Page 39 of Hero Next Door
He snorted and closed the door behind us. “I have no idea. But I’m game if you are.”
If it meant getting to relax and have dinner with him, Iwasgame. And that surprised the hell out of me. I’d never been the girl that did things reckless or surprising. Slow and steady and responsible, that was me. I didn’t relax. I didn’t let up on the constant need to succeed.
I was different with him, though. Something about him made me feel safe enough that I could let all of that go.
So if we were going to play a game where we might end up as Monopoly figures because we drank wine that was too expensive to drink? Yeah, I was up for that.
* * *
I took another sip of the wine—which was good, but had yet to turn me into a small man with a monocle and mustache—and contemplated him. The dinner had been amazing, and the conversation was typically wonderful, but I had questions for him.
Of course I wasn’t going to get answers unless I actually asked them. And I thought I might have finally had enough wine to do just that.
“Why were you in the desert with people who wanted to skin you alive?” I asked bluntly.
He looked at me blankly, like he wasn’t sure whether he’d heard me or not, and I snapped my mouth shut. Shoot.Too forward, Parker. Too blunt. I should have known better than to ask questions when I’d had this much to drink. Alcohol made my usual straightforwardness even more straight. Straight like an arrow.
And sometimes I shot it was too hard.
“I was in the Marines,” he said slowly. “Enlisted right after we graduated and got sent to the Middle East. You... didn’t know that?”
Now it was my turn to look at him blankly. “Dev, I left town within minutes of us graduating and did my best to never talk to anyone from this town again. Why on earth would I have known that?”
“Good point. Well, the short story is that I enlisted and got sent overseas immediately. Spent four years there, running missions and fighting off the bad guys. Dodging car bombs and insurgents, doing my best to make friends with the locals.”
He was tossing the words around like they were no big deal, but I was watching his eyes, and they were staring past me. Seeing memories, I was guessing. And if the tilt of his mouth was anything to go by, they weren’t memories he liked.
They were more like ghosts.
“That sounds intense,” I murmured.
His eyes came back to me, and they were very definitely haunted. “It was. I lost too many people I loved. And then I came home and found my mother sick. A heartbeat later she was gone, too, and I...”
His voice cracked with strain and I reached out, threading my fingers through his and squeezing.
“You figured you’d better protect yourself against that sort of loss in the future,” I finished for him.
The surprise on his face was evident, but he wouldn’t have been so shocked if he knew what my history was like. When you went through something like that, when you were carrying that sort of baggage around with you, you started making deals with yourself. Deals that focused on how you could protect yourself in the future.
Mistakes you would never make again.
And in that moment, I saw very clearly what I found so attractive about this man. Sure, he was incredibly gorgeous and big and impressive and very strong. He could be annoyingly possessive and I doubted whether he’d ever met anything he thought he couldn’t do.
But he was a broken bird, too. And our souls had been speaking together on that level right from the start.
CHAPTER23
Dev
The girl had drunk way too much wine to get home on her own. She was actually staggering, though I was sure that if anyone ever told her that, she’d promptly stab them right in the stomach.
Still, I didn’t have any intention of letting her get behind the wheel of her rented SUV and drive back to her house. Even if it was only the next house over.
“You’re staying,” I told her firmly. “You’re tired and you’re drunk and it’s the middle of the night.”
“I don’t need to stay,” she said, throwing my hand off. “I’m quite capable of running myself.”
I didn’t point out that running oneself didn’t have anything to do with driving while drunk, and tried a different tactic. “Look at it this way. It’s already 1 in the morning. If you sleep until 7, you’ll only have been here for six hours. That’s barely anything. Not even half a day.”
