Redeeming Her SEAL (ASSIGNMENT: Caribbean Nights Book 9) (26 page)

“No, because I’ve never told anyone.” His gaze searched hers, and she wished she could interpret the look on his face. “In case you missed the memo, I’m not good at sharing what’s going on inside me.”

Yeah, they should have matching T-shirts made. But obviously he’d come to the conclusion that he should start talking, and she liked the sound of that. Maybe they could do it together.

Her entire body strained to move toward him. But she didn’t. The fact that he was here and apparently had calmed down considerably didn’t magically make everything between them good enough to wrap her arms around him like she ached to.

“I heard what you said about building a reef. I like it.” He picked that moment to enter the living area, drawing close enough that her blood heated faster than she could compensate for.

Up close, he looked worn. Exhausted. Like maybe he wasn’t sleeping well either.

“I hope it at least convinces you that I’m on your side, Charlie.”

“It does. I don’t deserve—” He shut his eyes for a beat. “I have a hard time feeling like I deserve that.”

Oh, God. The anguish in his voice told her more than maybe he’d intended. But before she could argue, he took her hand and rubbed it absently. “I need to tell you about Iraq.”

Speechless, she nodded as her pulse shot through the stratosphere. Probably she wasn’t ready for this, but he clearly was, and she’d told him she could take it.

“What happened?” she prompted quietly.

“IED.”

The fact that he didn’t elaborate spoke volumes. She knew enough about explosives to understand what an IED was. Not with his firsthand knowledge, of course, but the fact that he was here and whole meant someone else had detonated it. One of his men?

“I’m sorry.” Her insides quaked as he kept stroking her hand, not speaking. She didn’t either, waiting until he was ready to talk about the rest of it. Or not, if he chose to leave off there.

One thing about letting him go that she’d discovered and would retain for the rest of her life—she didn’t need his secrets, but she did need him. And she was okay with that because it wasn’t weakness to love someone.

“Some villagers were helping us.” His voice had gone thin with the memory, and she didn’t like the direction this was going. “A small group of them. They hated extremists and what they were doing to their country, so they agreed to guide us through this really rocky area of the countryside near the border. I was convinced we’d be attacked from behind because that had happened to another platoon in the same area the day before.”

Oddly, his voice gained more strength as the story went on, and he finished clear and calm. “I should have been at the front. But I made a mistake. And yet I walked away scot-free.”

He owned it like the saint his guys portrayed him as. There had never been a moment in the history of knowing Charlie St. Croix where she’d respected him more. But that admission had come with a price, and his pain bled through her as clearly as if he’d reached inside her chest and twisted her heart loose with his fingers.

Lifting his hand, she held the back to her lips in wordless comfort because what could she say?
Yeah, you should have been?
Or
no, honey, it was just luck of the draw.
This had been his job, his life, and he blamed himself for making the wrong decision.

She of all people got that. “What happened when the IED exploded?”

“The villagers all died,” he said simply. Brutally. “But not instantly of course. That would have been too kind. Evan was at the front of the team and took the worst of the shrapnel. His recovery was not pretty.”

“I can see how that would affect you, Charlie,” she murmured. “Does it still bother you?”

“Every day,” he admitted. “I have PTSD. It’s not as bad as what some guys deal with. But it’s ugly, and it’s something I’ll probably have the rest of my life. I didn’t want you to be forced to deal with it as well. So I took away your choice. I’m sorry.”

He was
apologizing
. To her. Her heart cried for him as she squeezed his hand. “You should be. I can pretty much guarantee that a lifetime will not be long enough for you to make it up to me. But I’m willing to let you try. In case it’s not clear, I will always choose you.”

His mouth lifted in a brief smile. “I don’t deserve that either.”

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” she advised mildly. “It’s my turn to come clean, and then we’ll talk, tit for tat.”

“You’re going to be spending a long time making something up to me then?”

“Maybe. You asked me why Jared’s vendetta was my fault, but I never gave you the answer. It’s hard for me to share what’s going on inside for a lot of reasons, but I’m over them. And you deserve to know. Jared was easy to be with because he never threatened me. Emotionally. And his dollars paid for my research. It was a win-win. Until it wasn’t.”

“Was that when you sent him packing?” Charlie murmured.

He was listening. Openly. For the first time, she felt like she could honestly tell him what was in her heart, even if it was about Jared, without risking that she’d drive a wedge further between them. Or that he would leave. He’d already done that. The first time, she’d depended on a crutch to get her through. The second time, she’d depended on herself, and that made all the difference.

She wasn’t afraid anymore.

“Yeah. I couldn’t stand how disconnected I was from my own relationship. He wouldn’t accept that I was breaking up with him. It was… not a good scene. He wore me down until I told him the truth.” The unvarnished truth. And now she had to tell Charlie. “I looked him dead in the eye and said I couldn’t ever love him the way I could love you.”

She would always think of Jared as the man who’d gotten her through Isaac’s death, but no longer could she excuse or brush off being with him due to circumstances.

She’d chosen to be with him because she could never fall for him. It was insulation against being hurt, just a different method than the one she’d used against Charlie. That was the real sin—Jared had been nothing more than a shield to keep her from falling for a guy who had made her no promises.

Which had totally failed.

Comprehension dawned in his gaze, warring with a tenderness that was breathtaking. “He said I was in the way. I get that now. That’s why he got so pissed.”

“I’m pretty sure,” she said wryly. “The irony of this feud he started is that you’d already won.”

I
could love you.
Audra’s words echoed through Charlie’s heart as he tried to process. Because yeah. That felt like the winning hand all day long.

