Military Romance Collection: Contemporary Soldier Alpha Male Romance (62 page)

Chapter 1: Dark

“I can feel it, this wild inside of me. It thrashes and howls and growls, until all I can do, is scream just to cover the sounds. If I had known that the solution to my darkness was so simple, I would have done a lot of things differently in my life. I would have acted sooner. The best way to keep my wild at bay is to embrace it. And if that makes me too dark for this world, so be it.”

Tears were streaming down Sharee’s face. Of all the things she would have ever expected him to say,
that
really wasn’t it. He wasn’t supposed to give up and in. It wasn’t supposed to end like this. She felt heartbroken and more than a little betrayed…which she was sure was exactly the effect
he
had been shooting for.

Damn him
, she thought furiously.
Damn him to hell and back.

“What are you doing?”

Sharee jumped. She hastily wiped the tears off her face and pushed the chair back, the little wheels rolling her away from the screen she was not supposed to be looking at. On the page, the word “END” still taunted her with its final, Arial Bold characters.

She looked up and was not surprised to find the shadow of an amused grin on Tristan’s handsome features. She was not supposed to look at his work until he asked her to, but they both knew she could never resist the temptation to peek. He hardly pretended to be annoyed by it anymore. Besides, he knew she didn’t do it out of an impulse to pry; it was just that she couldn’t help herself. Sharee lived for good stories, and Tristan’s words were just too beautiful to pass up.

They were not the only beautiful thing about him, either. By then, the two of them had reached a high enough level of intimacy that he didn’t even bother to cover up when he got out of the shower in the morning—and Sharee would never dream of asking him. Presently, he stood across the desk in the studio with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist. Sharee knew that if she looked, she would see the lines of his hipbones disappear past the fluffy white waistband of the towel. She knew that if she let her gaze run along the impressive length of his figure, she would be treated to lean, strong muscles and smooth skin.

But Sharee didn’t look and didn’t let her gaze run, because Tristan was not her boyfriend. Tristan happened to be her boss, and despite the intimacy that inevitably came with assisting a genius author practically 24/7, Sharee still prided herself in her professionalism. She only allowed herself to fantasize about him within the privacy of her own apartment. 

So, even then, she forced herself to ignore his nakedness and just meet his eyes—dark blue like a stormy sea, and sharp as a razor blade. Sharee swallowed past her suddenly dry mouth. Sometimes professionalism was really hard to keep a hold on.

Focus, goddamnit,
she reprimanded herself sternly.

“Sorry,” she offered, although they both knew she really wasn’t sorry at all. “You said you might finish it during the night, I
had
to check.”

Tristan grinned openly this time. “Sure you did, darlin’.”

Sharee shivered. He had begun calling her “darling” the very first day she had started to work for him, over two years back, and he had not stopped since. The word rolled off his tongue like sin.

“What did you think?” he asked as he took a seat on the bright red armchair.

Sharee really wished he would go put on some clothes; it was hard to keep track of a conversation with him lounging about half naked.

“I thought it was very dark,” she said honestly. “Maybe a little too much.”

Tristan arched a dark eyebrow. “Too dark?”

Sharee hesitated. Tristan was generally good with constructive criticism, but even after two years, she was still mindful of not crossing the line.

“Go on, darlin’,” he said. “You know I can take it.”

She knew. She took a deep breath and resolved to get all of her thoughts out. “Tristan, this is the third main character you kill off in a year. Don’t you think it might be a little too much?”

Tristan Jacobsen was a prolific writer. His latest series centering on werewolves was going at a particularly steady pace. Like anything else that came out of his pen, it was selling by the thousands. No one could write horror like Tristan. He was generally viewed as Stephen King’s heir…even by Stephen King himself. There was something gripping and real about the way Tristan wrote about the things that go bump in the night, something ancestral that spoke to the reader.

But no matter how dark those terrors might be, his books always contained a message of hope in the end. Not so much lately. Lately, his books had gotten scarier, darker, of a darkness that left no escape. It certainly left no way out for the protagonists.

“I mean,” Sharee continued when Tristan did not react, “how do you expect people to get attached to your protagonists if you keep offing them at the end?”

“Eric Stratham is not dead.”

