Murder_ A Sinful Secrets Romance - Ella James Page 0,68
I pull my hair.
She pauses, hands reaching for me. “Are you mad at me?”
Her eyes are wide and innocent.
Because she doesn’t know.
I stalk out her office door, and through the den. I hear her voice behind me as I throw her front door open. My legs are so weak, I sink down on her porch stairs, holding my head with both hands.
She doesn’t know I can’t stop now. I can’t stop now. My dick is still hard. I can’t breathe.
I feel her come around in front of me. Her little hands cup my knees. She’s so gentle. I can feel the kindness emanating from her and it makes me want scream and tear my hair out.
“Barrett? Will you look at me?”
My eyes lift, involuntary.
“What’s wrong, Barrett?” She strokes my thigh.
I laugh. I rub my eyes, shielding myself from her warm gaze with my fingers.
“If I went too far…I’m sorry. I thought… You were hard and I— That was the first time since…” I open my eyes and find hers wide, her face gone pale and earnest. “I’m scared with other people,” she whispers.
I swear to God, I feel it all fall down around me. My resolve. My desperate barriers and all my longing—dead leaves scattered at her feet.
I stand up. Walk away! Just walk. You can’t stay here. You can’t tell her. Don’t keep lying. There is nothing you can do, you stupid fucker.
And still—my gaze finds hers. “It’s been that long?” My voice is low and soft, almost unrecognizable.
Her eyes go teary. “Please don’t pity me. I just…I don’t get out, you know? I’m stubborn, and I have my habits, staying here. I’ve gotten…bad at taking chances. I think over time it all got worse. I lose my nerve more every day and until you moved here I thought…”
“You thought what?” I rasp.
She blinks. A tear falls. “I don’t know.” She rubs her eyes. “I’m probably embarrassing myself. I think I did already.” She looks down at her—my—jacket. Her face reddens, and another tear falls. “This is how I’ve always been. I get so dumb and reckless. It’s been even worse with you.” She turns around, her back to me, her face lifting so I think her eyes are on the treetops.
“I’m sorry.”
I see her hands clutching her elbows. She’s hugging herself.
Before I have to choose—to go to her or not—she turns to face me. “I’m the kind of person who gets carried away. I think tonight I did that and I won’t do it again.”
She takes my jacket off, then pulls it to her chest.
“I’ll wash it,” she says, moving toward her door. She turns around and looks me in the eye when she gets on the top step. “Still friends?” she asks.
She gives me a tiny smile, her tongue sweeping over her lower lip as it begins to fade.
This is my out.
This is the moment that I close this door. I tell a lie. My girlfriend died—the Burka-wearing one. Now is the wrong time. I’m a mess. Not well enough to get entangled. Anything.
Words are clogging in my throat; the wrong words. I swallow them back. I nod, hoping my eyes don’t scream too loudly.
“Always.”
FOUR
BARRETT
September 20, 2011
Dove is at the highest point in our overwatch formation, on an outcropping above my head, when the call comes through the Porta Phone.
“Pack up shop and go back to the insert point,” McVay tells him.
“Uhh…what?”
“You heard me.” McVay is an asshole. “Get moving.”
Over the mountain peak. Back to the field we ID’d back at base as our entry and exit point.
Dove doesn’t tell McVay that the highest of all our high-value targets— a top-ranking al-Qaeda officer we’ve code named Ugly Fuck—has just shown up in the village down below us. Dove himself has not yet noticed this.
We’ve been waiting on Ugly Fuck for weeks up here in the barren Hindu Kush, a stark, 25,000-foot-elevation mountain range between central Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. Two of our team’s best assaulters have been on the ground for the last four days, but we got no warning about Ugly Fuck’s appearance, so they clearly didn’t have the intel for it.
Ugly Fuck is on a tall camel, fifth in a long caravan of rocket mortar and AK-bearing beasts that’s trickling into one of the most Taliban-friendly Pashtun villages.
During the thirty minutes I use to photograph Ugly Fuck’s bearded mug and document his location, Dove struggles to signal me. I don’t notice the pebbles he’s lobbing at my head because my mind is in the game.