Honor Reclaimed (HORNET #2)

Chapter 16

CHAPTER 16

“You shouldn’t be back here.”

Seth tensed at Phoebe’s soft voice, so close behind him he could probably turn around and pull her into his arms, kiss her, and lose himself in the sheer goodness that made up Phoebe Leighton until all of his bad half-memories disappeared.

He didn’t.

Instead, he climbed to his feet and put more distance between them before facing her. “I’m not allowed in the courtyard?”

“No. I mean, yes, of course you are. But Afghanistan. You shouldn’t have come back.”

His gut twisted. No doubt she was right. His latest shrink even told him she didn’t recommend exposure therapy for his PTSD treatment. He was too damaged.

And yet…

“I have to be here,” he said. He wished he could better explain the deep-seated need, but there were no words, except for the same ones she’d given him in the foyer.

“Why? For those men in there?” She pointed toward the house. “They don’t respect you. They don’t trust you.”

“Not them,” he said softly.

“The team you lost?” When he couldn’t manage a reply, she sighed. “Oh, Seth. That’s it, isn’t it? You think you’re doing this for the men you lost.”

He flinched. “Yes. For them.”

“Do you think you’re honoring them in some way by being here?” she asked and shook her head in answer to her own question. “You’re not. You’re just pouring salt into your wounds and for what? What are you trying to prove, Seth?”

Her words struck a painful vein of truth that she had no business digging into. “You can’t understand.”

“Maybe not. I didn’t know your men, but if they were good friends, they’d hate to see you tormenting yourself like this.”

She was right. Cordero had been big on forgiving and forgetting, and Bowie had always advocated living in the moment, looking forward, and not dwelling on the past. They’d probably both be kicking his ass all the way back to the States right now.

When he didn’t reply, Phoebe took a step backwards like she planned to leave, and a jolt of alarm rattled him to his core. He didn’t want her to go. He didn’t want to be alone.

He reached out and grasped her hand. “Thank you.”

Her brow furrowed. “For what?”

She was staring up at him, the moon bathing her features in soft white light. Or maybe that was her internal light, shining so pure and bright. A beacon for a drowning man like him.

Awed, his hand lifted of its own volition and almost touched her cheek before he caught himself, his fingers so close, he felt the heat radiating off her skin in the cool night.

Her lashes fused and anticipation hummed from her. So many impossible possibilities charged the air between them.

Seth dropped his hand. Maybe he was a fucking coward after all, because right then, he feared touching her more than anything else.

Phoebe sucked in a breath and drew away. “Um, you still haven’t told me what you thanked me for.”

Backing up a step, he tilted his head. Indicated the door to the house. “You stood up for me in there.”

“Of course I did,” she said as if it was a given. “Someone had to.”

“Not many people do.”

“Well. Ian’s a bully and if there’s one thing I can’t tolerate, it’s bullies.” Her expression softened. “But you were in the wrong, too. Answering a bully with violence only feeds the part of him that’s broken. He keeps picking at you because he wants you to snap. Maybe to prove you’re more damaged than he is or maybe even because he wants you to fight back, attack him, hurt him. Either way, you can’t give him what he wants.”

“Sounds like you know a thing or two about bullies.”

“I do.” A small smile tipped the corner of her mouth. “I was the nerdy girl in high school. Glasses, braces, frizzy hair—the whole stereotypical nerd package. Always had my nose in a book, didn’t particularly care about how I looked, participated in things like chess club and debate team.”

Her description put an image in his mind of a younger, awkward Phoebe with all the same spunk and even less tact. A light, foreign sensation overrode all of the poisonous emotions swilling inside him. It almost tickled at the center of his chest. Was it…amusement? It had been so long since he’d last experienced anything close, he had trouble placing it. But, yes. Amusement.

He wanted to hang on to the feeling, extend this moment into forever, and searched for something to say to keep the conversation going. “I bet you killed at debate.”

“As a matter of fact.” Her chin lifted with a smug kind of pride he found adorable. “My team took the Massachusetts State Debate Championship three years running.”

At some point during their conversation—he wasn’t exactly sure when—they’d started walking, strolling around inside the walls of the shelter’s property.

Seth spotted a ragged soccer ball on the ground and bent to scoop it up. He tossed it from hand to hand. “I was a jock in high school. Wasn’t a sport I couldn’t conquer.”

“I know. You wouldn’t have looked twice at me.”

Unfortunately, she was probably right. But gazing at her now with her springy curls falling out of her ponytail and her blue eyes full of amusement at the memory of her high school self, he couldn’t see how he’d not notice her. “I don’t know about that.”

