Sweet Recovery (Ex Ops Series Book 4) (10 page)

When she kept staring at the floor, not saying a word, I tried again.

“Gin, what’s wrong, baby?”

Time stood still as I waited for her to say something. Honest to God, it felt like even the world had stopped, because somehow, I just knew this moment was going to be burned in my memory for the rest of my life, haunting me.

When she finally looked up, her face was as blank as a brand new canvas, and her eyes were as artic as the frozen tundra. All the warmth that had glowed from that face only hours before was completely gone. Where the fuck had it gone?

I started to get out of the bed but stopped when she held up a hand and stood up. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Just don’t.”

My mouth opened to ask her what the hell was wrong, but she cut me off.

“It was good we ran into each other, Lucas.” She waved a finger in the air between us almost flippantly. “We finally closed this chapter we both left open long ago. Now it’s time to say good-bye.” Just like that, she turned and headed for the door, discarding me like yesterday’s garbage.

Confusion, hurt, and rage ran rampant through me in waves so strong I started to shake. My mind was going a million miles an hour, but making no sense at all.

There was so much I wanted to ask, to say, but the only thing I could croak out as she opened the door was, “Where are you going?”

With one foot out the door and a look over her shoulder, she said the last words I ever expected to hear.

“Back to my fiancé in Chicago. Good-bye, Lucas.”

The door shut behind her, and the oxygen disappeared from the room. I couldn’t breathe. Fuck, I thought my heart stopped beating, too. Or maybe it was just broken altogether. The pain was so immense in my chest that it felt like a ten-ton elephant was sitting on it. The pain was so devastating it forced me to suck in a breath, giving much needed oxygen to my body. With the oxygen came a different sort of fuel—a red haze of rage to the likes I had never felt a day in my life.

Not when I had been fighting for my life in the desert. Not when I had watched my brothers fall around me. Not even when I had kicked my own ass for breaking the one precious person who meant the most to me.

This was anger so thick it was choking me, so deep I could feel it in every fiber of my being. I wanted to set the world on fire. I wanted to choke some nameless, faceless man to death for taking what I had thought was mine. Since I couldn’t do either of those two things, I gave in and let myself do the one thing I could.

I destroyed absolutely everything around me, starting with the motel room.

That was how I ended up in jail an hour later.

Chapter

7

Ginny

Staring out the private airplane’s window, I watched the landscape of Miami drift away, replaced by fluffy white clouds and blue sky.

“I don’t know why you’re sulking over there. At least you got fucking laid on this trip. All I got was a black eye and the threat of having my balls removed and shoved down my throat by your father before I die, thanks to you,” smarmy Brad sneered from the other side of the aisle.

The cutting comment was immediately followed by a thudding sound that sounded like a fist hitting flesh and Brad cursing some more. I couldn’t bring myself to care enough to turn my head around to see what had happened. I wasn’t sure anything mattered anymore as I kept my eyes pinned to the spot where Miami used to be.

Somewhere down there was the only other person besides my mother I loved unconditionally. Eternally. Enough to hurt him so he could hate me, allowing me to walk out of his life, leaving him safely behind.

I felt so hollow on the inside I was pretty sure I had left part of myself in that motel room with him. I just wasn’t sure what it was.

My heart? Definitely. My soul? Possibly. My will to live? That remained to be seen.

While Lucas was the reason my heart beat, the person I breathed for was my mother. Therefore, like it or not, I had to keep going, even if I felt dead inside.

As the sky became a solid thing and the ground disappeared almost entirely below, I shut my eyes against the bright blue sky and allowed myself to remember Lucas in those sweet moments before I had crashed us to pieces: sleeping soundly in the bed, holding me tightly in his arms, keeping the rest of the world at bay. Just me and my knight in tarnished armor in a rundown motel that felt like a castle to me as long as I was with him.

That was the closest I was ever going to get to the happy ever after stories my mom used to tell me. That moment in time, right there.

