Honor Bound by Joey Hill (speld decodable readers .txt) 📕

the woman I met a year ago. The woman I still want, the woman I can’t wait to discover more about every day.”

She blinked back tears. “How do I know you aren’t staying with me out of pity? I do know you, Peter. You’re honor bound to save the damsel in distress. You don’t know anything else.”

“I’m honor bound to stand by the woman I love,” he responded. When a little sob

escaped her, he traced her tears, kissed them away. Dana had to hold on to him, so hard her nails dug through his shirt. Maybe she imagined it, but the voice that spoke against her ear had a suspicious break to it. “I’m only scared shitless that you might not want to stay. I’ve never held a woman against her will.”

“Oh, really?” she managed. “What do you call forced into a cab and flown off in the middle of the night? You have a problem with ‘no means no,’ Captain.”

He gave a shaky half laugh. “Don’t change the subject. You’re so worried about what’s happening in my head. How do I know you aren’t staying with me out of some weak-assed dependency?”

She swatted at him. “Peter Winston. I haven’t said I’m doing anything yet.”

“If we trust each other, we’ll both know the truth in time. We’ll know it’s love, real and true.” Guiding her now-captured hand to his jaw, he let her feel the resolve in his mouth, touch his lips, so she couldn’t mistake his meaning. “In the long run, the doubts won’t matter, Dana. You’re going to become more self-reliant every day, and one day you’ll know for sure why you’re with me. I know how important that is. You’ll start giving me shit about being overprotective, and I’ll shout back. We’ll fight, make up, the way couples do. But you’ll always admit I’m right, because you want me to be happy.”

It startled a snort out of her. “I wouldn’t count on that one, Captain.”

He shifted beneath her, tightened his arms. “You’ve lost your sight, some of your hearing. You haven’t lost your brain, your sense of touch, smell, your inner strength.

Your soul.” His fingers touched the Lord’s Hands, sliding along her shoulder blade.

“Every time a soldier goes into battle, he’s believing in something more than his physical body. Whether he calls it God, luck or his own damn gut, he does. The body’s a crutch, sweetheart.”

He put her hand on his heart, and did the same with his own, the heel pressed to the high curve of her breast. “This is the real deal, what we all rely on when everything else is taken away. Tonight, for a few precious seconds, you knew that. I saw it in the way you held yourself, the way you walked to me and handed me that leash back, regal as a princess.”

Because of him. His refusal to let her hide from herself, his willingness to use his friends and all their seductive talents, as well as his own, to tap into the deepest part of herself, a part that wasn’t destroyed by that bomb. A path to re-creating the rest. And he was asking her to rely on his heart while she took that journey.

Closing her eyes, she pressed her lips together. “Peter . . . my family is gone. Gram died I guess the way a person’s supposed to go, but my parents, my brothers . . . They were taken, in a way. I’ve never considered myself damaged, just good at getting along and doing what needs to be done. But you’re offering your heart to me. Even if I could look past any worries I have about whether or not that’s real, I’ve got a terrible fear about that.”

Despite her best attempt, her voice broke. She tried to steady it, trying not to fall apart, but here were the damn tears again. “That fear says, ‘How much more do I have to lose?

How much more can I take?’ I feel all alone, anticipating the day you’ll be gone, like everyone else.”

“Damn it, you’re not alone.” He tucked her head underneath his chin, his arms becoming steel bands, every muscle hard and sure against her. “I knew you for one night, went off to damn Afghanistan for a year and couldn’t shake you. Your scent, your voice,

everything you are. I’m willing to take the chance that fate knows something I don’t, that it’s going to give us a long time together, time to make this thing we’ve got deeper, harder and more powerful and peaceful than we can imagine. So that if we do lose one another to something in the future, even if it’s old age, we’ll know every second was worth it.”

He lifted her up, so she felt his gaze on her face again. “As for how much you have to take, you have to take it all. Every bit of love and life you’re given. I bet that’s what your gram taught you.”

She thought of that, all the way home.

Home. When he opened the door, guided her through it, Dana took a couple steps,

stopped and breathed it in. His home, one he wanted to share with her. One he wanted her to be a part of, to make it theirs.

Thinking about that now, she moved forward, using her fingertips to find her way, drifting along the easy chair with the stuffed kitten, the side table, the table with the vase and chess set. She already knew more about where everything was here than she had in the place she’d stayed for months. As if she wanted to know this place. Or already knew it, somehow. Just as she seemed to know him. He moved behind her, slow. He was

keeping pace with her, but remaining silent, as if he understood she was debating something important.

She felt his tension, that murky undercurrent she’d felt off and on from the first moment he’d darkened her door again. Those were the emotions that would tell her what he