Champagne and Bullets: Book 1 (Military Moguls) (10 page)

“You have a very smug smile on your face, Mandy. Care to share your thoughts?”

Seb’s sexy voice pulled her attention from the pristine scene before her to his handsome face. Each day they were together she fell deeper in love with him. It made her feelings thirteen years ago seem silly and childish in comparison.

“If you must know I was thinking about you.” She gave him her best coquettish smile and reached over to run her hand up his arm, the rough hair tickling her palm. He was devastatingly hunky in a pair of navy blue swim shorts that left his chest, arms, and lower legs bare. His body appeared sculpted from marble, the flesh beckoning, but this time she didn’t deny herself. She let her hand glide up to his broad shoulder, massaging the tight muscles. He’d needed this day as much as she had.

“Me?” His well-shaped eyebrow quirked and his lips turned up in a smile. “You mean how I cooked dinner last night and then did the dishes?”

“That was impressive.” Laughter bubbled from her lips and she let her hand trail back down his arm so their fingers could entwine. “But actually I was thinking about some of your other talents, specifically the more…intimate ones.”

Her voice had dropped to a whisper but her body hummed as images of their sizzling night ran through her mind. After attaching nipple clamps to her breasts, Seb had tied her face down on the bed and worked over her bottom and thighs with a crop while a vibrator buzzed between her legs. It hadn’t taken long before she’d been begging to be fucked but he’d drawn out the play, amping up her arousal. When he’d finally thrust his cock into her waiting pussy, she’d exploded almost immediately with the most intense orgasm of her life. Afterward he’d spent quite a bit of time just holding her until she’d reluctantly come back to earth.

She’d felt so close to him. He’d been in tune with her every thought and feeling, almost as if they were one person.

“I’ve had a smile on my face pretty much all the time as well,” Seb agreed as he rubbed circles on the back of her hand with his thumb. “We certainly have chemistry to go along with the love.”

Amanda knew they were lucky. Not every relationship could boast a passionate desire paired with a tender ardor. Her marriage to Emmett certainly hadn’t had either of those components. Guilt that she hadn’t told Seb the truth weighted heavily on her. If there was ever a moment so happy and peaceful that nothing could ruin it, it was now.

“Seb,” she began tentatively, “there’s been something I’ve wanted to talk to you about. My marriage and…everything.”

“You don’t owe me any explanations,” Seb assured her in a soothing tone that did nothing to assuage her nerves. “I left and you needed to move on with your life. I understand that.”

“I need to tell you. I haven’t told you the whole truth about things.”

Her throat tightened up as memories of her life with Emmett came crashing back. Her fingers grasped his own a little tighter and she steeled herself for a conversation she’d rather never have.

“Whatever you tell me won’t make a difference as to how I feel about you. I love you no matter what.”

Amanda knew Seb loved her. She could feel it as if it was a living thing between them. But would he respect her once her story was done?

“When you left I was devastated. I didn’t get out of bed for days. Everyone was worried about me. I think Mother thought I might do something—” Amanda paused, not wanting to make him feel guilty but needing him to understand the depths to which she’d fallen, “desperate, I guess. Friends and family watched me like a hawk and eventually were able to get me up and out of the house. It was a first step back to some sort of normalcy.”

She heard Seb’s indrawn breath as the meaning of her words hit home. She never would have done harm to herself but the people in her life had been that concerned about her mental state.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” Seb said with a raw tone in his voice. “If I could go back and undo it all, you know I would. The last person I wanted to hurt was you. Please believe me.”

Amanda did believe him. But it didn’t change what had happened next, how her life had spiraled out of control.

“My parents and my friends kept dragging me out to parties and the like. Anything really to get me out of the house. I’d taken the semester off of school because I’d missed so many classes and basically I had no direction in life.”

“That’s when you met Emmett,” he offered, his expression somber. “And you got married.”

Seb made it sound so simple when in reality it had been something far different.

