Page 76 of Royal Guard

“I’m too ashamed to stay at the ranch, with my dad. He was a Marine his entire career. I’ve been discharged and now I can’t even get a job. So I move to LA. Get a job as a doorman in a dive bar. But I’m too... dumb, I guess. Everyone else is on the take, like let one drug dealer in to deal, and stop all the others, in return for a cut. But I didn’t want to do that. Didn’t seem right.” I sighed. “Like I said, dumb.”

“Notdumb,” Kristina said fiercely. “Good.What were you doing in New York?”

“Thought if I could get away from the desert, the flashbacks might stop. They didn’t. So I was heading back to LA... when I met you.”

Her eyes were shining with tears. There was so much I wanted to explain about what she meant to me: how meeting her had changed everything. She’d given me something to be loyal to, something I believed in. She’d made me feel happy for the first time since it all happened. And I loved her like I’d never loved anyone: she was sweet and special and bright and the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. But my words had run out. I gazed at her, shook my head, and just said, “I know I’m not a prince. But you’re right for me.”

And she just nodded and kissed me. She scoochedhigher up my body, straddling me, and we lay like that in the darkness for a long time, our cheeks pressed together. I felt...lighter.Like something had released, inside me. “It’s the first time I’ve ever told anyone,” I muttered. “I mean, I told the brass how the others died. But not how it felt.”

She nodded and the feel of her silky hair brushing my shoulders calmed the last of the anger inside me. It was weird: I wasn’t used to feeling at peace.

“You know, there are people who can help you with the flashbacks,” she said tentatively.

I shook my head. “Couldn’t,” I mumbled. “Tried it. Couldn’t talk to them. You’re different.”

“Then will you at least let me share something with you? Something that worked for me, after the war?”

Just the reminder that she’d suffered made my arms tightened protectively around her. I wanted to kill every one of the bastards who’d imprisoned her. “Go on.”

“I still get the flashbacks, sometimes. When it’s really dark, or I’m alone. Sometimes they come as nightmares and those I can’t stop...until I met you.” She ran her hand over my chest. “But the flashbacks... my therapist taught me how to beat those. Maybe it’ll work for you, too.”

I nodded, but half-heartedly. “They’re so real,” I said. “And sobig.And... heavy.” I shook my head. “I know that doesn’t make sense. It’s just a memory. But—”

“But it feels like it’s solid, like it weighs a thousand tons,” she said.

I blinked at her, surprised. “Yeah.Like a freight train coming at me. I can’t stop it.”

She raised herself up on her arms so that she couldlook down at me. Her hair hung down, brushing my chest and, if I glanced down, I knew I’d see her breasts, pale in the moonlight. But I was so focused on what she was saying, I managed not to look. “That’s because you’re so big and stubborn,” she said, mock-sternly. “You’re trying to fight it.”

I scrunched up my brow. “What the hell else am I supposed to do?”

She put those cooling, calming hands on my biceps. “You let it come, but youget out of its way.Like you’re sidestepping.”

“Sidestepping?”

“You don’t have to move much. Just enough that it misses you. Just think really hard about somewhere you really like. A place you’d like to be, with a person you’d like to be with. You’rethere.And then the flashback still comes, but you’re notinit. You’re just watching it, like it’s on TV.”

I stared at her. If it had come straight from a therapist, I would have written it off as a load of horseshit. But I trusted her. Hell, there was no one I trusted more. “Somewhere I’d like to be?” I said slowly.Texas. “And someone I’d like to be with.” I looked right at her, and she flushed, then cuddled down on my chest again.

I lay there feeling even better than before. I didn’t know if it would work: it didn’t seem like much of a weapon, given how powerful the flashbacks were. But just havingsomething,after all these years... that helped.

There was a sound outside the window, very faint. I could barely hear it, but Kristina jerked to attention and listened and so I did, too. It sounded like bells.

“It’s the clock tower in the city,” she said at last.Her body had gone tense. “Midnight. Ten hours until the bombers launch.”

“You did everything you could,” I said. “Garmania started this. They pushed you and pushed you. They tried to kill you over and over again.Andyour dad. And planted bombs and—”

“I know. I just... I don’tfeelthat it’s true. I can’t believe they want to go back to war with us. Not in my gut.” She sighed and let herself flop on top of me. “I suppose I just don’t want to believe it.”

She lay there on my chest, defeated. And I frowned up at the ceiling. She’d done so much to help me. I wanted to help her. But I didn’t know anything about politics, or being a leader.

So, I just told her what Ididknow. “Your instincts are good,” I said.

She jerked up, startled. “What?”

“You were right about Emerik and Jakov. And Caroline, too. None of them were traitors. And you’re smart. You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. If you say Garmania doesn’t want war, I believe you.”

She shook her head. “But they’re behind everything! It all points to them!”

---