Liberty
Authors: Ginger Jamison
A man she thought she knew. A passion beyond her wildest fantasies…
When Ryan Beecher returns home after a long deployment overseas, Lexy barely recognizes her husband. The man who left Texas for Afghanistan was cruel and abusive. The man who comes back to her is a badly injured stranger with amnesia—and no memory of their life together.
Lexy can’t believe how much Ryan has changed. The wounded marine is now gentle, caring and tender. And his touch awakens yearnings she’s never felt before. As he takes them both to the point of no return, can Lexy trust this lover who seems to live only for her pleasure…as he seeks his salvation in her healing embrace?
A poignant and erotic story of longing, secrets and second chances, Liberty explores the limits of desire and the boundaries of love.
LIBERTY
Ginger Jamison
To Emmanuelle, for believing in this book, and to Christine,
AKA Casey Wyatt, for kicking me in the pants when I needed it.
Contents
Chapter One
I
t almost awed him. Almost. And only because
awe
was not the proper way to describe what he was feeling. He knew something big was going to happen. Something huge. Something that was going to rock his world, that was going to change the course of his life. And that made him restless.
All week he had been on alert, the tiny hairs on the back of his neck standing at attention, almost as if they were on the lookout for the same unknown element. It was a part of his job to be on alert. Awareness seemed to be his constant companion for the past year.
He signed up for this.
Willingly.
And just maybe that deep, empty feeling came with the territory, along with the sand and the oppressive heat.
“What you thinkin’ ’bout?” Terrell Ramon asked him as he switched his assault rifle from one shoulder to the other. Terrell was the youngest man in their squad. He had dark brown skin and big doe eyes that made him look like one of those Precious Moments figurines. He was a baby compared to most of them but he was there because he was smart, a whiz with his hands and all things technical. Terrell could dismember a computer in thirty seconds and put it back together in twenty-five.
“Looks like you thinkin’ about a woman?
Ooo-wee!
” The kid slapped his thigh. “I love thinkin’ ’bout women,” he drawled in his thick Mississippi accent. “My woman’s waiting for me at home and she’s bangin’—thick booty, pouty lips and the prettiest damn smile you’ve ever seen.” He grew wistful. “She wants to get married. I think I might have to.”
He smiled. Terrell couldn’t have been more than twenty-two. “You don’t sound too sure. Do you want to get married so young?” Normally they wouldn’t be having this type of conversation while on duty, or at all, but they had been stuck on this detail for too long and he needed something to take his mind from the constant niggling feeling in the back of his mind. “What’s she like?”
“Sandra?” Terrell grinned widely for a moment as if remembering something funny. His eyes softened, taking on a look not often seen in this place. “She’s always on my ass, since we were babies. But she’s good for me, you know? Don’t take none of my bullshit. Funny as hell.” He sobered a bit. “I guess I love her. Being here makes me realize that.”
He nodded. This conversation had taken a more serious turn than he had intended, but he knew how the kid felt. It was hard being in a foreign country, thousands of miles from your homeland, your comforts, the people who made life bearable.
But they’d signed up for this. They fought this war even if they didn’t understand the politics behind it.
“What about you, T-dog? You got a girl waiting for you?”
He shrugged. “I’ve got a girl but I don’t know if she’s still waiting.”
“She’s cheating?” Terrell raised a brow. “Fuck her. You’re here busting your balls while she’s banging some other dude. Forget about her. Women love a war hero. Once we get home you’ll be swimming in panties.”
He let out a rusty chuckle. “It’s not like that, Terrell. She just wasn’t happy with me when I left. I don’t blame her. I wasn’t the best man when I was with her.”
Terrell nodded sympathetically as if he knew the complexities of an adult relationship. “What’s her name?”
He shook his head remembering the beautiful woman he’d left behind. “Her name is—” Then it happened.
It.
He heard it first—a blast, an explosion—that momentarily caused him to lose his precious hearing and then he felt
it
. Heat, blistering heat, that burned and twisted and melted his skin. And then he saw
it
in slow motion, like some scene from a movie, like he was some actor playing a role. But he wasn’t. This wasn’t a movie. This is what he had been waiting for. He was flying through the air for what seemed like hours but must have only been seconds. When he landed, the air rushed out of him. Everything went black. And when he opened his eyes again things weren’t in the vivid color he was used to, but sepia—muted colors of tan and beige, of sand.
Reality came rushing back to him all too quickly. There was yelling behind him. No. Screaming. Screams of pain. Of terror. Of disorientation. Someone was yelling orders. Someone else was yelling names. There was all of this noise around him, deafening him. He looked around, sending a silent prayer of thanks that he was able to look around, and saw images that would reduce a normal man to tears.