“Oh, please,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “I bet you were the rich kid, quarterback, prom king, and had the prom queen-slash-head cheerleader on your arm. You wouldn’t have talked to me unless you needed to buy an English paper off me.”

Seth’s jaw tightened at the reference to his ex-fiancée, but he refused to let the memory of Emma ruin…whatever this was. The first moment of light, easy conversation he’d had in a long time.

He hefted the ball and shot it in her direction. “I’ll have you know, I had an A average in English.”

She caught it easily and lobbed it back. “So you’re the rare breed of smart jock? Aren’t you on the endangered species list?”

“We’re about as endangered as the nerd who can handle a ball.” He tossed it down and kicked it.

“Oh, I know how to handle all kinds of balls.” She stopped it with her foot and grinned. “Let’s just say college changed things for me.”

He froze as a long-forgotten heat fired his blood and filled areas of his anatomy that had no business being filled.

Was she insinuating…?

No. Couldn’t be. He had to be reading her wrong. Her smile was all sweet innocence and, really, why the fuck would she want someone as mentally and physically scarred as he was?

As he stood there debating, the ball rolled past.

Phoebe planted her hands on her hips. “Not a sport you can’t conquer, huh?”

He fumbled for a response. “I was distracted.”

“Oh yeah? By what?”

You , he wanted to say but couldn’t force the word past his lips. Everything about her was distracting. Entrancing. Gorgeous.

Christ, this woman.

Everybody had handled him with kid gloves since he’d returned to the States. Save for Ian, even the guys on the team treated him differently, walked on eggshells around him, which put him on edge as much as it did them. How many times had he wanted to shout at them to treat him just like a normal teammate? For fuck’s sake, he wasn’t going to break down if someone cracked a morbid joke, but all forms of joking always ceased whenever he entered the room.

But this woman. She didn’t handle him like he’d break. She acknowledged his issues and let him deal, but she treated him like... like a human being. It was such a refreshing change from everyone else in his life these past two years, he could kiss her for it.

And that was the second time the thought of kissing her had crossed his mind.

No. Kissing wasn’t on the menu. As intriguing as the idea was, even a sexless brush of his lips across hers seemed forbidden somehow. Like crossing a line he’d never come back from.

Phoebe closed the distance separating them and before he realized her intentions, she stood on her toes and pressed her lips to his. All kinds of sparks ignited in his blood, sizzling his nerve endings, at once freezing him to the spot with a cold kind of dread and blasting him with so much heat, sweat broke out across his brow.

She lingered with the kiss seconds longer than necessary and left the taste of sweetness and spices on his lips, like the chai tea Afghans were so fond of. His heart thundered in his chest and it took a tremendous amount of willpower not to draw her back in for another, deeper kiss.

She released a shaky breath that clouded in the air and rested her hands on his chest. She had to feel the pounding of his heart, but gave no indication.

“Tongue-tied?” she asked.

He stepped away from her. “This can’t happen.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m… damaged goods. I’m crazy.”

Her eyes closed as if his words pained her. “No, you’re not. You’re traumatized and you’d realize that if you just opened up and talked to someone. Anyone.”

Now his heart was pounding for an entirely different reason. The thought of talking about his little slice of hell… “I can’t.”

“Someday you’ll need to, and I’m willing to listen when that day comes.”

Willing to listen…

The words shook loose a little nugget of fact he couldn’t believe he’d forgotten: she was a journalist. Of course she was willing to listen. She didn’t want to save him—she wanted a scoop. He couldn’t trust her with any details. He’d made that mistake once before, telling pieces of his story—his team’s story—to reporters, only to see it blown up into something grandiose or ugly or downright unrecognizable.

Never again.

He took another step away from her, his blood running cold. “Willing to listen so you can splash my name all over the headlines? Go on national TV and talk my story to death again? Or are you one of the so-called journalists who likes to dig up dirt?”

All the color drained from her face. “I?—”

“Yeah, that’s it, isn’t it?” And here he’d thought she was special in some way. Maybe even someone he could grow to trust.

Disgusted with himself, he left her standing there in the middle of the yard. Trust her? What bullshit. You couldn’t trust anyone but yourself in this fucked world.

And in his case, he didn’t even have that.

Phoebe stared after him. How did they go from chatting about their vastly different high school experiences to him accusing her of—well, exactly what she had done to him two years ago? But he didn’t know that. He couldn’t have known about the horrible things she’d written about him because she’d gone by Kathryn Anderson back then. Nobody from her new life knew. As far as she was concerned, Kathryn Anderson was dead and buried and never to be resurrected.

