Page 58 of Her Devoted HERO

Dex wasn’t scared, he was enraged. He’d called Detective Warren before he’d left on maneuvers and given him Clint’s name and number. He’d specifically said that if anything changed in the investigation, Warren needed to call Clint so that he’d have a heads up on ensuring Kenna’s safety. Warren had known for twenty-four hours that they’d had the wrong guy. He and Sanchez should have called Clint. They didn’t. That meant for the last twenty-four hours Kenna had been left unprotected.

“What are you thinking, Dex?”

“I’m thinking how good dinner was tonight. I liked the meatloaf you cooked.”

“Bullshit. You’re still pissed off. I can feel it rolling off you in waves,” she said as she pushed away from him.

“Come back here. I was thinking of meatloaf and cuddling.”

She was studying him closely. He knew he wasn’t getting away with anything. Still, her next words stunned him. “Your protective instincts are so deep, they’re in the marrow of your bones. What happened to you? What made you that way?”

“It’s what SEALs do,” he said glibly.

“Fine, don’t answer me.” She deserved a better answer. She deserved more. She deserved the truth.

Slowly, as if the words were torn from him, he said, “I couldn’t save him.” Even now, after all these years, his voice got thick just thinking about Ricky.

“Who?” she asked softly.

“My brother.”

She reached out and brushed her hand over his heart. Then kept it there. He pressed his hand on top of hers, holding it close. Needing it close. Needing her close.

“Ricky was older than me. He...he was everything to my parents. They thought the Earth orbited around him. I came eight years after Richard Edward Evans was born. I was an accident. They’d only wanted one child, so they didn’t give me any attention, but Ricky did. He had my back from the day I was born. I might not have been wanted by Mom and Dad, but I knew that Ricky loved his baby brother.”

Dex pictured his brother in his mind’s eye. He liked thinking of him when he was sixteen. Whole and healthy. Ready to take on anything.

He looked down and saw Kenna’s empathetic and confused expression. “You can’t even wrap your head around it, can you?”

“I can understand Ricky loving you and having your back,” she said slowly. “But your parents? No. I don’t get that in the slightest.”

Dex sighed. He still didn’t get it either. It just was.

“What happened?” she asked.

“He was popular, and the parents gave him everything he wanted. They never said no to anything. Cars, vacations with his friends during the summer, anything he asked for. He was just a kid, but our mom came from money, and they never denied him anything. Whenever Ricky was gone, they’d send me to Gram and Gramps here in San Diego.”

“And?”

“When I got back the summer before his senior year, he’d changed. I was nine. All of a sudden, he didn’t have any time for me. It hurt. When I tried to talk to him, he yelled at me and told me to quit following him around like a goddamn shadow.” Dex remembered that moment like it was yesterday. They’d been in the backyard, and Ricky had screamed at him.

“It was then that I knew something bad was going on. The Ricky I knew and loved would never have said that to me.”

“What did you do?”

“I spied on him. I caught him shooting up in his bedroom. I didn’t know it was heroin, I just knew it was drugs because I’d seen it on cop shows, so I knew it was bad. I told Mom and Dad, but Ricky denied it, and they didn’t believe me. They grounded me for telling lies.”

“There had to have been signs. Didn’t they take it seriously? Why would a nine-year-old boy lie about a thing like that?” She was appalled.

“Because he was their golden boy,” Dex sighed.

“If they loved him, they needed to take notice,” she protested.

“It didn’t work that way with them, Poppy,” he said sadly.

“What’d you do next?”

Dex smiled. She knew him. She totally got the fact that he hadn’t given up. “I snuck into his room and found his stash. There were needles and everything he needed to shoot up. He had it hidden in his sunglasses case. I brought that to my parents.”