ROMANCE: Mason (Bad Boy Alpha Male Stepbrother Romance Boxset) (New Adult Contemporary Stepbrother Romance Collection) (145 page)

Andrew sat in the car for another moment, stunned at what had just happened before he hastily undid his own seatbelt, grabbed his pack and ran out of the car and up the stairs of the porch after her.

“Hannah, come on, let’s talk about this,” he said as he entered into the front door, noticing that Hannah had moved the end table to the opposite wall of the entryway and had apparently bought a painting to hang in its place, before throwing his backpack on the ground and following her into the kitchen.

“Hey,” he said, frowning when he saw Hannah pull out a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and head over to the drawer beneath the oven where they kept the corkscrews and bottle openers. “Don’t you think it’s a bit early to be drinking?”

She looked at him sardonically, taking the bottle opener out of the drawer and popping the cap off the bottle. “You wanted to drink, so I thought we’d start early. Grab a bottle, we can call up the boys and have a night on the town, or morning I suppose. It doesn’t really matter I guess, now does it?”

“Stop that,” Andrew grunted, walking over to her, taking it effortlessly out of her hand and dropping the whole thing in the trashcan.

“Hey!” Hannah growled, walking determinedly over to the fridge intent on getting another only to have Andrew stand firmly in her path, blocking her. “Move,” she bit out acidly through clenched teeth.

Andrew brought a hand up to run through his hair in agitation, bringing it down as he realized that the old habit wasn’t nearly as effective with nearly all of his hair chopped off in a buzz cut. He sighed, his hands going down to rest limply at his sides. “You hate drinking, especially beer,” he said, not quite sure what else to say. “The only reason you have those is because I bought them before my last deployment and didn’t get the chance to drink them.”

“Yeah, well, things change,” Hannah said flatly, looking him straight in the eye. “You miss a lot when you’re gone for six months. Birthdays, anniversaries, pregnancy scares, changes in taste.”

Andrew’s head snapped up quickly at the mention of pregnancy scares but Hannah quickly waved it off. “It was right after your last deployment, my period was a couple of days late but I got it, it’s fine.”

Andrew sighed in relief, his body physically relaxing as he nodded. “Okay, you’re right, I have missed a lot, and I’m sorry. . . .but you know, you winced just a bit when you smelled it after opening, things may have changed, but I don’t think that your distaste for beer is one of them.”

Hannah crossed her arms over her chest, looking at him defiantly. “Well, it’s always good to try new things right?”

“This isn’t what this is about, and you know it. You’re mad at me, and I don’t know how to fix it; let’s just talk about this.”

“There’s nothing to talk about, Andy,” Hannah snapped, leaning back against the counter behind her. “Not everything can be fixed, you try and try to fix everything, but I don’t need to be one of them.”

He paused, head tilting just a bit in confusion as he considered the words. “What do you mean by that?” he frowned, “I don’t try to fix everything, that’s ridiculous.”

“Really, is it?” Hannah asked. “You ask me on a date to fix spilling coffee on me, you go off to join the Navy to fix our country’s diplomatic relations, you’re trying to fix this right now.”

“So I’m a bad person for wanting to stop a fight with my wife and try and make things better? And that thing about the first date, you know that’s ridiculous. I was going to ask you out to begin with, but as I went over you were running to get somewhere and ran right into me. The coffee spilling was completely accidental and in no way factored into me asking you out on the date. And I didn’t join the SEALs to fix the country or whatever else you were getting at. I’m one person, and I’m certainly no Captain America. I did it because . . . well because I needed to, I needed to serve a purpose, to be a part of something bigger than myself. To find myself.”

“Oh and so you had to do that without me, away from me. Just leave me here behind and waiting around for you to find yourself, waiting by the phone every night and praying every second of every day for your safety all so you could go serve a greater purpose that you aren’t even sure how to tell me about. Because you weren’t happy? Because I wasn’t enough for you?” her voice cracked on the last part, breath hitching in her throat as her chest heaved with emotion, blinking furiously to prevent the tears that were fast coming to her eyes from spilling over and rolling down her cheeks.