A tear slipped down my face, and I didn’t bother to hide it. I was certain there wasn’t much anyone could do to hurt me anymore. I had pretty much done it all to myself when I had wrecked the man sitting in a bed, staring at me as if I were blowing his world to pieces in slow motion, blowing my own world apart at the same time.

A rustle of clothing next to me was the only warning I had that someone had sat next to me before Dexter spoke to me in a low tone that only I could hear. “You saved his life. You know that, right?”

I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t even if I had wanted to. My throat was so tight words wouldn’t form, and I didn’t think I had taken a full breath since walking out that door.

The silence on my end didn’t deter my father’s trusted man from talking.

“Your tears tell me he meant something to you, little girl, so take my advice. Don’t let anyone else see you cry over him. Don’t give your father a reason to look into this any further, other than the idea that you had a one-night stand.”

Letting my head slump forward, my forehead leaning against the cool glass, I whispered the only words that came to mind. “Why? Why can’t I just live my life the way I want to?”

There was a pause of silence behind me, and then Dexter finally muttered back, “Not everyone gets to be happy in this life. You should get used to it.”

As I opened my eyes, the world outside that window looked duller.

That was because Lucas was the color in my life, and I had just thrown that palette of happiness and possibility in the trash.

Lucas

Numb.

All of my anger had bled away to a numbness. I was so damn numb that, if it weren’t for the steady heartbeat still thudding away and the overwhelming pain radiating through my chest, I would wonder if I were dead. I couldn’t even feel my hands, which should probably hurt like hell.

My knuckles were busted open from punching holes in the motel room’s walls. Turning my hands over, I stared at my palms that were covered in small cuts. That was probably from throwing the chair into the mirror and shattering it. I hadn’t bothered to watch what I had grabbed after that, just blindly grabbed whatever I could to throw around the room in my fit of rage.

The nurse who worked here at the jail had already removed the small pieces of glass trapped in the cuts and disinfected the wounds. She had gone on and on about how she couldn’t believe I didn’t make a sound as she cleaned my scrapes and asked me several times if I was in shock. She had also wrapped my hands in bandages to stop the bleeding, but I had taken those off about an hour ago as I sat here on this bench in a holding cell.

Blank.

This cell was absolutely sparse, just a small room with only a bench bolted to the wall. There wasn’t anyone or anything else in here with me, not that it mattered. I didn’t want anyone around me right now, anyway. I wanted to sit here and be as blank as the room was. Maybe, if I concentrated on the nothingness, I would start to feel that way, too.

Betrayed.

How could she give me the hope of something more when she had someone waiting at home for her? The girl I knew would have never betrayed the ones she cared for like that. Had I broken her so much that she had become a different person?

Destroyed.

The world could burn down around me, and I wouldn’t give a damn. Why should I? What was left in it for me?

Nothing.

That was what I said to my commander after he bailed me out of jail. I didn’t answer a question he asked as we rode straight to the airport. Apparently, he had stayed behind to look for me while the rest of the team had headed back to our home base in Virginia.

Nothing was also what I felt while he gave me a dressing down on my disappearance and demanded answers.

After all of my rage had bled out in that destroyed motel room, the overwhelming feeling of absolute nothingness had taken over. I was a robot, a shell of a person. All the organs might work, but it was just a machine running on fuel. I didn’t think there was anything human left in me now.

That was probably why I was able to sit there while Jaxon yelled, cussed, and ordered me around from Miami to Virginia. His frustration and anger radiated from him in waves. I had never seen the man lose his mind the way he was right now. I just had nothing left to give him.

At least, I didn’t until he grabbed my arm on the tarmac and pulled me around to face him.

“Soldier, you will tell me what the hell happened, or I will remove you from this team. Do you understand me?” His words were cold and clipped, but the message he was conveying was clear. He was worried, maybe even scared, because I wouldn’t talk.

Done.

I was done with it all. Ginny. This team. The fucking world. However, Jaxon was a good man, and I had enough of something—maybe humanity—left in me to put him at ease before I walked away.

Looking him in the eye, I told all I was willing to tell him.

“Remember that girl I mentioned? The one I had lost?”

