SCAR_A Dark Military Romance Read online

  I stand there, waiting for him to tear my secrets from me, but instead of those powerful hands ripping at zippers and buttons, he takes two steps back and looks at me.

  “Strip.”

  What? I can’t.

  “Mary,” he says, his voice more firm than ever. “Take your clothes off. Now.”

  “I can’t.” My voice shakes and cracks. “I can’t…”

  All I can do right now is repeat those two words. I can’t take my clothes off. I can’t let him see me. I can’t be naked. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I’m frozen and useless to him and to myself.

  Ken makes a soft sound and steps forward.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  I can’t even bring myself to say it. I want to cry. I’m ruining this. He wanted me. He was going to have me. If I weren’t so fucked up and broken he’d probably be inside me right now. Instead, I’m cowering before him and trying to hide the tears which are coming to my eyes.

  Ken’s arms slide around me. He sweeps me up against his body and carries me over to his bed. He lays me down and lowers his body next to mine, his arms encircling my waist as he pulls me up to rest against him. Then he holds me close as I bury my face in his chest and wish I wasn’t like this.

  “Whatever you’re afraid of… I promise, it won’t come true,” he rumbles with reassurance.

  It’s a big promise, and one he shouldn’t be making.

  “I’m ruined, Ken. Forever. No man is ever going to want me.”

  “That is absolutely not true,” he says, his voice low and serious.

  I turn my face away from him. He doesn’t understand. He’s an incredible man and an amazing person. He’s brave, he’s incredibly smart, and he’s one of the most physically powerful people I’ve ever met. He could have literally any woman he wanted. He could walk into a grocery store and pick a woman up like most people pick up a few apples.

  “Mary.” He growls my name and a ripple of delicious fear runs down my spine. Yes, I am afraid of him, but fear has a different meaning to me now. This fear I feel with him is nothing like the horror I endured in the hospital. That was a death of feeling which drained me of my will to exist. The fear I feel with him makes me more alive, causes my heart to race, my tummy to flutter. Little goosebumps appear on my skin, and the hair on the back of my next stands erect.

  “Look at me.”

  I can barely bring myself to look at him. He makes me shy. He is everything a man should be. I am nothing a woman should be and we both know it.

  “Look at me!” He snaps the words with harsh command and when I still don’t move my head, he takes my chin and turns my head toward him.

  “You are beautiful,” he says. “You are not less for what you have been through. You are more. You bear the scars of life. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. They are marks which tell everyone who sees them how much you have survived.”

  “Men don’t care what a woman has survived. They want a pretty little innocent unblemished girl. They want to be the ones to defile. They don’t want used, broken women.”

  I see a flash of pure anger in his eyes. “And who taught you that?”

  “Everyone?” I shrug. I know it’s true. They don’t advertise cars with scantily clad women covered in scars and marks.

  “Not all men are mindless, and not all men are looking for an innocent princess,” he says. “Don’t give up on love yet.”

  He pulls his fingers away from my chin and lets me sit with those words. They’re nice, but it’s going to take more than words to change how I feel inside.

  “I’m going to take your clothes off you, Mary,” he says. “I’m going to start now. You can stop me if you want to, but I don’t want you to.”

  I lie there next to him as his fingers find the zipper at the top of my neck and lower it down to my waist in a slow, steady motion. That alone won’t bare anything. Beneath the overalls, I have a white t-shirt and a bra on top, and boxers and panties below. I left him remove the overalls, feeling their heavy protection slide away from me.

  “Lay on your back,” he urges softly, crouching over me as he pulls the thick fabric from my hips and down off my legs.

  I’m letting him do what he wants with me, and I don’t even know why. Maybe part of me just wants to get his rejection over with. He’s not going to want me once he sees me, I know that much.

  His fingers curl under my t-shirt, peel it up an inch and I freeze. Now he can see them for sure, the little white lines marking me. He doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t even seem to see them as he draws it up, over my head. I can’t see him for a moment. There is nothing but white fabric, pit sweat in the underarms and then I am free, in my bra.

  “They’re everywhere,” I say as he puts a strong hand to my belly, his splayed fingers running over my skin. “They kept… they…” I can’t begin to say what they did. He can see what they did. Every part of it is written in scar tissue, perfectly neat, anal retentive marks joining and converging across my torso.

  He’s looking at me. Seeing me as I really am. Scars and all. I can’t read the expression on his face and I don’t know if I want to either. Does he pity me? Is he disgusted?

  The fear has gone. It’s been replaced with something almost worse: safety.

  I can’t risk feeling this safe. That makes no sense to anyone who hasn’t been hurt, but it’s the most urgent thing in my mind. I have to get up, away from his strong arms. I have to hide myself away, make sure that he doesn’t have the chance to love me.

  “Stay still.” His voice is gruff, and stern and calm. It gentles me. And then he reaches for my bra, his fingers finding the clasp between my breasts. This is the moment of truth.

  KEN

  Her left nipple is missing. There’s a thin line of scar tissue where it once was. It’s not as bad as it could be, and plenty of people live with far worse, but I know none of that matters because it’s all an abstract concept until it’s your body and it’s happening to you.

