***
Damn Leonard and his talks. His advice had pounded in my head all day until inspiration struck and I made the calls and arrangements. Belle wasn’t the type of girl to be swayed by just a new diamond necklace or the latest iPhone. Frankly, if she had, I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about her. I’d had flings or drunken hookups back in L.A. with more than my fair share of bimbos and golddiggers. In between my usual subs, I’d be bored and entertain the newest ditzy CW or Freeform starlet on my arm for a date or two. None of them were like her; none of them had her resolve or her spirit. None of them would dare talk back to me like she had while cleaning my wounds.
Belle was special, and I didn’t know if I could be the man she wanted, but I was fucking well going to try it. I hadn’t run from snipers in Iraq or mad bombers, and I wasn’t about to turn chicken shit because of some girl.
Even if I didn’t want Belle to leave me when she saw everything I was hiding.
Then again, might as well tear that Band-Aid off if I didn’t have any other choice.
But the gift I’d gotten for her would take a day or so of set up. I hadn’t given them a hell of a lot of notice, and even with tons of money, there were things that even I couldn’t swing. That meant I’d have to try and talk with her first, and then see if the gift could win her over fully tomorrow.
I approached the door to her room with my blood pounding through my veins. She was pissed, I got that, but I wasn’t even sure what I was going to say. I could talk the panties off a girl in five minutes, but this wasn’t about charm. This wasn’t about getting someone ready to party. This was about trying to make up for what an ass I was being with someone who was already wounded and, even before the service, I hadn’t had a lot of experience with that.
Knocking on the door, I waited as I listened to the sound of a chair scraping on the wood floor. “Belle, I know you had dinner already in your room, but I was wondering if you’d like to go on a walk on the beach with me. It’s gorgeous under the moonlight. You really haven’t heard the sound of the surf unless you hear it fresh on the beach.”
The door pulled open ferociously. She was there, staring at me with those blue eyes, now so like ice. Crap. “So, that’s it. You walk out on me after sex like I’m your call girl, and we’re just going to give it twelve hours and have a moonlit stroll, holding hands?’
“I’m sorry for what happened. I… can I come in?”
She paused and looked toward her bed, probably wondering whether I was trying to trick her. Again, not my style. I only wanted the willing and had no fucking understanding of guys like those punks at the bar who didn’t feel the same. Besides, this wasn’t about sex, at least not right now. I understood that I needed to make things right here, and I was trying. She could be in a damn bowling alley for all it mattered; we’d be about as likely to do it as we were now.
“I just want to talk. I didn’t think you’d want to do it in the hallway in case any of the staff overheard.”
Belle’s expression softened. “I forget this place has staff, I mean, outside of Leonard and Mrs. Johnson.” She stepped aside to let me in. “I don’t think this conversation should be anything but between us.”
I nodded as I stepped through the threshold and sat at her desk chair just to emphasize my point that this was about a talk and only that. “I shouldn’t have left you last night.”
Belle didn’t sit on the bed or the sedan chair. Instead, she crossed her arms over her chest and tapped one foot on the floor before her. “No, you shouldn’t have. All I did was touch your shirt and ask about why you always wore it. That wasn’t an excuse to make me feel like a whore.”
I swallowed hard at that. That was the last thing Belle could ever be and the last thing I’d ever want her to think about herself, even if I was the jerk who’d put that thought in her head. “It’s not about you. It’s me.”
Belle shook her head. “That was the kind of line my college boyfriend used to feed me. I need to understand more than that. Is this how it always is? Is this about landmines? I feel like I’m going to set off a damn trip wire.”
“No, it’s…”
I couldn’t continue. Her words struck me hard, like a punch to the gut. Even though I was sitting in the white, clean bedroom before me, I wasn’t there anymore. No, I was back in Iraq, back in the grueling heat and the checks to my boots to make sure a damn scorpion hadn’t crawled in it. The jeep was rolling through the desert on the regular recon mission until we hit the wrong spot, until…
There was a concussion so loud that I couldn’t hear, couldn’t focus.
Blinking, I tried to crawl out of what remained of the vehicle to my friends. When I got to Jimmy… dear fuck, was that his arm?
“No!”
Belle’s arms were around my shoulders then and it snapped me back from the flashback. I was shaking and the sweat was pouring down my forehead. I closed my eyes, trying to get some breath and sense into me, and then I was there again in the desert, the blood of my friends all over me.
“No, Jesus Christ!”
Belle cupped my cheek, and I opened my eyes. “Drake, look at me. Whatever you’re seeing, it’s not real. You know that, right? You know that you’re safe now. It’s back there and it can’t hurt you anymore.”
I took in a shuddering breath but focused on those blue eyes, ones that shone like sapphires. That icy coolness was gone from them now, and I wished I could feel relieved about that. All I felt like right now was a burden. But I had to sit there, had to take in deep measured breaths to match her own as the flashback waved over me and faded. Belle’s kind words and her kind eyes were the only anchors I could cling to in order to keep from slipping back to that fucking hellhole of a desert.
“Shhh,” she said, stroking my hair. “It’s all right. You’re here in the Bahamas with me. You’re not there, Drake. You never have to be there again.”
I swallowed and set my forehead against hers. “You shouldn’t have to see me like that.”
“I don’t mind. I understand… I think more than a lot of people who know you that the service took a lot out of you.”
“That’s an understatement, but that’s why,” I said, reluctantly slipping out of her grip and sitting back up in my chair. “It’s why I’m a Dom. I need to have control over something because my mind keeps dragging me back there whether I want it to or not. It’s why I hide all my medals in a footlocker, why I try not to talk about it. It’s why I don’t…” I trailed off, not wanting to talk about what lay under the clothes I wore.
“Were you badly injured?” she asked, nodding toward my eyebrow. “I know you have that scar, but I wasn’t sure if you were sent home for injuries, at least it wasn’t in your dossier. I realized when I saw the Purple Heart that it had to be more than a flesh wound to earn that.”
“I didn’t earn it,” I replied, an automatic reaction. I was no hero and the medal wasn’t something I deserved, not in a million years. “But, yeah, an IED explosion and it wasn’t pretty. It took me about six months to be able to walk normally again. It was a complete sonofabitch. I was lucky though,” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “I got to come home at all. Christ, I was twenty-three and had a cath bag attached to me for the better part of a year in a V.A. hospital. But I was the lucky one.”
“Your whole team?” she asked, the concern coloring her words.
“Yeah, every damn one of them, and not a one deserved to die like that,” I said, rubbing at the top of my right knee. “I keep everything covered, and I should have explained more to you about it. It’s not awful but it’s not exactly pretty either, and I just need the privacy. I think about what happened in Iraq too much…”
“And you’re right back there,” she said, leaning forward to kiss me.
I was surprised at the tenderness of her kiss. It wasn’t some hungry make out, no full-out porno tongue, but it was sweet and intimate, something I needed right then with the flashback still so fresh in my mind. It wasn’t even a kiss, not really, I realized. It was a promise; Belle was swearing, at least for now, to stick with my fucked-up self.
God help us both.
She pulled back and stroked my hair. “I’m sorry I pressed. I should have figured it out, put the pieces together better.”
“And it doesn’t give me some special license to be a dick to you. I shouldn’t have either, but it’s… it’s too much sometimes.”
She nodded and then stood, crooking her arm out for me. “Then maybe we don’t have to talk about it. After all, I heard that the moonlit beach and the crashing waves are something I just have to see to believe. Will you take me, Drake?”
“Princess,” I said, regaining my usual swagger, even if most of it was bravado. “I’ll take you anywhere.”