Romance: SCREWED (An Arranged Marriage to the NFL Bad Boy) (A New Adult Contemporary Athlete Sports Football Romance) (10 page)

Dean was sitting on his couch in a dimly lit living room cleaning his 9mm Beretta when the knock came at his door. There was only a single lamp turned on, both because the light still stung his eyes—an after effect of overindulging the night before—and because darkness suited his mood.

It was easier somehow in the dark to ignore the world outside. He could almost pretend nothing had changed, that the last few months had never happened…almost. A couple shots might do even more to kill the pain, but it was early in the day yet. He would wait until late afternoon at least.

He didn’t really need to clean the pistol, but the easy, practiced motions of the action, a ritual repeated hundreds of times before, soothed something inside him.

What did it say about him that he had only cold, hard steel that had been forged for violence to turn to when he was at his lowest…well, that was another thought best pushed back into the recesses of his mind. They were piling up back there, back in the corner that housed a childhood of abuse and violence, followed by an adulthood of the same- even if the violence by his own hands had always been for the right reasons.

Does being a monster on the government’s leash make me any less of a monster?

When the knock came, he was both relieved and wary—relieved to have a distraction to pull him from his dark thoughts, and wary because there was no one left who would visit him for companionship. James had been the only one, and now he was dead.

Dean shook off the thought as he went to answer the door. Then he wished to hell that he hadn’t.

There stood Maria, looking worn and fragile with a cardboard box clutched to her chest. He could see in her pinched brow and in her haunted but compassionate eyes that she was worried about him. He wished the worry on her face could help him to feel something besides regret and rage.

“What do you need, Maria?” The words came out hard and clipped.
Fuck, she didn’t deserve that
. It wasn’t her fault that looking at his dead friend’s wife had his insides torn to shreds. Christ, he was an asshole.

Her mouth tightened momentarily, but she didn’t return his tone. “I just brought some things over that you might want. Some things that were James’s, but I think he would want you to have them. Some pictures of the two of you, a few old home movies…I had them boxed up and ready, thought I would give you the box next time you stopped by, but you never came.” He could hear the accusation in her voice, barely restrained though she tried to hide it.

“I was going to Maria, I swear. I just…”
Couldn’t stand the thought of looking you in the eye.
“…didn’t get around to it.”

Then he saw her anger rise to the surface. Somehow the righteous fury in her eyes made him feel better. He deserved it.

“Couldn’t find the time, Dean? That’s just…fucking rotten.” The curse word fell heavy and flat from her lips. She was a gentle woman, not given to swearing or insults. “I can’t think of a single time my husband didn’t drop everything for you the second you needed him, didn’t come rushing when you called.”

She shoved the box at his chest and left with a rushed, angry gait. Her anger did nothing to rid him of the guilt that plagued his every waking moment though. It was only a fraction of what he deserved, a few paltry drops when he deserved a storm of retribution to cover him, surround him, fill his lungs...

With wooden steps he shuffled to the kitchen and upended the entire box into the garbage can. Somehow the sound of it hitting the bottom of the pail was a knife twisting in his gut.

How long he would have stood there, staring into space, he wasn’t sure, because another knock sounded at the door. Probably Maria, come back to give him another piece of her mind. God knew he deserved that and more.

It took a second for him to realize that it was not Maria, but Ava standing on his front step. When he said nothing to welcome her, she breezed past him into the living room like she had every right to be there. Dean was too emotionally exhausted to care one way or another at the intrusion. Ava froze when she saw the gun.

“Cleaning your gun, I see.” She tried to convey a light, mildly curious tone, but even she could detect the slight tremor in her own voice.

“Yes. It…soothes me.” Damn, admitting to the need to be soothed at all was a bad idea, he realized too late, but his emotions were raw and exposed after Maria’s visit.

“Cleaning it does?” This time her tone was inquiring, but not pressing.

