Handcuffed by Her Hero (33 page)

She stopped in her tracks. She
was too stunned to move. She blinked hard. Then again.

Sure enough, Trevor hauled Zeke
into a huge hug.

There was too much chaos in the
room for her to catch everything Trev said, though she caught the more emphatic
snippets, such as “saved her goddamn life” and “we all owe you, man,” and
something about keeping Z in a lifetime stock of his beer choice.

Rayna shook her head, so tempted
to indulge a full laugh. But if that happened, she knew the tears would come
next. Fate had a crappy sense of humor sometimes. The very day Z earned
Trevor’s confidence was the day he didn’t need it anymore.

She turned back toward her other
brothers, who were still bunched together and smirking like a home
transformation team getting ready to spring the Big Reveal on her. “What the
hell are you mouth breathers up to now?”

Dallas flashed his sideways grin,
putting her senses on higher alert. “If we said we have a bigger surprise,
would you believe us?”

She folded her arms. “Define
‘surprise.’ You guys have used that term for everything from trying to pierce
my ears yourselves to inviting yourself along on prom night.”

Dallas scowled. “Prom night was
fun.”

“Both junior
and
senior
year?”

It was the retort that pushed at
Rayna’s lips, only she got beaten out on uttering it by a saucy,
slight-accented voice from somewhere behind Arah. A woman’s voice.

She gasped. It wasn’t just any
woman.

“Oh, shit!”

She shoved her brothers from the
front while they got jostled apart from the back. When a distinct pair of dark
indigo eyes came into view, topping an infectious smile that was surrounded by
a luxurious forest of dark brown hair, she let out a scream worthy of a fifteen
year-old. Ava did the exact same. They dove into each other’s arms and shrieked
some more.

That lasted for all of ten
seconds.

Their cries were turned into
stunned yelps as they were yanked apart with militaristic force. The qualifier
was spot on, since the force was Ethan Archer. He body-slammed Ava until she
tumbled back onto the couch. Ethan followed her trajectory, though the mound of
tulle into which they fell turned everything into the consistency of a water
slide. The two of them disappeared onto the floor and under the fabric as all
seven of her brothers
and
Zeke looked on with a smorgasbord of stunned
laughter.

“Nice work, Archer!” Z called.
“You got her!”

Rayna didn’t bother shooting him
a glare. “Ava?” she yelled. She paddled through the fabric, instantly worried
when she didn’t feel her cousin fishing from the other direction. “Ava, are
you—” She froze after lifting a wad of the gold pile to discover where her
cousin and the soldier had landed. “Oh my!”

Ava had landed on her back. Ethan
wound up pretty much on top of her. Though he braced himself on both elbows,
their noses and mouths practically touched. They were both breathing hard, and looked
like they’d enjoy nothing better than getting sealed back inside their golden
cocoon.

A sliver of envy twinged at her.
Twenty-four hours ago, she was sure she gazed at Z a lot like that.

She compensated for the pain with
sardonicism. “Sergeant Ethan Archer, may I introduce Ms. Ava Chestain?”

Ethan’s black lashes lowered as
he took in all of her face. “Ava,” he echoed. “That’s really pret—” He huffed
an interruption. “Wait.
Chestain
?”

Trevor scooted closer. “She’s our
cousin, man.”

When Ethan snapped his gaze back
to her, Ava beamed her gorgeous smile again. She got a hand up in a fast wave.
“That’s me. Cousin Ava.”

Ethan glowered. And…
blushed
?
“I thought you were a terrorist.”

Ava bit her lip. Her hand fell to
the bulge of Ethan’s bicep. “Not a terrorist.” She practically whispered it.

“No. Definitely not.” Ethan’s
answer was just as intimate.

“You two going to get a room?”
Trevor interjected.

