Fearless (Somerton Security Book 3) Page 5

  She’d just brought it to his door.

  His hands quivering, Will popped the cap on the Tylenol, shook out several pills, and washed them down with a huge swig of water. On a sigh, he leaned his head back against the tree and closed his eyes.

  “Hey, Coop?” he asked, popping one lid open to stare at her.

  She didn’t answer. Nothing, and she meant nothing, good ever came of a sentence that began “Hey, Coop.”

  Shit like that was how she’d taken a joyride in her father’s pickup at fifteen.

  How she’d shattered Sid Paulson’s nose at seventeen.

  It was what had convinced her that outshooting her training officer was a good idea.

  And it was what Will had whispered across a quiet phone line just before he’d taken their relationship—if she could call it that—from witty banter and bad jokes to sexually charged promises and a desire she could name but never taste.

  “Hey, Coop,” Will started again, his chest rattling with the warning of a coiled and ready-to-strike copperhead.

  “Don’t even think about it . . .”

  “How’d the hipster burn his tongue?”

  She stared into the open top of her meal and played along. “Ugh, your jokes make my brisket taste bad.”

  “He ate his food before it was cool.”

  She shook her head on a snort, then disposed of the packages they’d emptied. “I’ve always wanted to know; what’s with the jokes, Bennett?” As long as she’d known him, Will had been full of two things—confidence and terrible jokes.

  The corner of his beard twitched, as if a long-forgotten memory tugged at the edge of his mouth.

  “Special Forces training—you spend a lot of time being uncomfortable, and a lot of that time focused on being uncomfortable. Different units handle it different ways. I know a SEAL whose unit used to sing their way through long nights tucked into the Pacific—we did that, too,” he explained. “But turns out, we had this one guy—smartest damn fucker I ever knew, in the field anyway, I know a guy back home who could run caffeine-driven circles around Einstein—”

  “Focus, Bennett.”

  “Right. Anyway, guy couldn’t carry a tune to save his life. Sounded like a cat in heat trying to swallow sandpaper. Drove the rest of us nuts.”

  “So, no singing,” Cooper supplied.

  “No singing. But we had to have something to keep us up, keep us going, keep us talking.”

  “And dad jokes are what you came up with?”

  “Man has his best ideas at two a.m. when he’s freezin’ his balls off and knows exactly what his CO will do if he nods off.”

  “But dad jokes.”

  “The worse they were, the better they worked. Kept us going and drove everyone else nuts.” He shrugged. “Over the last few months . . . helped pass the time. Let me focus—or get a little lost. And I guess,” he said with a tired sigh, “honoring the tradition feels like honoring Felix, too.”

  “The guy who couldn’t sing?”

  “Felix Harrigan—used to call him Felix the Cat, the way he always managed to turn trouble to luck.”

  Death itself sighed against the back of her neck and Cooper went still.

  Will slid to the plastic mat, tucked his arm beneath his head, and mumbled, “Caught up to him though. Traded his ninth life for a sniper round in Afghanistan.”

  Cooper swallowed hard against the bile that tried to rise and looked away. Afghanistan wasn’t something she ever wanted to think about, but though the words were thick and heavy, she forced them past a tight throat. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” he said.

  No, it wasn’t, she reminded herself.

  Will blinked, long and slow, then finally let his eyes fall shut just to snap them open again.

  He tightened his jaw and shifted to his back, staring up at the canopy.

  Coop recognized the look. Less obstinate refusal to sleep and more desperate fear that this time he wouldn’t wake. Freedom was so close he could taste it. He’d probably even let himself think about home. About hot showers, double cheeseburgers, and clean sheets. Thoughts that had been forbidden. Dreams that had felt unattainable.

  But there they were. Just out of sight. His for the taking.