  I cup her breast and run my fingers over her skin.

  “You’re beautiful,” I say. I mean it too. She is beautiful in so many ways. She’s strong and she’s soft and she’s the kind of woman who is capable of challenging me without being a raging harridan about it. She’s the perfect mixture of bratty girl and mature, driven woman. She doesn’t really need me. She would survive on her own just fine, but I want to be there for her. I want to make sure she never hurts like this again.

  “You’re just saying that because you have to.”

  “I don’t have to say a goddamn thing, girl,” I growl, leaning down and nipping lightly at her earlobe. She’s going to learn a new relationship with pain with me. She’s going to learn that it can hurt good. It can be constructive, and instructive.

  “They defaced me.”

  “They left their marks. I left a few marks on them too,” I say, my lip curling back in feral instinct at the memory. Very occasionally, it is good to unleash the animal which prowls at the back of every male mind, the thing which craves blood and death and the screams of the dying. I was a beast the day I took her from them, and I do not regret a moment of it.

  I run my hands down her body, the curves of her waist and hips and I find the underwear which is keeping the rest of her from me. It slides down her body at my urging, leaving her utterly bare besides dark curls at the very apex of her thighs.

  The scars truly aren’t as terrible as she has imagined them to be, but she won’t believe me, not yet. She’s lying there with fear in her beautiful eyes because she can’t risk believing what I’m saying to her.

  So I pull my shirt off. Let her see the man she is with. I bear the marks of war. Three bullet holes. One in my right shoulder, another below my ribs, the third an inch lower. I caught six bullets that day, these strays were the ones that missed the vest. There’s also a long burn from an explosion which runs down the left-hand side of my abdominal plane.

  “I’m hardly untouched either,” I point out, lifting her hands to
my body, so she can run her fingers over my torso and the scars that mark it.

  The military is a massive organism which, among other things, has become expert in the application of pain and damage. But those skills can be used to heal as well as to hurt.

  “It’s different for men. Men are supposed to be scarred.”

  I raise a brow as I look down at her. “Miss Mary, you wouldn’t be sexist would you?”

  She gives me a little smirk of a smile, and a hint of a laugh. My heart swells at her reaction. She is letting me in, and she is beautiful. She is the most beautiful woman in the world, scars or not, I can see her pain and her bravery, her strength and her softness. They are all laid bare to me.

  I lower my head and begin to kiss her body, every part of her I can. This is reconnaissance. I am learning where she squirms, where she moans, where she goes soft and gives little gasps.

  My cock is rock hard and I want nothing more than to push it between her thighs where her dark curls are hiding the entrance to her tight pussy, but I take my time. Because I want to, and because I know it must have been a very long time since she was with a man. Her fear of showing those scars tells me all I need to know.

  “Please,” she whimpers. “I need you inside me.”

  I don’t like to disappoint a lady, especially not one as beautiful as she is. It’s my pleasure to push the head of my cock to that heated, wet little crevice between her legs and surge forward, feeling her body wrap around me in perfect feminine embrace.

  I take it slowly, make sure she isn’t in any pain. She is very tight and her body takes some time to adjust, but soon she is moving back against me with little moans which don’t hold those first whimpers of pain, and soon I am lost in her body, surging back and forth inside her hot, wet little cunt.

  She’s perfect. I can’t express how gorgeous she is, how her body and her character and her fucking soul are all so beautiful to me as I rock my hips against her, supporting my upper body on my arms so I can look down and enjoy the sight of her.

  It’s not long before I am seeing past the scars entirely. They are a small part of the total package, the curve of her hip, the softness of her thighs, the way her tongue curls against mine as I kiss her deeply.

  I wanted to fuck her, but I am making love to her, and in this moment it feels as though we have known each other for lifetimes.

  It’s so good, I almost forget. Almost.

  “I was going to punish you, wasn’t I?”

  She undulates beneath me, her inner walls squeezing my cock, her hot wet embrace driving me to distraction. I can’t let her make me forget. She was a disobedient little brat and she will pay for that.

  I slide my cock out of her, admire the way her pussy lips flower so beautifully, pink and spread and dewy with her arousal and mine.

  She can’t think that she’s going to get away with things because of scars, or ideology, or any other excuse she throws at me in hopes of getting away with things. She’s going to pay for her disobedience the old-fashioned way.

  “Face down on the bed.”

  She makes a whimpering sound, but it’s heated and it’s soft and when she rolls over I see the pretty curve of her yet to be reddened cheeks. She has a great ass. It’s full and feminine. I could stare at it all day, but right now I’m going to lay my belt across it and make damn sure she knows that when I say stay, I mean stay.

  I stand up, my cock bobbing erect and covered in the sleek shine of her juices. I go for my belt, two inches of nice thick shiny black leather, a perfect contrast to the pale ass she’s presenting to me.

  “In the future, you’re going to be a good girl and do as I say, aren’t you,” I murmur, reaching down to stroke her hair.

  “Yessir,” she mumbles.

