Garrett chucked his new empty at the trash can. Incomplete pass. The bottle shattered on the patio stones. Perfect. “Fuck. Off.”

“Check,” the man replied. “I’ll do that. And you keep up with your ‘fine’ thing. Ordering your woman around like she’s on some weird probation but giving her little reason to feel connected or safe in the prison you’ve confined her in—her own home, at that. Jo and I didn’t notice all the tear streaks on her face when we got here, either. Of course, I won’t bring up how you barely touch her—”

“Shut up.” Garrett surged to his feet. A bitter laugh exploded from him. “You have a couple of big ones in that nut sack, Uncle. Did you really come here to call my shit about ‘connection’? I’d laugh, but I’m too busy getting over the shock.”

Wyatt tipped back and touched a finger to his lips again. “Don’t forget the energy suck of keeping all those kinky fantasies under control.”

Garrett froze. The action reflected exactly what the man had done to every blood cell in his body. He glared at Wyatt, but damn it, his uncle’s face was mostly draped in shadows due to the twilight.

Everything save his eyes.

Finally, Garrett managed to choke out, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Wyatt. Fuck. Wyatt.

The fucker made him wait through another tortuous silence. The only thing about Wyatt that moved were the flames in his eyes, billowed into a full bonfire now. Ironic, that. The fire didn’t do a damn thing for Garrett’s frozen bloodstream. This royally sucked.

“Garrett…I know you were there.” The man finally shifted. As he leaned forward to his knees again, he let out a rough cough. “That night, in the barn…when you saw Josie and me—”

“Fuck.” Garrett clawed at his hair and spun away.

“It wasn’t like I had an ear peeled for you, son. You scrambled outta there with the grace of an ox on an ice rink. Man, I sure hope they gave you dance lessons in training.”

“I can’t believe you’re trying to joke about this.” He veered around and rushed at his uncle. “No, what I really can’t believe is how you never, in twelve years, chose to really grow a pair and talk to me about it!”

“Right. And that’s such a great conversation starter for post-Drooley Sunday brunch. ‘Hey, Garrett, did I ever tell you how your Aunt Josie saved our marriage by suggesting I tie her down, flog her, and then fuck her until she screamed through four climaxes? Oh, and pass the coleslaw, buddy. Thanks.’”

“You lived next door, Wyatt.” He spread his arms. “I was fifty steps away!”

“You were also a goddamn pup.”

“No.” He swept an arm back and stabbed a finger at the man. “That’s what you wanted me to be. That’s what you saw because of the fucking pedestal you couldn’t climb down from. I was a young man. And”—he watched his finger shake—“I was confused.” More mortar tumbled off his heart, this time in chunks. It hurt. Holy hell, it hurt. “I was so fucking confused.”

He dropped his arm. He let his gaze follow that direction too. Wyatt’s continuous regard still weighed on him like a wool blanket. The guy picked now to fork over his undivided attention?

At last, his uncle gave a low sigh. “Yeah,” he murmured. “I was confused too.”

Garrett nodded tightly. This transparency had taken twelve years to come, but the man was giving it his all and a little more. On any mission, that was all you could ask of someone.

Garrett turned up the gas-fed flames beneath the rocks in the fire pit. Zeke would be bringing the women home soon, and he knew Sage would be chilled. Her endurance against the Puget Sound moisture had been whittled away by a year in the wild. He paced across the patio and glanced through the living room toward the front door, half from the hope she’d be coming through it and half to buy some time to form a clear thought.

No-go on the Sage appearance. But he did connect with the curiosity that burned at him from Wyatt’s confession. He sat again, voicing his question with more than a little amazement.

“So that’s really what happened? Josie was the one who—who saved your marriage?”

Wyatt gave back a slow, sure smile. “Damn straight she did.”

“By offering herself to you.” Garrett felt his brows crunching in incredulity. “By asking you to…”

“Be her Dominant. Yes.”

