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  “I need more than that, Church. You can’t really expect to ask me something like that and want an answer with no explanation.” Everything inside of me was surging and rushing, trying to catch up with this new, unexpected turn of events.

  He heaved a sigh that lifted and dropped his thickly muscled chest. “When my family asked me to come home, instead of telling them I needed time, that I wasn’t ready to face them and the real world yet, I told them I was hanging out in Denver because I met a girl. I thought it would get them off my back, and it did . . . sort of.”

  I sucked in a breath and shifted my legs under the now clammy and cool towel. “You lied to your family?” I didn’t like that one bit.

  “I’ve been lying to them for years. When they wanted to know where I was, what I was doing . . . I lied. Every time they asked if I was safe and I told them things were fine, it was a lie. This was just one more lie that I told so they didn’t have to worry about me. I wasn’t ready to go back, now I am, but I need you to go with me. There’s an eighty-year-old woman that’s counting on me to come through for her and I need you to make that happen.” He said it all so point-blank and matter-of-factly that I was convinced maybe I was dreaming the whole thing. Maybe I was still wrapped up in bed with Dolly snoring next to me. Maybe my last date had been bad enough that I’d officially gone off the deep end.

  I reached out and grabbed the taut skin above the top of his jeans. There wasn’t any fat there to trap between my fingers but I still managed to get a solid pinch in. Church swatted my hand away and took a step towards the door. “What in the hell was that for?” He rubbed the spot through his T-shirt and glared at me.

  “Well, clearly I’ve stumbled into a terrible romantic comedy and Hugh Grant is going to burst through the door any second, either that or you’ve been reading too many romance novels and are using the plot that’s in pretty much all of them to fuck with me. You can’t possibly be asking me to pretend to be your fake girlfriend in real life. That shit doesn’t happen.” I kicked the soggy towel off my legs and climbed to my feet. I pointed a shaky finger at him. “You better not be asking me to lie to your family for you, Church, because that is something I won’t do and I won’t forgive you for asking me to do.”

  He swore again and held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’m not asking you to lie, Dixie. You keep telling me we’re friends, well, I need you to be exactly that. I just need you to be my friend in front of my family.”

  I scoffed at him. “That’s ridiculous.”

  When he was within touching distance he reached out and put one of his hands on my shoulder and used the knuckles of the other to tilt my chin up so that I had no choice but to gaze up at him. “I’m asking you because you are the only person that can help me. I’m asking you because I know you mean it when you say you care about me.” The pad of his thumb moved along the edge of my jaw and again I forgot how to breathe.

  “That’s not fair, Church.” I didn’t like that it felt like he was using my inherent desire to see the people I cared about happy and whole against me.

  “Never claimed to be the kind of guy that plays fair, pretty girl.”

  Pretty girl.

  It was like a knife in my already bleeding heart.

  “I don’t know if this is something I can do.” I wanted to because I wanted him to find the peace he was obviously lacking, but I also wanted to be able to look at myself in the mirror every day and not hate the woman I saw staring back at me. I wanted the fairy tale my mom talked about, the dream guy my sister managed to land, but I never wanted to be desperate or pathetic in order to get it. Love was supposed to make you better, not make you hate the person you became in order to obtain it.

  His gruff voice rumbled from somewhere over my head since I couldn’t force myself to look up at him as my mind whirled and my heart thudded heavy and painful in my chest. “I know it’s asking a lot, but I’m asking anyways because I don’t have a choice.” That was probably true. He was a man that very much handled things on his own terms and in his own way. He was a creative problem solver, proven by the fact he was standing in front of me regardless of the hell he had seen and the terror he had witnessed firsthand.

  “You should’ve been honest with your family from the get-go. Neither one of us would be in this spot if you had been.” I didn’t mean to snap at him but I felt a little cornered and he was still stroking my jaw, which was making my head fuzzy and my resolve weak.

  “That ship sailed a long time ago.” He sounded mad about the fact, but all the anger was directed inwards, into that void of darkness that lived in the center of him.