“I met Emmett at a cocktail party. He was handsome and charming and he seemed so easy to be around.” She kept her voice under control, not allowing the past to undermine what she’d accomplished in the present. “Honestly it was because he was so different than you that I even gave him a chance. Where you were more thoughtful, he was spontaneous. Where you were intense and often brooding, he was happy go lucky. He was easy to be around so when he asked me to marry him…”

Taking a deep breath, she remembered that day clearly. Still heartbroken from Seb’s departure, she’d leaped at the chance to be normal again.

“You said yes,” Seb interjected. “You really don’t have to explain this, sweetheart.”

“I do,” she insisted. “I said yes because I loved you so much I didn’t think I would ever love anyone else, so why not marry Emmett? He said he loved me and I thought that would be enough. But it was even more than that. You don’t know how many people would look at me with such pity. It was as if I was some pathetic dog whose owner dropped them off at the pound. I wanted that look to go away. So I married Emmett.”

“But it wasn’t enough?” he asked. “Did the looks not go away?”

He was sitting up now, his brown eyes almost black with pain he couldn’t hide. She’d hurt him when she’d married Emmett. If she’d known it at the time, she never would have gone through with it.

“The looks did go away but no, his love wasn’t enough.”

“God, Mandy.” Seb shook his head, his elbows resting on his knees. “You’ll never know what I went through when I found out you were engaged. Fuck, the day you got married I got rip-roaring drunk and had to be carried back to my bunk. I can’t tell you how much it goddamn hurt. It hurt and the pain never completely went away. I would rather have been shot a dozen times than feel that again.”

She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them as if to protect herself. The rest of the story wasn’t pleasant and his mention of pain brought all hers back, both mental and physical.

“I wanted to be a good wife, I really did. But Emmett knew I still loved you.”

“And that hurt him?”

“No.” Amanda shook her head and looked out at the water lapping gently on the sand. She pulled her sunglasses from her nose and chewed on one of the earpieces. “He never loved me so he wasn’t hurt except for maybe his pride. I think he thought that I would eventually fall in love with him, but of course that never happened.”

There was a silence with only the sound of the waves and birds. “He never loved you?” Seb finally asked.

“Never. He married me for my money. He’d already gone through his own trust fund so he needed to find a rich wife. I was perfect. I was too emotionally distraught to see what game he was really playing before it was too late. He didn’t tell me for a while though. It was only after we’d been married about six months that he admitted it. I think by then he knew that I was never going to fall for him.”

A few nasty words fell from Seb’s lips and his features had turned stone cold. If Emmett had been here with them, Amanda was sure Seb would have taken a swing at her ex-husband. She would have let him.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said hastily, not wanting this discussion to veer off track. “His avarice was the least of his bad qualities. Emmett was not a very nice person. He was especially not nice once we were behind closed doors.”

Seb’s eyes had narrowed and she shivered at the pure violence in his gaze. “What did he do to you? Tell me, Mandy.”

Amanda took a deep breath, knowing that if Seb was this angry now what she had to tell him might possibly send him over the edge. Their idyllic day at the beach had been torn to shreds.

“The day I left Emmett was the day after he beat me so badly I had to go to the hospital.”

‡

T
he air sucked
from his lungs, Seb could barely breathe as each sentence Amanda uttered grew worse, more horrific than he’d ever imagined. All that time while he’d been in the Middle East, he’d thought she was happily ensconced in marital bliss. But that hadn’t been the case at all. Amanda had been trapped in a nightmare.

He hadn’t been there to protect the woman he loved. He’d failed her. Again.

Seb jumped up from the lounge chair, too angry to sit still. He wanted to find Emmett and break him in half and maybe beat on his face and ribs for a while. Even that wouldn’t make up for what had happened to Amanda.

But it was a start.

She reached for his hand and tugged at it until he stood still. “Don’t, Seb. I’ve been all through this and I’ve come out the other side. Sit down and let me finish.” He didn’t move and she pulled harder on his arm. “Please.”

