Page 17 of Lumberjack DADDY
“Why don’t you ever talk about your time in the service?”
A dark shadow crosses my heart, and my lips curl down. “It’s… difficult. Unless you were there, you wouldn’t understand it.”
“Maybe not. But I do know that keeping it all bottled up inside isn’t healthy for you either,” she says. “Keeping your trauma inside is like poison to your soul.”
“When did you switch your major from art to psychology?”
She laughs. “Stop. Seriously though. If you ever want to talk, I just want you to know that I’m here to listen without judgment.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Of course.”
As we walk the trail, I slip my hand into hers on impulse. She smiles as our fingers intertwine, and she lays her head on my shoulder. There’s an ease between us I don’t think I’ve ever felt with anybody before. It’s an odd feeling. And yet at the same time, it feels… right.
I place a soft kiss on the crown of her head. “The men in the picture you were looking at the other night?” I start. “That was my old unit. They were like—no, they were my brothers. We went through some real shit together.”
“What happened to them?”
“We were on a mission, chasing a real bad guy. We got some bad intel, and we walked into an ambush,” I say. “and Hicks I are the only ones who made it out alive.”
Her hand tightens on mine. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”
“We were both wounded pretty badly. But we were the lucky ones,” I tell her. “We got patched up and we got back into the fight. It took some time, but we finally tracked down not just the bad guy we were after that day, but the one who fed us the bad intel. The one who walked us into that trap. After that, I was done. I rotated out when my tour was up.”
As we walked, I continued to open up to her. I shared my most horrible, heart-wrenching moments overseas. But I also shared some of the good memories I carried from that place. I told her about my unit—my brothers. I’ve never spoken to anybody about any of this before, but with Emery by my side, it just felt natural. And she listens. She asks questions here and there, but she mostly just listens without reservation or judgment.
As I share all this with her, I feel my heart grow lighter somehow. I don’t understand this effect she has on me. I don’t understand how she’s gotten me to open up like this. How she’s managed to kick in doors I thought I’d sealed shut forever a long time ago. It’s like she has the key to the locks I thought I’d thrown away after I came home. It’s like she’s had them all along, and I was just waiting for her to find me.
“It sounds like you’ve been through a lot,” she says. “A lot of terrible things.”
I nod. “Yeah. I’ve seen some shit.”
“But you’ve also seen a lot of good, too, it sounds like. Not just with your unit, but with some of the people you were over there protecting.”
A faint smile touches my lips, and I shake my head. Before Emery, I can’t remember the last time I smiled. In the last few days, I’ve smiled more than I think I have in all the years of mylife combined. But she brings it out of me with the same ease that got me talking and sharing all these stories and memories with her.
“I’ve never shared any of this with anybody before,” I say.
She smiles. “I guess I’m special then.”
I turn and hold her gaze as I nod. “Yeah. You really are.”
Her cheeks flush, and she pulls me down into a soft kiss that’s sweet, tender, and promises so much more. I find myself anxious to get back to the cabin. This girl has made me insatiable. She’s unlocked desires inside me I never even knew I had. And I can’t get enough of her. I want her so bad, I’m half tempted to take her again right now, right here on the trail.
Before I can do anything, though, my phone chirps with an incoming text. With a sigh of irritation, I pull it out and frown when I see the alert notice on the screen.
“What is it?” she asks.
I open the link, and the view from the cameras I activated this morning appears on the screen. Staring at them for a moment, I don’t see anything and start to think some animal wandered by and set off the motion sensors. But then, movement from one of the cameras draws my attention. I zoom in on the view and feel my jaw clench.
“Son of a bitch,” I mutter.
“Eli, what is it?”
“Call the police,” I tell her. “And stay here.”
“Eli—”