Garrett emulated his uncle’s pose, settling elbows on his knees. “With all respect, sir, that’s not the first thing wives usually bring up as a quick fix-it for matrimonial woes.”

“Oh, we were way past the easy repairs, Garrett.” The man’s grin twisted into an uneasy grimace. “Your dad and I started scouting bachelor apartments for me. I even thought of going back into the big green government machine as a trainer, maybe a desk jockey somewhere.”

“That would’ve killed you.”

“I was half dead anyway.” As the man peered into the flames, Garrett noticed things on Wyatt’s face that had never been there before. Deeper grooves around his mouth. Gray tinges in his beard and hair. A well-earned wisdom in his eyes. “My spool was at its end,” the man went on. “I wasn’t super soldier anymore. I wasn’t super anything anymore. And when Josie first talked to me about the lifestyle, I have to admit that I wondered who she was and what she’d done with my wife. Turned out she’d been in some online support groups and made a friend who swore to her that BDSM was better than Xanax and a hell of a lot more satisfying.” With that assertion, his lips curved up again. This time, the expression came with a wicked twist. “Turned out she was right.”

Garrett snorted. This still felt like some strange fourth dimension where nothing was real. “So…what happened then? You just took her to the barn one night and—”

“Shit, no. There were conversations. Lots of them. I had to be convinced I had my real wife, remember?” A soft chuckle vibrated the man. “But I’ll never forget the first night that beautiful woman kneeled at my feet and surrendered herself fully to me. It was a gift, Garrett. A treasure for which I’m grateful every day.”

They were words for a song lyric. That was all great and dandy. But nobody was paging Springsteen here. Wasn’t Wyatt leaving out a huge chunk of the debrief? Garrett shifted restlessly. “Okay, that’s fine and fantastic—for you. But what about her? What does Josie get out of all this? Is she really doing this and—”

“Enjoying it?” Wyatt laughed with heartier emphasis. “Ohhh, yeah.” He sobered fast. “Think about it for a second, would you? Wrap your head around what a soldier’s woman has to go through. When the plumbing busts, we’re not there. When there’s a scary noise at night, we’re not there. And during the shittiest times, when the hormones rage, we’re still not there. Now multiply that by months, by years. When you ask her to hand over everything to you, you’re offering to set her free from all that crap, if only for a little while. The decisions are suddenly not hers to make. The control is gone. The pressure is gone. And she feels completely safe about letting it go, because the man she loves is the one who’s taking care of it.”

Garrett pushed back his hair again. He stared at the fire, wondering if the flames had sprouted an invisible fire bolt and thrown it into his brain.

“Shit,” he blurted. “Holy shit.”

The pictures Wyatt had just painted were the frustrations of a regular battalion wife. But Sage was no normal anything. It was why he’d fallen in love with her inside a month. It was why he’d gotten his ring on her finger as fast as he could. It was why his soul had never truly believed she’d died—and true to her no-normal self, she’d proved him totally right. But in doing that, had he ceased to see her as a real woman with real passions, fears, and insecurities? When she’d begged him to control her, had his soul insisted on worshipping her instead of loving her, of meeting her deepest needs? He’d practiced plenty in the art of pedestal-building, hadn’t he?

She’d needed him. Really needed him.

And he’d just kept pushing her away.

Why hadn’t he seen it that way before?

A breath fell from him that felt like a boulder. Like it did any good. Another stone rolled into place behind it, lodging itself at the base of his throat. “I’ve been such an ass.”

Wyatt huffed. “Hell. Cut yourself some slack, whelp. You don’t have all the answers.” He flashed a grin Garrett hadn’t seen on his face in over ten years. “That’s my job.”

Garrett smiled back. It felt good—damn good. He was suddenly soaring at ten thousand feet over the earth again, his pulse pounding as if he were about to toss his ass out of a plane. But this time, he didn’t have a parachute—and didn’t need one. He had wings of revelation. Wings that would carry Sage and him into a future full of illicit, incredible possibilities.

Fuck. How was he going to keep his hands off her during this impromptu dinner party?