MILITARY ROMANCE: The War Within Himself (Alpha Bad Boy Marine Army Seal) (Contemporary Military Suspense & Thriller Romance) (97 page)

Chapter Five 

Tessa paced back and forth. She had an itch from the inside out that she could only deal with if she kept moving. “So what is a writer doing in my head?”

He furrowed his brow. “Oh no, no. I’m not in your head. You’re in mine.”

Tessa nodded. If she couldn’t force her way into his deepest intentions, she would have to coax him into opening the front door. “So if I’m just in your head, why don’t you just talk to me?”

A mischievous smile stretched across his face. “I knew you would admit it.”

Tessa kept a straight face. She wanted to strangle him into to believing her. But she had already tried that way. That wasn’t going to work. “Go ahead. Tell me who your sister was. Talk to me about this room.”

He sighed, resting with his hands on his ankles, a distant look in his eye. “It was nearly ten Earth years ago.”

Tessa smiled. The man talked like a writer.

“I knew it was coming, so I prepared. I bought this place out with all the money I had made. My entire life’s earnings. Then I came down here with my family, every single person with my living bloodline.”

Tessa could feel the room heat even as he said this. She wasn’t doing anything to change anything. That must have been him. Maybe she had broken into his head after all. So why couldn’t she change his mind?

“A comet flew out of the sky like a falling star.” A smile played at his lips.

Tessa cocked her head to the side. There was a softness in him that made her heart grow warm. She wanted to nestle into him and sleep for days. She wanted to stop fighting him. She wanted to stop fighting in general.

“It rocked Kahara from the inside out. We had almost survived.”

“So what went wrong?” Tessa found herself holding her breath.

“It was almost over when my sister’s daughter began to…she was sick, and I guess the pressure was too much. We had been hiding out in this room for hours, almost twenty of us. I could imagine how uncomfortable the toddler was. It was understandable.

“So the little girl ran out of my sister’s arms and right to the door. It had been weakened. It wasn’t the way that it looks now: impenetrable. The storm and the comet had begun to take a toll. She started banging against it. Her strength, it was her gift. She was the strongest Kaharan even at her young age. My sister couldn’t stop her before she broke through…”

“You’re lying.” Tessa couldn’t stop the words from flying out of her mouth.

He clamped his jaw shut.

“It’s a panic room for a reason, right?” Tessa stalked toward the door. She pressed her palms against it, ignoring the burn. “It’s impenetrable, even for a little girl with a gift.”

The man shook his head, one fat tear falling out of his red eyes. “I thought it was over. I thought it was safe. At least for me to crack the door for five seconds. I’m no scientist. I didn’t know.”

Tessa slid herself across the floor until her leg was pressed against his. “But you blame yourself.”

“If I hadn’t unlocked the door, she wouldn’t have run out and…” His voice grew heavy. “Her mother went after her and…she let the fire in. I tried to tell them not to go outside. I tried to tell them to go deeper underground. It wasn’t until I had locked myself in a closet on the third lower level that I even noticed I was alone.”

His voice was like knives to Tessa. Her eyes stung with tears. She wanted to absorb all of his pain. She could feel the little girl, hear her voice in her head. Before she knew it, she was sobbing with him. She let her head fall on his shoulder, let her touch comfort him for the moment. She let him cry into her. She let him break himself and her.

Tessa knew the words she had to say. She would break him even more, but she couldn’t do it quite yet, not without milking him for everything she could. “So where are you now? What is your life like?” She needed to know him.

“I work on a spaceship. I used to be the head of sanitation.” He let out a dry laugh. “Imagine that: bestselling author, the head of sanitation. Anyway, I controlled waste on the ship. So the commander tasked me with destroying it now that we have a settlement on Earth.”

Tessa’s eyes flashed wide. She couldn’t believe her ears. A settlement for people like her? Her heart throbbed with satisfaction. She had been right to believe. There was a place for her. Now all she needed was his help. “So you’re on the ship right now?”

