Page 139 of Forged By Sacrifice

I chuckled. “There’s nothing wrong with that, you know. If you are. I mean, I think you’d still get a lot of flack for it in the military, but—”

“We’re not.” Mac turned back toward me with a wicked smile that I bet many ladies adored. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it if we were, but we’re not. I don’t think we’d be opposed to working out something with the three of us, though.”

“Knock it off, Macauley.” Tall and silent, Eli, finally spoke with a not-so-hidden warning in his voice.

Mac smiled at me with a shrug.

Eli made his way into the kitchen and quietly started putting the groceries away. I hopped up on the counter and watched them. Him.

He was leaner than either of the other two with a tattoo that peeked out from the back of his tight T-shirt at the neck. He was really more Jenna’s type than mine: tall, dark, brooding. Normally, I was all about guys like Truck, with mischief in their eyes and blonde hair. But somehow, I found my body actually leaning into Mr. Silent when he opened the pantry beside me.

“I promise I won’t bite you in the middle of the night,” I teased, surprised as the words slipped out of me. There was something about this guy that pulled at the edges of me, daring me to push him. Push myself.

He met my eyes with hazel ones the color of wheat in the summer sun. We were both caught there for a moment, sea and sand and grains of straw mixing together in our eyes.

“There isn’t going to be a middle of the night,” he said.

If I was daring to disobey my father’s commands just by being there, I certainly wasn’t going to be forced to obey this man’s. Not that I intended to spend the night with any of them. That wasn’t why I was there. I was there because I had a couple days before I could head north, and I refused to spend it in the same house as my father. I couldn’t do one more day without losing it. After trying to get past what he’d done earlier this year, the latest catastrophe I’d discovered had pushed me past the yellow, to green light, go.

Those thoughts brought me back to the beach house and the beer in my hand. I sighed and took a sip.

I was surprised when Eli pulled it out of my hand.

“You aren’t twenty-one,” he growled. It was an actual growl. Like one a guy in one of Jenna’s sexy novels would do. It made my insides tighten in an unfamiliar way.

“You only know that because I was honest about my age. The license I have in my wallet says I’m twenty-two. Will that make you feel better?”

I jumped off the counter, landing closer to him than I’d been before. I went to grab the beer back, but he brought it to his lips and chugged it down instead. I watched the movement, his Adam’s apple moving underneath the smooth skin beneath the stubble that dotted his chin and cheeks in a way that it wouldn’t if he was on duty.

When he was finished, his eyes turned down to meet mine again. There was something there. Not just desire. Something more that I didn’t want to identify. Dad’s cadets and I were like pineapple and pizza. They didn’t belong together.

I had plans that were a long way away from cadets, and military colleges, and Texas. I didn’t need anything getting in the way of that.

But I’d also had enough of people controlling my life, so I wasn’t going to let this cadet dictate for me what I could and couldn’t do. I moved away, taking another beer from the six-pack in pure defiance. Like defying my father after he’d tried to take my future away. I stuffed another lime inside the bottle and moved out of the kitchen.

When I finally looked back at him, after sitting on top of the small dining room table, he was watching me. I just smiled and raised the beer to him before taking a sip.

I could see his whole jawline clench. I felt sort of bad. It wasn’t his fault that he’d caught me in the middle of one of my worst weeks ever. Scratch that. Worst few months ever.

I took another drink while he eyed me. I wouldn’t finish it. It would make me play sloppy later at the bar, and I never wanted that. I wanted to feel every moment of being onstage. It was what I lived for. I was determined to not let my dad, or anyone, or anything take that away from me again.

Maybe after my set it would be good to get drunk. Maybe it would allow me to forget, for a few hours, just how shitty things had been. But without Jenna, I wouldn’t be able to get too drunk. We’d always been each other’s safety valves. Only one of us drank at a time so that neither of us woke up having had something happen that we hadn’t wanted.

I ached to call Jenna. The only remorse I had about what I’d done was leaving without telling her, without giving her my new number. I didn’t want her to have to lie to my dad when he questioned her. She’d be his first line of attack once he realized that I wasn’t at graduation. That I wasn’t sitting in the chairs waiting for them to call my name like every other dumbass senior at that dumbass school he’d forced me to attend.

He'd be furious that I’d embarrassed him.

The three men finished putting away most of the food they’d bought in silence while I fought with my emotions, the pleasure of leaving tainted by the age-old fear and despair that came whenever I went against him. I had to remind myself there was nothing more he could do to me. Nothing I wasn’t prepared for.

My country music was still blaring. It didn’t seem to bother the cadets, but it was making me itch, making me want to pull out my guitar and start strumming along to forget everything but the music. So, I jumped down and went over to where I’d left my phone after syncing it to the expensive equipment Dad had recently bought for the home he rarely visited.

I switched over to a random playlist that Jenna and I used when we were getting ready to go out. Upbeat. Eclectic. Oldies and newbies mixed together. Hoping it would chase away some of the anxiety that had crawled over my skin.

When I turned back to the men, they’d moved on to preparing dinner, working as a team with minimal communication on a simple meal of hamburgers and tots. Eli moved past me to the deck and the expensive, built-in barbecue.

I followed and watched as Eli lit the briquettes. The smell sent my brain into a swirl of memories of parties that Dad had held at our home in Galveston. Parties for his fellow faculty members. Sometimes his favorite cadets. I’d never seen these three among them. That either meant he didn’t think they were connection-worthy, or it meant that they were smart enough to see Dad’s slime for what it was.

Greediness. A need to be connected to someone who would make a bid for some high-powered government position someday. Someone he could ride along with, like he’d once tagged along behind my grandfather. Before I could remember. Before my mom and grandparents had been taken away, leaving me with just Dad.

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