Blair’s spine straightened, the sensual moment interrupted, and she breathed hard to let it go for now. Jet’s head lifted.
Kodiak tipped an invisible hat in her direction. GQ gave her a respectful nod.
“Appreciate that,” Blair said, working at keeping her emotions in check. “Jet’s mine. Blue and Sundance are spoken for.” She gestured toward the row of stalls on the left. “You can pull from the remounts. They’re solid, sensible, used for recerts and backup. They’ll do fine under men who can stay in the saddle.”
Kodiak grinned. “We’ll behave.”
“I make no such promises,” Skull muttered.
Blair shook her head.
Breakneck lingered a few paces back from the others, eyes scanning the length of the barn without hurry. He didn’t look at her. He’d nodded once out in the yard when their eyes had met by accident, a brief, contained acknowledgment that felt like a line drawn in the sand.
Her chest tightened in a way she pretended not to notice.
She turned back to Jet, giving his forelock a gentle tug. “Easy, handsome. We’ve got company.”
Jet’s ears pricked forward, attention locking past her shoulder.
She didn’t have to turn to know who he was focused on.
Breakneck had drifted closer, slower than a man approaching something volatile. His gaze had settled on Jet with the same alert intensity she’d seen when he’d operated during the Marques extraction. Reading, evaluating, and absorbing.
“Geezus, he’s beautiful. Where did you find this guy?”
His assessing eyes went over Jet, slow and unflinching, the way she’d seen him read terrain and threat. He was closer to her mount than any man ever got, standing inside that narrow margin Jet allowed without consequence.
“Tied to a tree. Malnourished. Abused.” She couldn’t keep the emotion out of her voice. “I liberated him.” When she’d found him, Jet had been fragmented, but never broken. Something in Blair’s gut whispered that Breakneck was standing now where Jet had once been…fragmented, scarred, wary, intact by will alone.
“So,” Breakneck said quietly, “you’re one of those people.” His mouth twisted wryly, like he expected her to want to fix him.
“Define one of those people.” She kept her tone neutral, but there was an edge to it she didn’t bother hiding. She didn’t like being sorted into neat compartments.
“The kind who takes in strays,” he said, “gives them a new lease on life.”
He slid a step closer, his attention flicking between Jet and Blair, reading them both as if either might shift without warning. There was expectation in his voice then, as if he’d learned the hard way that people always wanted something from him. That care came with conditions.
“You’re not a stray, Break,” she said softly. The words slipped out before she could stop them.
His jaw flexed. A muscle ticked beneath the skin, sharp and restrained, like she’d landed a clean hit straight into whatever emotions he was holding at bay. He looked like he was always fighting something. Fighting himself, maybe his past, and the urge to believe in anything that looked like mercy. She knew what that felt like. The numbness, that worked for a while, kept the pain at a distance, but stole everything else along with it. The color. The hunger. The parts of yourself that made life worth living.
Dancing had been ripped from her in a terrible accident onstage. Her knee had been repaired, but her days as a prima ballerina were over. She’d survived by doing exactly what he was doing now, holding the memories at arm’s length so they couldn’t keep hurting her.
No wonder he looked so exhausted.
She had no idea what he was fighting. God, she ached to know, not because she wanted to soothe him, though she did, deeply, but because she could give him something else. A sounding board. Someone who had been there. Someone who understood the cost of surviving things that take pieces of you with them.
22
United States Naval Academy, Bancroft Hall, Annapolis, Maryland
Than held it together through the hearing. Through Fly breaking at the docks.
Through the long, brutal silence on the walk back alone. He’d transferred Fly into the waiting arms of his M&M and Clint.
But when he closed the door to his room, the world shrank to the size of four walls, and the weight of losing her crushed him flat. He was supposed to meet Bear and his own family right afterward. He tried to swallow, raw and ripped open, the sob clawing up his throat. Tried to breathe. Tried to be strong, because that was what he had been his whole life. The lucky one. The dutiful one. The one who bore things without breaking.
But he couldn’t.
