I could name the pieces now. The age difference between us. My brother, his best friend. The duty, and the brotherhood of the military. All of it, right there on the surface, fighting with the thing underneath that I'd just tasted on his mouth.
He wanted me and he hated himself for it. And he was going to walk away because he thought it was the right thing to do.
“Callie…" My name in his mouth, rough, wrecked. A warning and an apology at the same time.
I didn't push. I didn't reach for him again, didn't try to argue or convince or close the gap he'd put between us. I just looked at him, this man who'd been a mountain every second since I'd arrived, steady and immovable and sure, and watched him come apart at the seams.
"Goodnight, Angel," I said.
I walked past him, out of the kitchen, up the stairs. I could feel his eyes on my back the whole way. I didn't turn around.
In my room, I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my fingers to my lips and tried to breathe.
That wasn't a man doing his job. That was a man falling apart.
And I was the reason.
FOUR
ANGEL
The kiss was still on my mouth three days later.
I couldn't burn it off. Couldn't sweat it out in the workshop, couldn't drown it in coffee, couldn't bury it even when Rook brought me information. Every time I sat down with the intel, every time I focused on the dirty cop's name and the web of connections spreading out from him like cracks in glass, my brain would hold for ten minutes, maybe twenty, and then she'd move through my peripheral vision and all of it would scatter.
The way she tucked her legs under her on the couch. The curve of her neck when she bent over a book she'd found on the shelf. Her laugh, sudden and startled, when Duke said something stupid at the table while she ate breakfast. The way her hips moved when she walked and didn't know I was watching. The fullness of her, all that softness I'd been trying not to see since the moment she sat down in my lodge, and now I couldn't stop.
I kept catching myself. That was the worst part. The tactical brain would be mapping routes and timelines and then I'd realize I'd been staring at the shape of her thighs in her jeans for ten seconds and the disgust would hit so hard it made my teeth ache.
She was twenty-eight and she was Ryan's sister. She'd kissed me in the kitchen three nights ago and I'd kissed her back like a man with no restraint, no honor, no sense, and the taste of her mouth was still right there every time I breathed in.
I found Ghost on the porch that afternoon. He was sitting with his boots on the railing, a cup of coffee balanced on his knee, watching the nothing in particular.
I sat down next to him. Didn't say anything for a while. Ghost never minded silence. He was the kind of man who could sit with you for an hour and say nothing and you'd still feel like you'd had a conversation.
"Ryan would've been forty-three this year," I said.
Ghost didn't move. Didn't look at me. Just nodded, slow, the way he did when he was letting you get where you were going.
"I gave the order," I said. "I put him in the field that day. I've lived with that for six years. Made my peace with it, or close enough. And now his sister is in our compound and kissed me three nights ago. I kissed her back, and I don't know what the fuck I'm doing."
Ghost took a sip of his coffee. Let the silence sit for a long beat.
"You asking me a question?" he said.
"I'm telling you I'm a piece of shit."
"No, you're not." He said. “And for the record, I was there too, you were doing your job.” Flat, factual, no room for debate. "Ryan loved you. If he knew she was safe with you, in every way, he'd be glad. You know that."
"I sent him out and he didn't come back."
"Yeah. And you've been paying for that every day since. You think wanting his sister is the worst thing you've done?" He looked at me then, those pale eyes that saw everything and forgave most of it. "The worst thing you did was survive him andspend six years punishing yourself for it. Let something good happen, Angel. Christ."
I didn't answer. Ghost went back to watching the treeline.
He made it sound simple. It wasn't simple. Ryan had trusted me with his life and I'd gotten him killed, and now I was falling for the one person in the world Ryan had trusted me to protect. Every time I looked at Callie I saw both of them, her and her brother, and the guilt was so tangled with the wanting that I couldn't pull them apart.
It felt like I was betraying a dead man.
