Ruthless Bastard (Dangerous Love 3)

“Yeah,” he agreed with a soft nod. “The blackest black I’ve ever seen. The stars were so bright. The whole world looked different there.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Nothing like here.”

She sipped her hot chocolate, wondering over all the things he’d seen, all the missions he’d taken. “Do you miss the military?”

He tipped his head to the side, his curious eyes on her. “Why do you ask?”

She shrugged. “You were in the Army for a long time. You must miss it.”

He loosened a breath and stared up at the stars again, his jaw bunching. “Yes, I miss it.”

“But are you happy being a detective too?”

“It’s satisfying.”

She swallowed another sip of hot chocolate then laughed softly, shaking her head. “That was a piss-poor attempt at dodging the answer—you realize that, right?”

His mouth twitched before he looked at her again. Their gazes held for a beat. Then a haunting darkness fell over his expression. “I might miss military life, but I also can’t trust myself anymore.”

Her gut twisted at the raw pain in his expression. “What do you mean?”

He glanced back up to the sky, his brows drawn together, and his eyes grew distant, going back to a different time. “I couldn’t trust my shot after I got wounded,” he explained. “I’d go back to Afghanistan in a second if I could repair my shoulder enough to know that if I fired off a shot, I wouldn’t miss. Being a soldier was my calling.”

Her heart squeezed tight. “Even with the nightmares you suffer, you’d still go back?”

“In a heartbeat,” he said in an instant. “I’ve never felt purpose like I did when I was a soldier. To protect, to defend, to lead, I lived and breathed that life, and I was very, very good at my job. But the injury has made my reflexes slower. That could kill the men I’m trying to protect.”

“So, you’re saying that being a detective is second best.”

His head fell to the side again, those intense eyes landing on her. “It’s not second best. It’s just another life, not the one I thought I’d have.”

The pain in his eyes was palpable. It hadn’t been there before he went off to the military. She wished she could remove it. “Well, I think you did your job. You saved lives, and they got a good eight years of your service. But considering how you came home, I’m not so sure that it was a bad thing you got shot.”

His brows rose up. “You wanted me to get shot?”

“No,” she said, nudging her shoulder into him. “Of course not. All I’m saying is that you were different when you came home, and if you’d stayed longer, I’m not sure how that would have been for you, you know?”

“I never thought I’d come home.” His lips clamped shut, like he hadn’t meant to say that.

She pushed, feel

ing her blood heat a little. And not in good way. “Ever?”

He gave a firm shake of his head. “I thought I’d die in those deserts,” he said, so cold and distant. “I almost did.”

She reached for him, placing her hand on his arm, and she was so damn glad when he didn’t pull away. “Did you want to come home?”

There was a long pause. He didn’t even look like himself when he glanced at her. “No.”

“Oh,” she whispered, suddenly feeling like the air had been knocked out of her.

He took in her expression then slowly shook his head as if he hated himself for making her look like that. “You have to understand, Kinsley, that when I left for the Army, that had been the life I wanted. It suited me. The brotherhood, the cause to make this world a little bit safer, and to fight for those who can’t fight a bigger evil, it was all I wanted to do, but there was a cost, and that cost was that you turn off a part of yourself to get the job done. You don’t see faces or genders or ages. You see killers wanting to kill the brothers beside you.” His voice changed then, growing harder. “I trained. Hard. I did my job. And I was good at that job. This civilian life…I never thought I’d ever come back to it. My life in Stoney Creek ended when I entered the military.”

She swallowed the emotion that clogged up her throat. He didn’t need to fill in the missing pieces. The short affairs with women while he waited for a new mission. The danger. The risky adrenaline rush. That was Rhett, through and through. And when he returned home for good, he’d been forced to be something he never wanted to be. She nearly kept quiet, but something in her gut told her to push. “So that’s why it was hard for you when you got back?”

“Just changed the direction of what I thought my life would be.” He paused and gave her a quizzical look. “Out of curiosity, what did you notice that seemed hard for me?”

“Smiling,” she said.

He gave her a look that revealed a whole lot of his raw emotions without saying much at all. “Smiling?”