Saving Serena (Hawk Security #1)

Chapter 41

CHAPTER 41

Duke

The next morning, Friday, I lifted my head. Big mistake—a swarm of angry birds was trying to peck its way out of my skull. Settling back down into a puddle of my own drool was equally bad. This was the price I paid for doing the right thing—the thing that would save Serena. But the pain in my skull was second to the hole I’d torn in my heart. I’d never forget Serena. To save her, I’d walked away, and to save herself, she had to forget me.

I had to pee something fierce, so I levered myself up and took a long gulp of vodka from the bottle on the coffee table—hair of the dog. Hobbling, I made it to the bathroom.

“ You won’t feel like running for a while ,” the doc had said, and that was an understatement. Between my head, the bruises, and cracked ribs from the bullet hits, and the knife wound, only my toes didn’t hurt.

Heading back to the couch, I grabbed the bottle for two more slugs, hating the burn as it went down. I’d know it was enough when it didn’t burn anymore.

Staying shitfaced was the plan for the foreseeable future. I lifted the bottle for a fourth gulp. Alcohol, lots of it, would ease the pain, and with time, I’d learn to live without her. Time—that’s what I needed. And a fuck lot more vodka.

Setting the nearly empty bottle down, I decided I could do this with class and drink out of a glass. Classy, yeah, classy drunk sounded good. So, I detoured to the kitchen before I had so much I couldn’t walk. To save my eyes, I didn’t turn on the light.

“Fuck,” I yelled when I stubbed my toe on a damned stool and almost fell over, hopping to the counter on my heel. Fuck, my big toe felt like I’d cut it off with a dull knife, and it was my good leg too.

Keeping my injured foot off the floor, I balanced on my bad leg, ignoring the pain in my thigh as I reached for a glass in the cabinet.

“What the hell happened?” The yell hurt my head something awful.

Surprised, I jerked around. The glass slipped from my grasp, breaking on the granite edge of the counter, and fell to the floor.

Jordy laughed.

I had to put the heel of my good leg down to regain my balance. “Fuck,” I yelled as I yanked it back up with a piece of glass stuck in my foot. With glass in the heel and a bum toe, that foot was now useless. It hurt like hell to hop to the side on my bad leg.

Jordy kept laughing.

“Fuck you,” I said as I lifted my injured foot to the sink, turned on the water, and rinsed the injury.

“Want some help?”

“Fuck no.”

He walked around and grabbed my foot anyway. “Hold still, you big pussy, or you’ll jam it in farther.”

I grabbed the counter edge for support. “What the fuck are you doing here, anyway?”

“I drew the short straw. You fucked up with Serena, then you started drinking and got so plastered somebody had to babysit you.”

Outside of what I’d said to Serena, I didn’t remember much of last night. I knew I’d started drinking—a lot. Not remembering had been the objective, and I’d gotten that part right.

The room started to sway. The extra swigs of vodka were getting to me. “I need to get to the couch.”

“You need to hold still.” He yanked, and blood started to flow in the water as the glass shard came out. “And then you need to go man up and fix things with Serena.”

“I need more vodka and then to sleep on the couch.” The idea of using the bed I’d shared with Serena was too painful.

Jordy patted my foot dry with a paper towel. “If that’s what you want, get yourself there so I can bandage this. I’m not fucking carrying you.”

“You’re a fucking fool,” Lucas repeated.

“Ditto that,” Jordy said.

That pretty much summed up my brothers’ opinions of my behavior.

They’d even brought over my sister Alice to pressure me. But she was easy to ignore. I pointed out that she hadn’t even met Serena.

“But I’ve talked to her, and I know you well enough to know this is a mistake,” she argued.

“My life, my decision,” I repeated. This was going nowhere because they got no say in how I ran my life, and the risks I was and wasn’t willing to take.

After Marilyn, and after the mistakes I’d made while protecting Serena, she fell into the not-willing-to-take-that-chance category—end of subject.

“Stupid and stubborn,” Lucas said, pointing a finger at me. “Just like a fucking frogman.”

“That’s me,” I agreed, not interested in prolonging the argument. They’d already taken up enough of my drinking time.

Lucas pulled away from the wall. “Since this is such a nonissue with you, I’ll expect you back to work first thing Monday.”

That sucked. I’d wanted to spend a good solid week drinking away my misery. “See you then,” I said instead. At least I had the weekend.

Serena

“Serena, wake up.”

I blinked my eyes open on Friday morning to find Grace’s caring face.

“How do you feel?” she asked. Behind her were Terry and Constance.

I pulled my covers up to my neck. “Like shit,” I admitted.

