He immediately stepped up to defend Jett. “No. You’re nothing like her. She was…cruel in the way she bent regulations. She carried out unsanctioned training, and treated her troops like inferiors, which at the time I failed to see.”
She’d hidden those things from him successfully for a while, but her true colors had eventually bled through.
“When she tried to dictate how things were going to progress with us, far too rapidly for my liking, I started to balk, and began noticing that a lot of her traits weren’t nice at all. I finally noticed that she could be downright evil when it came to punishinginferiors, or her enlistees for slight infractions. I didn’t like what was coming to light, so I started to back off.”
“Don’t tell me. She didn’t take that well.”
“Not in the least,” Trask stated. “When, after a particularly heated argument, I told her we were simply in different places in our lives, and that we should end our time together as friends, she became vindictive, deciding that I needed to be taught a lesson for defying her. She…”
Damn,this was painful. After a thirty-year career without so much as a blemish, Audrey had tried to smear his good name, and had almost succeeded.
Trask swallowed the lump that had risen in his throat. “She reported me to our superiors, saying that I…abused her.”
Jett groaned, and Trask felt that solidarity deep in his heart.
It was like Jett really saw who he was, and didn’t doubt for one second that he wouldn’t have done such a heinous thing.
He cleared his throat. “She’d taken pictures of her…skin after I’d?—”
“Nope. You don’t have to go into detail here, Trask,” Jett assured him. “I get the picture. And I want to go bitch-slap that woman. She sounds like a fucking cunt.”
Whoa! Trask had never heard a word like that come out of Jett’s mouth before. His spitfire must be really pissed.
Hisspitfire? Where had that come from?
“How did you get out of it?” she asked, bringing him back into the conversation.
“Luckily,” he told her, “I had a good friend who was an acting attorney for the base where we lived, so I contacted him as soon as she filed charges. It was a good thing, too, because a lot of my superiors, hearing Audrey’s complaints, immediately thought the worst of me, and would have thrown me right under the bus to be prosecuted, or at the least would have gotten me court-martialed, if not for Kurt. He spent hours poring throughthe many texts she’d sent me over the month we’d been together, and in the end, was gleeful. Her language, her suggestions, her over-the-top demeanor; they all pointed to her not only being okay with a little…rough play, but put her firmly in the driver seat where she’d suggested some outrageous scenarios for our meet-ups.”
“So what happened?” Jett asked.
He could see she was practically holding her breath as she dropped altitude to closer peruse the landscape up ahead.
“Charges were quickly dropped. But at that point, I was disillusioned that so many people I thought would have my back, had instead been quick to judge me guilty. So I decided to cut my losses and leave the service.”
“Which burned your ass,” Jett responded wisely. “You were a career soldier, and had thought to retire with a few more stars and bars on your uniform, but the Marines let you down.”
She’d summed things up amazingly well in just one sentence as she continued.
“I feel for you, Trask. And I understand how, after going through all that, you had a hard time trustingmymotives.”
Trask ran a hand over the back of his neck and sighed.
“Well,Idon’t understand it. Because you’re nothing like her. So, if you will, can you explain it to me?”
CHAPTER 30
Jett chuckled,and a lightness overtook Trask. The minute he’d admitted his folly, he knew she was going to forgive him.
“I’d love to dig into this, Trask,” Jett responded sincerely, “but the lake and the ice shack are just up ahead, so we need to put this discussion on hold.”
Trask raised his head and gazed out the window nearest him.
Sure enough, Jett had brought them down low enough that he could see the ice-hut. But there was no human activity anywhere around it.
Trask immediately became focused.
“Are you able to buzz the shack a couple times to see if we can rouse Richard if he’s inside?”