Sighing with frustration at the angry knot that had taken up residence in his chest, he fell reluctantly back down onto the cushion. His teeth were gritted together but for Amanda he would try and keep control.

“Go on,” he urged, his gut churning with the need to beat on something or someone. Hard. “Did he hit you often?”

“Just that one time, but looking back on it now I realize he’d been working up to it from day one. He separated me from my friends and family by moving us to London. Isolated me so that I had no one to depend on but him. Verbally he was nasty to me, pounding away at my self-esteem. Typical abuser behavior. The night he hit me it really wasn’t that much of a shock. I knew he hated me. He resented having to marry me for money.”

Thinking of his sweet Amanda in a marriage like that was almost more than Seb could bear. She hadn’t deserved any of the crap life—and he—had dealt. No wonder she was so strong and independent now, wanting to take care of even the littlest things on her own. She’d never had a man she could depend on.

“The night he hurt you?” he asked, the words slightly strangled in his throat.

“I wanted to move back to Florida.” Amanda shrugged as if what had set Emmett off had been meaningless. “He didn’t. We fought. He hit me. The end.”

“How bad?”

“A black eye. A broken arm. Two cracked ribs,” she recited as if it had happened to someone else. “After being treated at the hospital, the British equivalent of a social worker came to talk to me. She found me an out of the way hotel to heal in, and once I was better she drove me to the airport. Emmett, never thinking I would actually leave, hadn’t tried to take my credit cards or cash. I came home and filed for divorce. He of course sued for spousal support and I paid him off. Last I heard he’d run through all the money I gave him and had to marry again. Poor woman.”

“And you started volunteering at the shelter,” Seb said slowly, trying to digest all that had happened in the intervening years. The fact that Amanda wasn’t completely soured on men was amazing. Add in that she could still trust him to tie her up or spank her in the bedroom…it was a miracle.

To his shock, Amanda smiled and laughed. “The shelter didn’t exist. I started the foundation that created the shelter. I never wanted to forget how vulnerable I felt, and I sure as hell didn’t want anyone to feel the same way. I was lucky, Seb. I had the money and resources to get away. Most women don’t. It only felt right that I should help them. And to be honest, it helped me too.”

“The foundation and the shelter are yours?” He should have known and would have had he taken the time to look at any of the paperwork that had flowed over his desk in the last few days regarding the sale of the house to Poplin.

“Yes. I don’t go out of my way to advertise the fact since I don’t want the questions. Mother and Father know and my best friend Susie. That’s it. Well, and now you.”

“It has to be costing you a fortune.” It was a stupid thing to say but Seb wasn’t a man used to dealing with emotions. The fact was he didn’t know what to say. He was angry and bitter and he didn’t know what to do with those feelings. So much time had been wasted. So much pain. All of it his fault.

“Pretty much.” Amanda laughed and reached for his hand. “But I swear to you it’s worth it when I look into the eyes of the women and children at the shelter.”

Seb tugged his hand from her grasp and scraped his fingers through his hair. “How can you be so calm about this? I want to beat the ever-loving shit out of your ex-husband.”

“Because I’ve had a long time and a lot of therapy to help me deal with it,” she stated. “If I remain angry and bitter? He wins. He gets to control me from thousands of miles away and I won’t let him do that anymore. I’m the one at the wheel of my life. I drive.”

Amanda tapped her chest but her brows drew together in a frown. “Do you think less of me because of this? Do you want to ask me why I stayed when he started being a jerk? My parents did. Susie understood, though. She knew that I wanted to make my marriage work and that he emotionally abused me until I felt like I didn’t have anywhere or anyone to go to.” Her chin lifted and her blue eyes sparkled with defiance. “But maybe you’re one of those people who thinks that I did something to provoke him? Or that I was an idiot to stay for so long? I’ve met plenty of those at the shelter, Seb. They seem to think that abuse victims ask for it in some way.”