Hurricane Hearts (Storm MC Reloaded 1)

She’d uttered seven words that pierced my heart, but it was the words she hadn’t uttered yet that I knew would crack it wide open.

As she moved away from me, I snapped my hand around her wrist and held her in place. “What did you do?”

Her gaze cut to my hand and she tried to pull out of my hold. Tightening my grasp, I said, “Don’t back out of this now, Angel. And don’t think for one second that I’m letting you go. We need to sort this out, and that can’t be done if you walk away.”

She blinked and I took in the heavy rise and fall of her chest. “This can’t be sorted out, Winter. What’s done is done. I can’t take any of it back.”

My chest was tightening with every second that ticked by. “No, you can’t, but you can start by telling me what you lied about.”

Staring at me like she wanted nothing more than to flee this bathroom, she swallowed hard again. The silence became almost unbearable, but patience was a strength of mine, so I waited for her to fill it.

Finally, she gave me what I wanted. “Before I tell you, you need to think back to what we’d been going through in those last few years before we broke up. The stress, the arguments over your work, the fact you were away so much, and that when you were home, you weren’t really there.”

I remembered those years clearly, like they were just yesterday. The fights we’d had, the nights we’d slept apart, the pleas for me to leave the military, the tears, and the crushing heartbreak of it all. Birdie had supported my career choice from day one, but the SAS had been demanding in ways she’d never seen coming. Physically and mentally taxing, each tour hardened me in new ways. While I was over there taking target after target, seizing drugs from the Taliban, and destroying weapon caches, my relationship was falling apart. Each time I returned home, we struggled to reconnect because I struggled to leave behind the horrors of war.

“I remember,” I said, wishing like fuck I didn’t. Wishing I could take all that shit back and make better choices for me and Birdie.

She nodded before glancing down. The roar of silence threatened to consume me, to swallow me whole while we were suspended in that moment of before. The moment before she finally told me what had blown us apart all those years ago.

Looking back up at me, she said, “I didn’t want to lose you to that war.” Her voice cracked and she tried to swallow her emotions, but it was impossible. The floodgates were wide open now; our emotions were hurtling full force at us. “I told you over and over that I didn’t want you to go back. Every single time you came home, I told you.” She abruptly stopped and exhaled a shaky breath. “You have to understand how desperate I felt, Winter. To save you. To save us.” Her eyes madly searched mine, looking for understanding. But how could I give her that when I didn’t know what for yet?

“Birdie,” I forced out, wanting anything but to ask my next question, “What did you do?”

“I made a choice for us without giving you the opportunity to have a say. Even though we always swore to be completely honest with each other, and even though I knew how you felt about women who went down the path of getting pregnant intentionally to keep a man”—she paused one last time, again begging me silently to understand—“and even though we’d discussed the timing for future attempts at having a child, so that you could be around to support me through it if there were complications again, I went off the pill with the intention of falling pregnant. I wanted to force your hand. I wanted you to choose us over the military.”

Her confession was a bullet to my heart. It forced its way in, crushing and burning and destroying. I was unprepared for it. I had no bulletproof vest when it came to Birdie.

I let go of her hand as my brain connected dots. “You had another ectopic pregnancy?”

“Yes.” It was barely a whisper and yet it reverberated with ear-splitting noise.

“And you lost your other tube.”

She nodded, but gave me no more words as she watched me with tears tracking down her cheeks.

A year into our relationship, she’d fallen pregnant accidentally. Both of us wanted children, so it had been a blessing. However, it had been an ectopic pregnancy and she’d lost a fallopian tube. The doctor had warned us there was a chance she could have another ectopic pregnancy after that one, with the possibility of losing her other fallopian tube, so we’d agreed to put off having children until I could take time off and be home with her in case of any complications.

The main reason I wanted us to wait, though, was so I didn’t miss out on one minute of her pregnancy. As far as I was concerned, those nine months were far too precious to not be home for. I wanted to be there every step of the way for my woman and my child. My father had ingrained that sense of responsibility in me.

“Fuck.” The word tore from my soul. The sense of loss wasn’t just about the loss of her ability to have children; it was about so much more than that. Some wouldn’t even comprehend what this was about, but Birdie did. It was why she now looked at me like she feared my reaction.

I lived by a code, honesty its pinnacle. I walked away from people who didn’t return the honesty I gave them. Birdie knew this, and so she knew that right now my gut and heart were in free fall.

I didn’t know what to do with this information. Not a place I was used to being. Between my upbringing and military training, decisiveness had been drilled into me as a standard response to any situation. I took information in and quickly processed it before making a clear and firm choice. But not this time. Fuck, this time my heart was getting in the way of my brain.

I loved Birdie. With everything in me, I fucking loved her. I had done so almost from the day I met her, and all the way through to now. Even during my darkest days in the five years she hadn’t been mine, I had loved her. I hadn’t thought there was anything she could do that would change that. But fuck, life had a way of knocking you clear to your knees when you least expected it.

“Say something, Winter,” Birdie pleaded,

her eyes filled with the same level of anxiousness as her voice. “Tell me you’re done, tell me you want me to go, tell me you hate me. Just say something!”

As I stood there staring at her with thoughts wrapping their way around my heart, choking the fuck out of me, I wondered if we’d finally found something that would kill us. We’d already been through so much together; when did it all become too much? I was a fighter. That was me—heart, body, and soul. I didn’t fucking give up on things or people that were important to me. And Birdie was the most important person in my life, so I wasn’t about to give up on her. But would my love and my fight be enough? Because right now, I felt pretty fucking annihilated. I felt like an exhausted soldier crawling through the mud, riddled with bullets, desperately seeking shelter from the enemy, not sure if I was about to take my last breath.

“Winter.” Max’s voice cut through my thoughts. “You good to go? I’ve gotta get back home to take Jesse to a party, so I don’t have a lot of time.”

With my eyes firmly on Birdie, I answered him, “Yeah, gimme a minute.”

“You go,” Birdie said. “I’ll book a flight home and get out of here while you’re gone.” Resignation blasted from her voice. She’d already given up, but fuck if I’d allow that.