His unit had been hit hard. It must have been a rocket attack. Only something powerful could reduce the men he had known as brothers to shreds. He could no longer tell who was who, the dust was too thick. The men were covered with sand, with blood. Their cries of pain were indistinguishable from one another. This was almost too much to bear, and even though he had seen a lot in his time in the service, the sight of his fallen men made him want to cry.
“Tex!” somebody called.
Get up,
he told himself.
It’s time for you to take action. You are a marine. You were trained for this. Your life was leading up to this moment.
Attempting to stand, he put one leg in front of him but it didn’t want to hold his weight. Sharp, breath-snatching pain shot up his leg and into his body. It was like somebody was grinding broken shards of sharp glass into his muscles. He couldn’t walk, so he crawled on his hands and knees, scraping them, causing the skin on them to grow raw and red and bloody. There was a man down not far from him who he didn’t know. No. That wasn’t right. There were only sixteen of them. He had to know who the man was. But he couldn’t tell.
The soldier was unrecognizable. Dirt. Blood. Open flesh. That was all he saw, along with the dark grit that decorated his face.
“I’m dying, man,” the unrecognizable soldier told him. There was a slight twang to his voice. He knew him.
“Try not to,” he said sincerely. “You owe me fifty bucks.”
“It’s my time, brother.” He grinned, but the smile was mixed with blood, dirt and pain. “At least I can say I died for my country.”
“Don’t say corny shit like that right now. I’m going to help you.”
“You can’t help this—” He motioned to his torso, which was no longer covered with skin. “You look like shit, brother. Go help yourself.”
“I’m fine,” he said, even though his vision started to blur and his head began to throb with a pain that was almost indescribable.
“Do me a favor...” His voice started to fade. “Tell my wife—”
“Tell her yourself,” he barked.
“Tell Lexy I’m sorry, and give these to my mother.”
The dying soldier began to hand over his dog tags.
No.
He shook his head. He didn’t want to honor anybody’s last wishes.
But he would. He had to.
He’d signed up for this.
And so he grasped the man’s hand, the dog tags between them, and felt the life drain away. He felt his own life about to go with it. The spinning in his head grew out of control, his body began to seize and he slumped over in the sand as he succumbed to a world of foggy pain and darkness.
Chapter Two
“M
rs. Beecher, he’s right in here.”
When Lexy Beecher learned her husband was in a rocket attack and survived...she sighed. That probably wasn’t the usual response of the wife of a marine who hadn’t seen her husband in almost two years. But then again she wasn’t the usual wife.
When the officer phoned to tell her the news, she couldn’t bring herself to cry or laugh or even breathe a sigh of relief. She didn’t like her husband and while she hadn’t wished him dead she never wanted to lay eyes on him again. Her husband was a horrible man. An awful man. “A piece of no good, low-down stinky shit,” as her best friend and Ryan’s cousin, Di, called him. It wasn’t a harsh description.
It was truth.
“He was hurt very badly.”
She nodded slowly, trying to take in all the information that was being thrown at her. The doctor thought she was in shock, but she wasn’t in shock. She was numb. She didn’t love him. She was going to leave him. The divorce papers sat in her nightstand just waiting for him to come home. She should have served them to him years ago but she wasn’t able to. She had been stuck. Everybody, including Ryan, thought they had her pegged. They thought she was weak, that she lacked the backbone, the confidence to make it in the world without him. They were wrong.
Ryan’s mother was the only one who got it right. She thought Lexy stayed for love. Lexy had stayed in a marriage to a man she felt nothing for because she did love somebody. However, that person was not her husband.
Her husband had gone out of his way to make it impossible to leave him, to keep her down, to keep her bonded to him. Hell, he had almost succeeded once, but she wouldn’t ever be stuck again. It took her two years to rebuild, but she regained everything—including her self-respect.
“He wasn’t stable enough to move until this week,” the doctor continued, but Lexy barely heard him.
After he had left for Iraq, Lexy had taken steps to reclaim her life. She began to once again save every penny she could spare. She had researched different towns and the services they had to offer. She found a cute little place where she could live for cheap, and some jobs that would pay the bills. She wouldn’t need anything from him. Nothing except what she prized most.
Her freedom.
And all he had to do was sign. All she had to do was get him to sign. That task would be difficult, almost Herculean, because the one thing her husband took pride in was his power over her. He wanted to keep her shackled to him like a dog and it wasn’t out of love or friendship or simple companionship. He did it because he thought he could, because once upon a time she had been stupid enough to let it happen. To him she was his property, and when he was drunk she turned into his punching bag. How could she be so blind to not realize that he never loved her? She never loved him, either; for ten years they had existed on sick codependence.
Lexy had married Ryan when she was just seventeen years old—when she had been beautiful and naive and filled with hope. Ryan had been twenty-two, devastatingly handsome and deceptively sweet. He was everything an innocent girl thought she wanted in a husband.