“Using it, cleaning it. It’s…guns are what I’m good with, how I’ve made my living.”

“I see.” Somehow he felt like maybe she really did. “Teach me to use one then?”

“Why?”

“I’ve spent weeks now trying to bring you some measure of peace. If guns are what you need to feel that way, so be it. We’ll just consider it a new type of therapy.”

The words brought a smile to his face. The spark of humor surprised him, and encouraged him. It was the first light emotion he’d felt in a while, he realized. Even his lust for Ava was a heavy, weighty thing, an inexorable force rather than the light, easy encounters he’d had in the past.

“Guns for the crazies, huh? Something tells me the world won’t exactly embrace your methods, Doc.”

He took her to the range, though. They both rode on the back of his bike. He went slower than was necessary and took a longer route, relishing the feel of her arms around his waist. The innocent contact, the trust it took to get on a motorcycle with someone, was a balm to his wounded spirit.

Ava didn’t pressure him to talk about anything that he didn’t want to. They simply enjoyed each other’s company. Dean found that when he wasn’t using the attraction between them as both shield and weapon, that Ava was a woman that he admired, with a quick wit and a strong spirit. She was also most definitely someone who deserved much better than anything he had to give.

With an unusual burst of sentiment, he decided that he would take her easy affection today, cherish it as the gift it was. Tomorrow, though? Tomorrow he would give her a gift of his own. He would walk away. He would walk away and save her from being entangled with a monster. He would save her from giving a piece of herself to a man who would didn’t deserve her love.

When they came together that night, it was not a rushed and frantic encounter like the ones they’d had before. Dean laid her on his bed, tried to show her with every touch, every kiss, what he would never admit to her in words.

When he entered her warm, wet heat and plunged into her again and again it filled him with a sense of completion like nothing ever before. It was more than sex, he realized with surprise, though he wouldn’t allow himself to examine exactly what that meant.

Ava stretched, delighting in muscles that were slightly sore for all the right reasons. Last night had been nothing short of amazing. Dean had finally let his shields down, and what she found beneath them was everything she could ask for from a man. He had cherished her with his eyes, his words, his body. He had made love to her—no way could last night be described in any other way, though she’d never been one to romanticize sex, and the results had been satisfaction so complete that a small part of her wondered if she would ever be satisfied with anything less again.

Even if that was true, it might just have been worth it.

Ava hadn’t forgotten her intention of getting inside Dean’s defenses to help him—well, maybe she’d forgotten for just a few hours there, but who could blame her? The man did things to her that could make any woman forget her own name.

But, he’d opened up to her yesterday. Not enough to begin to confide in her about the last fateful mission he’d been on, but enough for her to hope that he would in the future. And if she had to warm his bed for a while longer before he did? Well, that was definitely fine with her.

She ran one hand down Dean’s back. He shivered in response to her touch but didn’t wake. With a smile she decided to make herself some coffee. She would wait for a bit, let him wake up so she could kiss him goodbye before she left, maybe even try to make plans for seeing him again…

She padded softly through the apartment, and found everything she needed to make a pot of coffee. When she went to dump out the old grounds though, there was a box upended into the trash can. She took it off and started to take the bag from the can so that she could replace it, but stopped when she saw several photos in the otherwise empty bag. She reached down and began to sift through the items. The photos were of Dean and James, and there were home burned DVD’s as well. Some of the pictures showed the two as boys. Their arms were around each other in most of them, and they had the too-bright smiles and haunted eyes of children who had already been to hell and back, who were leaning on each other to survive.

She rose when she heard Dean come into the room, one of the DVD’s still in her hand.

“Well, good morn—”  The words dried up on his tongue, and she saw stoic weariness replace the sleepy warmth that had been in his eyes.

“What is this, Dean?” She couldn’t understand what had led him to throw these things away. She saw him begin to put on the mask of sarcasm and humor that he used to hide his pain from her. But that wasn’t happening again. Not this time.