But all of this was suddenly too much after a day with his father, a red-eye flight from Baltimore, followed by two hours of trying to figure out where the hell Audra had disappeared to.

Panic coupled with fatigue had almost put him over the edge, and then the forty-five minute boat ride to get home for some serious regroup time had finished the job. Only to find the woman he’d nearly burned down Freeport to locate had been holding court in his living room.

His knees weakened, causing him to weave. The concern that sprang into Audra’s eyes undid him.

“Charlie.” Her thumb smoothed over his knuckle. She’d never let go of his hand, and he liked that they’d been connected as he hashed out the chaos inside his head. “Come sit down with me. You look like you’re about to fall over.”

He nodded, so tired he could hardly breathe. “Feel like it too. Been traveling for hours.”

Plus he’d barely slept in three days—impossible to do so, he’d discovered, without a nightmare slayer in his bed.

Collapsing on the sofa with Audra felt so natural that his head was in her lap before he’d realized they weren’t back in her apartment in Freeport, everything was not okay and they still had a lot to say to each other. Like the confession he’d been practicing about how he’d screwed up. How hard it was to admit his mistakes and how unforgivable it was that he’d pushed her away.

But her soft hands in his hair soothed him so much that he closed his eyes and let her touch drift through him straight to his soul.

“Where did you go?” she asked, her voice as low and soothing as her hands. “If you want to tell me, that is.”

“To see my father.” That had been brutal. But necessary, and he owed Mama C more than he could ever repay for whacking him upside the head with it.

“You did?” Her disbelief spoke to the enormity of what he’d done. She knew just as well as the guys on his team that Montgomery St. Croix was a bastard whom Charlie had vowed to never speak to again.

Funny how “never” had turned out to be about a decade and a half. “Had to. It wasn’t fun, but I needed to make my peace. I’d rather talk about it some other time.”

It was only relevant by virtue of the fact that it had loosened the grip of the past, which he’d desperately needed so he could be here with Audra, in this moment.

His father had looked… old. Worn down by life and loneliness. Charlie refused to let that be his own fate because of his father’s mistakes.

“Tell me about Naomi then,” she suggested.

“She was my girlfriend,” he mumbled, fatigue slurring his words. But he needed to say them. “I loved her so much, in that no-fear way that only a nineteen-year-old can. But she loved herself and my father’s money, probably in equal measure.”

“Uh-oh,” she murmured. “There’s that dreaded ‘m’ word.”

He smiled because of course she got that money did not make his world go round. It made it easier to say what came next, which he’d never said out loud. “I walked in on her and my father going at it in the pool house. Needless to say, that experience stained the next fifteen years of my life.”

Including the way he’d handled every waking second with Audra, even from the very first. Shame on him for painting her with the brush of other people’s sins instead of taking what she was offering at face value.

Her fingers stilled in his hair. “Oh, my darling. I’m so sorry.”

Her voice cracked. He rolled, wedging his cheek against her stomach so he could see her. So she could see him as he told her the God honest truth.

“You know what? It got me to Coronado. Being a SEAL was the best thing that could have happened to me after that.” He shut his eyes for a second as her scent unfolded inside him. As he considered what might be growing even now in the womb beneath her skin. “And you were the best thing that could have happened to me after being a SEAL.”

Which he’d very nearly destroyed because he couldn’t accept the redemption she’d offered. If he did this right, he’d get the umpteenth chance to try again, and he’d succeed at loving her the way she deserved this time.

He sat up because it didn’t matter how tired he was or how much he craved her touch. Some things needed to be said while looking a woman in the eye. “Audra, I pushed you away because I didn’t want to saddle you with damaged goods. Instead of talking to you about my failings, I took your choice away.”

There
was the irony in this situation.

“It’s okay,” she said immediately with a small smile. “We both messed up because we suck at this. Look at my example. I went to Jared to fix my mistakes and ended up making it worse.”

She flinched, and he had a pretty good idea why.

“It’s okay if you want to talk about Jared.” Saying his name still didn’t conjure up rainbows and unicorns in his mind, but he was through being unreasonably jealous. “I’ve had a lot of time to think and a lot of thumps to the head about my own stupidity. I can’t say I’ll ever be overjoyed with the fact that he’s a part of your past. But I accept that he is.”

His jealousy over that relationship stemmed one hundred percent from guilt over his own shortcomings. Turned out once he forgave himself, the urge to break Jared’s fingers vanished.

Cautiously, she eyed him. “Can you accept the fact that I did care about him but that he has nothing to do with us?”

The crossroads he’d been working toward loomed, but he nodded instantly. “Yes. Because I forgive you. It’s forgotten, as if it never existed.”

That hadn’t been so hard to say after all. The more you did it, the easier it got.

Eventually, he’d have to say it to Jared because that was the right thing to do, whether his former friend understood the need for it or not. Charlie didn’t enjoy that last bit of chaos remaining unresolved. But that one might have to wait. At least the concept didn’t make him want to punch the wall anymore.

Her smile lit him up inside, salving his wounds. Fitting into the holes he’d created with his stubborn inability to forgive.

“So where does that leave us, Charlie? Can we at least agree to take it slow and see what this new phase looks like?”

Gazes caught, they stared at each other as the last two years melted away and all that mattered was this moment where they stood on the brink of the rest of their lives. All he had to do was reach out.

“No,” he murmured, which was what he should have said to her on that beach the first time, before he’d walked away like an idiot. “Slow doesn’t work for me. I want the adrenaline-pumping, thrill-seeking woman I fell in love with to take my hand and jump in. No holds barred. Be with me, love me, take everything I’ve got because it’s always been yours.”