Handcuffed by Her Hero by Angel Payne Page A

ever-present session journal.
    Finally, Sally stated, “So he got
back early from the deployment.”
    Had the woman spoken like they
were just trading costume ideas for the Halloween bash next week?  “Uh…yeah.”
    “Bet you were glad to see him.”
    “Uh-huh. I was. And then I slept with him, Sal. Did you get that part?”
    “Yep. Sure did.”
    “And you’re not shocked?”
    “I’m stunned that you thought I’d
be.”
    She went silent while scrunching
one of the T-shirt’s sleeves into an accordion fold. Yay. The self-appointed
stupidity medal just got bumped from silver to gold.
    “Now, let me guess,” Sally went
on. “You two agreed it would be a friendly little tension reliever, right? Just
a way to burn off some stress? But hindsight isn’t bearing that out?”
    She let the fold fall apart along
with the edges of her composure. “Hindsight.” It fell out on a whisper. An
image engraved itself on her mind with not-so-nice severity. Z’s broad, bare,
shoulders as he’d made a beeline for her front door. “Sure. That’s a good way
of saying fucked up to shit, isn’t it?”
    “That’s pretty harsh language.”
    She looked up. Hell, here came
the tears, anyway. “It’s a harsh world.”
    Getting her bitter side on didn’t
help things one bit. The ache in her throat got heavier. The loss in her heart
flooded deeper. Neither got better when she remembered the look Z stamped into
her before turning from her. His stare, full of so much regret and discomfort,
that she’d been certain of one thing. He’d likely been prepping it long before
their night of reckless sex.
    Great. Out of all the Special
Forces studs in the world, she’d slept with the only one who dealt the goodbye
fuck after the deployment.
    She erased the wetness from her
face in two furious sweeps. “Look,” she muttered, “I understand what happened.
I even understand why.” After her easy catch of Sally’s tissue box lob, she
went on, “I just don’t understand…all this.” She waved one of the white swipes.
“I have a lot of friends on the base. And some of them come with ‘equipment’ that’s
handy at times…”
    Sally smirked. “Helps to know a
soldier with a good-sized…gun.”
    She returned a watery laugh. “Yeah.
It does.” As if she were getting naked physically as well as emotionally, she
curled her knees to her chest. “But I’ve never had any problems putting them
all back into their compartments. What’s my problem now?”
    Sally released a meaningful
breath. “Zeke’s a little too big for a compartment.”
    Rayna snorted. “No shit.”
    “I didn’t mean that literally.”
    “Neither did I.”
    After another silence passed,
filled mostly with her efforts to force the memories of Thursday night away,
she hurled the tissues to the floor but kept the T-shirt.
    “I hate this,” she spat. “I hate
feeling like this. All right, I admit it. I was just part of his job for a
while. Maybe a part that lingered longer than most, but—” She rested her cheek
on her knee. “I told myself it wouldn’t be forever. I knew it wouldn’t be,
since the second we got out of that damn jungle. And nothing got any easier when
I found out he’s a Dom—”
    She coughed to cover how she
chopped back the rest of the word.
    “He’s a what?” Sally asked.
    “A—a dog lover.” She averted her
eyes. “And you know how my back porch is a magnet for every stray cat in the
neighborhood.”
    “Rayna.” Sally’s tone got layered
with concrete all of a sudden. The woman leaned forward. “You’re racing all
over the place with this.”
    She raised her head and winced. “I’ve
noticed, thank you.”
    Sally uncurled her legs. As she
came forward some more, she L-shaped her elbows atop her knees. “What do you
want here, sweetie?”
    The ten million dollar question.
If only searching her heart for the answer made her feel that way. If only she
didn’t have to search her damn heart for the answer. When had Zeke