“Just not the guest room.” Zeke
added it with a smirk in his tone and on his lips—while his eyes latched again
to Rayna. He was back to staring with that golden fire that made her long for
nobody and nothing but him. Half of her yearned to toss the tulle back on top
of her cousin, grab his hand, and head straight for the spare room he’d
mentioned. The other half was tempted to heave the entire ball at him before strangling
him with it.

In the end, she decided on door
number three. The frustration, fury, and helpless angst exit.

With a heave, she dumped the
tulle mound back across the couch. With another thrust, she got back to her
feet and dashed out the slider. Somehow, she got out a believable excuse about
needing to get some fresh air. The pretext seemed to stick with everyone, even
Trevor.

Everyone except Zeke.
Of
course.

He caught up to her as she hit
the packed dirt path that ran around the lake. “Bird? You okay?”

She didn’t break her pace. “Stop
that.”

“What?”

“You know what!” Everything
darkened as they clanged through a gate in order to leave the condo complex and
enter the woods. “You don’t get to call me that anymore. You don’t get to call
me anything anymore, except my damn name.”

“But I’ve been calling you that
for months. Why—”

“Because nothing’s the same.” She
flung the words like whip cracks as she halted and turned on him. “Nothing
will
be the same.”

Damn it.
Fresh air, her
ass. The wind soughed through the trees and lifted his thick hair from his
rugged face—and goaded the edges of her self-control. She had to purposefully
drag in air in order to keep speaking. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “but you
don’t get the Friend Zone back, Z.”

The words clearly tore into
him—and her, too. Sudden and stinging as a fall into ice, the tears came and
fell. Her words fell out on ragged chokes. “You don’t get to call me ‘bird’
without me wanting to fall to your feet. You don’t get to call me ‘honey’
without me craving to give you my wrists. You don’t even get to laugh at the
damn radio without me wishing your lips were against my ear as you do.” She
whirled, unable to keep looking at the tormented crevices that formed around
his eyes, at the corners of his full lips. “And you don’t get to keep sneaking
those looks at me!”

She heard him take a step.
“What’re you—”

“Stop! You know exactly what I’m
talking about! Those—those stares. The ones you level when you don’t think I’m
watching. The ones you steal at me when you don’t think your soul’s listening,
either. But goddamnit, Zeke, it’s listening, all right. I know it because I
have to stare back, and I have to endure looking all the way down inside you
again. And when I do, I hate you even more, because it’s so golden
and—and—giving—and breathtaking—and the only one who doesn’t see any of that is
you
!”

At some point, she wheeled back
toward him. He didn’t try to get any closer and actually reminded her of one of
the trees that surrounded them, rooted in place but rocking in the wind. “I
never wanted to hurt you, Rayna.” His voice sounded like shredded bark. “God
damn
it.
I’m trying like hell
not
to hurt you.”

She swayed now, too. “I know.”

“When I get back in a few months,
this will all be better.”

“Bullshit.” She shot him a bitter
laugh. “Sir.”

“Z!” Garrett’s bellow shot
through the woods. “Dude, you out here? Let’s get started on this list, man!”

After a long second, Z called,
“Yeah. Give me five, would ya?”

Garrett didn’t respond. The
silence spoke his friend’s impatience loud enough. Rayna kicked the ground,
making messy divots of mud and leaves. She only stopped when Zeke threaded the
ends of his fingers through the tips of hers and squeezed. She clenched every
muscle in her body to avoid tugging herself into him, begging him to
reconsider, telling him they could take this a day at a time, that this was
worth trying for…worth fighting for.

“You going to be okay?” he
finally whispered.

She forced in a lungful of the
icy air. Gave him a shaky nod. “I’ll make it work, Sergeant,” she told him.
“That’s what you guys do against the bad guys, right?”

He chuckled quietly and pressed
his lips to her knuckles. “Exactly.”

“Okay, then.”

She just had to pretend the bad
guys were her own heart and spirit. For forty-eighty more hours, she was
officially at war with herself.