  “I know the feeling,” she whispered, keeping her voice steady as wants and wishes encroached like hungry, laughing hyenas, ready to tease her with thoughts of chili fries and barbecue, of cold cider and the gingham tablecloth her mother still used for every backyard crawfish boil. She heard the laughter and inhaled the smoke of cedar chips and charred meat.

  She pushed all of it away.

  “I know what it’s like to be so damn close to the end you can practically taste it.” Her sister’s laugh rang in the back of her head. The ghostly touch of her mother’s arms wrapped her tight. The deep timbre of her father’s voice struck her bones like a bell. “To fight back the fear that if you stop, if you let yourself rest”—she swallowed hard but carried on—“it could all be snatched away in a heartbeat. That the road home could be lost forever if you stray even just a little.”

  He turned his head and studied her in the quiet way of a predator confronted with something that both confused and intrigued him. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  He rolled to his side, carefully cradling the wound they’d done their best to clean and treat and bandage in the car. He needed antibiotics. Intravenous fluids and a shit ton of rest.

  She could only offer him the rest.

  “Sleep, Will. It’s all going to be waiting for you tomorrow.”

  “Promise?” he asked.

  She nodded and forced the word past dry lips. “Promise.”

  It was an oath she knew better than to make. And one she might not be able to keep.

  But as his eyes closed and Will fell into sleep the way only the truly exhausted could, Cooper knew she’d move heaven and earth to try.

  Will deserved to go home.

  They both did.

  Chapter Five

  Fuck, he was cold.

  He pulled his knees close and tucked his arms to his chest. A cramp hit his gut and he extended his legs, then pulled them back in, then extended them again. Nothing helped. Everything hurt. And though misery had become familiar, it certainly hadn’t become comfortable.

  “Bennett, you all right?”

  He jerked and opened his eyes to find Cooper sitting across from him, a hazy vision he was half tempted to believe was nothing more than a mirage.

  It wouldn’t be the first time.

  How many nights, lying at the bottom of that fucking pit, had he looked up and seen Georgia’s scowling face just outside the bars?

  How many times had he stared through sweat and grit and agony to see Ethan prowling the tree line?

  How many times had he heard Cooper’s voice, pressed to his ear, low and sexy and seductive even as she’d laughed at him?

  In the early days, he’d taken strength from friends who weren’t there, but were almost certainly looking for him.

  But as time had worn on and hope had grown dim, he’d considered those hallucinations little more than specters of his old life there to escort him to the next.

  But they never had; they’d left him behind to die, then worse, left him behind to live.

  And every time a fever broke, or the agony stopped, and his mind loosened its stranglehold on fantasy and let reality intrude, Will had come back to find himself both disappointed and alone.

  Forgotten.

  Sometimes, when he was weak enough to be lonely, and hurt enough to be angry, he hated them for it.

  He trembled, the cold going bone deep.

  “Will?” Cooper prompted, sitting up from where she’d reclined against her bag.

  “Got a Tauntaun in there?” he asked through clenched, chattering teeth.

  “Keeping to the Star Wars jokes? Really?”

  “Trekkie,” he accused, his shoulders aching beneath the grip of tight, tense muscles he felt al
l the way up his neck.

  “Don’t be insulting.”

  He shivered as she stood, pulled the bottle of pills from her bag, and brought them to him with the water at her hip.

  “Cold?” she asked, shaking two pills into the palm of her hand.

  He jerked his head.

  “It’s the fever,” she whispered, helping him sit up. “And the sweat.” She handed him the pills, which he swallowed past a tight, dry throat. The metallic rim of a water bottle touched his lips. “Drink, Will. You need the water.”

  His hands shook, and his teeth clacked against steel before a warm hand settled on top of his and helped guide the water to his mouth. When it ran dry, he collapsed back to the ground, his skin pebbling, the cold spreading like an oil slick as he sweat through his shirt.

  “You’re getting worse,” Cooper mumbled.

  He was, but he knew from experience there was so much further still to go. It wasn’t the first time his body had been besieged by fever. Wasn’t the first time he’d exhausted muscles beneath the strain of full-body shivers.

