Return to Glory (Hqn) (4 page)

She knew there was nothing else to say then but goodbye.

They drove to the station in silence, and when it was time for him to board, Betsy gave him a fierce hug.

Rather than tell him she loved him again, she whispered in his ear, “Don’t forget your promise.”

“I won’t.” He brushed his lips lightly over the crown of her head and boarded the bus without looking back.

Betsy stood alone in the pale, sodium light of the station with his dog tags clutched in her fingers and kept her own promise. She didn’t cry until the bus was gone.

* * *

T
HAT WAS THE
last time she’d seen him, before todday.

Now he was back and her stupid heart didn’t understand how much things had changed. How much he’d changed.

Betsy knew the only way this could end was badly—that was one thing her heart did understand.

And it didn’t care.

CHAPTER FOUR

J
ACK COULDN’T FACE HER
after what had happened.

He’d been so weak, so powerless, so
broken.
His failure had been splayed wide in front of her like an autopsy, but she hadn’t turned away from him, which was worse somehow. Maybe because it was obvious she thought he could be fixed.

But some things, once broken, couldn’t be pieced back together—parts were missing.

Like Jack. He wasn’t whole, and he never would be.

Despite what had happened last night, he had to face her again, if only to make her take that check. Jack knew he owed her, and the money was the only thing he had to give.

A small voice reminded him that wasn’t quite the truth. He had his wreck of a body, and if her kiss was any indication, she seemed to want it. She couldn’t look at his face, but she’d pressed herself up against him, her sweet, lush curves so inviting.

He knew she was still in love with the idea of him, still wanted the golden boy he’d been when he left. Maybe that was what she needed—the ugly truth to crush the fantasy.

So maybe she’d let him go. The fire in her eyes, the determination...

Now he was lying to himself. He wanted Betsy, and as far as he’d fallen, if she’d have him, he wouldn’t be able to say no. Touching her was bittersweet because it was the only time he could feel anything more than pain.

He eyed the whiskey bottle on the table, and when he would have reached for it, he stopped. Next to it was the envelope that held Betsy’s check, and it sat there like an accusation.

Jack swore and picked up the envelope instead of the bottle. He’d need it when he got home anyway.

It occurred to him that rather than see her again, the embodiment of the life that was lost to him, he could simply give it to Betsy’s mother and leave. He’d promised Betsy he’d come back, and so he had. Their accounts would be as even as they ever could be.

Yes, he’d leave before he shattered the image of the hero she believed him to be, and the heart of the girl who’d loved the man he’d been.

His decision made, he grabbed the envelope and headed to his car. Driving with the prosthesis wasn’t a challenge, and he knew that he’d fared better than most with the cutting-edge technology of the endo/exo implant—the titanium mesh implanted in his femur having actually become part of him. He’d had less downtime, fewer struggles, and logic told him that he had a lot to be grateful for.

But logic wasn’t there with him in the dark. It should have been; he’d been a SEAL—the best of the best. He stared death in the face and dared it to come take whatever it thought it could, and yet, when the flames came and he could smell the stench of his own burning flesh in his nose— He pushed the thoughts away, unwilling to face his cowardice.

When the house came into view, a sickening wave of nostalgia washed over him and turned his stomach. He remembered every night he’d spent in that house. The tree house at the back of the property where he and Caleb had hidden out from India when she was on a tear, his first real kiss in the closet in the downstairs family room during a middle school party, and Lula Lewis’s fried chicken on a Friday night after a home football game.

The house lived and breathed with memories that were better left undisturbed.

A sudden dread hit him. As if, if he took those last few feet, everything would change, but that was stupid. There was nothing behind door number one that could change what he’d come to do—what he had to do.

He moved forward, one foot in front of the other.

The brightly painted red door opened, and rather than Lula, it was Betsy standing there.

Her features were drawn and tight, some heavy burden tugging her shoulders down, the corners of her mouth, and the weight extinguished the light in her eyes.

Seeing her like that tore at him with sharp claws. That was exactly what he feared he’d do to her. He realized Betsy wasn’t the only one attached to an ideal. Jack needed to believe nothing could touch her, that she was safe from all the bad things in the world. Especially him.

