Promises in the Dark (27 page)

He turned the car off and opened the back windows a little, even though the rain would come in. It would get way too hot in there otherwise.

He’d been furious from the time he’d ushered her into the car and she damned well knew it.

Finally, she spoke. “Tristan, I didn’t mean—”

“To ask the locals about me?” He paused. “I’ve known you two days. I’ve known people for years and never told them shit about my life. Because I didn’t want to, because it was none of their business. Because I didn’t want them to look at me any differently. But hell, they always looked at me differently.”

“I wouldn’t have.”

“You already do.”

“Maybe that has nothing to do with what you’ve done in your past,” she said quietly, and for a second his heart almost stopped at the power of those words, because maybe she was telling the truth. “Tristan, you were in the military. I know that you had to do things.”

“You mean kill, right? Yeah, I did—before the military and after. I’m no saint, Rowan, and Jesus and Doc J and all the missionaries in Africa aren’t ever going to heal my soul and get me into heaven. I know that and I don’t care—I’m not looking for redemption from them.”

Or from you
. But he didn’t say the words out loud—couldn’t—and so he cursed loudly and slammed his fist on the steering wheel, stared straight ahead as the rain sheeted the windshield.

Doc J hadn’t missed a damned trick, had asked him that morning, “What’s going on between you two?” and then held up a hand. “Forget it. I’m not your mother.”

“Thank God for that, because you’d make an ugly mother,” Tristan had shot back, and Doc J’s face had broken into the first smile Tristan had seen all day.

Yeah, Tristan had it bad, and Doc J knew it; he had it bad enough to know that spending tonight alone wasn’t going to happen. So he might actually have to put some work into this … whatever it was.

Because this woman made him want to beat his chest. Bay at the moon.

This woman made him want to spend the night, wake up in the morning and do it all again.

A capable woman was the biggest turn-on. And, as he’d just discovered, his greatest downfall, because he’d stopped thinking about anything else but her. For the first time in a long time, he didn’t care.

All he’d done on the drive back from Freetown was think about her. Worry what would happen to her when the soldiers came to shake the clinic down. Women didn’t fare well in this place, and she was too stubborn to recognize that arguing and protesting wouldn’t do any good.

Even though he knew she’d be safer leaving, he didn’t want her to. Planned to convince her not to by going into her tent again and taking her, hard and fast and then more slowly. When he regained some of his composure, he’d tell her she couldn’t leave. Lay it on the line.

He just hadn’t been planning on revealing any of that right now. But things happened faster here—everything was more intense than it normally would be, and that included bonds. And secrets, they seemed easier to share in this place, typically because you never thought you’d see the person again.

Or you didn’t have to share them because they wouldn’t be around long enough to matter. But Rowan, despite her earlier meltdown, she would stay. He could feel it, the way he always knew rain was coming, days before it actually did.

“You don’t scare me. Not in the way you’re thinking,” she said after a few more minutes of silence.

“Yeah?” He turned in the seat so he faced her. “You should be scared, Rowan. Because I want to do things to you that I’m sure you’ve never done. Never even thought about doing. I want to take you in ways you can’t begin to imagine … in ways I know you’ve never been taken.”

Her mouth opened, then closed.

He got close enough to put his lips on her neck, to feel the hammer of her pulse against them. “You let me take you last night—will you let me again, right here?” His fingers brushed her breast, her nipple already stiff. Her breath came in quick gasps and she nodded as the car shook, thanks to the wind.

He had her trapped against the seat. And could tell she liked it.

Dammit, the woman had no sense at all, didn’t scare easily.

Made him as hard as a rock. In a second, he could’ve had the seat reclined, his body covering hers, her hot sex bared to him, with his cock buried inside of her; the car would shake harder than it was from the elements, and he wouldn’t even have begun to be sated.

She was so goddamned willing to let it happen. Was actually letting her hand wander between their bodies in order to get to the zipper on his cargoes.

Let her
, his dick insisted.

Instead, he pulled back, told her sharply, “We can’t do this. You should just go home. Find a nice investment banker—”

Her breath caught hard, and shit.
Shit
. Her husband …

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay. Dan
was
an investment banker. I never felt like I fit in my family. I always went for jobs that had me working with my hands and my brain at the same time,” she explained. “Dan understood that. Accepted it. Marrying him made me happy, and it made my family happy, so it worked out well.”

“You did it to make your family happy?” The anger crept into his question before he could stop it.

“I could never have married someone I didn’t love. I don’t have it in me to fake it.”

There was definitely nothing fake about Rowan. He was sure of it. But then he’d thought Janie had been on the up and up.

She was a seventeen-year-old girl, asshole
. And he’d been a surprisingly naive seventeen-year-old gang member who should’ve been smarter and steered clear of her neighborhood.

“You don’t belong here. You should go home before you get hurt,” he said.

He was daring her to stay, daring her to deal with him—and really, he wanted her to fail, because he was scared.

He might be more scared than she was. Tristan knew he was so far from measuring up to anything she’d had that he shouldn’t even bother trying.

“What were you like before you came here, Tristan?”

“If you knew me then …”

“You’re not the same person you were.”

“I’m the same. My loyalty just lies with someone different these days.”

Her hand went to his biceps, her palm cool on his hot skin. “Tristan—”

He shrugged off her hand. “I’m not looking for a pity screw, okay?”

“You think I’m sleeping with you out of pity?”

“No, I think you’re slumming and it’s hot and exciting but you’ll get tired of it and end up with someone who belongs in your world.”

“I don’t have a world anymore!”

“You can’t make
me
it, then. You can’t.”