Z needed a beer. Or twelve. Actually,
he needed it an hour ago—at the moment he’d forced his legs to walk from those
woods, away from Rayna. But hell, he really needed them now. After nine slices
of wedding cake, he was fucking ready.

 Only now, there was a hefty line
at the dry cleaning shop.

After he growled for the fifth
time, Garrett backhanded him in the chest. “Chill, assface.
What
is your
goddamn problem?”

“Oh, I dunno,” he drawled. “Maybe
I’ve got Diabetes now. Seriously, Hawk. Eight different flavors? What the hell
is lavender buttercream? Apple tiramisu? Cake is chocolate, man. Frosting is
white. The roses are yellow, and—”

“Goldenrod.”

“What?”

 “The roses are goldenrod, you
cretin. They have to match the napkins.”

He would’ve laughed, but his
shock eclipsed even that. “You are beyond pussy-whipped. I can’t even figure it
out. What’s the term for what you are?”

“In love.”

He fell into silence. He wasn’t
arguing with that one. Hell, he didn’t want to. “Well played, fucker,” he
muttered, grinning at the look of total serenity on Garrett’s face. “Well
played.”

As his friend took a second to
preen, the line moved forward at last. Two girls moved in behind them, giggling
openly. Zeke attempted to ignore their high-pitched titters, but they were
gaping right at him. He got in a surreptitious peek at his reflection in the
shop’s glass front. Aside from the fact that his hair was way too long due to his
cover on the Korean mission, nothing was out of place.

The girls laughed again. He
rolled his eyes behind his sunglasses. Fuck. Nearly thirty years old, and he
felt like a farty old man.

“Um…excuse me?” One of the girls,
a little blond in a tank top that exposed more that it covered, looked up at
him with little bats of her lashes. “Can I ask you something?”

Zeke gave her a polite smile.
Though he and Garrett were wearing civvies, they carried their dress blues on
hangers over their shoulders, which meant they were representing the Army as if
they stood here in full work attire and boots. “Sure thing, miss.” He glanced
at his watch. “It’s almost three thirty.”

The second girl, probably a
little older, wore too much eye makeup and an inch of lip gloss that reminded
him of the damn lavender cake. “Ohmygawd, he thought we were asking him for the
time,” she said. “Ohmygawd, that’s so humble.” She twirled her hair around a
purple fingernail. “And hot.”

Z frowned. “Pardon me?”

The little blond let out a sigh.
“Um, I think what we’re trying to say is…um, you
are
Zeke Hayes, right?”

“You totally are,” insisted the
brunette. “I mean, come
on
, Jade, look at him!” She gingerly poked his
arm. “Ohmygawd, your muscles are way huger in person. And
so
hard.”

He shot a gape at Garrett. His
friend was already wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. He was getting
no
fucking help there.

“What you did to those two
creepazoids on Saturday night was amazing,” Jade gushed. “When we saw you on
the news, we were so proud to be Seattleites, just like you. I called my
stepsister in Omaha and totally bragged that you’re from Lewis-McChord. Your
woman is so lucky. Do you think I could have her cell? I want to find a guy
just like you, Zeke. Could she give me pointers on how to do it?”

“Uh, listen—she’s not—”

My woman.
The conclusion
clung to the inside of his mind tighter than the inside of his mouth. The
syllables wrapped themselves through the rest of him, too, ribbons that twirled
through every nerve and muscle and breath… that were all imprinted with Rayna.
Her bright beauty. Her cinnamon scent. Her husky laugh. Her pure, sweet
passion. She was wound so deeply into him…

And now you’re
going to have to cut those ribbons out, man. Every single one of them. Soon,
goddamnit.

“She’s not what?” Jade queried
with wide-eyed hope.

Just not now.

“She’s—erm—not around. Yeah,
uh—we’re getting married. I mean, we have
friends
who’re getting
married. She’s busy helping with all the plans. Not here. She’s doing
it—uh—somewhere else. I probably need to be getting back, too, and—”

“Could we have your autograph
real quick?” Lavender Lipgloss asked it with a sweet grin. She was better at
the eye-batting thing than her friend.

