Protector #5 (A Navy SEAL Military Romance) (6 page)

Brian trailed off as he choked up. He bent
his head again and took a few deep breaths before looking up and saying,
“Claudia had taken two of her friends back to the bedroom to show them Daddy’s
“big gum,” that’s what she’d called it because we’d all laugh when she said it.
Anyway, she’d let her friend Caroline handle the gun and Caroline had
accidentally pulled the trigger. For some reason, Will hadn’t locked up the gun
or made sure the chamber was clear before he’d shoved it in the bedside drawer
and the bullet had gone straight through Claudia’s chest tearing her aorta in
half. She died almost instantly.”

“After that my mother started drinking
pretty heavily and
Will
got really strict with me. By
the time I hit high school, he was waking me up at dawn to do morning workouts
with him and came in to check that I’d made my bed according to regulation
before I went to school. I’ve always joked that the military was a cake walk
for me compared to what I lived with at home.” He stopped and gave me a weak
smile, and I squeezed his hand as I smiled back at him.

“Anyway, I haven’t been home in a couple of
years, I can’t go home. My mom is a raging alcoholic and Will is…well, he’s
Will. He ignores her drinking until she needs medical attention and then he
waits for her to dry out enough to be allowed to come home. Every time she does,
the cycle starts again and she winds up calling me to come get her because she
thinks Will is trying to kill her. I can’t go there without wanting to take a
drink myself, so I stay away.”

“You must feel really alone,” I observed.

“You have no idea—,” he stopped and looked
at me. “Oh wait, yes, you do.”

“
It’s
okay, Brian,”
I said. “I’m so sorry about your sister.”

“It happens,” he shrugged.

“Yeah, but I’m still sorry that it happened
to you,” I said quietly as I reached up and stroked his cheek with my fingers.
He closed his eyes and leaned into my touch. “It’s going to be okay,” I
whispered.

Brian nodded, then opened his eyes and
leaned down and kissed me deeply. I held his face between my palms as I
returned his kiss and felt the two of us sharing all of our pain and loneliness
in a way that made it a little more bearable.

“We’re going to get through this and we’ll
be okay,” I whispered into his lips.

*****

We
lay in bed together
for half the morning before Brian said he was hungry and that we needed to get
something to eat. I agreed and got up to go shower and get ready. We decided to
go down to the restaurant for a change, so I took my time getting ready. I
smiled at myself in the mirror as I stroked a coat of mascara on my lashes and
then dusted peach blush on the apples of my cheeks to give me a little color.
We’d been inside so long that I felt like I hadn’t seen the sun in ages.

I pulled on a jean mini skirt and a loose
fitting t-shirt before I slipped my feet into a pair of thin black thongs. I looked
at the rumpled bed and smiled to myself when I remembered the way Brian had
held me against his chest and moved inside me. There was no denying that we had
something special, and there was no way I was going to give it up after this
was all said and done. I wanted him in my life and I was going to find a way to
make that happen, no matter what I had to do. I could switch schools if I had
to, I didn’t want to, but I had decided I would if it meant that Brian and I
could be together.

I grabbed my purse and skipped out into the
living room to find Brian standing in the middle of the room holding my open
laptop in one hand and running his other hand over his crew cut with an
anguished look on his face. I gave him a confused look before I realized what he
was looking at — the letter! He’d found the email I’d written to Dominic.

“Ava, really?” he said with so much pain in
his voice it broke my heart. “You wrote this yesterday? And sent it?”

“Brian, no wait, let me explain,” I cried as
I moved to take the computer from him. He held it up over his head, far out of
my reach as a sad look of betrayal spread across his face.
 

“I think this is pretty self-explanatory,
don’t you?” he said quietly. “You’ve spelled it all out pretty clearly.”

“That’s not what I meant!” I cried. “I was
trying to trap him, not get back together with him! He’s a psycho, and I wanted
to catch him so that I could get back to my life — our life!”

“I’m not quite sure I see that here, Ava,”
he said. “What I see is a woman who is still in love with her ex-boyfriend and
who resents the guy her father hired to protect her.”

“I only said that so he wouldn’t try and
hurt you, Brian!” I frantically tried to convince him of my plan, but since I’d
never breathed a word of it, he’d been caught unaware. I didn’t blame him for
being angry, but I didn’t want him to believe that anything I’d written in that
letter could possibly be true. “I love you, Brian! That’s the honest truth! I
love you, not that jerk who abused me and made me feel worthless!”

“Could have fooled me,” Brian said sadly. “I
don’t believe you. I think you’re playing both sides and waiting to see who
wins.”

“Oh my God! You are so pig headed!” I
yelled. “Why can’t you trust me? Why don’t you believe me?” I stopped yelling
and began crying in frustration. He was choosing not to believe me, and there
was no way I could convince him that I’d had a plan to try and trap Dominic.

“Ava, I wish I could believe you, I really
do,” he said. “But I can’t.”

Continued
in Protector #6, the protector series.
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This
book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are
products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not
to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual
events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Copyright
© 2015 Claire Adams