  “I don’t want you to be a liar, Church.” That wasn’t the kind of man that had made me fall so far and so fast.

  “I promise on my mother that I won’t ever lie to you, Dixie.” He sounded so sincere, so earnest that my heart finally overthrew my brain’s tyranny over my common sense. He needed me, and I think we both knew from the outset that there was no way I could deny him help when he asked for it. It wasn’t in my nature to deny someone I cared about my help and there was no way I could tell the person that I was stupidly sprung on “no.”

  I blew out a breath that made the floppy hair in front of my face dance. I lifted my hands so I could wrap them around his wrists. It made me shiver when I couldn’t even get my fingers to touch as I tried to close the circles around them. His pulse kicked hard under my fingertips.

  “I need to make sure it’s okay with Rome that I go, and I need to get someone to watch Dolly for a few days. If I can get all that squared away then I’ll come with you.” I was convinced any kind of happy-ever-after for me involved him but I was starting to wonder if his was a different kind of happy-ever-after that had nothing to do with realizing I was the one for him. It sounded like his happy-ever-after involved closing rifts and knitting breaches that stretched far and wide. He needed me in an entirely different way than I needed him. The knowledge stung but I still couldn’t deny that I wanted to be the one that he turned to for help. I also wanted to be the one to help him even if it hurt my heart.

  He stared at me without speaking for a long, drawn-out moment and then slowly nodded. He let go of my face and stepped back.

  “I already cleared your time off with Rome. We had a long talk this morning when I told him I had to leave. He called Avett in to cover for you the next week or so. I told him I wasn’t sure when I was putting you on a plane back home.”

  I scowled a little bit and started to follow him out of the bathroom. “You were so sure I was going to agree to this nonsense?” That was annoying.

  He looked at me over his shoulder and his lips quirked again like he was trying to smile and he simply forgot how. “I was. You always come through for your friends, and even though I never gave you reason to, you’ve considered me a friend from the get-go. I’m gonna go clean up that mess in your kitchen. Maybe you want to put some pants on before your guest gets back with the dog.”

  I looked down at my still-splotchy legs and then back up towards his retreating back with a huff. At the sound he turned around and looked at me over his shoulder with a lifted brow. “I think it’s pretty cute you’re all grumbly and scowly when you first wake up. You’re like a furious kitten looking for something or someone to put your claws in.”

  I sat there with my mouth hanging open and staring at the space he was no longer in. No one thought I was cute in the morning. No one except Church apparently. I groaned and dropped my head into my hands.

  I should have stayed in bed. Nothing good ever happened before noon.

  Chapter 4

  Church

  I should have been elated that she’d agreed to go with me, it saved me the hassle of trying to explain why I lied to my family, but all I could feel was all-encompassing relief that the good-looking redheaded man that had answered the door was family and not someone who had had the pleasure of spending the evening in her bed.

  I’d wanted to rip his heavily tattooed arms
off and beat him within an inch of his life with them when he pulled open the door looking understandably irritated at my early morning visit. He’d seemed far too comfortable in Dixie’s home and there was no stopping the flood of jealously and the flickering flames of rage that raced through my blood when he looked at me like I was the interloper. I’d held myself back because I didn’t want to hurt her and I didn’t want to hurt myself, but seeing someone else in the place that I knew was rightfully mine made all my good intentions burn like acid deep inside my gut. Whenever I tried to do the right thing it somehow managed to go horribly wrong.

  Dixie had good timing. She’d put the fires of jealousy out and started a different kind of burn under my skin by doing nothing more than standing there looking rumpled and endlessly cute. Her hair was always kind of wild and unkempt, but straight from bed it looked like it had taken on a life of its own and was looking towards world domination. Her soft brown eyes were even darker than normal when filled with leftover sleepiness and her dusting of freckles stood out even more since she wasn’t wearing any makeup. If she looked that rumpled and messy after a night alone in bed I couldn’t keep my mind off of wondering what she would look like after hours of hungry hands and an eager mouth having their fill of her soft skin and sweet smile. It was a struggle to keep my eyes off the bare expanse of leg peeking out from the bottom of her ridiculous T-shirt because I could tell the other guy had his eyes on me and he didn’t like the way my eyes were on her at all. He was protective . . . and he should be. None of the thoughts I had while trying not to blatantly check her out would make him very happy.

