Twist My Heart by Brooke Taylor (ebook audio reader .txt) 📕

a dog? Thea had hit the nail on the head—there had to be more to this. But what else could she have been involved in?

It wasn’t too late. He could take the exit and hand her over. Wipe his hands clean of the situation and meet up with the guys as planned. Be lounging on the beach of an exotic hedonistic island in less than twenty-four hours without a care in the world.

He glanced up to the rearview mirror, straight into Titan’s hard stare as the dog stood protectively over Thea’s sleeping body.

Nik dropped his nose and eyed the German shepherd over his sunglasses. “Don’t even give me that look, dog.”

Chapter Twelve

I awoke to a muted world, my hearing muffled. From my position in the vehicle’s backseat, I could make out the tips of evergreen trees and an occasional sheer rock wall through the tinted windows. My head pounded. My bones ached. Then it came back to me—the tornado. My mind cataloged those memories easily, but still nothing from before. “Nik?”

“Right here, Tiggs. How you feelin’?”

I half-smiled, half-winced—glad to hear the warmth returned to his voice, yet everything inside of me railed painfully against moving. “Where are we? I feel…ow.”

His masculine rumble filled the car. “Just ow?”

“Really ow. Bad ow.” I reached to feel what my head was resting on and stroked Titan’s fur. His wet nose pressed cold against my fingertips.

“I bet. Really bad ow is the worst. Here.” He handed me a bottle of water. “You’ll need to stay hydrated. We’re almost home. An ice bath should help the soreness.”

“Home?” Ice bath? That couldn’t be right. “Why can’t I hear you? Everything sounds fuzzy and far away.”

“It’s the altitude. Pop your ears.”

Altitude? “We’re not in Kansas?”

“Not anymore. We’re in Colorado, near Estes Park. You slept hard the whole way. My cabin’s up the road.”

“Didn’t you say you came from California?”

“I did. Our base is in Coronado, but my house is in Estes,” he clarified as he picked up his buzzing phone. After glancing at the screen, which I could see was littered in messages, he dropped the phone back in the cup holder.

“Everything okay?”

“Depends on who you ask.” He grinned into the rearview mirror. Between the baseball hat and his sunglasses most of his face was hidden, but damn, he still looked hot as hell. And I probably looked like really bad ow.

I sat up despite my revolting muscles and head throbbed incessantly. As he sped from curve to curve, it was a struggle to stay upright. I started to yawn, but a loud ripping noise shocked me into shaking it off. “What the heck was that?”

“What was what?”

“The screeching noise.”

“Screeching? Probably your ears starting to pop on their own. Haven’t you ever…? Oh, guess you wouldn’t remember, huh?”

I fought the urge to growl, ‘No, guess not’. I didn’t like seeming like an idiot about something clearly so simple. “Tell me how to get this popping nonsense done.”

“Pinch your nose, blow out hard.”

I did as instructed and immediately regretted it. “Holy frick! Is there blood coming out of them?” My fingers came back dry while the sound of Nik’s rumbled laugh came in loud and clear. “It’s a miracle. I can hear you laughing at me again. How do I unpop them?”

“Sorry, Tiggs, you’re stuck listening to me now.”

“It’s a good thing you have a sexy voice. And Wanda did call you a keeper,” came out before my slothful filter caught it.

He turned away from the rearview as he shifted in his seat. The sunglasses hid any emotions showing in his eyes, so I had to venture a guess. “What? Not good with compliments?”

He turned the Jeep off the main road. “They’re fattening for the ego.”

“I’m sure your ego is as rock solid as your abs.” My filter had no chance against a backhand like that, but it was totally worth the sexy jaw flex he responded with.

* * * *

‘Home.’ Nik hadn’t realized how infrequently he’d used the term until he’d said it to Thea. He’d say ‘going to my cabin’, ‘my house’, ‘the mountains’, ‘Colorado’, ‘the States’. But never ‘home’. Home was a place with family, and the only family he had were the Teams. The base was his home. A home I’ve just given up, he reminded himself.

The cabin wasn’t so much a cabin really, more like a well-built log house. Three bedrooms, two baths, a walkout basement turned man cave with workout room, and a deck with an amazing view of a timber-filled gorge, twenty acres of which was his. It’d welcomed him back from various tours and deployments as well as a few casual vacations with buddies. At the end of the day, it was simply a building with an awesome view.

He pulled into the garage and proceeded to let Titan out before helping a stiff-legged Thea unfold herself from the backseat. He’d only brought his best friends, Coop and Leo, and a few other military buddies here. Never any women. Women were more of a recreational activity for him—something he did in town for a few hours, not much different from a golf game, movie, or getting a massage. He supposed it made him an asshole, but he figured he was doing them a favor really.

Sorry, Wanda, I’m no one’s keeper.

Inhaling a deep, cleansing breath of mountain air, he found himself curiously watching Thea take in the one place on earth that was his alone. The retreat had a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view teeming with dense stands of lodgepole pines. Quaking aspen groves stood out against the dark rock outcroppings with their slender trunks decorated in mottled white bark. Impressive ponderosa pines towered overhead, while narrowleaf cottonwoods dug their roots into the river rock and sandbars along the valley streams.

The fall foliage in these upper mountains, with the heart-shaped aspen leaves turning from silvery green to bright gold, was world-renowned, but now, the late spring meant a rainbow of colorful wildflowers blooming. The melting of the snow-capped mountains filled the rivers as