He nodded, absentmindedly wrapping his arm around her torso.

She couldn’t deny how natural it felt. She could feel herself melting into him, but she had to stop. If she ever wanted to meet this man in real life, she would have to fight for him. One last fight. One more time.

“I’m flying it into the sun.”

Tessa’s heart dropped. Suddenly all of her hopes and all of her dreams fell right into the pit of her stomach. That was the heat. It was becoming more and more unbearable. And now, now that she was paying attention, she was sure she heard screaming coming from the other end. His end. A man was yelling at him.

Tessa didn’t need to know specifics to understand that she was running out of time.

“No. No. Listen, you…what’s your name?”

“Jrym.” He wasn’t even looking at her anymore.

She could feel him slipping through her fingers. She couldn’t let him die, wouldn’t see him go. “Wait. Jrym, you can’t do this.”

“Why? Because the voice in my head is telling me not to?”

“Who told you to do it in the first place? Voices in your head.”

“What? Are you trying to change my mind? Because it won’t work. I have given my share. I have built the new Kahara. I won’t be alive anymore.”

Tears poured out of Tessa’s eyes. “You. Can’t. Do. This.”

He pressed his palm to her face.

She squeezed her eyes shut.

His hand shook. “I’ve already decided.”

She knew what to say. She had to say it. She was in his head. She just had to move one or two things around. “You can’t do this. You can’t let them get to me. You can’t let me die inside.”

He looked at her. That had gotten his attention. “I’m not letting anyone die.”

Tessa gulped. Her whole body was covered, filled, flooded with devotion. She wouldn’t see him go. She had visions of the two of them in this magical Kaharan settlement together. She imagined a whole different life for herself, and now for him too.

“You’re letting yourself die, and me too. I followed your call out into the middle of nowhere. I believed in you. If you don’t come save me, if you don’t find me, I’ll never survive. One day these tests, they’ll go too far. You are
killing
me.” She rested her hand on his chest, her whole body shaking because she knew this had to work, because she couldn’t do it without him. “Just like your niece. Just like your whole family.” The words oozed from her mouth, the vilest of poisons.

He threw her off himself and stood up, looking away from her as his choked breathes echoed off the walls.

Oh no.

Tessa went after him anyway. “I won’t let you do this, Jrym. I believe in you!”

He turned on her, his eyes wild like fire. “You want me for yourself!”

Tessa gasped. She had done it. “You can’t deny me.”

He huffed and huffed and ran toward that heavy door—desperate movements.

As he wrapped his hands around the lever, Tessa caught up with him. “I’m out there. Just come to me! Leave all of your unhappiness behind. Come to me! We could start a whole new life. You can forget you ever wanted to end it.” She had to dig so deep into herself that she reached a place she promised herself she would never visit, a place she had locked up because she had to survive. Because she couldn’t break.

“If you don’t come for me, no one will.” Her sobs were weak, defeated. “They’ll just take me back inside. The way they guard me, I’m sure that no one even knows I exist…except for you. If you don’t want me, I don’t know what I’d do.”

His face crumpled as he looked into her eyes. “I want you.”

Tessa huffed out a breath of relief as he rested his chin on the top of her head.

“For some insane reason I want you more than anyone else.”

“So stop this. Find me.”

But he slowly shook his head.

“Why?” Tessa cried.

“Because I’m done with living and nothing can change that.” With that, he yanked open the door and disappeared outside.

Without thinking, Tessa ran out after him only to find a fire raging through the building.

Chapter Six

Jrym’s eyes flashed open to a control board and scalding heat.

“Jrym! Come on! We’re far too close! If you’re not here in the next thirty seconds, I will have to disengage without you!”

Anxiety spilled out all around him. His own sweat blinded him. He glared at the gauge. It was broken. It wouldn’t tell him where he was. But when he glanced through the windshield, he realized he didn’t need it to. All he could see was the super star.