  The relief that she wasn’t hooking up with a guy who wasn’t me was short-lived as I scrambled to get everything needed for the two of us to hit the road together. I wasn’t sure what the weather was going to be like, so that meant I needed to stock up on a little bit of everything to make the long ride down south. It was almost twenty hours, most of it through the plains of Kansas and tips of Missouri and Arkansas. That meant the conditions were going to be varied across the board weather-wise and it was up to me to make sure my passenger had everything she needed to make the ride as comfortable as possible. Now that she’d agreed to ride with me I wanted to make sure there was no reason for her to back out. I’d never been on the Harley for that long of a ride either, but I figured after years of riding around in tanks and other armored vehicles and flying in and out of hot spots in cargo planes that my ass was well beyond up for the job.

  Rome actually gave me a helmet he had sitting in his office that was small enough to fit Dixie. He told me it was his soon-to-be wife’s, but she hardly ever used it now that they had two kids under the age of five. The free hours they had to ride together were few and far between and with winter on the horizon he was looking at parking his bike for the next several months anyway. I took the helmet gladly but the conversation that had come before it about why I needed to borrow the headgear in the first place had come begrudgingly.

  Rome knew a little about my history. It was impossible to keep from him considering he was my CO for most of my military days. When news came from home, good or bad, it was always filtered through him first. As expected he listened to me lay out my laundry list of sins without saying a word and when I was done all he did was nod, tell me I would be missed around the bar, let me know I would always have a place in Denver and a sympathetic ear if I needed to talk, and agreed with me that it was well past time I got my ass back to Mississippi. Just like I knew he would, he told me that family was everything and if I was the kind of man he knew me to be I would go do right by mine.

  It wasn’t until I told him that I was asking Dixie to go with me that his demeanor changed. His dark brows snapped down, the scar that bisected his eyebrow pulled tight, and made him look like a man very capable of making me regret any bad decision I may make where the bubbly redhead was concerned. I’d been to war with Rome Archer, so I knew exactly what he was capable of and I knew things wouldn’t end well for me if I misstepped with someone he considered part of his family.

  “You send that girl back here with a broken heart and we’re going to have issues, Church.” Those issues would very likely end up with me in the hospital waiting on broken bones to heal.

  “I don’t plan on hearts being involved in any way, shape, or form, boss man. I need a favor and she’s the only one that can do it for me. We’re friends.” We weren’t really but we were something close to that and I knew there was no way Dixie’s affable and eager-to-please personality would let her tell me no. I needed her and she had this way about her that made it known if you were someone she cared about, someone that mattered to her, there was no way she could abide letting you down. She was also a chronic fixer and had an openly bleeding heart, so I was also aware of the fact that when I explained there was a rift that needed mending back home her desire to meddle and tinker with the lives of those she loved would automatically kick in. It worked for me, though I had serious doubts that any of this would work for her.

  Rome shook his head at me and a knowing grin played around his mouth. I hated it when he looked at me like he knew something that was bound to knock me on my ass when I figured out whatever it was for myself.

  “It’s cute that you think you can actually have a battle plan with it comes to your heart, soldier. You go ahead and let me know how well that works out for you.” He pointed a finger at me and lowered his voice. “You take care of my girl like she’s one of your men out there in the firefight. You watch her six and I guarantee that she’ll watch yours. You mark my word that this is going to be the biggest battle you’ve ever fought and you’ll never have been so happy to lose when you finally surrender.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. He had no idea what he was talking about. It would only be a fight if I had something to give up and since I didn’t believe in love, or soul mates, or the kind of forever that shined so brightly out of Dixie’s dark eyes, I wasn’t at risk of losing anything.

