Last True Hero (25 page)

D
are's lips are scorching me. His fingers are lighting me on fire. His words are turning my insides to molten lava. His eyes are leaving me breathless, electrified.

My senses are all tangled up, and every time I try to catch my frenzied breath, I just breathe him in even deeper. He's completely consuming me, and I freaking
love it
.

As his burning lips travel south, tracing a fiery line along the side of my belly, I arch up toward him, wanting more. More of him. More of this. More of us. But instead, I blurt out something that I haven't forgotten, something I can't forget even right now at this pivotal moment.

“Secrets,” I gasp.

He stills, frozen above me. He looks up, his clear, bewitching eyes meeting mine, his lips still touching my hip bone. Keeping me locked in his gaze, he drops one more soft kiss on my burning skin and then departs, moving up adjacent to me until he's lying on his side right beside me.

He trails light fingers between my breasts, down to my belly, back and forth, and I shiver in response. Damn my fucking mouth.

“I'm sorry.” A lump forms in my throat, because I think I've ruined the moment.

No, I'm pretty
sure
I've ruined the moment. Maybe the night. My life?

“Don't,” he says quietly. “Don't apologize. You deserve to know me. All of me. Before we…before this happens.”

“You're not mad?”

He sighs. Then he pushes himself up in one fluid movement until he's hovering over me once again. His eyes hold that familiar, intense expression that is so totally Dare, and his dark chocolate hair falls over his forehead and around his face. It's a little longer since the last time I saw him, I realize suddenly. It's curling toward the bottom of his neck.

“Understand me right now, Berkeley. I am not mad at you. I'm worked up right now because you're lying in a naked heap underneath me and my body is screaming at me to take you. I want to worship you with my lips. I want to fucking devour you right now. Because, whether you know it or not, you already own me in every way that means shit. But I'm not mad. I'm just ridiculously hot for you.”

Heat pools in the very center of me and speeds to the throbbing spot between my thighs. He can do that to me with
words alone.
I seriously can't decide if this man is angel or devil.

Feebly, I nod as I squirm a little under his hard body. So hard.

He rolls off of me again, returning to his spot beside me.

And then Dare tells me his story.

“I enlisted in the army when I was eighteen. I'd been shuffled throughout foster homes for years, and none of them were good. I saw way more pain than any kid should have to see, and I was empty inside because of it. I barely graduated high school because of all the days I missed. Some days I just didn't go, others I was suspended for fighting. I was an angry kid, Berkeley, and there wasn't any hope for me.

“I was damn lucky the army found me. I talked to a recruiter one day at a mall, and that was all I needed. When I enlisted and started out in infantry, I learned a discipline I never had in my life before then. I learned how to answer to somebody, and I learned how to trust other people. I had to trust the guys in my unit because all of our lives depended on it. For the first time in my life, I began to thrive.

“I was good at this job. I was strong. I loved the workouts and the training that went along with being a soldier. I rose through the ranks pretty quickly, because I deposited everything I had into it. I had nothing else, no one else. Army was my life. I lived it and breathed it. I loved it.

“When I made Ranger, I was stoked. I relished the opportunity to plunge into enemy territory with my brothers, scoping dangerous places out for our Airborne friends to demolish, or for our marine friends to storm. It was what I was good at. I could plan and execute better than anyone else.”

He pauses, his fingers still trailing along my belly, and looks up into my face. I'm riveted by his story, but one hand is stroking his hair as I stare back. I'm holding my breath, waiting for the rest of his tale.

He bends and softly kisses my shoulder before he continues. “One night, we're on a mission to clear an airfield in the C.A.R. That's the Central African Republic. Rebel forces in the country used this particular airfield to distribute illegal weapons throughout the nation. It was our job to go in, make sure the place was clear for our other forces to land and take over.

“It was pretty routine. We dropped in from the air, which we'd all done a hundred times before. But somehow, there were rebels waiting for us when we arrived, and an ambush ensued.”

