“It’s a shame what happened to Chance. He was always a nice kid. A real charmer. Always wore his heart on his sleeve.” She shook her head. “Then he joined the Navy and got deployed overseas.”
“He was in the military?” I asked. I was surprised because he had never mentioned it.
“Oh yeah, he was Navy SEAL,” Daisy gushed. “And I’ve seen on the TV what they do. How hard they train. How fit they are. They’re so dangerous and manly, I get all hot and bothered just thinking about it.”
Daisy fanned herself while Molly looked at her as if she was crazy.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“Got himself blown up,” Molly said. “Barely survived. Spent months in a coma, burned and broken. It was real sad.”
I knew he was injured somehow—the scar on his face was telling—but I had never asked him about it and he had never mentioned it.
When the growl of a Harley alerted us to Chance’s arrival, we all went to the window and watched him turn on the street, all six-foot-four of him roaring into the parking lot and pulling up in front of the dinner. My heart did a double flip.
“If you haven’t fucked him,” Daisy whispered as she leaned in closer, “can I suggest that you do? A man like that doesn’t cross your path more than once in a lifetime.”
Her words echoed through me as I rode back to the cabin on the back of his Harley, my arms wrapped around the wall of muscle taking me home.
Fucking him wasn’t an option.
But letting him in was.
CASSIDY
We sat on the porch. It was our second night out under the stars. Relaxing on the deck chairs, we ate leftovers from the diner while the pink dusk darkened into an indigo twilight.
When we finished eating, Chance took our plates inside and turned on some music. Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Texas Flood” cruised out of the speakers.
Chance reappeared on the deck with a couple of beers.
“Molly mentioned you were a SEAL,” I said, accepting a beer from him.
He sat down slowly, his dark eyebrows drawn in. For a moment he didn’t say anything, and I saw the muscle in his jaw begin to flex. This was obviously something he didn’t like talking about. He took a gulp from the bottle before he spoke.
“Yeah, I was,” he said. “Got medically discharged last year.”
I wanted to ask what happened but didn’t want to upset him. In the end, I didn’t have to ask. Before I changed the subject, Chance offered me an explanation.
“An RPG was fired into the building where my team and I were conducting a surveillance mission. I was the only survivor.” He drew on his beer. “Got me put in hospital for some time. Got me medically discharged.”
“I’m sorry,” I said softly.
He looked at me, wearing his poker face, but I could see the pain in his eyes. I got it. You could mask the pain on your expression and in your body language, but in your eyes? Not a chance.
I wasn’t going to push him. Just like he didn’t push me.
Inside, Stevie Ray Vaughan changed to Katey Sagal’s “Strange Fruit.”
I put down the beer bottle. It was time to have the conversation I had avoided for days. It was time to bring down my walls and tell him everything.
“When my parents fostered me and brought me home, they let Barrett name me,” I said, drawing my knees up to my chest and looking up at the stars.
Surprised, Chance turned his head to look at me. “They did?”
I nodded. “My foster mom said later that it was to help him cope with the change. A way to include him. Unfortunately for me he didn’t see it that way. He saw it as ownership of me. Because in his warped mind, giving me my name made me his. I wasn’t his foster sister. I was his toy. His plaything.”
Chance was silent but his face was rigid, his eyes intense as he listened.
“When I was twelve and he was fifteen, he took me to an abandoned shack in the woods. He held me down and branded me with a branding rod he made in workshop at school.” I slid the hem of my dress up so Chance could see the dark scar seared into my hip. It was in the shape of a B.
B for Barrett.
“Motherfucker.” He exhaled, his eyes black.
“Like I said, he thinks I’m his.” My heart started to thud in my neck when I thought about what came next. I paused, choosing my words carefully. “A few weeks later, just after my thirteenth birthday, he forced me to return with him to that shack. Our parents were at some charity gala in DC and had left us in the care of our elderly nanny. Later, he admitted he’d drugged her tea with something.”