Zeke glowered. “What the hell do
you want that for?”

Garrett stepped forward. “Sorry,
girls. We haven’t given him his medication yet today. Of course you can have
his autograph. Got a pen?” He accepted a Sharpie from Jade then handed it to Z.
“Paper?”

“Don’t need any.” The brunette
jerked down the neckline of her shirt, exposing half of her full, pale breast. “Just
sign right here, Sergeant Hottie.”

To Garrett’s credit, he didn’t
spit up any residual cake in laughter. But damn, did his eyes say he wanted to.
They glittered with bright blue mirth as his lips twitched, also fighting not
to explode with his obvious delight in this ridiculous scene. “Go ahead,
Sergeant Hottie.”

Zeke jabbed the pen back into his
chest. “No.”

“Huh?” The girl pouted her shiny
lips. “Why not?”

“Hawk, I’m
not
signing
that chick’s left headlight.”

“I think these are what you girls
might need?”

Magically, a couple of issues of
the
Stranger
materialized in front of the girls. While Z was grateful
for something to write on other than their chests, he gawked at the paper’s
front page, and realized way too late that Garrett was doing the same thing. The
alt culture periodical featured a shot of him from behind in the rain, the
blood from the gash in his back running down his back. He looked like some
idiot off a comic book, an impression that got driven home by the headline.

Batman Lives.

The mire in his gut got stirred
into a straight-up case of
holy shit
when he looked up to thank his
savior.

“Luna.”

She looked strange. She looked…normal.
Aside from the lavender and silver streaks in her hair, which was pulled back
with a nondescript headband, she could’ve been another pretty girl going about
her day in this strip mall. She wore normal blue jeans that were topped with a
pretty hand-painted T-shirt that he recognized as her own work thanks to the
sleeping white cat depicted at the edge of one sleeve. Even her makeup was
subdued. And kind of nice.

“Hi, stranger.” She said it with
a smile that bordered on nervous.

“Hey,” he managed to stammer. “How
did you—I mean what are you—”

“There’s a great art supply place
down the street. But I like the barbecue place in here, so I stopped to pick up
dinner for later.”

She gave the explanation as he
whisked off a couple of signatures for the girls. As he let Jade snap a picture
of him and Lipgloss, Garrett shocked the crap out of him by smiling at Luna.
Since the second they’d met, the two had been repelling magnets. As soon as
they got near each other, their disgust made the earth leave its axis.

“Thanks. Your timing was perfect,
Morticia.” Hawk added a wink to the nickname he usually flung at her in
dismissive ire.

Maybe the earth’s axis was doomed
again, since Luna actually laughed. “Anytime, Cousin It.”

Garrett scratched at his hair,
which matched Z’s in the thick-and-styleless department. “Ha ha. Guess I’ll own
that one, at least for another hour. Then it’s all back to a high-and-tight.”

“Getting ready for the big day,
huh?” She finished it with another laugh, in response to Garrett’s stunned
stare. “You and Sage were the subject of most conversations at the club last
night. Congratulations, by the way.”

Hawk’s grin widened. “Thanks.”

Zeke shifted forward. “As much as
I hate to rip apart this alternate universe we’ve clearly entered, can I ask
for a second with Morticia, Hawk Man?”

“No prob,” his friend returned. “I’ll
handle the turn-in while you do that. So hand over the Batsuit, dude. I’ll make
sure they remember no starch.”

“Thanks, Alfred.” He gave the
uniform to his friend with a satisfyingly harsh shove.

As Garrett chuckled and turned
into the shop, Z dug his hands into his back pockets and nudged his head gently
toward a little alcove near a door marked
Smoothie Bar Employees Only.
Luna followed his direction without a word, pressing herself against the wall.