“Who hurt you, Tristan? Who the hell shredded your heart?”

Was it that simple? Probably. He’d always found the more uncomplicated truths the most important. “Just a high school love gone wrong. I thought she was it for me … she was using me because I was good in bed and a nice
screw you
to her family.”

“Why?”

“I was poor. The bad boy. In a gang.” He shrugged. “Such a fucking cliché, and I fell for all her pretty words.”

“And you’ll never do that again.”

One look at Rowan and he knew he already had. “I’ve got enough troubles without falling for someone.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve got a dishonorable discharge that follows me around. I took the fall for someone else—and so for the second time in my life, my name’s shit.” Just like Janie’s family treated him … just like they’d told him he’d turn out.

Her parents had tried to ensure that. “Look, you really want to know all this? Here goes—Janie, the girl, accused me of theft. And rape. Really, she just needed to get out of what her family considered a scandal, with her all-important reputation intact. So you’ve got the classic good little rich girl takes up with poor boy who lives too close to gangland for comfort. Who do you think the police believed? Hell, even my mother believed it.”

Jesus, he still sounded so bitter, even today. He needed to let that shit go, because all it got him was pissed, but maybe laying it all out there for Rowan would help somehow. “It was the night before the prom. I’d borrowed money, gotten a tux and a limo. Bought her flowers. I still couldn’t believe it. I was going to show up at her old man’s mansion and prove that I could be good enough.” Even now, shame flushed his face. He’d been so young and stupid. “And then, just as I was getting ready, the police showed up. Said Janie had accused me of raping her, and robbing her family, the night before. They had my fingerprints.”

He’d been at the house the night before, yes. His fingerprints were everywhere … and his DNA was inside her. They’d had consensual sex while her parents were out, but Janie didn’t—wouldn’t—admit that.

“Her father came to me, told me he’d drop all the charges if I stayed the hell away from his precious baby. Said he couldn’t afford to have any half-breed mongrels messing up his lineage. Said my kind would try to get her pregnant and take all her money.”

Rowan’s eyes widened. “He knew you didn’t rape her.”

“He knew. But this was an effective way to get me out of the picture and scare the shit out of her.” He scrubbed his face with his palms as if he could scrub away the memories. “I loved her—that was all I knew. And she sold me out, which I get. Well, now I do. It got me on a better path than I was going down. I enlisted right after that, and I haven’t been home since.”

And then, years later, when all that was behind him, another sharp and swift betrayal by someone he trusted. “On a mission in South America, my commander got a direct order for us to pull out of a firefight and return to the LZ. Our team knew it was the wrong decision, that we couldn’t pull out of the town or most of the people left alive wouldn’t be for much longer. Lots of women and children who we were defending against a local drug lord’s men. But apparently, Army Intelligence had gotten a new lead for us, said to leave the town and move on. The commander was my friend and so I stayed behind, disobeyed the order. He was supposed to help me out of a court-martial—I stayed behind so he wouldn’t get in trouble and lose his rank. The aftermath shouldn’t have been as bad as it was, but hell, it
was
bad.”

Apparently, his team had missed the drug lord and everything got twisted around on Tristan—he’d been the one who’d insisted on staying behind and refusing the order. The one who held up the team as they’d tried to reason with him.

At least that’s how it was laid out to him by his Army-appointed defense lawyer when he found himself in the brig.

He’d taken the rap, accepted the punishment and found himself alone again. To this day, he was still angry with himself that he hadn’t fought back, but a big part of him had known that fighting that system, with only his word against his commander’s, would be a losing battle and could’ve cost him much more. Beyond that, he’d lost someone he’d thought of as a friend.

He wondered if all of it was part of a larger pattern, if it was something he’d consciously chosen or if it was as simple as the universe enjoying crapping on him.

But he knew there were many people who had it worse than he did. “So there you have it—how I get screwed over when I trust someone.”

“You would’ve been okay if it had just been the girl. But when you were accused of ignoring a direct order and no one believed you didn’t, it brought it all back,” she said with a quiet understanding.

“You’d think that realizing that would make it all better, but surprisingly, it doesn’t.”

“You feel how you feel. Who’s to say it’s wrong?”

Rowan hadn’t said anything he’d expected, didn’t act like he’d expected—why was it so easy with her? He’d been with women who’d lived through their own forms of tragedies and they’d never connected to him like this.

With Rowan, it felt real. But it had also felt damned real on all those summer nights down by the lake when he’d held Janie tight and they’d talked about a future together, about how she wanted out from under her family’s thumb.

She’d never gotten far. He’d learned she’d married the son of her father’s associate, in a big society wedding. And he’d never let himself even think about getting serious with another woman.

“I would never do that to you,” she breathed, and shit, had he really said all of that out loud? The heat must be getting to him—or maybe he had malaria or something. “And Doc J doesn’t think your name means shit.”

“Out here, it doesn’t matter. If I wanted to go home, it would.”

“Do you? Want to go home, I mean.”

“I haven’t known what I’ve wanted for a really long time.” But that was the biggest fucking lie he’d ever told, and he’d told a lot in his day.

He wanted to feel the way he had at seventeen—in love, the world in front of him.

He also never wanted to feel the pain of rejection again—not the way he’d gotten it from his mother and the Army, and not the way he’d gotten it from the person who’d told him she loved him most in the world. “I was raised by my mom. I put her through hell, disappointed the shit out of her—I know that. And when I went into the military, I wrote to her … she never wrote back. She died a few years ago. I couldn’t even bring myself to go home for the funeral. I don’t think she’d have wanted me there anyway.”