Soul and Blade by Tara Brown Read Free Book Online

a place inside me that is damaged from everything. A life without family or memories of love. Years of being a soldier and seeing too much and feeling too little. Years as a mind runner who feels my emotions plus the victim’s, and stumbles blindly in the brains of others. Years of PTSD that I don’t even want to scratch the surface of. But he matches the damage. I can’t figure out how—he’s so perfect—but he does. He somehow matches me and I him, and we round all the bad things off.
    There is a reason Dash is the way he is, a reason he fucks and doesn’t make love. A reason he doesn’t talk about things.
    And I doubt that reason is entirely his upbringing.
    There’s more and I don’t care what it is. He doesn’t ask to see my issues, even though I know he wants to, and I won’t ask to see his. I would rather not see mine, so adding in anyone else’s is scary.
    “Do you want to eat now?” he asks, snapping me out of my thoughts.
    “Yes, please.” I put Binx down, smiling when he sprints from the room, from my needy mood, his least favorite.
    Dash walks to me, lifting me up and hugging me tightly. “Let it go. It doesn’t matter now anyway,” he whispers and carries me from the room. He hasn’t started heating up the chicken, but I swear I can already smell it.
    We eat. We shower. He tries to touch me and I cower like a rape victim. We each go to bed dissatisfied and annoyed.
    It’s not the evening the chicken Parm deserved. It deserved wine and kisses and maybe a soak in a deep tub followed by a massage.
    But it isn’t what I get.
    I get heartburn and heartache and memories that aren’t real about things that have scarred me.

5. S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y NIGHT!
    Y a ready for this?” Angie nudges me, grinning from ear to ear. Since Dash and I picked her up at the airport in New York for the blessed weekend with Dash’s family, she’s been grinning. I’m almost scared she’s forcing it, even if she flew all the way here from Scotland.
    I frown but nod, making her laugh. “Ya can be excited, Jane. Yer about to marry the best man in the world. A girl should be excited on the day she tries on her wedding dress.” Maybe she is genuinely happy for me and not faking it at all. Maybe I’ll be alone in the faking it. Lord knows I had to fake it the entire drive up to New York from DC.
    I swallow, but my mouth is dry and my throat is oddly sore. Even the walls of the town car feel like they’re closing in around me.
    She rolls her wide eyes. “Just get it out then, ya awkward wee weirdo.”
    “I’m sorry. I know it isn’t mine to be sorry for. I know I didn’t do anything. But I feel sick all the time when I think about it.”
    She winces, her eyes glossing over for half a second. But she shakes her head, swallows, and squeezes her eyes shut until the tears are gone again. “He doesn’t deserve a single moment more of me time or me energy. Not a minute of it. He was a wanker and a scumbag, and he was never mine. I see that now. I was a means to an end.” She opens her eyes and smiles through the pain. “I am better off. I’ve joined a dating site and I have three hundred hits.”
    “A dating site?” The skeptical agent inside me screams this is a bad idea. I always assume the worst, which in the case of dating sites is abduction and possibly being made into a skin suit.
    “Och, ya don’t expect me to spend the rest of me days pining after some Irishman? Bah, never happen. From now on I only date Scots, and I only accept men with beards.”
    My nose wrinkles involuntarily. I don’t like the idea and I can’t hide it.
    “Don’t make that face. Ya don’t know.” She leans in so close I can smell her coffee breath. “Ya have never actually lived until a man has rubbed his beard on your cunny.”
    I lean back, horrified and unsure if I should mention the article I saw about the germs in beards.
    She closes her eyes and relives something naughty before sighing and nodding. “Tell Dash to give