  After the lecture from Rome and securing the agreement to ride south from Dixie, as well as earning a few deadly glares from her couch surfer, I swung by the closest shop that would have women’s riding gear and picked up everything that Dixie could possibly need for the upcoming ride. The zip-up chaps that the sales guy brought out immediately had my mind diving into the gutter with all kinds of inappropriate thoughts. They were meant to be worn over jeans and zipped all the way up the sides for easy removal but all I could imagine was what they would look like on her tiny frame with nothing else. She had the prettiest pale skin, flawless and cream colored with just a few adorable little freckles across her nose and the tops of her shoulders. The idea of all black leather against all her sweetness was enough to make the fit of my pants a little tighter. The image of Dixie covered in nothing but leather and me wasn’t something that should be playing through my mind if I was going to make the effort to keep things in the friend zone but I couldn’t stop it. I never wanted her friendship, but now that I had it and needed it for my own end I knew I needed to not mess it up by letting my dick make decisions for me.

  She wasn’t the type of woman that I was normally attracted to. She was too soft, both in spirit and in life experience. I tended to drift towards the women that were just as jaded and just as world-weary as I was. I’d seen a lot in my lifetime, both at home and in the far-flung places my previous career had sent me, so it was hard to look at life through anything but cynical eyes. When I first met Dixie I was convinced her “I never met a stranger because everyone is a friend” act had to be forced and fake. I couldn’t get my head around the fact that there was someone in the world that hadn’t had their spirit crushed by how truly terrible things could be. I figured she had to be working an angle, that her entire bubbly, sunny disposition was nothing more than a front to work the customers for bigger tips, but as time went on, as days turned into weeks and weeks bled into months without the slightest falter or crack in that brilliantly bright façade I realized Dixie really was that upbeat, unflap
pable, and positive all the time.

  Being the cynic that I was I told myself that the only way she could be that happy, that cheerful day in and day out was because she had lived a life where she didn’t have to witness what a ruthless bitch fate could be. I figured she’d never had to live through loss or fight through all the things that came after. I convinced myself she’d never seen a struggle or had to battle hardships, but one night after closing the bar down I’d had a few too many cocktails and let my theory slip to Asa. The other southerner had shut me down before I finished spewing all those bitter accusations.

  He’d pointed out that it was much easier to let life beat you down, to put up a shield and hide behind walls when life kicked you around, than it was to keep on smiling. More truth that seriously hurt just like he’d intended it to.

  I tended to think that all I had endured during my time serving my country and all the tragedy that had come before it made me invincible, and unbreakable. I’d taken the worst that fucking fate had to throw at me and I was still ticking. I told myself I was stoic and knew that the only things in life I could actually control were myself and my reaction to the things happening around me, but after Asa’s harsh, behind-the-bar truth I wondered if I’d taken my emotional lockdown a step too far and had simply stopped allowing myself to react to or feel anything altogether. Being numb served its purpose when you were in the middle of hostile territory but I was home now and that numbness and coldness weren’t getting me anything other than a lonely bed and an estranged family that I still needed to beg forgiveness from. I wasn’t stoic, I was scared and that made me feel pathetic and weak.

  I wasn’t the only member of my family that had been kicked in the heart and stabbed in the guts by tragedy, but I was the only one who’d decided a war zone was an easier place to be than home. I tucked tail and ran. I purposely chased after danger and disaster because I was positive that if I made it a point to put myself in the heart of conflict and peril whoever was in charge up in the great beyond would finally leave the people that I loved alone. It made no logical sense but to an eighteen-year-old kid without many options and with way too much loss in his life, it seemed like a brilliant plan. I was surrounded by death, I might as well go to a place where all of it made sense, where there seemed to be some kind of rhyme and reason to the loss and letdown. As asinine as my thinking might have been it worked . . . at least it had until Elma Mae took her tumble down the stairs.