“You may not recognize him,” the doctor continued, pulling her out of her deep thoughts. “He has a lot of contusions, a broken leg, rib fractures, burns over twenty percent of his body and a broken nose. In addition to that he took a nasty blow to the head. He’s been in and out of consciousness for over a month.”
She took it all in. He had been through all of that and didn’t even have the decency to die. “Has he said anything?”
“I’m sorry, Lexy.”
She looked up at the handsome military doctor. “Why are you sorry, Doctor? He couldn’t have said anything he hasn’t said before.”
“No, Mrs. Beecher—” The doctor shook his head. “He said, ‘I’m sorry Lexy.’ Those are the only words he has spoken since he’s been here.”
Lexy suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. Of course Ryan would wait until he was half blown-up to repent for his years of bad behavior. But that was Ryan. He always had a knack for apologizing. She had spent the first half of their marriage forgiving him, too. But now she was too smart to ever believe those words again. She wasn’t a teenager anymore and she was all out of forgiveness.
“I know this is a lot for you, Mrs. Beecher.” Dr. Andreas placed his hand on her arm. “You need time to absorb it.”
She nodded once, still numb to it all.
Lexy had met Ryan the year her grandmother, the woman who raised her, died. He promised her all the things she craved. A family. A support system. He promised to take care of her. She never had that. She had come into this world an orphan. Her mother was a free spirit who died in childbirth. Her father didn’t bother to stick around. She had never known them. Not the way they looked or smelled or smiled. She didn’t know where her slanted dark eyes came from or the kink of her unruly hair or even the color of her skin.
She was neither white nor black but some sort of indistinguishable brown that made her ethnic identity a mystery. Rumors swirled that she was Native American, some people told her that she was interracial—part black, part white and a bit Hispanic. She was her own version of the Small World ride.
Ryan didn’t see it that way. He called her half-breed or mutt or whatever derogatory name rolled off his tongue.
“He was found lying unconscious next to another soldier. His dog tags were in his hand. It was a good thing they weren’t lost. We would have had a hard time identifying him. His condition was more critical than the soldier found lying next to him and yet your husband was the one to survive. This was a miracle.”
Miracle.
Ha!
Lexy scoffed at the idea. God didn’t save Ryan. The God she knew didn’t save anyone—not her parents, not her grandmother and certainly not her. Why would he start with Ryan?
She thought about her grandmother, Maybell, who wasn’t really her grandmother at all, just some woman who had loved and cared for her since she was an infant. The people of her small town rejoiced in telling her that Maybell had just showed up one day with a squirmy wild-haired baby. When asked where she had gotten the child, she’d replied with a succinct, “None of your damn business.”
Lexy loved that cranky old woman dearly but she was as old as an oak tree when Lexy was a child and her love of deep-fried, gravy-covered, barbecue-smothered delicacies didn’t help her diabetes or high cholesterol. She died when Lexy was sixteen, leaving her devastated and a little more than brokenhearted.
“You should prepare yourself, Mrs. Beecher. He’s stable now but that can change at any moment.”
“Please call me Lexy,” she said, attending to the man. “Ryan won’t die. He’s not the type of man to let go.”
Ten years ago Ryan had set his sights on her and hadn’t let go. She was just a child reeling from the loss of the only person who loved her when he swooped in.
She should have known then.
He was a man of twenty-two and she a girl of seventeen. He must have sensed her weakness but she couldn’t fault him for that. She should have been stronger, but what girl could resist a beautiful man who held you while you cried, who gave you your first kiss, who whispered soothing words in your ear and promised to take care of you forever?
She let him take advantage of her. And even after he started drinking and raging she didn’t leave at first because she thought she could change him, and then because forces outside of her control kept her firmly in place.
The only person who made those long years bearable was Ryan’s mother. Lexy adored the woman who, too, had been married to a man like her son. Mary had iced her bruises and protected her from Ryan when he was at his worst. She was a sympathetic ear. A few times Mary helped her pay the one bill that was so crucial to her survival.
It was Mary who finally convinced him that drinking himself to death wasn’t the right way to go, that beating his wife was something no real man would do. It was she who convinced him to go into the marines.
But now Ryan was back, in a military hospital, sixty miles from home.
Lexy felt like she was suffocating with his nearness.
“Are you ready?” The doctor put his hand on the small of her back and guided her into the room.
She saw him. Alone. Seemingly hanging in that precious state between life and death. And it was like somebody punched her in the stomach. Her body betrayed her. And for reasons she couldn’t begin to understand hot tears ran down her face.
“Holy shit, Ryan. What happened to you?”
He was bandaged like a mummy. It had been a month since the blast and yet he looked like he had been carried off the battlefield yesterday.
