Deploy, Part One (Rawlings #1)(80)

The whole way home Justice had felt sick with dread and exhausted. Tested.

The Rawling’s wanted closure for everyone, including Declan. To them, him deploying and thinking Nolan was out there needing him was a distraction. A funeral would not erase the craving for revenge. However, Declan’s revenge and answers could be found when he came back.

Justice had a hard time agreeing with them. Every time she argued with them, they’d tell her something she didn’t know before. It was humiliating.

“I cussed your grandmother, Declan!” she raged as they stormed through the airport. “I told her she had no right to spring this on you and she said you knew!”

Declan turned sharply and glared down. “They’ve been trying to put the memory of my brother in the ground for years! They’ll put me there before I let ‘em.” Then he turned as if his words were not daggers, as if the dread of him leaving had not turned her emotions inside out, for some reason, more so this time than any other.

Once Declan showed up at his father’s bar, his long arm rushed across the bar top crashing the drinks, flyers and food—everything there—to the ground.

The bar was full of Rawlings’.

“He is not gone!” Declan roared. He lifted his chin in the stillness of the bar, as he peered into the aggression that soared through his blood. The people who made him strong, strong enough to not give up. “Do you think he’d quit on you?” Declan demanded. He kicked the stool. “Do you think Nolan would give up so it would be easier on him?” He glared at his dad, at his brothers. “Maybe if you f*cks were not so busy trying to put him in the ground this shit would be handled by now.”

Chasen got in Declan’s face, and Declan slugged him. It was on then. Tobias tried to pull them apart, and instead took a hit he felt he had to return, then Atticus and Boon climbed in.

Even Nash was in the mix. Cousins, friends, military friends—it was an all out brawl.

Then all at once Missy Rawlings stood on the bar and yelled, “I’ve called the law. You know what that means!”

They did. If they were enlisted it wasn’t the local law that would be the issue in their lives, it would be the MPs.

A lot of people scrambled to leave then, but the core of Declan’s family stayed right there.

“It’s that easy for you?” Declan yelled at all of them. “Three years and that’s it, forgotten, don’t f*cking matter anymore!”

“You know that’s not true!” Chasen said, willing to go at it again. He’d lost more than one son and the only way he was getting this one back was by kicking his ass a time or two. “You cannot be over there fighting, away from home, thinking of this shit. Shit that needs an end.”

“This isn’t about me!” Declan raged. “You’re going to nail my brother’s coffin shut so I can be at peace when I’m gone—peace! Are you f*cking kidding me?” he said as he pointed right at Justice, making her flame with her famous blush.

He’d made her feel like dead weight. A burden he had to carry. Pointing her out, saying with her as his, he had no peace, he’d always be at odds. Justice didn’t hear the rest of the fight. She left. She gathered from Dawson hours later that no one went to jail. Missy had been bluffing.

The fight between Declan and his dad went on for hours, same with his brothers. At the end, his threat was lethal. “Stay away from me and my own.”

To Declan, ‘me and my own’ was Nolan and Justice.

Dawson didn’t get much further with the story, Declan pulled up just before dawn and both Bell and Dawson left.

Declan paced her room like a lion. She didn’t even bother to ask him ‘what now’—she knew his moods and this was a dark one. Hers wasn’t all that peachy either. Whisky and a flame dancing side by side, an explosion was inevitable.

Even if she got in his face, laid out how he made her feel, how out of all the shit they had been through, tonight he hurt her more than ever before—he’d never hear her. Declan was too pumped from this fight with his family, ripped at the thought that everyone had given up but him.

All at once, Declan pulled her up and had her against the wall. He stared deep in her eyes as he stripped her panties from her and then pulled her arms over her head, holding her in place with one hand as his other reached to hold her thigh on his hip.

Hard and fast, heart pumping, frustrated thrusts were what came at first, but then somehow they slowed, the tension in his shoulders left and he bowed his head to her shoulder. She felt him shudder, and could have sworn she felt a tear slide down her chest.

“We can’t keep doing this,” he said through a pant.

She reached for his face, to see his eyes, to read the answers his lips wouldn’t tell.

Declan jerked his head away as he stepped back.

“You need a better tomorrow, a better everything than I can give you.”

Rage came to her as she moved but he turned his back as he put his clothes back together. “You deserve a family and a man that won’t forget about you when you’re outta sight,” he said as he left her room and went down the steps double time.

“You son of a bitch!” she yelled after him, but he never looked back, not even once.

She grabbed her robe and was down the stairs in a beat, right on his heels.

“I’m not your f*cking burden! If you leave me now, there is no coming back. You hear me? I can’t handle this!”