“Autopilot, Jrym. Come on! I can’t live with myself if I let you go like this!”

“What have I done?” Jrym felt a tinge of regret. That beautiful woman. She was gone. He would die in minutes without ever having met her.

“JRYM!” And, what’s worse, she needed him. She had pled for him and he had turned his back. He was disgusted with himself, but what could he do?

***

Tessa sobbed as quietly as she could into the night. That had been her chance,
her very last chance
, and she had blown it. Now he was gone, millions of miles away. Now she had no one coming to save her. Now she had no future.

Unless…

With a start, she realized that there were moments in that dream when she felt she was looking at him from the inside out, when she felt all that warmth while he talked about the fire. Oh, and
the actual fire
. She wasn’t in his dreams. She was with
him
. In his head. They weren’t communicating. She had unwittingly used her powers to seek him out. So she squeezed her eyes shut and tried again.

***

“Jrym!” she yelled at the top of her lungs as she raced through the seared halls of that office building. Since he had disappeared, she’d have to follow her intuition to get to him. But she knew he was in there somewhere. She ran up the stairs, floor after floor after floor, looking for him, begging for him, until finally there he was, standing and facing the window, flames licking everything around him.

He turned as if he had been waiting for her, a strange smile in his eye.

She didn’t hesitate. She had no idea how much time she had left as it was. In any moment he could vanish. So she crossed the flames for him and clutched his shoulders, a forcing him to look at her.

“Stay with me.”

“It’s too late.”

“No.” She had to blink away the sweat running down her eyebrow. Her skin throbbed and pinched from the heat. “I will not let you say that to me.”

He tried to look away from her scalding gaze, but she wouldn’t let him. She took his face in both of her hands, because she refused to let him go. Then an urge overtook her until it was the only thing she could think to do. She hopped up to her tiptoes and pressed her lips against his.

She didn’t know what to expect. She had never done this kind of thing before.

But as soon as he melted into her, his hands searching her from the inside out, his lips dancing with hers, his tongue jutting into her mouth, as soon as her body responded and he lit her on fire the way that those flames could never do, she knew she had made the right choice.

***

Jrym lunged toward the abort button with everything in him. That was it.
She
was it. He felt the spaceship power down, but they were still hurling toward the sun. “Alec!” he roared. “I’m coming!”

He sprinted down the melted halls of that ship, thoughts bouncing around in his head. Where had this woman come from? A creature so powerful she could make him feel this way. It was like they were destined to find each other, destined to bond. Suddenly madness was not the only option. Suddenly he wasn’t alone. Suddenly he had sprung back from the dead and into the world of the living.

Tessa. Oh powerful Tessa. She had saved him from himself, from eternal fire. Now he had to find her, because for the first time he saw a future for himself, a future with her.

Epilogue.

Tessa was exhausted. She had spent the better part of her first night in the real world sending mental signals to Jrym, but now she could feel him close by. Real close. She could feel the rustle in the wind, the disturbance of the grass.

No.

She could see it. A light beamed from the stars.

But then there was the rustle of the men looking for her on the ground. They wouldn’t yell for her. No. That would startle her. They had thought that much through. But the rustling was more than enough to spook her.

But that light…

“Climb down.”

It was Jrym’s voice in her head.

She followed his instructions, nothing but complete trust in him. As her feet hit the cool mud, she felt strong hands wrap around her waist. She peered through the darkness at that body, at Jrym disguised as a security guard. 

Even in the shadows she could see that he was smiling. Not a cynical smile, not an insulting one, a real one.

She wrapped her arms around his neck, relief drowning her. “Oh God. You came.”

He chuckled into her ear. “If we’re going to be real Kaharans, you’re gonna have to stop saying that.”

Tessa smirked. “Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.”

He shook her playfully, planting a kiss on her forehead.

She had to stifle her giggles.

“Come on,” he said. “I need to finish this extraction.”

With that, he took her away.

THE END