  Worse was what came next.

  Severe dehydration.

  Waking nightmares.

  Hallucinations so real and vivid they became an agony all their own.

  He’d been here before. Suffered as infection or disease ravaged him. Broken beneath his body’s inability to keep going under the merciless strain of too much brutality and too little water.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d wondered if this time he’d fail to rally, fail to come out the other side of freezing fire.

  But it was the first time he feared that sickness would prevail where cruelty and torture had not.

  He was so damn close.

  Will tucked his arms to his chest, pulled his knees in tight, and tried to focus on something, anything, that would keep him there.

  “So close. So close,” he mumbled, over and over and over again until the words became little more than the hiss of a river as they spilled past his lips.

  He blinked and sweat slid into his eyes, stinging and burning and blurring the world around him.

  Something rough and wet touched his face, wiping away the salt and water his body couldn’t retain.

  Cooper slid back into focus, her touch gentle as she worked her way across his skin with the edge of a soaked shirt.

  “Try to sleep.”

  He stared into a face smeared with dirt and paint and carved with the hard lines of too much living and too little sleep. He’d know her voice anywhere, but would he recognize her on the street? At a bar? In his bed?

  “Getting ahead of yourself there, Bennett.”

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, realizing he must have said the part about having her in his bed out loud.

  “I’m not a walk of shame kind of girl.”

  “Buy you dinner first.” He grinned, or at least tried to. He was pretty sure his face moved. “S-send you off after a hot shower and my famous eggs on t-t-toast.”

  “Never happen,” Cooper assured him, her words harsh, but her touch gentle. “I’d kick you out of my bed the second I was satisfied. You can take your own walk, wondering just where you’d lost your underwear, and make your famous eggs on toast for one.”

  “M-m-issing out,” he chattered through lips too tired to smile.

  “I guess you’ll have to rest up. Bounce back.” She stared down at him, a curve pulling at the corner of a mouth he dreamed about. “And earn the privilege to prove me wrong.”

  He wanted to laugh, but it escaped a sigh and he slid back into sleep, focused not on whether or not he’d wake, but instead on just what it would take to see what Coop looked like when she did.

  They’d brought out the ants.

  God, how he hated them. The way they scuttled across his skin, their tiny feet a dotted line tap tap tapping to the place they’d bite.

  The back of his neck

  Behind what was left of his ear.

  In the curve of his armpit.

  As bad as the bites were—and they were an agony he could not have imagined—the anticipation was so much worse.

  Stripped and strapped to a chair, ankles bound at the bottom of the legs, hand secured behind his back, and blindfolded, he could do little more than track the dozens of insects as they marched across his skin.

  To wait for the skittering to stop.

  Each bite, an agony.

  Each held in scream, a victory.

  He could handle the pain. Pull it in and push it through his system like a determined tide that would eventually turn. He just had to wait it out.

  No, the pain wasn’t the problem.

  His helplessness was.

  Bound tight, sight gone, muscles immobilized to the point that a simple flinch was painful—that was the hard part. Of all the things that had been stolen from him over months of captivity—his flesh, his freedom, his honor—the loss of his ability to fight back had been the worst.

  But he never stopped trying. Let the desire fester until it became something cold and unforgiving.

  Vicious.

  Something scuttled across his skin, and Will jerked, a yell caught in his throat, and struck out.

  “Fuck, calm down,” a voiced urged him.

  Hands gripped his shoulders, pushing him back, holding him down, and Will realized he wasn’t bound at all.

  He threw a punch, caught someone across the chest, and rolled away to freedom.

  Amidst a hail of cursing, he turned to his belly. Pushed to his hands and knees, drove his feet into the ground and his body forward . . . only to eat dirt when he tried to stand. His head swam, and his vision blurred, and Will trembled, his muscles like overcooked spaghetti and his head a beating drum.

