Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 54645 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 273(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 182(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54645 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 273(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 182(@300wpm)
“You’re never going back there again, so I don’t care if he thinks you’re called Kim Fucking Kardashian. It makes shit for difference now.” He smiles that brilliant white smile, and I take my first deep breath in over four hours.
Trent dries his hands on a fresh dishcloth and pulls me close. He leans down to take me into a deep, passionate kiss, wrapping his bulging arms around me, pressing my breasts against his t-shirt. His tongue opens my mouth, and our breathing intensifies, as I pull back, taking a deep breath. Still so shocked that this is happening. “You should have told me though about it all and I want more details but right now, how about you help me with these bandages, Nurse Ratchet.”
“Shower first. You stink,” I push his chest, but it’s cemented in place. A flea pushing an elephant.
He narrows his eyes and his expression darkens. “Careful, little girl. Your ass has to be screaming for mercy today. You sure you want to push me?”
I look up at him, feeling wide-eyed. Innocent. Just like a kid again. “No,” I whisper. “I don’t.”
He pinches my face possessively in one of his big hands. “I bet your ass isn’t the only thing that’s sore, either.”
He’s right about that. The screaming pain deep inside me ricochets through my body with every step I take. Between that and the throbbing fire on my ass, there’s not much that could entice me into another sparking right now.
“I’ll be good,” I whisper. “Promise.”
And Trent answers with one more greedy, dark kiss before striding out of the kitchen, leaving me there. Panties soaked. Head spinning.
CHAPTER 14
Trent
“I thought it would be easier the second time, but it isn’t,” she whispers, as she carefully and tenderly unpeels the medical tape from my skin. Her eyes shimmer with tears, and then she blinks them away, but unsuccessfully. Her eyes go damp as she looks at my wounds. “You’re so lucky to be alive.”
I know what she’s seeing. I can see them in the mirror behind me, reflected in the mirror over the sink in front of me. And it looks fucking awful, which it is. Two bullets tore right the fuck through me, missing all my vital organs by some fucking miracle, and exploding out the back of me like comets.
“What were you doing out there?” she asks. She carefully unpeels another edge of tape on the next bandage.
What I was I doing? Dangerous shit for a good cause, at least that’s what I told myself. Not something I’m going to burden her with now, or maybe ever. “I can’t talk about it. Alright?”
Her eyes meet mine in the mirror. “But it’s just me. You can tell me anything.”
My heart fucking breaks. I want to tell her. I want to tell her everything. Always have, always will. But more than that, I want to protect her. To keep her safe from the world. My world, if necessary.
My nights are spent in visions of the waking nightmare that has been my life. Sleep comes in minutes, not hours, and only helps to make the flashbacks more vivid. The smell of singed flesh stronger, the cries of the guys in my group louder. Last breaths. Tears in the fucking dirt and sand.
Tell my mother…
Tell my wife…
Nothing trains you for that shit. It’s only your own will that powers you through the sight of your own bullet blast through the skull of your first kill. Sitting on top of a building for hours, waiting, your only companion steel and iron, pressed against your eye, waiting for your target to come between the cross hairs.
Then time stops. Life stops. The world stops. The laser locks on and your index finger squeezes. Boom.
That shit fucked me up. I’m not the only one—so few guys come out the other side, so few guys are capable of rebuilding something, anything, that resembles a life.
I knew when I boarded that cargo plane that Kat was my next target. She had been in my cross hairs for way too many fucking years. The forbidden fruit that haunted my dreams. That filled my fantasies. I decided on that flight home, watching the gauze bandages fill with blood, that somehow, someway, I was going to fucking have her.
Sister, step-sister, whatever, there was nobody else for me but her. Time is not promised, another heavy, brutal lesson burned into me while I was away.
Now, here she is, her hands bandaging my physical wounds, but healing me in so many other ways.
Her body brushes against mine. And each time it does, I feel some broken shards inside me come back together again.
But if only she knew that every fucking time I glance at her, every time she smiles, every time I see her dimple, my cock jerks in my pants.