Another puckered mark a couple of inches below his defined pec. A bullet hole.
My craving for chocolate waned at the very real evidence of how hard the world had already worked to take him away.
I swallowed bile.
I focused my attention away from the body and the ash in my stomach to my sister, drooling over my man.
Wait, did I say “my man?”
“Polly,” I hissed, snapping my fingers at her and wondering if I needed to dose her with a spray bottle in case she humped his leg or something.
Her eyes moved to me.
“I approve. Hard.” Her voice was dreamy. Well, dreamier than usual. “Despite you lying to me about this yesterday.” She shook her finger at me, chastising like she wasn’t six years younger than me and not yet able to legally drink.
Keltan grinned.
I gritted my teeth. “Keltan, this is my baby sister. Polly, this is Keltan.”
“Yes, it is,” she breathed.
Keltan’s grin widened. He held out his muscled arm. “Nice to meet you, Polly.”
She stared at it. The arm. The tattoos snaking up it. She was a sucker for tattoos, unfortunately. Well, and any male who had the chance to ruin her heart. I used to think our difference between men was summer and winter. But maybe I just hadn’t been able to see the leaves for the trees.
“Dude, he has an accent? Why do you still have clothes on?” she asked, quickly shaking his hand with a cheeky smile.
I put my head in my hands.
An echoing horn sounded in the distance. I glanced to my front door, which Polly had left open.
“Oh, right,” she said. “I’ve got a cab waiting for me, and I spent my last twenty getting the wine, which in turn made me pass out on a sofa smelling of old people.” She screwed up her nose. “So, I need you to pay the man who saved me from that. Tip him good,” she ordered, pointing her finger at me.
I rolled my eyes. That was not the first time a version of this had happened. Or even the fifth. “I’ll get my purse.”
Keltan’s hand on my arm stopped me from moving. “I got it, babe,” he murmured, eyes dancing with amusement.
He snatched his shirt off the sofa, and both Polly and I watched him shrug it on. The only thing we needed was David Attenborough narrating the process, we were watching him that intently.
He winked at me before heading towards the door where the horn of the cab beeped once more.
As soon as he crossed the threshold and was out of sight, Polly was across the room, snatching my arm painfully.
“Okay, spill. Now,” she ordered.
“Ouch,” I hissed, trying to struggle from her grasp, but for a tiny thing, she was strong. “For someone into peace and free love, you sure are violent with your only sister.”
“Well, that only sister was keeping a big muscled and deliciously accented man from me,” she accused.
I glared at her. “I wasn’t keeping him from you… exactly,” I said. “He only just arrived.”
She rose her brow. “From where? Valhalla?”
I scowled. “No. Deployment.”
She dropped her hand and gaped me. “No. Fucking. Way. He’s a soldier?”
“Wipe your face, you’re drooling.” I gave her a look. “Plus, I thought you were against war. Passionately. You dragged me along to enough marches. That should translate to those who fight in them.”
“I am,” she defended. “But I’m not against men in uniform. In fact, I’m thoroughly for men in uniform. I think I might start up a march to stop the wars but keep the uniforms.”
“Hate to disappoint, Polly, but I gave the uniform up,” a deep voice said from the hallway. “And unfortunately, as long as greedy assholes with guns and money exist, so will war.”
We both jumped.
“Well you shouldn’t. Give up on being a soldier, that is,” I said. “Your stealth skills are pretty good.”
My words were merely that. Words. No way did I want him back over in a place that people, more often than not, didn’t come back from. And even the ones who did come back, they weren’t exactly the people who left either. One only had to ask Jagger, or people who knew him before he came home from the war that disfigured not only his outsides but his insides too.
Keltan grinned, showing no signs of disfigurement, or maybe just hiding it better than the rest. He continued his journey to me, snatching my waist and pulling me into his side easily, naturally, as if such as gesture was something he did all the time in front of my sister, who had just caught us on the precipice of having sex on the sofa.
“I don’t think that surprising two arguing siblings, both of whom seem to be reasonably hungover, is considered a stealth skill. In fact, it’s just called walking,” he teased. His twinkling eyes went down to me, smoldering with more than a little desire as his grip on my hip tightened. “Though I do know how you feel about walking,” he murmured in my ear.