The best thing about it being Saturday was Warrior Fight Club.
Which meant that Billy could attempt to fight out all the shit in his head and the restless energy in his body that had kept him awake all night.
Awake picturing Shayna’s beautiful body. Awake with her voice in his ear saying that she was an adventurous woman.
Which was about a million times better than the other images and sounds that had been keeping him awake lately. On the same call where Ryan had asked for the favor for Shayna, he’d also informed him that one of their buddies hadn’t survived the injuries he’d received on an op a few weeks ago. And that knowledge seemed to have revived Billy’s old nightmares.
So, yeah, imagining Shay was far preferable, even if she’d been a constant torment in his head, keeping him hard enough that he’d been tempted to take himself in hand. But no fucking way was he jacking off to the thought of her just a few hours after she’d moved into his house.
And that left fighting as the best way to chill his damn self out.
Even better? He was meeting a few of the guys beforehand to work out. With any luck, by this evening, he’d be drained—and therefore a significantly less horny and moody motherfucker.
One could hope.
He pulled his ass out of bed and grimaced at the stiffness of the right side of his body. Some of which was muscular, and some of which was his ruined skin.
In the bathroom, he pulled off the shirt he’d slept in and gave himself a once-over in the mirror.
“Shit,” he murmured. All that tossing and turning had opened up the ulceration on the top of his shoulder. Given how extensive his scarring was, he supposed he was lucky that he only had one place where the skin remained so fragile.
He frowned at his reflection. He was lucky. That, he couldn’t deny.
Of the eight men on his Ranger squad, five had died in the fucking trap that had been set. There’d been no reason to question the well-vetted intelligence they’d received about a large munitions stash hidden in the basement of a house in the middle of a densely inhabited part of Baghdad. No reason at all.
Until the explosives detonated, revealing that the whole thing had been a set-up and they’d been played.
Why did I survive that shit when so many others didn’t?
He’d asked himself that so many times over the past three years…
Needing to shake off the fog of sleeplessness, guilt, and regret, Billy took a quick shower, and then he treated the crack in his scar tissue with antibiotic cream. He debated bandaging it, but it wasn’t bleeding, and he really didn’t want to call attention to it. Next up came moisturizing the nearly forty per cent of his body that had suffered second- and third-degree burns, the most serious of which had been down his right side—the side that had been closest to one of the devices his squad hadn’t seen until it was too late.
A lot of his scarring had matured and mellowed enough now that it wasn’t super obvious, but the skin on his right shoulder, ribs, and back, that covering a lot of his right arm, and going down the outside of his right thigh, remained shiny and melted-looking and was where, if he was going to have skin irritation or scar breakdown problems, they occurred.
At first, he’d been too sore, too demoralized, and too stiff to do something as simple as rub cream on himself, but for most of the last three years, this had been part of his daily morning routine. Like brushing his teeth or hair. Just what he had to do if he wanted to have nearly full function of his right arm and shoulder.
But the tear in his skin meant he was either going to have to wear a tank that wouldn’t further irritate his shoulder, or wear the compression shirt he used to have to wear all the time. Four hours of working out argued in favor of the tank. He dressed in his gear despite the fact that he wasn’t meeting the guys until mid-afternoon, then headed downstairs to put on some coffee.
Except, he’d only made it to the top of the steps before he smelled the warm, rich scent of French roast on the air.
Sure enough, he found Shayna downstairs perched on one of the stools at the breakfast bar. Her shoulder-length red waves hid her face as she stared down at an iPad on the counter, and he cleared his throat hoping not to scare her for the second time in less than twenty-four hours.
“Oh, hey,” she said, her gaze cutting to him.
“Hey. You made coffee.”
She nodded. “Coffee is life. I hope you don?
?t mind.”
He wiped up a little spilled sugar and poured himself a cup. “I woke up to ready-to-drink hot coffee and you think I’m gonna mind?”
She gave him a smile, and it struck him again—as it had while they’d made and eaten dinner—that she was so damn pretty. Even sitting there in an old T-shirt and a pair of men’s boxers, without makeup, and with those curls going every which way. She’d always been a cute kid, though the infrequency of his visits to the Curtis house, the regularity of their deployments out of country, and the age difference between them had kept him from really getting to know her as anything other than Ryan’s little sister.
Which was exactly how he should keep thinking of her. Even though, she was right, she wasn’t a girl anymore.
“Just don’t want to overstep. I’m sure my invading your home for two months is inconvenient enough.”