“He lost his battle with his were nature and went dark side,” Sharee argued. “He might as well be.”

Tristan shrugged.

Sharee stared at him. “Tristan, I mean it,” she said, as gently as she could. “People need redemption. They need hope. It’s why they love your books so much, because you always gave them that no matter how terrifying the rest of the story was.”

“Yeah, well,” Tristan stretched his arms above his head, yawning hugely, “redemption and hope aren’t always in the cards.”

“Fair enough,” Sharee admitted. “But do they really need to not be in the cards for three books in a row?”

Tristan huffed, exasperated. “Look, if they don’t like it, they can read something else.” He got to his feet and walked out of the studio, presumably in search of clothes.

Sharee stared after him, stunned. “I’m just saying,” she called out. “This is a series. You may want to consider leaving some of the characters alive for your next book!”

“I’ll think about it!” Tristan called back, in the absent tone of someone who most definitely was
not
going to think about it. At all.

* * *

Tristan emerged twenty minutes later carrying two steaming mugs. He handed her one wordlessly, and Sharee accepted the coffee for what it was—a peace offering to placate the fretting assistant within her. Admittedly, she should have been the one brining him coffee, but over time, roles had become somewhat blurry.

He was dressed simply, in a pair of faded blue jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt that hugged his body in all the right places. Sharee couldn’t help but let her gaze linger. Boy, but he was a sight! She snapped out of it quickly and looked away before he could notice the appreciation shining in her eyes. She took a long sip of black coffee, relishing the warmth of the liquid in this gray Oregon morning.

“Sabrina called while you were getting dressed.”

Sharee delivered the information casually, but she felt a pang of irrational jealousy whenever the woman renewed her attempts at whisking Tristan away. The fact that he wanted nothing to do with her felt somewhat irrelevant to Sharee when she was forced to hear her overly chirpy voice on the other end of the phone line.

Tristan cringed visibly as he took a seat behind his desk. “Again?”

Sharee shrugged. “She wanted to know if you’re free for dinner tomorrow night.”

He looked at her with something akin to terror. “You said no, right?”

Sharee hid a smirk behind another sip of coffee. “I said I’d let her know once I’d talked to you.”

“Why on Earth would you do that?”

“Look, I told you time and time again,” Sharee said as she absently shuffled some papers around on the table that served as her desk, “I’m happy to assist you with anything and everything regarding your work, but your personal relationships are your own business. I’m not going to interfere with them.”

“Maybe you should,” Tristan grumbled.

Sharee looked up sharply. He seemed startled, as though he wasn’t supposed to say that out loud. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He swallowed visibly. “Nothing, never mind,” he said quickly, disappearing behind the screen of his iMac.

Sharee watched him curiously for another moment or two, and then she decided she was probably better off not knowing just what was going through his head.

“Before you start typing away,” she said when she saw him get ready for one of his intense writing sessions, “should we go over your plan for tomorrow?”

Tristan looked around the computer at her, a lost expression on his face. “What’s tomorrow?”

Sharee stared at him. Was he serious? “You’re meeting Derek for lunch, to discuss the tour for the new book.”
You know, the one where you kill off the protagonist,
again
?
she wanted to add, but she didn’t. She figured she had made her thoughts on the subject clear enough.

“That’s
tomorrow
?”

Sharee sighed. Like most geniuses, Tristan was always prone to distraction, but lately his brain seemed to be more scattered than usual. “Yes,” she said patiently, “that’s tomorrow.”

“Cancel it. Please,” he added as an afterthought, but that one polite word didn’t do anything to sweeten the blow.

Sharee stared at him in shock. “What?”

“You heard me. In fact, I would appreciate it if you canceled all my appointments for the next three days.”

“You don’t have anything else,” she said automatically, his schedule imprinted in her mind.

Tristan grinned, pleased. “Perfect.”

Sharee took a deep, steadying breath. She felt the beginnings of a headache forming in that spot between her eyes, right on top of the bridge of her nose. “Tristan,” she said, as calmly as she could, “you can’t cancel on your publisher two months before your tour begins. You need to sort out the details.”

“I’ll do it next week.”

“You’ve pushed it back enough. You really need to do this.”

“And I will,” he said. “Next week.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake!
“Tristan—”

“Sharee, I mean it.” He cut her off sharply. “Back off.”