“Don’t, Dean. Just…don’t. If you think you’re going to convince me that something isn’t seriously wrong after this,” she swept one arm to motion toward the garbage can behind her, “then you must think I’m a damn idiot. I’ve skated around pushing you because I can recognize a man who won’t be forced when I see one, but I’m going to have some answers before I leave here today one way or another.”

She saw the flash of pure grief in his eyes before he banked his emotions, then saw the anger born of defensiveness well up inside him. She watched as he finally broke, sighed the old, weary sigh of a man much older than he was, a man who shouldered a lifetime of disillusionment and regret.

“Okay…Okay, Ava. But don’t be surprised when you don’t like what you hear.”

He crossed the distance and turned her face toward his own with a gentle finger beneath her chin. His kiss was filled with yearning, with regret.

“I had to do that, just once more.” She puzzled at his words as he took her hand and gently led her back into the living room where they seated themselves on the couch. Then Dean let go of her hand and moved a bit further from her before his gaze focused on an empty corner. His voice, when he spoke, was lifeless and flat.

“James and I were…he was the closest thing I had to family. We were from a pretty small town, and neither of us was that well behaved.” He smiled, presumably at some memory of the two of them, and the reflexive expression seemed totally at odds with the anguish in his eyes.

“No one wanted to keep either of us for long, so we were in a lot of the same temporary homes together, the halfway houses for boys that were a little too much to handle in a more…traditional atmosphere. At first it was because we were broken, hurt and lashing out. Eventually though half our antics were just attempts to be placed in the same home again. I felt…less alone when he was there with me. We joined the service together too, both made it through selection and training to become SEALs. Then he met Maria and got married.”

Ava said nothing, afraid that if she spoke he would retreat from her once again. Somehow she knew that if he did, nothing she could do would be enough to reach him.

“I was so damn happy for him, so damn proud. I thought one of us had actually managed to make it through our childhood and still have a full, happy life…and it was good, for a while. It was. Then things started to change. It seemed like after every one of our missions he left a piece of himself behind when he came home, until…”

Dean met her eyes then, and his anguish seemed to be its own entity, a heavy presence robbing the room of light and air. “Eventually there wasn’t anything left of James, the James I knew, at all. He started going missing when we were overseas, even though you’re never supposed to go anywhere alone in a combat zone. He’d come back and seem…kind of strung out. I thought maybe he was using. Not surprising considering how we grew up. I still think he might have been…”

Dean let his eyes go to the floor then, and Ava could tell that he struggled to force himself to speak the next words.

“When we were ambushed…James started smiling, like he was having the best time…then he…he started killing our team, Ava. He was like a man possessed. I…I had to take him out. I froze though. I’ve never frozen before, no matter what I’ve faced. But seeing him killing his own teammates, it was like my mind just couldn’t believe my eyes, you know? If I’d shot him sooner, I could have saved every last one of them. Hell, if I’d just mentioned to someone when I noticed something wasn’t right…”

Ava could hardly breathe through the lump in her throat, and she couldn’t stop the tears that were trailing down her cheeks any more than Dean could go back and change that which had already come to pass.

He continued speaking after a moment. “I didn’t help him when he needed it most…but the least I can do is let him die a hero, keep his wife and children from realizing the he died a traitor, a cold blooded killer.”

She laid a shaking hand on his arm.

“I’m so sorry, Dean. I never realized… I won’t tell a soul. I want you to know that. I swear it.” She moved her hands for emphasis, and his gaze fastened on the DVD that she’d forgotten she still held in her hand. She flinched as he tore it from her fingers.

Gone was the teasing lover from last night, the broken man of just a few moments ago. All she could see in his eyes now was a grief-fed rage that she feared might consume him. He threw the DVD across the room, and the sound of it hitting the wall was as loud as a gunshot in the quiet of the morning.

“Get the fuck out, Doc.”