I didn’t drink often, but after Duke had ripped my heart out, Grace brought bottles of wine to my room and drank with me until I fell asleep. I did most of the drinking. The bottles of merlot sat almost empty on my nightstand. My headache said we should have chosen a white.

“Why are you all…”

Grace settled onto the edge of the bed. “I’m here for my bestie in her time of need.”

The sentiment made me sigh.

Terry moved closer. “And because her house is being fumigated and nobody else would have her. So I stayed to keep an eye on her.”

“Shut up,” Grace snapped.

“And I stayed,” Constance added, “to keep these two from killing each other.”

The look in Terry’s eyes as he gazed at Grace’s ass was the opposite of homicidal. “His brothers will talk some sense into him,” he assured me.

“It doesn’t matter.” The last thing I needed was any discussion of the fool I’d made of myself with Duke.

Constance offered a glass of orange juice. “I have to go into work for a few days so I don’t blow my cover. You should call in and take the day off.”

I accepted the glass and nodded. “Yeah.” I needed a plan for how much to tell my boss about yesterday. The higher-ups would be apoplectic that someone in the agency had been taking bribes and probably start looking for scapegoats. To save himself, Powell would likely accuse all of us of knowing and not telling him.

“I’ll stay,” Grace offered. “I can print out a picture of the jerk, and we can play darts.”

Terry laughed. “You carry darts around with you?”

Her head snapped around. “If you play pool, you have your own cue. I have my own darts. Plus, they can be handy. Like when you need a jerk to back off.” She made a shooing motion. “Git.”

Terry didn’t back up. “I’ll be at the office. If you need anything, call.”

“Sure.” I nodded. He couldn’t give me the one thing I needed, though.

All I wanted was to sleep and forget my broken heart. It was my fault for mistaking lust on Duke’s part for true caring, wasn’t it? I’d been such a fool to think a guy like Duke could want a girl as broken as me.

But first I needed to call Powell and take the day off.

“This is my lucky set. I think you need them more than I do,” Grace said as she put a plastic package of three darts in my purse. “For a while.”

I didn’t play, but I wasn’t going to argue with the sentiment. I dialed my phone and connected to my boss.

“Fine,” Powell said when I explained that maybe I had the flu. “But if it isn’t cancer, I expect you first thing Monday.”

Compassionate as always.

By mid-afternoon, I’d conquered the headache with fluids and Advil and even taken a shower and gotten dressed. In other words, I looked almost human, which was better than I felt.

Lifting the next spoonful of minestrone to my mouth, I blew on it, then swallowed. It tasted like…nothing. It was boring, just like me and the rest of the life I was doomed to live out. Even the light from the living room windows was duller than I remembered.

Two weeks with Duke had packed in more excitement than the entire rest of my life, and it was over. I was back to living in a house I didn’t even own, sitting in front of a fireplace that I always planned to light and cook marshmallows over, but never had.

I still couldn’t wrap my head around what had gone wrong between us. I’d thought we fit great together. The day at Disneyland had been nicer than any date I’d ever had. The nights had been fantastic. Everything had meshed until yesterday.

He’d rescued me. He’d done his job, and now that it was over, he no longer wanted me. He’d acted like he cared just to make me compliant, to keep me under control, and make his job easier.

Would things between us have worked out differently if I hadn’t instantly fallen for him? If we’d taken things slowly? If we’d met outside of this strange bodyguard environment where we had to be together all the time?

My heart skipped a beat at the sound of the door being unlocked. Could it be?

“Sis?” my brother Vincent called from the foyer. “You ready to go?”

Elation gone, I waited until he walked into the kitchen. “Go where?”

“Back home to Mom and Dad’s.”

I shook my head. “Not happening.”

He leaned against the wall. “I’m here to help you pack.”

“Nope.” I sipped another spoonful of soup.

“You’re a Benson. You’ve given up. It’s what we do, and then we go back home and hang out to forget our mistake.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Grace tells me she thinks you never really liked him anyway.”

I shook my head, not going for the bait. Grace wouldn’t have told him that.

“So, you do like him?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.” What I’d felt for Duke had gone way beyond like .

“If you’re going to follow in my footsteps and give up, you have to go all the way and move back home.” He thumbed toward the stairs. “So let’s get going.”

“Since when did you ever give up on anything?”

He smirked. “Not anything…anyone.” His eyes shifted to the prom photo on the mantel—the one of him and Ashley Newton, the one who’d gotten away. One drunken evening, Vincent had lamented to me that he counted not going after her as the biggest mistake of his life. “Learn from my mistake,” he’d said. “Don’t repeat it.”

I finally understood the message I’d forgotten.