Sharee snapped her mouth shut. She stared at him, dumbfounded. She watched as he pushed the chair away from the desk and stood up. She watched as he strode towards the doorway, and that’s when she finally snapped out of it.

“Where are you going?” she finally found her voice to ask.

Tristan didn’t look at her as he replied, “I’m going for a walk.”

Sharee glanced out the window. Sometime during their absurd exchange, it had begun to pour.

“It’s raining… Tristan!”

Of course, he didn’t listen. He never did. She listened to the front door open and close.

Sharee sat back in her chair, stunned. Over the past couple of months, Tristan had been especially weird. He seemed to grow more and more restless by the day, so much so that not even his writing seemed to help anymore. She had tried to coax him into talking about it a few times, but she could never get past his tight-lipped defenses.

She got up and walked over to his desk. She opened the file for his latest novel again, and sat down to read those last two chapters one more time. There was a darkness there, and for the first time Sharee found herself considering the idea that maybe the increasing bleakness in Tristan’s tales mirrored his feelings. After all, it was all too clear that something was seriously bothering him.

Up until now, however, whatever gloomy thoughts were going through his head had never affected his career. As his assistant, Sharee knew she had to put a stop to it before he did some serious damage to his work. She shuddered, already dreading the conversation.

Small steps,
she told herself.
One thing at a time.

Right now, the first step would be to inform Derek that one of his best authors was not going to discuss the tour.
Again
.

Sharee took a deep breath and picked up the phone.

***

Chapter 2: Love

The rain was kicking up a ruckus as it crashed down the forest, slapping at leaves and branches. Tristan liked it that way. In fact, he loved it. He loved the natural chaos that so accurately mirrored the one within himself. He, too, could feel the wild inside of him, like the protagonist of his new book.

Unlike
Eric, however, he could not embrace it. He was sentenced to deal with it and keep it at bay as best as he could. Sometimes, the only way he could “deal with it” was by letting the forest swallow him up, even if just for half an hour. It was the reason why he had bought the house that sat just on the outskirts of the thick forest right outside Moonville, Oregon. It was the name that drew him to the place. Moonville. It was ironic, of a corny kind of irony that a writer could not help but appreciate.

Presently, Tristan trudged through the wet forest and relished the cold slap of the rain on his skin. The loud sounds of falling water drowned out the cacophony of his own thoughts. The earthy smells of the forest grounded him. With every step he took, he could feel the wild within recede.

“When choked, dogs go docile—but wolves go wild.”

He had encountered that sentence in a book a while back.
The Black Prism
, by Brent Weeks, the best piece of modern Fantasy fiction he had read in some time. It had stayed with him, that sentence, and it resurfaced now, as he walked underneath a rainstorm through the chilly Oregon forest.

He wondered if he would eventually go wild too…well, wild
er
. Was he doing more harm than good keeping himself on a leash? Should he just embrace his darkness in order to prevent it from exploding?

He shook his head. No. That was the wild talking. He could
not
let it roam free, nor would he. He had enough trouble managing it as it was.

Instinctively, Tristan looked up at the sky. He couldn’t see anything past the thick, dark-green tops of the trees and the gray clouds, but he knew it was there. He could feel it. The moon. Its call had been getting stronger over the past couple of months. He found it harder and harder to resist it, to come back to himself when the dawn came.

His parents had warned him that might happen. They told him the call of the wild would get louder and louder as he grew older. Part of him had hoped they were exaggerating. As it turned out, they were only too mild in their descriptions of the urge that would unfailingly overtake him, like clockwork, once a month. Today, Tristan could feel the urge course through his veins with renewed insistency, making his blood boil and his skin itch with the desire of shedding it.

And Sharee wanted him to have lunch with Derek and think about book signings? He snorted out loud, safe in the knowledge that there was no one to hear him. No way. No way in hell. He was going to be a hermit for the next few days, even if he had to hide deep into this forest and not come out for all that time. Sharee could glare at him all she liked with those deep, brown eyes of hers.

As always whenever he allowed himself to think of her in the privacy of his solitude, Tristan suppressed a shiver. Everything about Sharee awakened his desire. Her chocolate-colored eyes. Her amber skin. The delicate dimples on her cheeks. The long black curly hair, shiny like a crow’s wings. The curves of her firm, athletic body. He wanted her, but it was more than that.