Jaxon’s brows snapped down, and he gave me a curt head nod as answer.

“Well, I found her, and I told her she was my priority. Except, I was only an option for her, and I wasn’t the option she chose. So do what you’ve got to do, Commander. Discipline me, kick me off the team—frankly, I don’t give a fuck. Just let me know what you decide.”

Walking off, I let the numbness take over again, closing myself off emotionally from the entire world. War had turned me into a hard-hearted man who didn’t think letting anyone into your life was worth the pain of them leaving it.

Ginny had turned me into a man who didn’t have a heart anymore … because she had killed what little of it had been left.

Chapter

8

Ginny

Two Weeks Later…

I sat in the armchair that I had pulled up next to the wall of windows in my living room, curled up to the side so that my feet rested on the seat. My sketch pad was on my knees, and the sunshine was the only light I was utilizing. The rest of the apartment behind me was somber and dark around the edges, sort of like me these days.

On the end table next to my chair was a glass filled with ice, orange juice, and vodka. Barbara was going to give me the lecture to end all lectures when she came in to clean my suite today, saying it was entirely too early in the morning for me to start drinking. I hoped my inclusion of orange juice would prove I had done my best to include some sort of breakfast.

Picking up the glass, I drained half of it, put it back down, and topped what remained of the mixture with more vodka. Breakfast was halfway gone now, and it would soon be down to nothing but clear liquid pain killer.

I’d told myself when I had walked out of that motel room that I wasn’t going to regret my decision. Lucas would never understand, but it didn’t matter. The best way to prove I loved him was to walk away from him forever.

If my father ever found out about him, he would have him killed. While he might have tracked me down in Miami with a tracking device on my phone, he had not discovered who I had been with in that motel room. Had he figured out it was someone from the life my mother and I’d had while hiding away from him in New York, especially a guy I once loved, the Young family would never be safe. Wellington would never take the chance of someone or something messing up his plans to marry me off in a business agreement that benefited him.

As my hand moved over the paper, tracing my pencil lines with black marker, bringing my design from a scratchy idea to life before my eyes, I lost the battle I had been waging to not dwell on the man who used to be the boy across the street.

Never in a million years would I have dreamed he would come barging back into my life with professions of love. Perhaps even worse than his claims of love were his apologies. It had been so much easier to hate Lucas while I was trapped in this life. To not hate him anymore and still be forced away from him was pure torture.

All I had now were the memories of those stolen moments, the hours I had spent selfishly lost in his touch, hoping he could save me.

It was stupid of me to wish for such an impossible dream. If I had been thinking more logically, I would have known all along that I was leading him on. Still, I couldn’t make myself regret that stolen time with him. Those memories were hopefully going to get me through the rest of my life without him. The only thing I did regret was hurting him the way I had, giving him the impression that I didn’t love him when the truth was I loved him with everything I was.

Of course, I didn’t believe love was the answer to anyone’s problems. Heck, love was what had gotten me in this predicament in the first place. My mother’s love for my father had spun a disaster through time and lives as devastating as any tornado could ever be.

So maybe I was wrong for hurting the man I loved, but I had spared him and his family from getting blown away by the destructive man who ruled my life.

Setting down the black marker, I picked up the charcoal gray color and started shading in the dark, dramatic lines of a giant wolf with razor sharp teeth bared at his prey. Part of the creature was already colored black, and now I would use a few different shades of gray as a highlight to detail his features, making the wolf’s eyes menacing, his teeth razor sharp, and his muzzle pulled back in a snarl of dominance. His body built for war and his claws sharpened to rend whoever might cross his path, he was truly a savage beast that stood over his captive with an undeniable message:
I own her. She is mine to let live or kill.

Dropping the gray marker, I picked up the maroon red for the wolf’s hostage. The woman’s features were hidden in profile and shadows, leaving only one of her eyes, the small curve of her nose, and her defiant chin visible. Everything about her was drawn in black and white because she was as innocent and naïve as snow. No shades of gray corrupted her appearance, because I wanted the character to convey that there was only right and wrong in her world.