Fire with Fire (Crash and Burn, Book 3) (A Military Romance)

C
opyright
© 2016 by Favor Ford Publishing

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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of Fire With Fire also contains three bonus books from Kelly Favor’s popular romance series, The Billionaire’s Rules.

C
hristina nears
the top of the stairs, chuckling as she says, “Yeah, yeah, I know I’m early, but I thought we could—” She stops talking when her right foot hits the landing. In her hands are two cups of coffee. Her face pinches in total confusion as she stares at me and Cole, naked together under my bed sheet, and then that confusion melts away as her eyes flash a deep, bone-piercing hurt aimed right at me.

My stomach kicks hard, and my skin itches from the look she gives me when realization of the situation sinks in. I suddenly feel ashamed, uncomfortably hot all over, and I want to burrow myself under this sheet so I don’t have to face the pain in her eyes. I totally loathe myself all over again, an old feeling welling back up from years ago, now made painfully fresh with this new injury to my sister.

“Christina…” I start to say, my tongue suddenly too slow to speak all the things I know I need to right now.

“Don’t. Don’t say one word to me right now.” Her tone strips away everything from the room, the warmth, the oxygen. She leaves both of the coffees on the wooden strip on top of the stairs and then turns and stomps her way back down.

I hop out of bed and scramble to find yesterday’s pants and shirt. I throw them on, all the while aware that Cole has now sat up and is silently staring at me. I can feel his gaze unwavering on my back.

“I need to talk to her for a minute,” I murmur over my shoulder. I don’t know why, but I’m scared to look him in the eye. Maybe because I don’t want to know what I’m going to see there.
Triage,
I tell myself. Deal with Christina first. She’s the pressing situation here. Then I’ll come back up and talk to him.

I barrel downstairs to find her hand on the front door. “Wait, stop. Christina,
please
. Let me explain.”

Christina whirls around, the fury and pain in her eyes setting me back a step. I haven’t seen her this upset since… My heart tightens. “Explain?” she sputters. “What’s there to explain? Looks pretty clear to me. You had sex with Cole. And I found out about it because I came over too early for you to hide the evidence.”

I fight to draw in a breath past tightening lungs. “Let’s sit down in my living room. I wanted to talk to you today about all of this, anyway.”

Christina reaches for a strand of her red hair, so like mine, and worries it between her fingers. “Let me ask you one thing,” she says in a deadly quiet tone. “How long have you guys been seeing each other? Because I seriously doubt, given the body language I saw between the two of you, that this was a drunken one-night stand or something.”

I take a moment to weigh my words, aware they’re going to impact the direction this conversation goes in. The entire discussion is filled with landmines. “We’re…not really seeing each other. Not like that, anyway.”

God, could I be more awkward right now? But what else can I say to my sister in explanation? Cole and I haven’t had any kind of official talk to clarify what the hell we actually are.

“How. Long.”

I bite my lip, preparing myself. “Last Wednesday, a couple of days before you and I met up with him to hang out, he and I got trapped in his brother’s bar’s basement. Things…kinda started then.” I rush to add, “None of this was planned, Christina. You have to believe that.”

“So when I told you I had a crush on him, you’d already had sex with him.” Her eyes are just as flat as her voice, and her arms now hang at her sides.

“We—we didn’t exactly have sex then…” My skin burns all over, and I fight the urge to fidget. I have to remain calm and coherent. I can explain, if she’ll only listen. “I was… Look, it’s really complicated—”

“So you knew I liked him, you had already fooled around with him or ‘whatever’ in the basement, yet you didn’t tell me at all. Not when I confessed to you that I like him, nor any time since then.” Her gaze drops to the ground and she drags in a breath. “You made me look like a total idiot, Lauren. Here I was, nervous as hell that night at the bar, wondering if I could get him to notice me as more than his best friend’s kid sister. When the truth was he was never going to see me that way. You could have been honest and saved me the mortification—and the waste of time—but you didn’t. What, were you laughing at me, how stupid I am to want him?”

It dawns on me then that Cole is sitting upstairs, hearing this entire exchange. I’m tempted to ask her if we can move this somewhere else—both to spare her feelings and mine because of the intimate stuff he’s overhearing—but if I do, I know she’ll walk out that door, and that’ll be that. I can tell by her body language, by her tone, that she’s upset enough to burn that bridge with me and not look back. My stomach is so tight and hard that I want to throw up.

“No, of course I wasn’t laughing,” I say quietly. “I’d never laugh at you, and you know that. I love you.” My voice breaks on that last sentence, and I clear my throat. “I was feeling tortured over it all and had no idea how to tell you the truth, wrestling with what to do for days. But honest to God, I was going to talk to you about it today. Plus, at first I didn’t know how he might feel about you,” I add quickly. “Hell, I wasn’t even aware you guys had talked while he was overseas. And…that Wednesday night was a surprise, out of nowhere. Totally unplanned. I don’t think either of us believed things would evolve like this.”