His body begins to tremble slightly, as if he's sitting outside without a coat in the dead of winter. I run my hands through his hair, over the side of his body, and caress his face, trying to comfort him. But he's telling his story now as if he's somewhere far, far away. Maybe he's still in that hellhole he's describing. Snaking fingers of dread are beginning to climb up my spine.

“It's pitch-black out there. My buddies are screaming instructions around me, trying to get the upper hand on the situation. I'm holding my sidearm, but my night vision is busted and I can't see well enough to know whether I'm shooting friendly or enemy. So I don't shoot. I can't.

“Then my guys' voices weren't screaming orders anymore, they were just screaming. And something exploded around us. After that I couldn't hear anything but the ringing in my ears. Everything else went quiet. Something hot sliced through the side of my fatigues, right here.” He runs a hand along his left side, where I know his scar lies.

There's a thin sheen of sweat covering his exposed skin. I can feel his growing agitation, but don't know what to do to calm him. So I just keep my hands on him, continuing to run them across his bare skin.

I place my hand directly over his sternum and squeeze my eyes shut when I feel how his heart is racing beneath my hand.

My Daredevil isn't scared of anything.

But it seems he's very, very afraid of this memory.

“You can stop if you want to, Dare.” My whisper is scratchy and urgent. I don't want him to feel like this. “You don't have to tell me.”

He grunts, giving a quick shake of his head.

“I want you to know,” he whispers raggedly. “I just want to get this out there between us. Because if you don't know all of me, of what I've done to be here with you right now…then you don't know me at all.”

I nod, and hot tears spring to my eyes.

“Okay, Dare. Tell me. I'm right here, and I'm not going anywhere.”

He sucks in a shuddering breath before he continues.

“When I woke up, I was somewhere stifling hot, and dark. I was on the floor, but my hands were chained above my head, cuffed at the wrists. My left side felt like it was on fire, and when I looked down I almost lost it. My side was sliced open, and there was a bandage covering it that was soaked in blood. I was woozy, I was aching. I knew right away that I wasn't going to make it. Not imprisoned the way I was. I just started praying, and I'd never done that before.”

The tears spill over, cascading down my cheeks. I love this man. I truly do, and everything he's telling me is just making my love grow. The fact that he's been through something like this is breaking me apart. I've only ever seen Dare as this strong, confident guy. The guy who makes me laugh. The guy who sweeps me off my feet. The guy who's made me fall in love with him. The little boy who endured so much heartache and pain is somehow a dark part of who makes him the man he is today. But this? This is something else altogether.

“I kept phasing in and out of consciousness, and I have no idea how much time passed. But after a while, the rebels came into the room in the hut where they were keeping me. I couldn't understand what they were saying. There were three of them. They were just screaming at me. I couldn't answer them. Finally, they got so pissed that they knocked me unconscious with the butt of one of their rifles.”

I jerk involuntarily. He strokes my hair again, trying to calm me.
He's
trying to calm
me
?

“Eventually, one of their leaders came in to talk to me. He was…a monster. The coldest man I've ever been in contact with, ever. He just sat across from me and stared for a long time. And then he would ask me a question in English. He'd ask about our military forces, about strategies that we used, about our plans for their rebel forces.”

He looks down at me, and his pupils are so wide they're swallowing his irises. It's a vast difference from the normally light green they usually are. It's startling. “And every time I refused to answer, he would hurt me.”

He must have read the look of horror on my face, because he shook his head. “It was always something minimal. He would break bones in my fingers or cut me somewhere on my body. Once time he broke my jaw. I've had so many surgeries to fix everything broken, I've lost count.”

The last remark is wry, and his lips twist in a humorless smile. “I never told him a damn thing.”

Finally, I can't contain myself anymore. “Dare…how long did they keep you there?”

He sits up, agitatedly running his hands through his hair and sighing. It takes him a long moment before he answers me.

Finally, he replies, “They intended to keep me there until they killed me, Berkeley. But I escaped before they had the chance.”

