“We’ll get to her,” he said, speaking quietly, his mouth at her temple.
She nodded her head and wove her fingers through his, holding his hand. He wanted to do more for her.
“Tell me your story,” she said, her words low so that he could almost believe they were in their own little world in the back seat.
Kaeden tensed, not wanting to share that part of his life with her. But he realized how ridiculous that was. Here he’d been this whole time pushing her to share her story, when he’d been holding back on opening up to her.
He took a breath and started, giving her the quick and dirty version. “In the last few months of my last tour of duty, I walked in on my platoon leader and a fellow marine in the middle of him assaulting her. I stopped it in time, but …” He stopped. What did he say? That the damage was already done?
It was. Alyssa had been traumatized and Kaeden’s faith in his platoon leader, a man he’d looked up to, was shot.
“She pressed charges and I backed her. It wasn’t supposed to come out, but of course it did. I honestly thought the rest of our platoon would back her, too, or at least our squad.”
“They didn’t?” she asked, running her free hand up and down his arm.
He shook his head. “A few, but most of them wanted the problem to go away. They wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened and her pressing charges went too far in their eyes.”
“Let me guess, they said she asked for it?”
“That, and worse. That it was consensual and she liked it rough. That she and I got caught together by our platoon leader and we’d made up the other story as a cover.”
“What happened in the end?”
Kaeden looked down at her, seeing eyes filled with nothing but kindness and sorrow. “She was abused all over again, tormented by the people who were supposed to be her brothers and sisters in arms. The people who should have had her back no matter what.”
“And you were, too?”
He shrugged. “Yeah. With me it got physical. I ended up with a lot of black marks on my record there toward the end. Not enough to end up with a dishonorable discharge or anything, but it wasn’t good.”
“What happened with her case?”
“She dropped it in the end. Put in for a transfer and it was granted. The reputation followed her, though.”
He was quiet. He didn’t want to tell her the rest of the story.
She squeezed his hand.
“She killed herself a year later,” he said, his words sounding hollow.
She continued to rub his arm as if she could soothe away the ache that always came when he thought about how he’d let Alyssa down.
Kaeden kept his eyes locked on her fingers where they were intertwined with his as he fought down the emotions that had roiled up to the surface at the retelling.
“Hey,” Jane said.
When he looked up to meet her eyes, she tilted her head toward the front of the car. “This team’s got your back.”
Kaeden’s chest tightened at that. He nodded. She was right. The people at Sutton had his back. He still couldn’t believe these men were in the car with them leaving a vacation with their families to help Jane.
It had been a no-brainer for him to leave with Jane to help her when she thought her mom might be in trouble. But when these men climbed into the car beside them, he knew he’d been wrong to keep his distance from them all these years. Wrong to let what had happened with Alyssa and his platoon and all the guys he’d served with convince him that he couldn’t trust the people around him.
He’d seen plenty of examples of the people at Sutton having each other’s backs over the time he’d been there. He should have opened his eyes and seen the truth of what he’d found with them.
They were family. He’d just been too damned stupid to see that before.
Chapter 32
Evan brushed the crumbs off his shirt as he climbed from the car. He had grabbed a pastry from the hotel coffee shop on the way out and ate it on the drive over.