Page 45 of Triple Threat

His head smacked against the bar when I punched him in the jaw. “That, that was for wasting my goddamn gin.”

I stood, brushed the front of my shirt off, and walked out of the bar.

I heard a glass break behind me.

Chapter Fifteen

Roan…

My hands were shaking, and I could keep my cool in any situation, from the moment when the IED had almost torn our loaned Humvee in half, to when in an online game raid that we had spent weeks building up to was nearly ruined when 733tID10T jumped the gun and charged the Temple of the Shattered God. My hands didn’t shake when I had applied a tourniquet to my own leg. They didn’t shake when I was filleting a Spanish mackerel, and they didn’t shake when I was the keyboard warrior in one of the games I played when I couldn’t find sleep.

They shook now. My head was overly full, my imagination and memory playing in a violent dance with one another. I could see her tears reflected in the glass, but I could also remember the wet sound as he shagged her. All the macaroni and cheese jokes on the internet suddenly made sense, and instead of laughing, or having that moment of enlightenment, I trembled with fury, the sound taunting me.

I wanted to tell myself it wouldn’t have been so bad. Instead of struggling to find a single reason that made it worse, almosteveryreason made it worse. How long had it been since I was with a woman? I had, since the accident and therapy, but it had been awkward, and strained. The handful of women had been circumspect, mostly, about my missing leg, my scars, my lack of frothing over machismo and bravado. Mostly.

Lach had never picked any of those women up and certainly had never shagged any of them in front of me.

The part that really hurt was that I hadn’t been able to do anything. I wanted to grab him, stop him, pull his hands off of her. But no, all I could do was stand there, staring, my cock hard, my heart racing, pounding in my temples. There had been an almost hypnotic motion to the way Lach’s lower back and ass had flexed as he’d shagged her.

Was this what it was normally like for him, for the women who were with him?

Fuck.

My balls still hurt like a bloody stupid teenager.

Idle hands are the devil’s plaything, so I made my hands busy.

My old coping mechanism had been the bottle, and last night, the bottle had gotten me a blackened eye and a bloody lip. My new coping mechanism had been learning to cook and though I’d mastered it, it was still as good a coping mechanism as any. I needed to make something, and I wanted to do something for Sadie. I needed my hands to stop shaking. It might be cliché, but I decided to make one of the oldest comfort foods I could think of, chocolate brownies.

The important thing was that the recipe was simple and didn’t require a high degree of precision or knife skills. The other thing was that there were two paths to making the best brownies – simple perfection, or over-the-top decadent. As much as I wanted to do the latter, with tiny marshmallows, fudge ripples, maybe sprinkles, simple was best. I had already picked up on the fact that Sadie preferred more simple fare.

The stand mixer handled the batter like a champ. I was pouring the second pan of batter when Sadie wandered into the kitchen. She had that quiet church mouse thing going, those big brown eyes, those pouty lips. Her eyes were quick, taking in everything I was doing while taking up the least amount of space possible.

My breath caught in my chest. She was wearing the lilac satin baby-doll that had been a recent addition to the collection, and she was achingly gorgeous in it. I felt a little ashamed for having picked out something like that for her. There was no modesty to it, and she might as well have been nude for as much of her that it concealed. My eyes flitted from her lips, to her nipples almost visible through the cups, to the shadow of pubic hair under the fringe of lace and thin panties.

“Hey,” she said softly.

“Hey,” I managed to croak back.

“What are you making?”

I cleared my throat. “Brownies.” I gestured to the square pan. The oven beeped that it had heated and was ready. I put both trays in and set the timer.

“Oh, nice,” she said. “Did you make them all fancy?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “They’re plain, or as plain as I could make.”

“There’s nothing wrong with plain brownies,” she said.

“I was making them for you.” She smiled and stepped closer to me.

“I don’t know what you could possibly think of me after last night.” Her eyes were wet, and she wasn’t able to meet my gaze. “But I’m not a whore. I-I don’t know why I let him…”

“I know,” I said quickly. “I know how he is, how he does.” I gave the smallest of shrugs. I felt the urge to make myself small. In the back of my mind, I could hear the noises she made, the moaning and whimpering, his cold stare. “And I could never think that about you,” I confessed. She put her hand on mine, her touch was light as a butterfly’s.

“So, I’m going to guess these brownies aren’t from a dollar mix,” she said.

“No, no,” I said, looking at where her hand laid on mine. “The cacao powder is fair trade, from somewhere, I don’t remember. Used some of the same dark chocolate I used to make the hot cacao. The rest? Well, it’s hard to get fancy with flour and eggs.”

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