  Booted feet approached. “Jesus, Will. It’s me. It’s Cooper.”

  Cooper?

  He knew that name. Recognized that voice. He couldn’t quite pull together the pieces—hadn’t even matched those two things together, but then he didn’t really need to.

  Because he knew who it wasn’t.

  Knew home when he heard it.

  Knew kindness when it touched him.

  No pain. No laughter. No lingering sense of humiliation.

  Gentle fingers stroked along his shoulder and down his arm. “You with me, Bennett?” that soft voice asked.

  He rolled to his back, let cool, malleable earth cradle his skull, and opened his eyes just to slam them shut again against harsh, piercing light that made his head throb and stomach turn.

  “Coop?” he asked, tasting the name against his tongue. Smooth and crisp as fresh spring water, it lacked the bitter tang of a lie.

  “Yeah.” She put a palm to his forehead. Slid her hand along dry, gritty skin. “Jesus, you’re getting worse.”

  The world tilted like a carnival ride when she helped him sit. “Keep your eyes closed until I get you back under the shade.” She helped him scoot back until his hands touched plastic; something crinkled and cracked as he lay back down. Even beneath eyelids that felt thick and swollen, he could sense the change in light. He cracked open one eye, then the other, and stared into a gaze the color of still, deep-blue waters.

  “Time is it?” he asked, pushing the words through a throat lined with barbed wire.

  “Mid-afternoon,” she answered.

  He let his gaze roam from the olive-green tarp above his head to the periphery—so much green. Nothing but jungle vegetation as far as he could see.

  “W-where . . .” This wasn’t camp. Wasn’t the pit or the mountainside . . . but it wasn’t home, either.

  Wasn’t safe.

  “You don’t remember?” she asked on a slow drawl of cautious words.

  He shook his head. Regretted the decision when his neck ached, and his head throbbed like a revved engine.

  “S-s”—he licked his lips, his tongue swollen and mouth dry—“secure?” They wouldn’t let him go. Wouldn’t let him leave. Wouldn’t let him live.

  “Shhh,” Cooper soothed him, pushing his sh
oulders back to the ground with an embarrassing amount of ease. “They’re dead. They’re all dead. Remember?”

  Did he? He searched his mind, pushing through a heavy fog that refused to part but slowly turned to a persistent wash of rain.

  A storm. A fight. Lightning had struck.

  “Thunder,” he whispered, the crack echoing through his confusion, and slicing through his questions. He remembered the rain. The death. The brutal pleasure.

  He shivered.

  “That’s right. Now drink, Will,” she said, holding more water to his lips. “And rest so we can get the fuck out of here when night falls.”

  That time, he heard it. The stumble of words. The indicative pause. The lie—though whether it was for her benefit, or his, he didn’t know.

  But he wouldn’t be leaving. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.

  And they both knew it.

  She should leave him.

  Probably would leave him when she realized there was no way he’d be able to get up, to walk out, to carry on.

  He caught her wrist as she pulled away. “Don’t . . .”

  He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t do it. Even as fear clogged his throat and helplessness made his limbs thick and heavy and uncoordinated. He couldn’t beg.

  But she didn’t make him.

  “I’m not leaving you, Will,” she promised. “You’re stuck with me.”

  Stuck with me.

  A casual statement bolstered by a conviction he didn’t understand from a woman he barely knew.

  Fuck, he hated this. Only hours ago, he’d sworn he’d never again be at the mercy of another.

  But here he was. Helpless. Broken. Dying.

  “Sleep, Will. I’ve got the watch.”

  I’ve got the watch.

  I’ve got your back.

  A hand cupped his cheek, stroked back his hair. Her voice grew dim and far away, the words a tumble of stones he couldn’t catch.

  But he held on to that voice. It had come for him. Saved him.

  He shouldn’t trust it to do it again.

  But as something cool and wet touched his forehead, stroked his skin, soothed him into a fevered sleep . . . he did.