Andrew was stunned, frozen in place as he looked at his wife, the woman he loved, so utterly and completely hurt, and by him apparently, and he had had no idea she had felt that way for what appeared to be ages.

“Hannah I-”

“Don’t,” she said, bringing her hand up to angrily wipe a stray tear that had managed to start a course down her cheek. “Just don’t,” she muttered, walking out of the kitchen and running hastily up the stairs to their bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

Andrew winced at the sound, rubbing the back of his neck anxiously as he replayed their conversation in his head, wondering just when everything had gone so horribly, terribly wrong. One moment everything had seemed to be going fine and the next it was like they were strangers, everything the other said being taken the wrong way and blown out of proportion.

Or, maybe, nothing had been blown out of proportion and things had merely been boiling just under the surface all this time and he had never noticed. He shook his head. How could he have been so unaware? He had called home at every chance he got, wrote letters back as soon as he received them and sent them whenever he could.

Nothing in her letters, nothing in their calls had signaled to him that something was wrong. Every time he came home they easily fell back into the comfort and the joy that came with being together. He had had no idea that the whole time she had been feeling so hurt. Like he had abandoned her. He groaned, completely unsure of how to set things right but knowing that somehow he needed to. She was the most important person in his life, the one person who constantly filled his thoughts and still took his breath away every time he saw her even after years of being with one another. He loved her, and the thought of hurting her physically pained him. His inner wolf was whining, clawing just beneath the surface of his skin and putting all his nerves on edge with the sheer need to comfort his mate.

He took a deep breath, closing his eyes tightly in an attempt to get his thoughts together. He wanted to fix things, but his desire to fix things seemed to be just the problem Hannah had talked about. And yet, that wasn’t what it was, not really. It wasn’t he desire to ‘fix things’ so much as his deployments and always being away for so long. She felt abandoned, and that he had chosen his service in the military over their marriage, over her.

But that was just the opposite. When he had met her, he was lost. He had been lost before he had turned into a werewolf, in a constant search for who he was, and once he had been bitten and turned that fateful night behind an alley after a bar brawl, he was only more lost. And then, he had found her. Someone so beautiful, so smart, so charming. She was a woman that just radiated confidence, and had a sort of magnetism to her that you couldn’t help being drawn in by. From speaking with her for only a few minutes, you could tell that she had her life together. That she knew what she wanted and knew where she was going. That she had goals, and nothing was going to stop her from achieving them.

And then there was him. A man whose goals had been entirely shaped by one chance night years ago, and whose sense of self hadn’t quite been formed or figured out. He had spent years looking for who he was, trying to figure it out, and trying to find a sense of purpose. After he had been bitten, his desperation to find those things had only increased, intensified.

So, in the hopes of finding a purpose, and becoming the man that he felt Hannah deserved, he joined the SEALs, like his father had done. And he liked it, to an extent. The brotherhood, the sense of comradery, of belonging. The feeling that he was part of something bigger than himself and yet he had an intrinsic part to play.

But being there also helped him realize a few crucial things about himself. For instance, that while the SEALs gave him so much, it helped him realize that his purpose was outside the confines of a ship, or out in the fields. His purpose was to be a good husband, to work in something that helped others, and to be there for Hannah. And out of those three, he was apparently slipping up on two of them.

He leaned back against the counter, head tilting back as he stared up at the kitchen ceiling, thinking over just what he would say to Hannah to make it alright. And to make it alright in a manner that appeared that he wasn’t trying to fix things just out of the sheer need to have everything fixed.

He laughed, thinking how ridiculous such a thing sounded in his own mind, let alone put into words and phrases when he finally built up the nerve to speak with Hannah. He looked longingly at the refrigerator before looking at the clock on the oven. As much as he wanted a drink to ease the tension building in his body and calm his nerves slightly, it was eight in the morning and too early, much, much too early for him to be drinking.