The more he got to know her, the more Tristan found himself attracted to her personality. Her determination. Her strength. Her quirky sense of humor. Her big heart. With each passing day he felt more and more attracted to her, until finally he fell in love. Not that he would ever tell her, of course.

Sharee Evans was the best assistant he had ever had, and he was not about to compromise that. And then there was that other thing…the wild. How could he ask her—or anyone else, for that matter—to accept it, when he could hardly accept it himself?

The short answer was that he couldn’t. The long answer was that he couldn’t, and it was killing him. It was simply killing him to be in such close proximity with her every day and not be able to touch her, or even just tell her how he really felt. But what choice did he have? He toyed with the idea of telling her sometimes, in the privacy of his own head, but the consequences he could think up were always disastrous.

The truth of the matter was that he couldn’t expose himself, and he surely couldn’t expose
her
to him.
It
. The wild. He would never hurt her, he knew that, not even in his wildest form, but his nature was still a horror to behold in its entirety. Sharee may be fond of horror stories, but to read a tale of terror was an entirely different matter from living one.

Tristan had made the choice of being alone a long time ago. He would never, he had promised himself, bring someone else into his horror. But that was before Sharee Evans. That was before he fell for her, so utterly and hopelessly. He knew he should push her away, for both of their sakes, but no matter how hard he tried, he could never find the strength within himself to do it.

Tristan heaved a deep sigh. The short solace that the heavy rain had brought him was quickly dissipating. He turned around and began the walk back to the house, fully knowing that she would be waiting for her there, and that once he was inside the door, he would have to go back to pretending to be normal.

An hour later, Sharee was climbing the walls. She had busied herself in all possible ways, even returning Sabrina’s call to let her know Tristan wouldn’t be available and he would get in touch later. But as unpleasant as that call was, it was nothing compared to the conversation with Derek Chapman.

The man was furious. This was the third time Tristan was canceling on him, something Sharee knew nothing about. Apparently, Derek had spoken directly to Tristan twice before to meet, and the man had always stood him up. Sharee instructed him to always go through her from then on.

However, they both agreed that a few—three—missed meetings were only the tip of the iceberg. The problem was that Tristan had become abrasive and unenthusiastic. In fact, Derek’s exact word had been “deadbeat”. Sharee had snapped at him not to use that term, but even she had to admit that it was becoming more and more fitting by the day. Somewhere along the way, Tristan had begun to miss deadlines. He was becoming more and more uninterested in his own work.

When Sharee told him about the death of the protagonist in the new book, Derek flipped. The first time Tristan had killed off his protagonist, it had been a bold, unexpected move that the audience had loved. The second time had been less well received and a little redundant. A third time would be suicidal.

“You
have
to make him change his mind, Sharee,” Derek had said. “Talk to him, today. I’ll call back in the evening.”

Sharee had tried to explain to him that she had already brought up the issue, and that it had been dismissed at record speed. Derek, however, had refused to listen.

“You
talk
to him,” he had insisted. “Let him know he’s throwing his whole career out the window.”

Sharee knew. She had not realized just how bad things were before, but the call with Derek had opened her eyes on a sight that well and truly pained her. Tristan’s inner flame was wasting away, not to mention his reputation, and she simply couldn’t allow it.

When she finally heard the front door open, she sat up straight and squared her shoulders, and she took a deep breath. She felt like she was readying herself for battle—which, in a way, was probably exactly what she was doing.

He walked into the studio a few minutes later, dripping water all over the Persian rug. Sharee stared at him with wide eyes.

“You’re soaked!” she cried, stating the obvious.

Tristan shrugged. “I felt like taking a walk in the rain.”

Jesus. This is worse than I thought.
“Go get dry. I’ll make some coffee, and then we need to talk.”

Tristan looked at her. “Have you canceled my meeting with Derek tomorrow?”

“Yes, I have.”
Sort of.
“Now, please, go. I have something important to discuss with you.”

