Page 51 of Jasper

She just needed to get out of her own head.

Maybe Jasper was open to a relationship. Maybe if she moved to New York, it would be possible.

The maybes and what-ifs could drive a girl crazy.

She needed to talk to someone about this, and since her mom was no longer here, that left Jarrod. She doubted he could call her, but she’d email him, and maybe he could call her tomorrow or something. He knew Jasper better than she did. He’d know if her what-ifs and maybes were crazy or not.

With a plan in hand, she went to find her computer.

***

Jasper sank down on the cold floor, his back hitting the stall door. He’d escaped out here to keep from carrying Sloane upstairs and fucking her. It would have been so easy to let himself do, but that wasn’t an option.

He was past the point of telling himself no. The two of them were going to end up in bed together; that much was clear. He just needed to figure out where it went from there. She was the kind of girl you married, and he’d been telling himself that wasn’t what he wanted at this point in his life.

But damned if she wasn’t making him rethink all that. Not the marrying thing, but the getting to know her thing, the thing that might lead him to the marriage proposal in the future.

She’d also been dicked around with by a bastard who treated her like shit, according to Jarrod.

And he didn’t want to hurt her.

So, instead of focusing on Sloane, he turned to something that had haunted him since she brought it up. His survivor’s guilt.

It wasn’t the kind of survivor’s guilt he’d assumed she was talking about. He’d killed a lot of people in the service of his country. He’d had friends killed in combat, friends who died right beside him. Those deaths would always weigh heavily upon him, especially the lives he’d taken. There were nights he couldn’t sleep because of them.

But he’d never felt guilty for surviving in a war zone. He’d felt nothing but gratitude toward his maker for keeping him alive.

But he did feel guilty about surviving all that when his brother hadn’t. He’d been taken hostage, brutally tortured, and killed. Their maker hadn’t seen fit to keep his brother alive when Jasper came close to death more times than he could count, yet here he sat alive when his brother lay in the cold ground.

That was what he felt guilty about. Living and being thankful for it.

It was a hard truth to admit. Sloane had made him think yesterday. She’d forced him to look at everything logically, even if he wasn’t ready to. It ate him up inside he was here, and his brother wasn’t.

He’d blamed Conner for it too. Deep down, Jasper had hated him as much as he hated himself for living. But that wasn’t Conner’s fault. Sloane made him see that too. Conner had suffered horribly, and he’d lived, so why couldn’t Henry? Why? That bothered him. Why couldn’t Henry have just held on a little longer?

He pulled out his burner phone and punched in a phone number he knew by heart, a phone number he shouldn’t have, but did.

Without giving himself a chance to think, he hit the little green phone icon and let the number ring.

“Who the fuck is this and how the fuck did you get this number?”

He sounded so much like Viktor, Jasper smiled.

“This is Jasper Watkins.”

“From Viktor’s company?”

“Yes.”

“Has something happened to my brother?”

“No,” he was quick to assure Conner. “I’m not calling about Viktor.”

There was a pause on the other end. “You’re calling about Henry.”

Jasper’s nostril’s flared. “You knew he was my brother?”

“Yes. He talked about you a lot.”

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