Sighing to himself, he pushed off of the counter, rolling his shoulders and straightening his back as he made his way towards the stairs. His mind was racing and his heart pounding, but he knew what he had to do, and he’d get it done. He felt like he was headed towards battle, only in this instance, the stakes were much higher. In battle, you were fighting for your life, in his home, at that minute, he was fighting for his heart. And he’d be dammed if he was going to lose it.

Chapter 2

Hannah didn’t know what to do, let alone what to feel. Everything was just a blur, a whirlwind of tumultuous emotions stirring inside of her. Earlier that morning she had been at the top of the highest mountain, and now she felt as though she had sunk down to the bottom of the lowest pit. Since the moment she woke up she had been on an emotional roller coaster and all she wanted to do was get off.

She wanted nothing more than to go back downstairs to Andrew, to forget about everything, all of the problems and all of the negative emotions of the last several months and simply jump into his arms. She wanted to bury her head in his chest and pretend that he never left and just be happy that he was there. That he was back and she could touch him. Could smell the scent of his aftershave and cologne and that fruity hair wash he had once bought by mistake but kept buying because he secretly liked it, even with all of Hannah’s teasing.

But she couldn’t. Of course she wanted Andrew to be able to see his friends, to go out and get a drink like old times and catch up on whatever had happened in their lives since Andy had last deployed, but she was selfish. And she couldn’t even bring herself to feel guilty about that selfishness.

She chuckled to herself, shaking her head just a bit as she angrily wiped at tears running down her cheeks, the action doing little to abate the flow of water from her eyes as the tears kept coming and coming. It was ridiculous. Her husband was home from a long deployment and he was downstairs and she was upstairs with the door closed, crying.

They should be cuddling, or making love or something similar. At the very least they should be together. But she was upstairs and he was downstairs and she couldn’t bring herself to bridge the gap between them. She didn’t know what to feel, let alone explain it to him. She so desperately wanted to be a ‘good’ military wife. To plaster on a smile that said everything was okay and to seamlessly fall back into their old, everyday routine, as if Andrew had never left. Her disposition needed to always be sunny and her only duty was ensuring her spouse’s happiness; he certainly deserved it, he had been fighting for their country after all. He had been put in danger who knows how many times. But she couldn’t bring herself to neatly pack up and store away all of the stirring emotions from the last few months and lock them behind a closed door until Andrew’s next deployment. She wasn’t even sure if it was possible.

She had spent the past months wishing for nothing more than for him to come back home safely, to be able to kiss and touch him again, and now that she could, she found herself in the curious and infuriating position of doing the complete opposite.

She sniffled, grabbing a tissue from the box on the nightstand and blowing her nose, hating how loud the noise it made was. She avoided looking in the mirror, unwilling to see how red and blotchy her face looked.

It wasn’t like in the movies. Where the dainty woman brought a handkerchief to her face and she quietly and delicately cried into it, fragile tears running down her flawless cheeks and not messing up her makeup in the slightest. No, that was a falsehood movie producers came up with to make ordinary women feel bad about themselves if they didn’t live up to those impossibly high standards.

Instead, the truth of it was that her face was red, splotches dotting her porcelain skin as black streaks ran in-between them from her mascara. In fact, her eyes were red, and on fire, not just from the tears but from the gooey, black gunk that she had so meticulously placed on  her lashes now directly in her line of vision, the makeup stinging and making her cry more.

And it wasn’t just the tears that were coming. Her nose was running too, so fast that she took the entire box of tissues and put it in her lap to make the process of grabbing a new one every five seconds easier.

Her breathing was another thing altogether. Not only did she have to worry about the makeup in her eyes, the snot from her nose and the tears running down her cheeks and the bridge of her nose until falling off of her chin, but she felt as though she were choking, or, more aptly put, drowning.

Her breath came out in short, rattling gasps, each gulp of air a struggle. Her breaths were hitching in her chest and her mouth emitted little hiccupping sounds as she struggled to get herself under control.