He looked at her curiously for a moment, then he nodded and walked out of the room. Ten minutes later, they were sitting at the kitchen’s table nursing mugs full of dark, warm, blissfully caffeinated liquid. Sharee watched Tristan carefully over the brim of her mug as she drank. There was a vacant, distant look in his blue eyes. She wanted nothing more than to grab him by his shoulders and shake him until he finally snapped out of it and came back to his senses.

“Derek told me something interesting,” she began carefully. “He told me this is the third time you cancel on him.”

Sharee had expected some sort of contrition, maybe even an apology, but none of it came. Instead, Tristan looked back at her blankly. “Yes,” he said simply.

“You never told me he had asked you to meet.”

Tristan shrugged.

Good God, give me patience.
Sharee gritted her teeth and bit her tongue to prevent herself from yelling at him. After all, he
was
still her boss. “I’m your assistant,” she said. “I need to know these things.”

“You’re right,” Tristan said after a moment. “I’m sorry.”

He didn’t look or sound sorry, but Sharee would take it nonetheless. “I told him about how the new book ends,” she said. “He doesn’t like it, either. He says it’s a bad move.”

“To be honest, I don’t give a fuck what Derek says.”

Tristan spoke calmly, but the sentiment was very much there. Sharee stared at him in shock. “Excuse me?”

“I like how it ends,” Tristan said. “It
needs
to end that way.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Sharee argued. “I’ve read the whole thing cover to cover, and it doesn’t ‘need’ to end that way. And you know it.”

“I like it,” Tristan said again. “End of discussion.”

He made to stand up, and Sharee glared sharply at him.

“Sit down,” she all but barked. She blinked, surprised at her own outburst.

Tristan was equally stunned. His eyes widened briefly, and he sat.

“We’re not done talking,” Sharee said. Her voice was less controlled now. She could hear the clipped, urgent tone in her own words. She decided not to fight it; Tristan probably needed a good shove anyway. “What’s going on with you?”

Infuriatingly, he stared at her with a confused expression on his face. “What do you mean?”

Sharee huffed, exasperated. “Don’t play dumb with me,” she said. “Both Derek and I have been noticing that you’re not the same. Your work is suffering greatly, and so will your career if you keep this up, and it’s like you don’t even care.”

To her surprise, Tristan shrugged again. “I
don’t
care,” he confirmed.

Sharee stared at him. It took a few moments for her to process that information. “What do you mean, you don’t care?”

“Look at this place, Sharee.” Tristan embraced the room around them with a gesture. “I’ve done very well. I could live off royalties alone.”

“I thought that was never the point with you.”

“Maybe it’s the point now. Maybe this is my last book.”

“
What
?”

“Look, I don’t know, all right?” Tristan finally snapped, his own frustration showing. “I’m going through some things, and I need my books to be dark in order to vent them out. If you and Derek and the whole fucking world don’t like it, then so be it. It’s not my problem.”

“It
is
your problem!” Sharee argued, incredulous. “Do you really want to throw it all away?”

“I want to write in peace!” he all but roared.

Sharee blinked. She stared at him, stunned by the rage she could feel radiating off of him.

“What’s it to you, anyway?” Tristan asked after a few moments of dumbfounded silence.

“What’s it to me?” Sharee repeated. She felt like this conversation was rapidly and inexorably getting out of hand. “I care about you,” she said honestly. “
That
’s what it is to me.”

“You care about me. That’s nice.” Tristan snorted. “I fucking love you.”

Sharee looked at him. She watched as the realization of what he had just said washed over him. His eyes widened and his skin paled. He looked like the proverbial deer caught in the highlights.

“I…” Sharee tried to talk. Her voice wouldn’t come. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?”

Tristan swallowed visibly. “I think you should go,” he said after a moment.

“What?”

“Go home for the day. I think we both need to take a beat.”

“I don’t want to take a beat. I want to understand just what the hell is going on here.” There was no heat in Sharee’s voice, just utter shock.

Tristan sighed. He looked very tired all of a sudden. “Please, darlin’. Please, just leave for the day. We’ll talk more tomorrow, I promise.”

Sharee didn’t have the heart to push him any further. Besides, she was starting to feel like pressing the “pause” button on this conversation was actually a good idea. She nodded and stood. Five minutes later, she was climbing into her car and driving away in the rain, leaving the cottage on the edge of the forest in her rearview mirror.