Chapter Twenty Three
Jacket
Not to steal one glint of the spotlight from Stick, but it’s freaking bizarre that I feel like this is my wedding day. All the guys from the unit are here. Backslapping, saying it’s good to get together again after all this time, we should have done it long ago.
And they’re not wrong. Like Stick, I was resisting, thinking it was maybe gonna bring shit up. But he’s made his peace with his memories and making new ones by the look of it. The guy looks like all his dreams are realized just standing there with his girl and introducing her to his old team mates.
Last night I had the deepest sleep of my existence. And without a flicker of any of the dreams I’ve had on repeat most nights since coming home. I didn’t wake up even when my Baby slipped out of bed to go make coffee and whip up cream. I could see myself coming downstairs every morning and finding my girl in the kitchen.
Only this would be in our own house. And she’d be wearing only a pair of panties, maybe my tee shirt, or a tank with the sides of her breasts visible in the cutaway. Fuck, my mind is full of images of a life with Bella. I’ve never done that before. It’s always been the furthest thing from my mind, picturing a future. Usually I can’t wait to get away. This time all I want to do is stay.
“That’s a gorgeous girl you got yourself, Dude,” Huggins, the guy we all call Huggy Bear is pummeling my hand up and down.
He’s gazing over my shoulder and I see Bella coming toward us in the distance. She’s too far away still to see her expression but her long bare legs are striding purposefully in my direction. Her shiny hair is swinging and so is her mini dress. My cock begins to unfurl and rise up. She looks incredible and she’s mine.
“I know,” I say to Huggins. “I can’t believe how I lucked out.”
“Don’t fuck this up,” he admonishes me.
I can’t stop grinning. It’s been about an hour and it seems like a week. I know what she’s heading toward me for. I need her too. I need her desperately. She reaches the edge of the crowd and is subsumed in heads. Then I see her, talking to the guy that works with her stepfather. I noticed him eyeing her earlier. Fucker better not be hitting on her.
I shove my hands in my pockets and slip away from the party.
“Where are you off too all smiling like the cat that got the cream?” Dottie asks.
“Just taking a walk with my girl,” I tell her.
“Did I do okay with the boys?”
“You were amazing, better than our drill sarge but a thousand times prettier.”
She smiles at that and says; “We’re about to have dinner, we’re going to light all the candles.”
“We won’t be long,” I tell her.
“I get it,” She nods.
And I think maybe she does. Like I said Dottie was probably as feisty and sexy as my Bella when she was young.
“You know, if my Bella is anything as amazing as you when she’s your age, I’ll be as mad about her then as I am now.”
Dottie cackles in delight and walks toward the long table to make it perfect.
I glance around but I can’t see Bella. Perhaps she’s already in the central clearing, waiting to meet me.
I pick up my pace and duck into the cover of the trees all strung with fairy lights. I’m gonna ask her. I should have asked Stick’s permission. Not for that – I’m not that stupid to ask a woman to marry me after two days. She’d think I was a lunatic and drive me off.
No, we can take this slow, get to know each other properly, figure out how to make it work. We need to be in the same town. I’ve got to figure out where I’m going to live, what I’m gonna do with my life. It’s time. I can’t keep driving around the country form place to place for the rest of my life.
Actually that was exactly my intention before I met Bella. But since I have gotten together with her, everything’s changed. Absolutely fucking everything.
She’s not waiting for me in the clearing yet. I step behind a couple of close trunks, hiding myself until she arrives. My heart is fluttering about nervously. Fuck it’s almost as bad as before a night mission, when you don't know what to expect and whether you’ll be alive after it. Same sensation, different emotion.
Because now I’m only fearful that she might turn me down. That she’s been having some fun for the weekend of her family wedding and I’m just a lunk to hang on to when she gets drunk later. I would think that if I hadn't seen the way she looks at me.
And when I asked her last night. After I made love to her more than screwed her, when she was lying curled up into my side, on the edge of dropping into sleep, when I asked her if she felt it too, she purred out a positive agreement.
I’m still grinning like a big idiot when she comes storming into the space between the trees from another angle. Her back is to me and she’s looking from side to side urgently. Like she needs me right now and is worried that I’m not here.
I couldn’t help but notice how she liked the rough side of me. How she liked to be held under my hand, restrained so she couldn’t move. She has to lie back against the tree trunk enduring the intensity of the pleasure I was drawing from her pussy. Christ, I need to be inside her again, I step out from my hiding spot, not wanting to startle her. But as she whirls around to face me, I grab her arms and press her up against the tree, same as before.
Her hands are pinned under both mine and I bend forward to take her mouth in mine, bite her juicy full lips. Then all at once, I detect the fury contorting her perfect face, I feel a sharp pain in my shin and realize she kicked me and my world blows to all corners of this field when she says, “Get your fucking hands off me.”
I release her arms from above her head but I’m still holding them trapped in mine at her sides. She yanks them away and it occurs to me that she’s going to hit me.
Then she does. The force she lifts her hand with retreats as she brings her fist down on my bicep. I could stop her, grab her arm and twist her into a hold easy as shit, but I don’t. I take the hit and stand there looking at her. I’m stunned not by the blow which barely registered on my muscle but by the hurt look in her eyes.
“What happened, Sweetheart,” I ask, cold hard calm like I’ve been trained to be under duress.
More than anything I want to take her in my arms and ease whatever’s hurting her but I think that’s me.
“What happened?” she hisses. “You slept with my sister is what happened.”
She stands there, her body shaking, her eyes glistening. I wonder who told her. How they told her that the words have left her so whipped by something that occurred before I met her. That was as much about a union between Stick and I as it was between me and Scherri. Three friends easing their fears and pain. I don’t know how to explain that to her.
“You need to leave,” she says at last.
“No, we need to talk about this,” I tell her.
“I don't want to talk and I don't want you here. I don’t even want to look at you.”
“Are you sure, Sweetheart?”
She jolts at the word. I’m not sure she isn’t going to smack me again, or spit on me.
“Totally,” she says coldly.
Her eyes are still hurting and I cant leave her like this. All I want to do is take her in my arms and tell her we can make this work if we want to. I open my mouth to speak, force myself through the frozen part of me.
“Please just go,” she says and her icy sheen burns my skin.
She turns and walks away out through the trees and I follow in another direction.