She laughed and then regretted it as it stole some of the precious air she had just barely managed to take in. The thing with Hannah was that once she started crying, it was almost impossible to stop. Even when she thought the majority of the tears had dried up and she was finally calming down, the slightest word, thought or tone could set her right off again and into another fit of tears.

And the worst of it was that she knew that Andrew could hear her, every sniffle, sob and nose blow. That was one thing she had had to get used to when she and Andrew had married. With his elevated senses, she had had to completely reinvent her previous conceptions of privacy.

Hannah looked up at a soft knock at the door, sniffling slightly before hastily wiping her nose and gathering all the tissue up off the bed to deposit into the waste basket beside it.

“Hannah? Babe? Can I please come in?”

Hannah mulled it over for a second, considering sending him away but knowing that it would likely make everything worse for the both of them.

“Yeah,” she said quietly, taking a deep breath and clearing her throat, “yeah, come in.”

Slowly, timidly, the door opened with a quiet creak as Andrew poked his head around it and peered into the room. His gaze immediately softened as he took in her appearance, his heart physically aching at the sight as his chest painfully constricted.

“Hannah, no, please don’t cry,” he murmured, stepping into the room and shutting the door as he headed over to her. He stopped just a foot away from her, hand reached out in her direction as if to touch her, but falling back helplessly to his side as he realized that he had no idea what to say. He wanted to hold her, but, from the slight, watery glare that she was giving him, he didn’t think that the gesture would be welcomed.

“I hate to break it to you babe,” she said in a wet and gravelly voice, “but regular people cry. I’m not Barbie, I’m not plastic.”

“I know that,” Andrew said, blinking at the odd statement. He was very aware that she was indeed alive and not plastic; even from downstairs he could hear her heart beating in her chest as though he were listening to it with a stethoscope.

“Do you?” Hannah asked, voice bitter and pained. “Because, you know, sometimes I feel like you think that I’m this perfect housewife with a part-time job to pay the bills that can always be on-call when you phone in when you’re away or always home in time to put a well-cooked meal on the table for you when you’re here.”

“Hannah-”

“No, just, let me finish please, I have a lot to say and I want to say it fast before I lose my nerve.”

Andrew nodded, waiting for Hannah to continue.

“You know, when you enlisted and went to basic training, they sent you home with a pamphlet, and it offered a list of support networks for the loved ones of people in the military. So, I went to one, it was a seminar of sorts, for how to best support your loved one and how to interact with them after their first deployment. The seminar was . . . disturbing, I guess, for lack of a better word. The lecturer went into pretty extensive detail about all of the possible horrors you all could and likely would be facing in the line of duty. And for Navy SEALs? God, it was terrifying. And then, they told us what to expect when, and” she swallowed, the word sticking in her throat just a bit, “if, you were returning. Any number of things from injuries, mood swings, depression, PTSD, so much. They told us that the best way to support you was to act like you had never gone away. To act like everything was back to normal and nothing had changed because what you would be needing most was a sense of security.”

She cleared her throat, looking away from Andrew and out the bedroom window behind him. “So, basically, that means I can’t feel. I have to be always happy, always up for anything. I can’t complain, I can’t get upset, and you know what, I can’t do it. I thought I could, I really did. When you got back from your first deployment I followed the lecturer’s instructions to the letter. And the deployment after that, I did pretty much the same, if you recall. I mean, think about it. Did we fight, get into an argument? Did I ever disagree with you? The answer is no. Because I couldn’t. Because I had missed you so much and I was so worried that if I upset you over here that you’d mess up over there out in the field because you’d be distracted, and it could cost you a limb, or your life. After your third deployment, I kept it up, but just barely. And now? Now I just can’t do it anymore. I don’t think I have it in me. Not even for a day. You know, it’s barely been four hours and I’ve already cracked! I mean, look at me, I’m a mess,” she said, throwing up her hands in defeat.