“I came to give you this.” He thrust the envelope at her.

She drew her gaze up slowly, her regard burning him through to his bones. Suddenly he felt even worse about offering her the check than he did not reading her letters. She hadn’t said anything, hadn’t been angry, but it was all there in the pools of her eyes. The acknowledgment of everything he hadn’t wanted to say to her, but somehow she knew.

“I don’t want your money.” Betsy turned away from him, but he grabbed her wrist.

Jack found himself watching the scene from a place outside time. A place where his rational mind could protest what his body wanted and no one would hear it. Instead of releasing her when she turned, he pulled her into his arms.

She came to him easily, all soft sweetness. Betsy clung to him like a life raft in a hurricane—and he thought the description apt because he was ravaged by the storm the same as she was.

Touching her felt as if all of his nerve endings were on fire at once when before, they’d been numb. It was pain, it was bliss. It was everything he wanted and everything he feared.

If he could feel all of this from a simple embrace, what would it be like if he kissed her again?

The moment hung between them, gravid with everything they’d left unsaid and undone. The weight of a semi crushed down on his sternum, and the envelope burned his fingers.

She pulled away from him slowly as if moving through water. Betsy slipped her hand into his. She led him inside and toward the stairs.

Toward her bedroom.

Toward something he knew was wrong but wanted more than his next breath.

If he’d taken her that night under the stars with whispers of love and blackberry cordial on her breath, it would have been more forgivable than what he was about to do.

She pushed the bedroom door open silently and he followed behind her.

The room was still pink, her sheets still white, just as they’d been when she was a girl, but all of the pictures and posters had been taken down and there were boxes stacked in the corner. Two lone pictures had been stuck to the mirror. One of Betsy with two friends with the Statue of Liberty in the background, and one of Betsy with a man. They were standing behind an array of pastries, both of them with a certain glow to their cheeks. Accomplishment. Camaraderie. Something else Jack didn’t want to name.

Betsy reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck again and he looked away from those pictures of another life, turned his mind away from the questions that bubbled up inside him. If he spoke, he knew the spell over them would shatter.

It was the right thing to do, to stop this before it went any further, but Jack was tired of the right thing.

Even though it was on the tip of his tongue to tell her she didn’t want this with him and all of the reasons why:

That he was broken.

That he was ugly inside and out.

That he had nothing to give her.

That even these moments would only be a hungry shadow of what she deserved.

He said none of them. Instead he kissed her. Jack crushed his mouth to hers and he wasn’t sure if it was because he needed to taste her again or if he was punishing them both.

Her for making him feel, making him want, and himself for not being able to deny the pull between them.

She melted under the onslaught, her body molding against his. There was no shy confession from her, no demure invitation like before. She was bold, her hands moving under his shirt, over his chest, his shoulders, his back.

While scarred, he knew that part of him was well made and pleasing. He was strong; he had to be to lift himself. He could lift her, too. Jack remembered that was something Betsy had always liked, to be picked up. To be shown that her curves weren’t too much for a guy to handle. To be reassured that petite wasn’t the only definition of
sexy.

When he would have hauled her up and wrapped her legs around his waist, she was too busy tearing his T-shirt off him, her fingers on the button fly of his jeans.

Stark terror coursed through him and he stumbled away from her.

Because she’d see. The ugliness would be right there in her face. There was no hiding it under a pant leg; there was no pretending he was whole.

What the hell had he been thinking? It was the middle of the day, the sun high overhead, and there was no darkness for him to hide in, no shadows.

His dick withered at the thought. He couldn’t let her see.

Yet his eyes were drawn to her mouth, the rise and fall of her chest as she struggled to catch her breath.

She still didn’t speak but turned her back to him and pushed her hair to the side, exposing the zipper on the back of her dress. Betsy stepped out of her vintage shoes and nudged them out of the way with a stocking-covered foot.

Everything about her was seductive, every gesture and every breath.

Against his will, he found himself drifting toward her, his hands on her zipper, sliding it down the length of her back. He drank in the sight of her creamy skin, her bra and panties a splash of delicate pink lace against perfection.