“And yet here we are.” Christina looks up at me. Her face is a mask, but her body is tight and she wraps her arms around herself. “After what happened with Max, it took me years to forgive you and stop being afraid to let my wall down around you. But I put aside my hurt because you’re my sister, and deep down, I believed you were sorry for betraying me with my boyfriend.”

I close my eyes against the wave of shame that hits me. Dammit. It’s bad enough hearing her speak about our past after all this time. But Cole just heard it too. When I open my eyes, everything is blurry from the tears burning and spilling out. “I’m sorry,” I say in an agonized whisper, but she’s not done.

“Now I see that you really don’t care about anyone but yourself,” Christina says, her eyes narrowed, her voice heating as she continues. “I was an idiot to believe otherwise.”

I take a step toward her, desperate to get her to stop and listen to me for just a minute. “That’s not true. I care deeply about you and your feelings, which was part of my internal angst over this.” I drop my voice to little more than a breath. “I tried to be just friends with Cole, honestly I did. I wanted you to have that chance if that was what you two wanted.”

“There was never a ‘chance’ with him, and I was a moron to not see it in the first place.” She shakes her head. I can see her eyes are glistening, but she looks up at the ceiling and blinks the emotion back. Her voice trembles when she says, “It’s always so easy for you, you know. Far easier for you than for me. Men fall at your feet to be with you.”

“That is so not true,” I retort in a vehement tone. She’s joking, right?

“Really?” Christina looks at me and wipes her eyes. “Because that’s how it feels. That I’m the shoddy version of you, the poor man’s Lauren. And no one wants to be with someone like that, not when they can have the original, the best. Not Max, not Cole. Not any of my high school boyfriends who dated me so they could be closer to you.”

I’m so stunned I can’t speak at first. Her words are so raw, so…filled with her belief of that as gospel truth, that I don’t know what to say. It’s ridiculous in every possible way.

“You’re kidding, right? You’re such a better person than I am,” I finally manage to say. My heart aches so deeply that I don’t think it’ll ever feel good again. “You forgave me after I hurt you like that, which shows a kind and generous nature. You’re fun and beautiful and smart and witty. And I’m sorry, Christina. I’m so sorry this has all unfolded like this. It’s not what I wanted.” I clench my hands to keep from reaching out to her.

I want her to forgive me. Because I know this isn’t just about Cole. It’s about the old shit it has dredged up between us. The stuff we just shoved aside and let go, in order to reconnect. I admit, it’s hard for me to believe she could have strong feelings for Cole, but maybe I’m wrong.

Regardless, she’s right in that I should have talked to her before. I should have said during our first conversation what happened between he and I in the basement. This is my fault, and I don’t know how to make things right. But I have to try.

“Let me take you to lunch,” I say. “Let’s talk more. I want to hear your side of things and listen. Please. We can sort this out, but we have to talk.” I don’t want things to go back to how they were, the years of silence, awkward family gatherings, the vast gulf between us. I missed her so badly, and now I’m afraid I’ve lost her again.

“I…I can’t look at you right now,” Christina says flatly, shaking her head. “I need some space to think.” She turns and walks out my front door.

God, that went so terribly bad. So, so bad. I drop to the couch and rest my head in my hands, hurting so much that I’m almost numb to it now, like my body is going into shock. I screwed this up. Because I was too scared to own up to Christina from the very start that something happened with me and Cole.

Shit.

Cole.

He heard the whole exchange from upstairs, where he remained quiet without intruding. I can’t imagine what he’s thinking or feeling right now. Is he upset with me too? I sniffle and wipe my face. Plod back up the steps with leaden feet to find a shirtless Cole sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling on his pants.

I settle beside him, leaving a gap between our sides. Inches that feel like miles.

Cole doesn’t look over at me. He finishes dressing in silence, slipping on his shirt, his socks. Methodical with his movements, not rushed.

The stiffness between us is thick enough to cut with a saw. Hard to believe that a half-hour ago, I was asleep and curled around him. Now it’s like we’re strangers. What is he thinking right now? Feeling?

“I…” I clear my throat and turn to face him, make myself look him in the eye. After all of this, he deserves me trying to be brave. “I’m sorry, Cole.”

He exhales hard and looks at me. “You could have told me.” The brief words are clipped as he speaks, and my heart falls. He’s upset with me too. I’ve royally screwed up on this one.

“It wasn’t my secret to tell,” I say. “Christina likes you, and she admitted it to me, and I was between a rock and a hard place.”

Cole eyes me for a long moment. Breathes in slowly, exhales through his nose. He rises. “I should go.”

I don’t want him to go. The urge to cry hits me so hard I can’t breathe. I fight the instinct to reach out and cling to his arm, to beg him to stay with me and hold me. I don’t want to be alone right now, but I can’t ask him to be there for me when I know he’s upset with me. It’s not fair to use him in that manner.

Cole deserves better than that. Better than a friend like me, who’s so damn scared she leaves a trail of pain behind her wherever she goes.

So I sit on the side of the bed, and I give a bobblehead nod.

And I watch my best friend—and the man I suspect I’m starting to fall for—walk down the stairs away from me.