“Hannah-”

“And now that I’ve told you all of this, I can’t help thinking the worst that now that it’s out in the air all the worst things the lecturer talked about are going to come true and I can’t,” her breath hitched, “I just can’t bear to think about anything like that happening to you and it would be my fault.”

“Oh God babe,” Andrew said, eyes wide as his chest clenched impossibly tighter as he closed the short distance between them and took her into his arms, enveloping his wife in a tight hug as he tucked her tear-streaked face into his neck and kissed the top of her head softly.

He gently began rocking her back and forth, making soothing sounds and trying to get her to just breathe. They stayed like that for about twenty minutes, Hannah’s sobs gradually turning into wet sniffles as her breathing went slightly back to normal, her head aching from all of the crying. She blinked, bloodshot and red-rimmed eyes looking up at Andrew wearily.

“That’s better,” Andrew said, giving her a soft smile as he blinked away his own tears and managed to stave them off with a bit of a struggle. “Hannah, listen to me. Are you listening?”

Hannah rolled her eyes, trying for a bit of a grin and failing. “I’ll try, but I think my ears are a bit clogged up with all the tears,” she said, voice sounding a bit strange with her stuffy nose.

Andrew smiled back. “Don’t ever feel as though you have to hide your feelings from me, any of them, the good or the bad, ever. And, if anything happens to me out there, God forbid, it will not be your fault. No way, none at all. Never think that. Dear God, who was this lecturer? I want their name and number and I’m going to have a word or two with them because what they said, was . . .” he spluttered for a moment trying to come up with words that would adequately express his outrage.

He took a deep breath, calming down just a bit before he brought his hands up to cradle Hannah’s face, bringing their lips together in a soft, slow kiss, ignoring the feel of her tears on his cheeks.

“I cannot imagine how hard this must be for you with me always being away on tours. I guess, I just never really thought about it. You were always so happy when I got back and things were just so great. And you know, I saw you in that theater class at the civic center, and I hate to break it to you babe, but you’re not going to win any Oscars anytime soon, acting should not be your fallback. Which means that I’m the biggest idiot in the world for not seeing through it. I’ve been a terrible husband. You’ve been hurting all this time and I’ve done nothing.”

Hannah laughed softly. “I’m not that bad of an actor.”

“You’re absolutely horrible.” Andrew laughed back, shaking his head. “I had thought Shakespeare was bad before, but then I saw your rendition of Ophelia. That was . . . that was really something.”

Hannah laughed, and laughed, so hard that it made her stomach hurt. “It really was terrible wasn’t it?”

“The worst.”

Hannah smiled, resting her head on Andrew’s shoulder as she closed her eyes, taking a deep breath and inhaling his familiar, calming scent. “You know, what you said, it isn’t true. You’re a great husband, don’t ever think for a second that you aren’t. It’s just that, this is a difficult thing to go through, for all parties. I just thought that holding it in, while perhaps sounding a bit logical-”

Andrew gave her an incredulous look.

“Hey, it sounded logical at the time; I just wanted to be what you needed. But obviously the whole holding it in thing doesn’t work. It’s not practical and it’s not healthy. Because, I’m not okay all the time. I’m not the perfect working housewife. I burnt the stupid lasagna five times trying to perfect it before you came back and I finally made it for you.”

“I could give a damn about the lasagna babe,” Andrew said, “all I care about is coming back to see you.”

“I know, it sounds so stupid when I say it but, it’s just . . . I don’t know, I can’t explain it. It’s hard. But, I missed you so much. Every minute of every day. I worry myself sick about you. There are some days,” Hannah swallowed, taking a deep breath before she powered through the words, “there are some days that I can barely get up in the morning because I’m stuck to the bed with fear, wondering if you will come back to me. I have panic attacks occasionally, but not many. And the nightmares, the nightmares are terrible. But, the worst part is feeling like I have no one to turn to. You’ve always been my confidant. And you’re the one person that I can’t talk to about this.”

“But you can, you can talk to me about this. I want you to. I don’t ever want you to feel like you have to handle this entirely on your own.”