His Purple Heart

32 - Mine alone

Trystan and I spent a lot of time together, grocery shopping, cooking together, visiting museums and a carnival themed runway show. All within a week. I hounded him almost everyday about his drinking status, and he didn't seem to mind. For now.

"I can't drink if I'm busy having sex with you several times a day," he said the last time I asked him if he'd been drinking.

I glared at him. "But we're not having sex twenty-four hours straight."

"But I am with you twenty-four hours. I'm not letting you out of my sight until I find the person who trashed your basement."

And oh, was he right. He hovered over me like a hawk and the only alone time I got was in the bathroom, and if I took too long in there, he'd be knocking on the door a few seconds later.

A few days ago he came home from a modeling stint and told me that we were moving out and that he'd gotten a bigger house just outside of New Orleans in a quiet neighborhood.

"Why?" I asked, looking up from the art magazine I was reading. "I like this place."

"You need your own space where you can paint. You've not been able to paint anything good since you got here. That client is still waiting, and you haven't been able to tell him that you're making progress. He knows that you had to start over because the other painting was destroyed, but this," he pointed at the canvas standing in the middle of his living room, "I don't know what that is, but it's not your work. It looks like Ziggy tried his paws at painting." He looked at me, green eyes blazing, daring me to disagree with him.

"Why do I have the feeling that this has more to do with someone trying to break in here?"

"I would do anything to protect you, Debra. Even if that means we have to move house," he said in a very serious tone.

I closed the magazine, focusing all of my attention on him. "So you've paid for this house already?"

"Sort of. I made a downpayment on it, but I want you to come see it first before we close the deal. What do you say?" He looked like a little boy waiting on his parents' approval. He was nervous, and I'd never seen him that way before.

I grinned, because he was right. I couldn't paint here. "Okay."

The security in the new house was top of the line. Bruce, Trystan's ex-marine now bouncer friend had helped him setup the entire thing. The system was trigger happy, going off every time I breathed too hard, but Trystan was truly impressed by what the thing could do.

Today, the day of the Veterans Ball, was our second day in the new house, so there were moving boxes everywhere. Combined together, we had a lot of shit.

This time around the bills weren't split fifty-fifty. Trystan insisted that it was his job to take care of me and provide for me, and all I had to do was sit back and be a good girlfriend.

I was doing just that until I stumbled upon a folder named background checks. I was upstairs in the master bedroom putting things away when I saw the box filled with Trystan's Marine books, including a few books about army vehicle mechanics.

I sat down on the bed and flipped through the folder. The top file belonged to Gonzales and the most recent printout of a court script was dated a few days ago. I couldn't believe it. Trystan had told me that he was going to drop the Gonzales thing, but apparently he was obsessed with getting revenge or something.

Did he plan on killing Gonzales? Was that it? Was I falling in love with a murderer? I knew the very first day that I met Trystan that he was a dangerous man, but this was another can of worms entirely. It was insanity.