“Time to be an adult and make up your mind. Are you going to give it your best shot or give up and go home to Mom and Dad? Those are your only two choices… Well?”

“You suck.” He’d ignored the curl-up-in-a-ball-and-sob-for-a-month alternative I’d been pursuing.

“Insulting me won’t do you any good,” he noted. “I’m staying until you make a decision.”

“Why do you have to be so mean?”

He snorted. “I used to think you were tough.”

“Now who’s being insulting?” I closed my eyes for a minute and wished him away. Peeking, I found it hadn’t worked.

He smiled smugly. We both knew he was right.

As much as I wanted to wallow, it was self-defeating, and I wasn’t a quitter. I levered myself up. I’d watched how letting Ashley get away had hurt him, and that wasn’t the path for me. I knew what I’d experienced with Duke, and I wasn’t wrong about what he’d felt. But something had spooked him. “I’m going to go get my man back.”

Nursing the coffee I’d ordered, I heard the woman next to me sigh before I saw him. Then, with a stir, every pair of female eyes in the small diner shifted to the man walking my way. Lucas Hawk had arrived. The men who noticed him shifted uncomfortably. Lucas exuded a dangerous vibe like nobody I’d ever met.

He settled into the booth across from me. “I think you’re safe now.”

I’d made up my mind, so direct was the order of the day. “That’s not why I called. But I suspect you know that.”

He shrugged. “Jordy and I both told him he’s being an idiot.”

The news warmed me. I didn’t expect them to be opposed, but having their support had to help.

“But he’s dug his feet in, and my brother can be pretty damned stubborn.”

“I’m not giving up and walking away. My family invented stubborn.”

My young waitress bounced up. “What can I get started for you?” she asked Lucas, complete with batting eyelashes.

“Coffee, black.” Curt as always.

She added more wattage to her smile and bounced again. “Need more time with the menus?”

Lucas shook his head, ignoring her jiggling breasts.

“Thank you,” I added as she left.

Lucas looked me in the eye with an intensity I wasn’t used to. “I’m on your side. I think you’re good for him.”

“Thank you. I’m going to go see him, but he wouldn’t open up to me before. And I don’t know how to battle a problem I don’t understand.” If anybody had the key to understanding Duke, it had to be Lucas.

He took a deep breath. “Has he told you about Marilyn?”

I nodded. “He had a nightmare and said her name. He told me she died, but I didn’t push for more. Was she an ex-girlfriend?”

“Has he told you about Freddy?”

“His SEAL friend?”

Miss Bouncy reappeared with a mug for Lucas. “Here ya go,” she tried again. She’d undone a button on her blouse.

Lucas gave her a minimal smile and pulled a sugar packet. When she left, he continued, “Not just a friend. His best friend, buddy, and teammate. They were inseparable. Freddy died in helo holding Duke’s hand, and let me tell you, that takes something out of you that can never be replaced.”

I nodded along, though I couldn’t comprehend the depth of that hurt.

Lucas stirred his coffee. “Marilyn was Freddy’s wife.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t guessed that connection. Duke clearly hadn’t been honest with me about her.

“She dated Duke first. Duke introduced them.” Lucas sipped from his mug.

I waited for more.

“She committed suicide after hearing of Freddy’s death. Duke was the one who found her.”

I cringed. “That’s terrible.”

“That’s the threat you represent.”

“You think I’m a suicide risk?” My voice went from angry to shrill. “You think I’m weak?”

He leaned forward. “Calm down.”

“Yeah, right. Calm down? You have no idea what I’ve been through.”

He gestured for me to lower my voice. “I don’t think you’re weak. No way, but he’s not being rational. It’s fear making him act this way. This business we’re in is dangerous at times. He doesn’t want to cause that kind of grief again.”

“But I’m no weak wallflower. You, of all people, should know that.”

“You’re the only one who can convince him of that. Have you told him about your…experience?” he asked. “How hard it was?”

Did he suspect what had happened to me during that time? I shook my head. “Not all of it. I haven’t been able to talk about it with anybody.”

“Your family?”

I looked down at the table. “Nobody.” I hadn’t even talked with Mom about it. She knew how long I’d been held, but not what had happened to me.

“It sounds like neither of you is being completely honest.”

I nodded. It was a situation I intended to change.

“I destroyed the tapes,” he said after a moment.

I gasped. I’d never known they’d been recording. I was grateful to Lucas all over again.

He shifted out of the booth and stood. “It won’t be easy, but if you’re willing to be completely honest, I think he’ll understand how strong you are.”

I nodded. But was I strong enough to unlock the chest and relive it?

“I’d say the next step is up to you.” He set a key on the table. “In case he won’t open the door.”