like that.

“What are you doing here?” he asked and his voice was a deep grown, something that shouldn’t have been able to come out of a human throat.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” I said, crossing my arms. I didn’t look him in the eye, I wasn’t stupid enough to challenge him, but I wasn’t going to back down. I did my best to push away the spark of fear I’d started to feel when I’d seen his eyes, and I squared my shoulders, staring very hard at his chest.

It wasn’t very easy to be stubborn when I couldn’t look him in the eye. Eye-contact had most of the impact.

“This is pack business,” Reid said. It was the second time I’d heard that since I’d arrived. It didn’t make sense.

“Yes, I’m starting to hear more and more about this ‘pack’ business of yours,” I said, and my voice didn’t sound as scared as I was. Point for me.

Reid’s face closed. Not that it had been very open before, but he was blocking himself off from me even more.

“Get her out of here,” he said to John. John to a step toward me, but I held up my hand.

“Don’t touch me, John,” I said, and I looked him in the eye. He averted his eyes, and I knew what was going on. Reid was Alpha of this little pack, and his team were part of it. I knew a bit about werewolves. I’d looked it up long ago, just after we’d gotten married. I hadn’t thought it was the same, because Reid was in the army and he didn’t have a pack he answered to the way other wolves did. But I realized now I’d been wrong.

“Reid asked me to escort you out,” John said, sounding unsure.

“Is Reid your Alpha?” I asked John. He hesitated for a second, eyes flicking to Reid, but then he nodded.

“Right, and I’m married to him. Which means that I’m the Alpha’s mate. The second. Right?” I was going out on a limb, but John was starting to look nervous.

“Reid asked me to—“

“I know what he asked you to do,” I said. “But I’m telling you not to. I’m outrank you, John, back off.”

He swallowed, glancing at Reid again, but then he stepped back. When I looked at Reid again he looked like he was going to explode. His face was red and his muscles bulged under his shirt. A vein stuck out on his forehead and I could actually see his pulse in his neck.

“Take it easy, Reid,” I said in a soft voice, still not looking into his eyes.

“You have no right to pull rank on them,” he said and his voice was calm. The dangerous kind.

“You married me. You gave me this position. Either I’m your wife and part of the pack, or neither.”

He pulled his lips back and snarled at me like an animal, but I let it slide. I was  starting to see a really ugly side of him, but I could feel the tension, the magic, in the room, and this wasn’t the time to confront him about it. The idea was to diffuse it without anyone dying.

“I’m going to ask you again,” I said in a low voice. “What are you doing?”

“This is a spy,” Reid said, pointing to the boy that stood trembling the middle of the room. He half-stepped behind Abdul like he would protect him, but if I knew anything about pack I knew where Abdul’s loyalties lay.

“It’s a child,” I said.

“He needs to die,” Reid said again and his voice had that animal quality to it.

“What?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My ears started ringing and it was like everything inside me stopped. The room started spinning slowly around me.

“He should have a hearing, at least,” I heard myself say, but my voice sounded far away.

“He’s an enemy,” Reid said.

“No, Reid. He’s a child.”

Reid growled at me, again a sound that didn’t sound right coming from his throat. I was suddenly sick of him treating me like that. Something inside me snapped.

“Stop it,” I said and I knew it was dangerous. No one just told the alpha what to do like that. But I was over it. I was over all of it. “Don’t be an animal. No one deserved just to die without a fair trial.”

I looked into Reid’s eyes and the blue flame in them scared me. But I held onto the stare. I was challenging him.

“Kill that boy, and you lose me,” I said. It was a direct challenge, an ultimatum. John gasped and I knew that my threat was as serious as I thought it was. But what scared me more than Reid’s eyes, the animal, the side of him that I suddenly saw, was that I meant it. If he killed that kid today, without having anyone step in and speak for him, I was going to leave him. I could walk away.

Yes, it would hurt.  Yes, I’d miss him. I loved him. But I have lived most of our married life alone. I could do it again.

“You’re not kidding,” Reid said and it was a statement, not a question. His voice sounded more like his own. He was swallowing his wolf down. I nodded, because I wasn’t kidding.

“Put him in a cell,” Reid barked. I turned my back on him – another very dangerous thing to do with an alpha, I’d read – and walked out.