Still, she should tell Seth the truth. Judging by his reaction, he was never going to speak to her again—and, God, the thought of his impeding anger opened a hollow ache in her belly. But he had to know.

She followed him inside and nearly ran into his back when she pushed open the door. He stood there, shoulders slumped forward, boots rooted to the floor as if he could not move any farther.

“I’m being an asshole again, aren’t I?” He faced her, shame burning in his gaze. “I’m sorry. You make me…feel things I haven’t felt in a long time. That scares the fuck outta me and I’ve had enough shrinks to know I have a tendency to lash out at things that scare me. So, uh…yeah, it was unnecessary. I don’t want to hurt you. I…like you.”

She opened her mouth to tell him he had every right to lash out—except “I like you too, Seth,” emerged instead. Dammit. But she just couldn’t tell him the truth. Not when his admission sent her heart fluttering like a crazy caged bird.

His lips twisted. “I can’t imagine why. I’m not exactly likable.”

On impulse, she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his waist, hugging him tight. His spine was like a steel rod, immovable, inflexible. She laid her cheek on his chest and breathed him in, a masculine scent somewhere between leather and a spice rack. “You’re too hard on yourself, you know that?”

His arms finally closed around her, albeit awkwardly. “I know.”

She sank into the embrace, hoping it would relax him, and for the moment, nothing else mattered. “You’ve already taken more than your fair share of beatings from everyone else. Seems silly to dish it out to yourself, too, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe,” he admitted after a beat and rubbed his cheek against the top of her head. His tentativeness broke her heart. Where was the confident, cocky Marine she knew he used to be? Was he still in there somewhere, buried under the scars, battling demons and desperate for freedom?

She thought so and wanted to help him find his way out.

“There’s no maybe about it, Seth.” She lifted her head to smile up at him. “Cut yourself some slack. All I ask.”

His mouth came down on hers, gentle at first, then coaxing. She hadn’t expected it and surprise filled her belly with butterflies. She opened to him and their tongues mingled, his invasion a pantomime of sex.

Crap, this was a bad idea.

Very bad idea.

No matter what her body wanted—no, demanded. She should put a stop to this because—because sex only caused problems.

His palms skimmed her spine, leaving a heated trail in their wake that sent a flash fire through her nerve endings. He hesitated at the dip at the small of her back as if debating the wisdom of continuing the southward path.

Oh hell. Why not? He needed a release as much as she did, they were obviously both attracted, and they were both adults. She’d never indulged in a fling before, but the need sparked by a simple slide of his hands convinced her that a fling was an awesome idea.

She rubbed against him, flattening her breasts to his chest, and the sound she made as he broke the kiss must have convinced him to keep going because he dipped his head again and backed her into the wall. His erection thrust into her lower belly and he gripped her rear, lifting her until she had no choice but to wrap her legs around his waist.

“Whoa.” At the other end of the hall, Quinn about-faced so fast on his toes, he put ballerinas to shame.

Seth lifted his head, a classic deer-in-the-headlights expression on his face, his hands still gripping her bottom. He fumbled to set her down and cursed when his zipper, pushed out by a very obvious erection, caught on the hem of her sweater.

“Sorry. Carry on.” Quinn waved a hand over his shoulder. “Glad to see you’re okay.”

“Yeah,” Seth said, his voice rougher than usual. “I’m, uh, okay.”

“Obviously,” Quinn muttered and all but spirited back to the dining room.

Phoebe laughed and buried her face in Seth’s chest. “He acts like he caught us naked.”

Although, if she were honest with herself, another five minutes and Quinn might have gotten an eyeful.

She backed away and glanced down at the zipper, still tangled in the weave of her sweater. Letting go of him, she ducked her head and tugged the sweater off, leaving her in only a tank top and the bandage around her arm. She straightened and burst out laughing. He looked ridiculous standing there with a sweater hanging from the front of his pants.

He scowled. “Not funny.”

“Actually…yes, it is.” She smothered another giggle behind her hand, but then let it loose when a muscle ticked in his cheek. He was holding back a smile and she wanted to see it, wanted him to realize he didn’t have to hide his laughter from her.

“How am I supposed to go in there and face the team like this?” he asked. “You think they gave me a hard time before?”

“Oh, chill out.” She knelt down and worked the sweater free. When she held it up triumphantly, she realized he was staring up at the ceiling.

“What?”

“Uh.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry about…”

“What? Your erection?”

Color crept up his neck to his face. “Yeah.”

“Why are you apologizing? It’s a normal reaction when a guy kisses someone he’s attracted to.”

“Not for me. Not anymore.”

This time, when he walked away from her, she didn’t bother chasing him. She sighed and pulled her sweater on.

What would it take to get through to him?