  I’m pretty sure she’d say anything to get my cock back inside her. I can tell from the way she’s rolling that ass she’s not even thinking about the belt. She wants that tight inner hole filled. Soon. Once I’m done teaching her a lesson.

  MARY

  The belt lands across my ass, a searing stroke which makes heat flash deep through my flesh. Holy fuck, he’s really taking his belt to me. I feel like one of the little rascals or something, caught by daddy and taking a licking for it. The thought makes me giggle just as the next stroke lands and my giggle turns into a gasp.

  “You think this is funny, huh?”

  He stands over me, so sexy and dominant, the leather clutched between his big hands.

  “No?” I squeak the answer. I don’t think this is funny at all.

  Other people have hurt me, but this isn’t pain in the way they inflicted it. This is the kind of heat and sting which wraps around my soul and makes me feel held. This is the kind of pain that imposes a limit, not the pain that degrades and destroys.

  This… is what I have been searching for all this time. I didn’t know it. I just kept pushing and pushing, looking for this feeling. This safety which is not entirely safe, this affection that isn’t cloying, shallow nonsense delivered with a plastic bag of wilting flowers and a dinner at a lobster chain.

  “You’re going to follow orders,” he snaps, his voice holding just the right note of dominance and care. “I will not let you get hurt because you think you know better. I will not let harm come to you from anyone, including yourself.”

  I need him. Not because of fate, but because he alone in the world seems to be able to see me for what I am. He doesn’t look past the scars. He understands them. He’s not afraid of them, or what they mean, and he doesn’t pity me for having them. They’re not a get out of jail free card for me either. In spite of seeing what lies beneath my clothes, the marks of those who hurt me so deeply I never thought I would heal, he’s willing to whip my ass because I disobeyed him, and maybe that means he intends to have me with him long enough for that obedience to matter.

  The belt lands a dozen more times, hot strokes making my ass burn. It all feels good. The arousal he left me with when he pulled out of me still burns low in my belly and the lashes of the leather that should hurt like hell are transformed into pure erotic energy.

  He drops the belt and surges inside me, his cock plunging deep into my soaking wet pussy. I let our a cry of pleasure as an incredible sensation washes through me. His strong arms wrap around me, draw me up from the bed, push me back against the wall and I am pinned there as his powerful hips surge against me time and time again, his mouth on my neck, my breasts, my lips, devouring me.

  This is not fucking, or lovemaking, this is something deeper and more satisfying than either of those things, and it is both combined. We are the same thing, for several incredible minutes, there is no difference between he and me. His cock plunges inside me, is wrapped in the tight embrace of my inner walls and we are one.

  Orgasm comes like a wild thing, rushing through us, making our blood boil. The thrusting, the crying out, the rough grinding and the desperate clenching, the tightening of muscles and the spending of seed. He carries me through it all until I can barely breathe from pleasure, and then he draws me back down to the messy bed where we began and we lie together in a silent reverie in which there are no words, only touch.

  4

  MARY

  Fast asleep in Ken’s arms, I feel as if nothing can touch me. I have never been as safe as this. Not ever, in my entire life have I felt so completely secure and utterly protected. He has touched me in ways no man has, he’s made orgasm something damn near transcendent. For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel damaged, or broken, or scarred. I feel complete.

  Later on, I’ll learn that it was 02:39 when the alarms went off. In deep sleep, it’s a detail I miss completely. All I know is that it’s loud and the arms which have been cradling me all night suddenly aren’t there anymore.

  Are we under attack?

  Ken is up and out of the CHU in a second, with only a hasty “STAY” thundered at me. How he managed to get clothes and boots on that fast, I have no idea. It’s as if he magicked them on before I co
uld properly wake up.

  I know better than to leave the room, but I get up and get dressed too, a lot slower than he did, but I want to be prepared in case we have to move. Bases like this one are vulnerable. There are jihadi forces spread across the country, some loyal to Isil, others only to their respective warlords. It’s impossible to truly explain how fractured this country is. It’s not just this war which has made things unpleasant. There are hatreds here which go back centuries, long before the empires which ripped this land apart were even dreamt of, let alone founded.

  My impression of the efforts to tame this place is that they are futile. Not because peace is impossible, but because the tapestry of this place is more complex than we can handle. There’s nuance and depth. To understand even one village, you would have to spend a good year hearing the stories, learning brothers of brothers, mothers of mothers.

  I think about all of this as I sit on the bed and wait to find out what’s happening. There could be a mortar incoming at this very moment. I’d never know it hit, unless it hit just far enough away to rip through the wall of this thing and turn the alloy into shards which burst through the human body like a thousand tiny hot knives. Best not to think about it really, but hard not to.

  Sitting and waiting to die, hoping I won’t, I’m at peace. Ken is out there. I don’t know what he’s doing, but the anxiety which would usually be making me a nervous wreck just isn’t there. He’ll take care of me. I mean, as far as he can, even he can’t do anything about an incoming shell.

  I walk to the door and open it a fraction, just so I can see what’s going on. The base is in serious motion, armored vehicles are being deployed, but I don’t hear gun fire, which means the base itself isn’t being assaulted. The fighting must be happening somewhere else. Somewhere that matters.