Once he joined her, Zeke took a
long second to look her over—carefully this time. She kept her head slightly
bowed, her eyes fixed on his chest, and her hands gracefully to her sides. Oh,
yeah. She had it all down perfect. Luna always did. She was flawless about the
stance, the posture, the demeanor, the phrases. Regrettably, she thought that
was all it took. Her impatience had torpedoed even second sessions with so many
Doms. He’d told her that before, promising she’d always have his honesty.

That promise didn’t stop now.

“So…hey,” he finally repeated.

She watched his hands as he
shifted them in his pockets. Her gaze darkened with disappointment.
Don’t
think about it, girl. They’re staying right there.

“Hey,” she replied quietly.

“I’m glad we ran into each
other.”

She shot a glance up to his face.
“Yeah. Welcome back.” Almost like an afterthought, she added, “From wherever
you were.”

“Luna, about that—”

“Skip it.” She held up a hand and
curled it back against her neck. “I’m serious, Z. You don’t have to do this. I
understand, okay? Saturday night was great. Thank you…for everything. But
afterward, I wasn’t a priority. I didn’t expect to be. You had shit to take
care of, and—”

He disobeyed his own damn rule to
flash a hand up, slamming it over her mouth. “Damn it, you
were
a
priority,” he leveled. “Your submission was incredible. I’m humbled that you
trusted me as you did. And I would have told all of that to you a hundred times
if shit hadn’t gone down like it did with that bastard Mua and his goons.”

She nodded and lifted an
unblinking gaze up through her lashes. The dark purple flecks in her eyes
glittered as the late afternoon sun bathed her face. When he lowered his hand,
she murmured, “You don’t like him very much, do you?”

“To put it mildly.”

“Why?”

He peered at her in curiosity.
The question wasn’t normal for Luna. She wasn’t the nosy poodle type. She was
the watchful cat in the corner, seeing everything, forgetting nothing,
revealing only if there was a worthy treat in the process. That meant he had to
phrase his reply with care. The shit that had gone down with King was
classified. For all intents, despite the viral video and the news coverage, the
shit that had gone down on Saturday in the street was, too.

“Scars,” he finally said. “Gashes
that are long over but remembered forever.”

The glints in her eyes were
joined by a wet sheen. She gulped deep. “Yeah. I know the feeling.”

Zeke winced. He knew the remorse
wasn’t required of him but it showed up, anyhow. He followed up on
every
play
session with a subbie, no matter how big or small their exchange. For Luna,
Saturday night had been big. Blowing-up-the-Death-Star big. And he’d flown
right out of the galaxy.

“Luna, listen—”

“Didn’t I say to skip it?” The
cat came out of the corner, damn near hissing the words. “I said I understand,
Z. You had bigger issues at hand than my sub drop. I got it, I got it.”

He moved in and braced a hand to
the wall next to her head. “You have every right to be tweaked. But I have
every right to explain.”

“There’s nothing to explain.”

“I had no idea Rayna was going to
show up.”

“But she
did
.” Her lips
twisted. “Didn’t she? Oh, how lucky for all of us that Princess Rayna chose to
grace the Bastille with her resplendence!”

He cracked his neck. Why the fuck
wasn’t that working to knock thoughts properly anymore? “Be careful where
you’re going with this, Luna.”

“Like you were careful on
Saturday, Sir? Like you
thought
about
anything
when her highness
got into trouble? Or did you just activate your royal guard card and fly to her
side, hoping to hear her gasp in sweet thanks?”

He shoved away. For the first
time ever, this woman really scared him. The vehemence in her voice, fired so
completely at Rayna, awakened every hair of the grizzly in him. Like that bear,
he exercised a choice. Walk away from the provoker or tear them open with a
swipe of his paw. He decided on the former before the latter tempted him deeper.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t
say that, girl.” He growled the last word so low, she wouldn’t be confused
about his meaning. “And maybe you should, too.”