He pulled her back against him hesitantly, his arm around her waist, and fastened his lips to the swan arch of her neck. Even her skin tasted sweet. If he thought he was broken before, Jack knew she was going to wreck him.

He could still stop. He could pull away from her; he could—

Betsy drew his hand up from her waist to cup her breast. He could do none of those things because he was lost in the undertow. Instead of drowning in the dark, he was drowning in her, in the inky black waves of her hair, in her creamy skin. He never wanted to surface; he wanted to fill himself up with her until there was nothing but Betsy.

She was warm, safe—she was all things good.

Until she tried to turn in his arms again.

“I don’t want you to see,” he confessed in a harsh whisper, sure that the spoken words would rip like daggers through the haze of need over them.

Betsy turned anyway and for a moment, he thought there would be pity on her face, but there wasn’t. Her dark eyes were half-lidded, her lips swollen from his kisses, and she was the embodiment of desire.

“There’s so much you don’t want, Jack. Tell me, what is it that you
do
want?”

“To stay lost in you,” he answered honestly. “But I haven’t touched a woman in two years.”

“What about yourself? Have you touched yourself?”

“Bets—” He was torn between being even more turned on that she asked, that she thought of him like that, and the shame that he hadn’t had the desire since his injury. He couldn’t stand to look at himself, let alone bring himself pleasure.

And the whiskey...he was surprised he could maintain an erection.

“This isn’t going to be good for you.” Another confession torn from him. He meant for more than the here and now, more than just fleeting bliss he might have been able to offer once upon a time, all those years ago.

Her hands slid down to his button fly again. “Yes, it will. You’re good at everything. You’re Jack McConnell.”

When her fingers closed over his length, he still had his doubts. “This is going to be over before it starts.”

“And yet it still will have happened.” She tilted her face up to his and feathered another kiss across his mouth. It was nothing like his cruel mastery, but it punished him all the same.

“Why do you want it to?” He breathed against her lips.

“Because if all we have is ashes, we should at least get to burn in the fire.”

He could understand that, process it. Her words made much more sense than the idea that she actually wanted him. He didn’t know where things had gone wrong for her, but obviously they had if all she had to do on a Sunday afternoon was him.

She was right. They both wanted this and it didn’t matter that he wasn’t whole, that he couldn’t spend hours worshipping her body, bringing her off time and again, even though he wished he could. This was about the moment, about burning to nothing. About feeling something more than pain.

For all that he thought she didn’t understand, with that simple sentence, he knew that she did.

If she could lose herself in him the same way he could be lost in her, he could give her that.

He tangled a hand in her hair and surrendered.

* * *

B
ETSY DECIDED THAT
was nothing compared to what it was like to have his hands on her body, his mouth on hers, and the sure knowledge that she’d finally experience this with him. It was the culmination of a fantasy, of a schoolgirl crush, but it was something more, too.

This joining was a haven against everything wrong in the world, against all their shattered dreams.

It was only right that the first time would happen in this room where she’d spent so many hours dreaming of him. Of course, when she’d imagined giving herself to him, it was all fey bubbles and breathy sighs. He’d been kind and patient in her fantasies—gentle and tender.

The reality was nothing even close to that. His hands were rough and calloused, his kisses were more like a battle than a seduction, but it was still everything she wanted because it was real.

She angled him back on the bed, still stroking him. Betsy didn’t want him to think about anything other than how good this felt.

Part of her was still afraid he’d try to be noble or maybe that he just didn’t want her. Even with the hard evidence of desire in front of her, that fear was still present that he’d said no all those years before and used her age, her brother, his nobility as an excuse so he didn’t have to tell her that her stomach wasn’t flat enough, her face not pretty enough...

Marcel’s face bloomed like a rancid flower in her mind.
You could be so lovely if—

No. She wouldn’t do this to herself.

“It’s okay if you changed your mind.” His voice was ragged and low, as if every word cost him something vital to speak.

Betsy realized she’d stopped her caress and was leaning over him with his jeans halfway down his hips. Low enough to reveal only what he wanted to share, but would still hide what he didn’t want her to see.