Honestly, if he had a day off, he wouldn’t know what to do with it. All he knew was guts and guns and gore. Besides, why would he waste his time doing nothing when he could be bettering himself, which would ultimately assist his team? “A day not training was a day lost.”
Her mouth fell open and she stared at him like he’d grown horns. “What? You mean to tell me you haven’t taken leave ever since you joined the military?”
“Well, I took some leave after basic, before I transferred to my Ranger Regiment.” Of course, he’d been barely eighteen at that point and young and dumb. He’d plowed his way through half the women with tramp stamps on their backs within a fifty mile radius before finally getting all his pent-up energy out of his system. Not that he’d tell Caroline that, and not that it mattered. He hadn’t been with a woman in years; he honestly hadn’t felt the need. Until now.
“And how old were you when you did that?”
“About twenty,” he lied. There was a hint of pity lurking in her expression, and pity was one thing Reaper couldn’t tolerate. Pity was for weak-minded, weak-willed, pathetic excuses for human beings.Hedidn’t need pity.
“And what about your friends? Your family?”
“My team is my family.” His unit was his entire reason for existence. They ate trained and worked as one, because any weakness in the link could mean death for them all. Every man in Reaper’s unit had earned his right to be there. If anything, Reaper didn’t deserve them.
Caroline’s voice softened, “What about your parents?”
Reaper answered as unemotionally as he had when Dr. Winters had asked him that exact same question in one of the interviews she’d conducted before they’d started Project Mayhem. “I don’t have any. And I don’t want any.” The multiple foster parents he’d had didn’t rank anywhere on the scale of parenthood. If there was such a thing, all of his parent figures would come in at a minus ten.
There she was looking at him with that sorrowful expression again.
“Don’t pity me. I’ve never known what it was like to have real parents, so I never missed them.” He poured as much hatred and scorn in his voice as he could to prove his point. “I never knew my parents, and from what I learned about them when I hacked into my file at the orphanage, I was better off not knowing them.”
And if she didn’t stop looking at him like that, he was going to bite her head off.
“You’re even stronger than I thought you were.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I imagine that most of the children who grow up without parents don’t go on to volunteer their lives in service to their country with so much honor and integrity.”
Okay, she must’ve bumped her head or something. She was talking about him like he was a goddamn saint, and Reaper felt obliged to relieve her of that false notion. “I joined the military at such a young age so I could have three squares a day.” Which was something he’d rarely had in his life before then. Ignoring her shocked expression, he pushed forward. “They gave me a bed to sleep in, clothes to wear, and only asked as much out of me as they did the man standing next to me. That’s more than I can say for any of my foster parents.”
Tears welled in Caroline’s eyes and her chin gave a telltale wobble, but she didn’t say anything. He didn’t fucking like it one bit. “Button it up right now. I swear to God, if you start crying, I am out of here. I don’t want or need your pity. I’m perfectly content with the way I turned out, just because I didn’t have the same silver-spoon-fed upbringing you did doesn’t mean I’m lacking.”
He used a tone that made most men cower, but Caroline didn’t even look away. A tear slipped free and tracked down her cheek, and dammit, he regretted his harshness.
“I don’t think you’re lacking. I’m in awe at how much you turned things around for yourself.”
He was an asshole. She’d been marveling at his story, something he never thought about, not since his very early adulthood, and here he was getting pissed off at her. Reaper blew out a sigh and brushed her tear away with his thumb. “I’m sorry. I don’t like pity, and I thought . . .”
She wrapped her tiny hand around his. “You thought I felt sorry for you. Well, I don’t, you’re too perfect to feel sorry for.”
“Perfect? Me?” He felt his lips tug into a half-sardonic smile. “Princess, I’ve been called many things in my life, but perfect isn’t one of them.”
More like ruthless assassin.
“You are to me. If it wasn’t for you, I’d still be in that lab. I would’ve died alone and scared. But probably not before I lost my mind. My father would’ve never found out what had become of me . . . and that would’ve killed him. You see, he lost my mother when I was born and he never recovered from it. I’m all he’s ever had. And then he sent you here, and you rescued me singlehandedly.” Her words grew stronger, her conviction evident.
She deserved to know her father was dead. He needed to tell her the truth, but he’d rather take another bullet to the shoulder than break her heart right now. “Anyone could’ve rescued you.” He couldn’t look at her.
Her fingers touched his chin and turned him back toward her. “No, not just anyone.”
Reaper fought a groan. There was definitely hero worship in her gaze. Goddammit. At first, he wanted that from her; he’d wanted her complete and willing cooperation, but now . . . Now it was all based on a lie. A lie that would completely destroy her—and maybe him too, if there was anything left to destroy.
He had to find a way to ease her into the truth and gain her cooperation. But damned if he could think of a plausible excuse right now. He needed more time. A couple of hours to formulate a plan and execute it. And even though he knew he was a complete bastard, he knew there was a small chance she’d run after he told her, and he needed to make sure he’d be able to stop her if that happened.
“We need to get dressed. I haven’t even secured the perimeter. If the soldiers find us here, they’ll get ambitious before I have a chance to fight them off.” He got to his feet, pulling her up with him. Next, he grabbed her discarded robe from the ground and helped her shrug the material over her shoulders to cover her exposed nudity. How could he have relaxed his guard so completely that he hadn’t even thought about their vulnerability out here in the open?
Reaper shrugged into his pants, grabbed the bottle of body wash, and then snatched Caroline’s hand, leading her back toward the hut as the sun began to set behind the trees.
