Redeeming Her SEAL (ASSIGNMENT Caribbean Nights #9) - Kat Cantrell Page 0,80
was that he’d pushed her away.
But her soft hands in his hair soothed him so much that he closed his eyes and let her touch drift through him straight to his soul.
“Where did you go?” she asked, her voice as low and soothing as her hands. “If you want to tell me, that is.”
“To see my father.” That had been brutal. But necessary, and he owed Mama C more than he could ever repay for whacking him upside the head with it.
“You did?” Her disbelief spoke to the enormity of what he’d done. She knew just as well as the guys on his team that Montgomery St. Croix was a bastard whom Charlie had vowed to never speak to again.
Funny how “never” had turned out to be about a decade and a half. “Had to. It wasn’t fun, but I needed to make my peace. I’d rather talk about it some other time.”
It was only relevant by virtue of the fact that it had loosened the grip of the past, which he’d desperately needed so he could be here with Audra, in this moment.
His father had looked… old. Worn down by life and loneliness. Charlie refused to let that be his own fate because of his father’s mistakes.
“Tell me about Naomi then,” she suggested.
“She was my girlfriend,” he mumbled, fatigue slurring his words. But he needed to say them. “I loved her so much, in that no-fear way that only a nineteen-year-old can. But she loved herself and my father’s money, probably in equal measure.”
“Uh-oh,” she murmured. “There’s that dreaded ‘m’ word.”
He smiled because of course she got that money did not make his world go round. It made it easier to say what came next, which he’d never said out loud. “I walked in on her and my father going at it in the pool house. Needless to say, that experience stained the next fifteen years of my life.”
Including the way he’d handled every waking second with Audra, even from the very first. Shame on him for painting her with the brush of other people’s sins instead of taking what she was offering at face value.
Her fingers stilled in his hair. “Oh, my darling. I’m so sorry.”
Her voice cracked. He rolled, wedging his cheek against her stomach so he could see her. So she could see him as he told her the God honest truth.
“You know what? It got me to Coronado. Being a SEAL was the best thing that could have happened to me after that.” He shut his eyes for a second as her scent unfolded inside him. As he considered what might be growing even now in the womb beneath her skin. “And you were the best thing that could have happened to me after being a SEAL.”
Which he’d very nearly destroyed because he couldn’t accept the redemption she’d offered. If he did this right, he’d get the umpteenth chance to try again, and he’d succeed at loving her the way she deserved this time.
He sat up because it didn’t matter how tired he was or how much he craved her touch. Some things needed to be said while looking a woman in the eye. “Audra, I pushed you away because I didn’t want to saddle you with damaged goods. Instead of talking to you about my failings, I took your choice away.”
There was the irony in this situation.
“It’s okay,” she said immediately with a small smile. “We both messed up because we suck at this. Look at my example. I went to Jared to fix my mistakes and ended up making it worse.”
She flinched, and he had a pretty good idea why.
“It’s okay if you want to talk about Jared.” Saying his name still didn’t conjure up rainbows and unicorns in his mind, but he was through being unreasonably jealous. “I’ve had a lot of time to think and a lot of thumps to the head about my own stupidity. I can’t say I’ll ever be overjoyed with the fact that he’s a part of your past. But I accept that he is.”
His jealousy over that relationship stemmed one hundred percent from guilt over his own shortcomings. Turned out once he forgave himself, the urge to break Jared’s fingers vanished.
Cautiously, she eyed him. “Can you accept the fact that I did care about him but that he has nothing to do with us?”
The crossroads he’d been working toward loomed, but he nodded instantly. “Yes. Because I forgive you. It’s forgotten, as if it never existed.”