Protect & Serve(65)

“Sounds like a plan, then,” I said, smirking as I stood slowly from my chair. “I hope I’ll hear from you soon then.”

“I’ll try to get you a match by tomorrow evening and arrange a date for the two of you,” Gwendolyn said, rising as I did and offering her hand awkwardly. “After that, we’ll see where everything goes.”

“I’ll be eagerly awaiting your call, my dearest Gwennie,” I said smirking as I watched her face redden with annoyance. “Yes, I know, ‘don’t call you Gwennie.’ ”

“Goodnight, Tristan,” she said, summoning some resolve after my purposeful little jab.

“Goodnight, Gwendolyn” I said as I turned and walked out of her office and into the night. I couldn’t help but chuckle as I walked a few blocks out alone in the early hours of the morning, enjoying the crisp night air as I gathered my thoughts.

I thought about the days when Gwendolyn and I were younger, teens who would have liked nothing more than to have never known one another, yet secretly harbored an unforgivable lust for each other—though “secret” could have been a strong term. I used to catch her staring at me all the time, her pale cheeks made rosy by all the naughty thoughts I was sure were running through her brain.

I happily recalled the night before I’d left for Afghanistan, the way she felt underneath my touch as I slipped her cami up her body. The way she’d writhed for me, her lashes fluttering, her fingernails dug in to the palms of her quaking hands. Was my Gwennie still a virgin? Part of me—a very southward part of me—was desperate to know, and had been ever since I left her dripping wet the night before my deployment.

Oh, what a dolt I was back then. I’d made assumptions about her character, writing Gwendolyn off as a girl who was just the same as any other I’d seduced. But she was stronger than that, not at all the shade of her mother I’d imagined she’d turn out to be. As punishment for my pride, I’d spent years wondering what it would have been like to have had her, to have consummated our forbidden affair. I wondered if I’d ever get the chance to know.

I also wondered if she even realized that the perfect match I’d described to her back there in her office fit her to a “T.”





5





Chapter 5





I sat in silence behind my desk after my brother left, walking so casually back into the night as though he hadn’t just completely flipped my life upside down. He had a habit of that, though, turning everything on its head just for the sake of a good laugh. But is that was this was? Did he just want to play with me?

It was certainly easy to think so after he’d practically named me as his perfect match to spend the rest of his life with. My heart was thumping like a war drum as I stared into the empty space that he’d occupied only moments before, looking so absolutely fabulous without even trying. All those memories of the two of us growing up together flooded back like a dam had burst in my head. It was almost too much to handle.

Tristan had been an absolute terror when we were in our teens. He’d discovered girls long before the two of us had met, and was more than popular with the younger members of the serving staff. His father, of course, never approved of the way he conducted himself, but I admired his freedom more than I admitted. My mother had always had me under a tight leash, constantly dictating my behavior and my choices in friends—even controlling which pieces of my wardrobe would be worn on different days. It was like I had two mother rolled up into one—both of them overbearing and controlling.

But my stepbrother could do as he liked, disapproval be damned. The fact that he was so bound and determined to gain back his father’s title after the announcement of my soon-to-be brother’s birth came almost as a shock, given Tristan’s utter aversion to authority, which was just what I had thought when he’d joined Her Majesty’s Royal Army. It was as though just as you thought Tristan would go one way, he decided to veer in a completely different direction simply for the thrill of throwing everyone else in the world off their kilter.

And how he was trying to get married—married to a woman who was, for all intents and purposes, the exact same as myself in personality and temperament. Just the thought of that had my mouth running dry. I felt my chest tighten as I bit down on my lip nervously. How could he do such a thing? How, after all of this time could I be the perfect match for him and he had never once said a word? If anything I had always felt as though Tristan hated me when we were younger, his constant chiding that I was a stuffy, stuck-up mother’s-girl still ringing in my ears like church bells.