Chaos & the Geek (Grace Grayson Security #1) - Elizabeth Stevens Page 0,29

feeling; I’d taken layers upon layers of skin off in the past because of that crawling feeling and it made me mad to ignore it, but I knew it would be better in the end.

Kit obviously realised when my breathing was back to normal as he rubbed my back and dropped his face towards mine. “Better?”

I nodded against him. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For…that. It hasn’t been that bad for a…long time.”

He tipped my chin up to look at me. “How often does it happen?”

“It used to be pretty regular. But it stopped a couple of years ago.”

He frowned and I hated the pain I saw in his eyes. I hated even more it was because of me. “Hawk never mentioned it.”

I looked down again. “He doesn’t know.”

“How?”

“I’m fine, Kit.”

“Amber, I know a sign of PTSD when I see it…”

I didn’t doubt he did.

I rested my head on his chest again. “We didn’t want him to worry. You guys were so busy. Risking your lives. He didn’t need to be thinking of me at home.”

Kit scoffed and held me tighter. “He always thought of you at home. We all did. Fucker would have died fifty times over if we weren’t thinking of you.”

I pushed away from him enough to look at him properly. “What?”

He smiled, but there was still sadness in his eyes. “All Hawk cared about was coming home to you. And we all cared about Hawk, so we all cared about him coming home to you. I lost count of the times I did the polytrauma stint and the rehab instead of him.”

Horror flooded me. “No. No. If I’d known.”

He took my face in his hands and smiled at me. And this time, it reached his eyes and it felt like my heart re-started. “None of us would ever have had it any other way. We were brothers and we looked after our own.” He brushed my hair back and dropped his hands to wrapping around me again.

“Gratia dei per chao…” I whispered, reverently. By the grace of chaos.

“Exactly. I was nothing without him anyway.”

“That’s not true,” I said before I could caution myself.

“What?”

I’d started now. “That’s not true. You’re plenty without him.”

“Like what?”

Damn. I couldn’t very well tell him that he’d been the world to me for years. That he was in danger of becoming the world to me again if I didn’t remember who he was, who I was. It didn’t matter if there was another side to him or not. He was off-limits.

“I don’t know,” I said softly.

There was a shift in the mood.

“Do you want to talk about?” he asked.

“About what?”

“Whatever happened that gives you these episodes.”

I huffed a laugh. “My boyfriend and my best friend went behind my back.”

His hand ran up and down my back gently. “Before that.” It was a reprimand, but I could also tell he wouldn’t push me if I didn’t want to be pushed.

“Did you work with hostages or something?” I blurted out.

“Sort of. We dealt with a lot of people. And most of them were terrified and hurt and in so much pain there was nothing we could do. But we never gave up.”

We found each other’s eyes again and I wasn’t sure exactly what I saw in his, but I could see something had changed him. There was pain deep inside now where before there’d only been…emptiness and a different sort of pain. Before they’d left, Kit had been trying to find his place in the world. Now he looked like he’d found it, but the truth was much too real.

“I was attacked,” I told him.

I felt his hands tighten on me. “What?”

I nodded. “Uh. It was a little after you guys finished your special ops training, I think. Pat said you were off to Beirut maybe?” I huffed a small, humourless laugh because it was better than crying. “Dannie, Farrah and I went to a party at Travis’ house. And uh… There was this guy there. We… We danced and drank. I don’t remember how we got to the bedroom…but, when I realised what he wanted, I tried to fight back. I got a fair few bruises for my efforts and I still have a couple of scars. But I kneed him before…” My breath hitched and I couldn’t go on.

But I was pretty sure Kit didn’t need me to.

He pulled me closer to him and it was the most accepted I’d ever felt.

On the rare occasion I’d told anyone that story, they’d looked at me like