Like a moth to a flame, she went to him, her feet unwillingly carrying her body to his bedside.
He was pale, almost a ghostly shade of white, his nose was different, straighter, his jaw seemed larger more square, but it was Ryan. His massive size was undeniable and he still had those thick chestnut locks that she used to run her fingers through when they were first married. She should have wanted to flee the room, but she was drawn to him like never before. She couldn’t pull herself away. She couldn’t force the tears to stop flowing.
Why are you crying, stupid? You hate him.
She had thought she was indifferent. At times she thought she hated him. Why then did it hurt to see him this way? Maybe deep down she had a tiny bit of affection for him. There would be no idealizing him, but there had been a time when he provided her with comfort. A short time when she thought she loved him.
She peered down at him, careful not to touch him, wondering what on earth she was going to do. Her heart started to race. The air in the room all seemed to disappear. There was no way she could get him to sign the divorce papers in his condition.
Leave it to Ryan to make an already difficult task impossible.
She couldn’t abandon him when he was like this. She would look like the personification of evil if she left him alone to heal. In Liberty, Texas, women stood by their men. They took care of their husbands.
Her conscience was speaking to her. The one time she wished it would fail her, it was loud and clear.
You can’t leave him like this.
He would need somebody to take care of him. He would need physical therapy, supervision. Constant support. Bile rose in her throat as she tried not to remember the man who beat her unconscious during a drunken rage. But how could she forget? It would be easier if he had died. At least then he would forever be a hero and she could go on with her life burden-free. But, no. Ryan never did make things easy for her.
“He doesn’t look good,” she managed to choke out.
“He looked a lot worse. He’s lucky. And up until now he’s been alone. Talk to him. I’m sure that will help.”
She looked away from the broken man in the bed. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say anything.” He patted her arm comfortingly. “Just say what you need to say.” The young doctor checked Ryan’s stats and then left her alone with him.
“What did you do, Ryan?”
Realistically she knew he hadn’t caused the catastrophe, but she was in no mood to be rational now. She felt like he had gotten himself into it so she couldn’t leave him. It was like before—just when she was ready to move on with her life he threw up a huge barricade.
“Why can’t you let me go? You don’t even love me.”
He stirred then, causing a moan to escape his dry, chapped lips. Startled by the noise, she jumped back and then laughed at her stupidity.
He can’t hurt you. You won’t let him.
She moved close again. The military did a fine job patching him up, but they did not pamper him. He was in need of a shave, his lips needed moisture and his growing hair stuck out in tufts all over his head. She could manage those things. Pulling up a chair next to him, she sat. This would be a good time to talk to him. She could say everything she had wanted to say for years and he would have to listen to her. He had no choice. It wasn’t as if he could get up and walk out.
She flipped her thick braid over her shoulder and dug in her purse, producing a pot of cherry lip balm. His hair couldn’t be helped as long as his head was bandaged, but his mouth she could fix. She placed her middle finger in the pot, scooped out a generous helping and smeared it over his cracked lips. If he had been awake he would have never allowed her to do this, to put such a feminine-scented concoction on his mouth. But there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it, so she did as she pleased. She smiled as the balm made his lips slightly shiny. She never had noticed how beautiful they were. Maybe she had noticed. Maybe his lips were one of the many things she found perfect about him when she was young and stupid and thought herself in love.
They could only be described as kissable now. Full. Relaxed. Soft. She wondered how they would feel pressed against her lips. On her skin. Trailing down her body. A shiver ran through her as she studied his pout. She hadn’t thought about him that way in years. Long ago he had ceased to produce butterflies in her stomach with his nearness. She was no longer seventeen or easily seduced by a man and his sweet kisses.
“Has anyone ever told you that you are very pleasant in this state? If you had been in a coma our entire marriage I would probably still love you.”
He stirred again and she wondered if he could hear her. In his drunken days a comment like that would have earned her a smack in the face. But no longer would she stand for that.
She would kill him if she had to.
Lexy cradled his face in her hands. There was a long scar on his jawline visible through his beard, and a smaller one above his eyebrow. Somehow the scars made him look sexy.
How was that possible?
She hadn’t been attracted to him in years. The last time she had seen him he was bloated and doughy. Now he was hard and lean. Forty pounds lighter. He almost looked like a new man. Was it possible that he could be a new man? The marines could have changed him. She hoped for his sake that they did.
“I’m not a fan of facial hair, Ry. You look like Grizzly Adams.” She sniffed the air, inhaling the smell of pain, sweat and medicated ointment. “You smell like a grizzly bear, too. I’ll have to clean you up.” Looking at him in such a helpless state caused her anger to spike. Her emotions were so all over the place. One minute she was dedicated to completing her duty to him as a wife, the next moment she wanted to run away.