My mouth goes slack. I sit up beside him, and he leans back against the ivory upholstered headboard of my queen-size bed. “You escaped?”

He nods, weary now. “It was an act of God. I can't call it anything else. I should have died there in that hut. Hell, I should have died at the airfield like the rest of my guys. They uncuffed me when they tortured me. It was after one of our interview sessions that I was lying on the ground, beaten and broken…so they thought. I slipped into an unconscious state, and I guess they just left me that way because they thought that if I wasn't dead, I was close enough to it that I wouldn't be able to move, even if I did wake up. I shouldn't have been able to. But when I woke, I realized that I wasn't chained. My body was heavy and in really horrible pain, and I was bleeding from a head wound. My ribs were cracked. But somehow, I got to my feet. I could hobble pretty well, and that's what I did. They were gone. Must have been doing a raid on women and children.”

He sounds bitter, angry. And rightfully so. I can't believe what he's telling me is true. He should be wearing so many medals of valor he can barely stand up from the weight of them all. He should be commanding some humongous unit of men, even helping command a base. What the hell happened when he got back?

“As soon as I left my prison, I realized I wasn't alone after all. They'd left a guard just outside the hut. Just one guy.”

He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and looks me straight in the eye. His gaze is tortured. I gulp, terrified of what he's about to tell me.

“It was my only chance to escape, Berkeley, and I wasn't losing it. He wasn't expecting to see me there. I caught him by surprise, and…I killed him.” His eyes close briefly, and when he opens them again I see the bleak emotion filling them up. “I killed him with my bare hands.”

Tears stream silently down my face, and I can feel my body going numb as I listen to the rest of his story.

“It took me days of just surviving in the jungle to make it to the nearest village. I dragged myself forward, I ate what I could find, I drank rainwater. When I finally crossed into that village, into safety, I fucking cried. And then I passed out.”

I can't take my eyes off of him. “What happened? They contacted the army?”

He nods. “They did, with a short-wave radio. And the PJs were there within hours. I was a mess. I was in the hospital for a month after that. But when I finally got out, I wanted to go back to duty. I had to go through all the standard testing for that. Physical and emotional. I was cleared emotionally, somehow. But physically…I was done. I couldn't serve anymore, unless I wanted to be behind a desk. I'm not a desk kind of guy. So I took the discharge.”

My eyes widen in disbelief. I know, I can hear by the way he talks about his time serving, that he loved it. That it is in his blood and he's made to protect people. My heart cracks for him, right there on my bed.

“I'm so sorry, Dare. I don't even know what to say. The fact that you survived something like that…no wonder you still have nightmares. I hate that it even happened to you. I hate you can't do what you love anymore. I hate—”

“Berkeley.” He interrupts me, his voice so quiet I have to lean toward his face. “Did you miss the part where I just told you I killed someone with my bare hands?”

I shake my head quickly. “Do you think I'd judge you for that? My God, Dare. You're a soldier. It was your life, or his. I would never—”

He stops me with his lips. They're upon mine, and it's…different. It's tender, more loving than any kiss Dare has ever given me. His lips devour mine, as usual, but in a slow, agonizing way. When he pulls back, his eyes are fierce.

“Thank you,” he says.

My head is spinning, and I grip his shoulders to keep myself upright. He pulls me astride him, into his lap. We face each other, staring. “For being Berkeley. The only person on the planet that I could share that with in detail. I'll never tell you about everything that happened to me in that hut. But the fact that I could share that story at all…it's everything, Berkeley. It's
everything
.”

I reach up, tangling my fingers in his hair and pulling him toward me. My voice is just as fierce as his expression. “That part of you? The part of you who fought against the odds of being a product of the foster care system? The you who clawed your way back from hell out there in the jungle? The part of you that did whatever you had to do in every dangerous situation you've ever been in? I love that part of you just as much as all the other softer, sweeter parts, Dare. I love you for every facet you have. To me,
you're
everything.”