So did he.
I shove aside dusty old memories and tell him the story of why I’m there. He’s one of the few people I’d trust with this intel, and only because he knows her.
Actually, he’s the only person I’d trust with this, because I’d prefer to go to my grave without confessing any of it to Susa, or especially Owen.
He slowly nods after I sum up what I know. “So what do you think that bitch wants with you after all these years? What’s her end game? Money? Or something else?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. The way we parted company, I assumed I’d never hear anything from her again.Shedumpedme.”
“Yeah, I remember.” He should, because he was there. Then she dumped him.
And then wereallygot fucked over. I think, at the time, losing her tore him up a lot more than it did me. I was far stronger in some ways.
Which is why he ended up belonging to me.
He studies me. “You haven’t talked to her?”
“Not yet.”
“Did he reply to her e-mail?”
“No. It’s been less than forty-eight hours since he received it. He’s not replying, unless I can’t handle this now.”
“What’s your excuse for flitting to Germany on short notice, should anyone ask me?”
I smile. “I have an old buddy from when I was in the Army who needed me.”
He snorts as he tips his glass for another sip. “You’re not wrong.”
I know he means it differently than I do, and pain arcs through my soul that I can’t be who he needs now. “Oh.” I reach into my pocket and hand him the key for the safe deposit box that I took out at the bank before making my way to his place, along with a business card with the bank’s name and address. On the back I’ve written the box number.
He turns the key over in his hand. “Did I ever say thank you?” he quietly asks.
He doesn’t need to clarify. He’s one of the three.
At least, in thatoneway, I was able to balance my karmic scales with him a little. It doesn’t make up for the years lost between us, or what might have been, or what I didn’t do, but he is alive, and the world is still a better place with him in it.
For that, I willneverregret what I did.
I don’t regret that I saved the other two men in the process, but they weren’t the main reason I threw myself over the three of them that day.
Eddie had been hit and was down, along with Dray’s brother, and Trent.
When we’d dragged them behind cover so the medic could triage them, Eddie had ended up in the middle.
I would have done it again, too. In a heartbeat. They were my guys, and I still lost Gohber and Kenney that day. I’d have thrown myself over them, too, if it would have saved them. I was in command.
They were my guys. Them and Reynolds, the third man who died that day.
I nod. “Before I was shipped back to the States. You were so out of it, though, you had no clue what you were saying.” I grin. “Fortunately, that’s the excuse I used to explain your rambling to the nurses. Even more fortunately, they believed my ass, or we both would have ended up in the stockade, or with dishonorable discharges.”
The ghost of a smile curls his lips as nods again, his eyes on the key. “Sorry,Sarge.”
My damned cockstillwants to twitch remembering what he used to look like on his knees in front of me with his lips wrapped around my cock and tears streaming from his eyes as I face-fucked him. And that’s been, what, over thirty years in the past?
A past known only to myself, this man here, and the bitch I’m about to pay a visit to.
Maybe in a different world, a different time, Eddie and I would have ended up together. But we were too much of a reminder to each other of dark and evil times we really didn’twantto remember. It might have poisoned us, eventually, if we literally hadn’t killed each other first with our dark version of “play.”
