For Love of Honor: A Military Bad Boy Romance (Stone Brothers Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Front title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Did you read book one?

  Inner title

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Epilogue

  The End!

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  About the Author

  For Love of Honor

  Samantha Westlake

  Copyright 2016 Samantha Westlake

  All rights reserved.

  For Love of Honor: A Military Bad Boy Romance

  Book design by Samantha Westlake

  Cover Image Copyright 2017

  Used under a Creative Commons Attribution License:

  http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0

  Adult content warning: All characters are legal and fully consenting adults and are not blood relations.

  Dedication

  For all my readers, both new and returning. I write it all for you.

  Did you read the first book of the Stone Brothers series?

  While this book is a standalone romance, two of the characters, Richard and Linda, were introduced in Book One, For Love of Valor. Spoiler alert: they fall in love!

  If you'd like to read their story, be sure to check out Book One of the Stone Brothers romance series by clicking the link below:

  For Love of Valor

  For Love of Honor: A Military Bad Boy Romance

  Chapter One

  TEDDY

  *

  I've always been good at figuring out, once it's all over, exactly where things started to go wrong.

  In this case, it all started to go wrong on that Saturday morning when, unsuspecting, I joined my brothers, Richard and Sebastian, for our family's monthly meeting. We referred to it, half-jokingly, as the "Stone Family Lunch."

  It always feels a little strange to me. We've never been an especially close family. We grew up surrounded by signs of our wealth; it gave us all the material goods that we could need, but I think that it hurt our development. We played outside, played Soldiers and Indians with each other, chased each other through the halls of the Stone family mansion as we played games of tag, did all the things that kids normally did.

  But we didn't go to Little League games, didn't join the Cub Scouts. Instead, our father pushed us to get in shape, constantly reminding us that we'd each need to serve our time in the United States military in order to earn our birthright, access to our family's trust fund.

  We would be wealthy, my father told us. But we had to prove ourselves, in the blood and mud of combat. This was his strongest, deepest belief, one that he insisted on espousing to us almost every day.

  Those words came back to me, for some reason, as I headed into the restaurant to meet my brothers for lunch. The restaurant, named the French Meadow, seemed like a peaceful sort of place. There were no American flags or other patriotic imagery to bring my now-deceased father's words to mind.

  But for some reason, I heard them in my head as I entered, almost as an audible whisper.

  "Fuck you, dad," I murmured under my breath in response. "I've found my own path."

  Inside the restaurant, I didn't have to look far to spot Richard, sitting at one of the tables. He had someone else beside him – Linda, I recalled vaguely. Dr. Linda? I couldn't remember her last name, or if I'd ever heard it. Sebastian, my younger brother, had told me that Richard was seeing someone. For some reason, I remembered my older brother speaking about seeing a therapist, not dating a woman, but maybe I'd heard it wrong. I wasn't always the best at remembering all those inane little conversational details; they'd flit out of my head the second that the conversation ended.

  As I took a seat at the table, the woman introduced herself. Dr. Linda Bisson. I repeated the name inside my head as I looked at her face, hoping that I wouldn't forget it five minutes later. She shook my hand, and I felt the ring on her finger.

  I looked down, and recognized that ring. That had been my mother's ring, the one that my father gave to her when he asked her to marry him. I looked back up at Richard in surprise, and he gave me a slight nod of his head.

  So, it had happened. Richard was getting married.

  I drifted through the next few minutes of conversation, not paying much attention as they prattled on about how they met, something with Richard seeking out Linda for PTSD or something like that. Instead, I sat there and gazed at Richard, wondering how he could seem so happy when he was going to throw his life away for just one woman.

  I paused, replaying that thought. It wasn't that I had anything against monogamy, I amended it to myself. I just didn't think that the idea of marriage made sense any longer. Why would Richard want to risk half of everything he owned on a wager that this woman would be the same in fifty years, that they wouldn't drift apart and become different people, people who no longer were capable of living and sharing everything together?

  I was glad he was happy, but I hated the thought of Richard losing everything to a bad marriage. As nice as Linda was, I still harbored my reservations.

  And then Richard asked me something, something that I missed because I'd momentarily lost the thread of conversation. I looked up, blinking, and he repeated it.

  "Teddy, will you be my best man?" Richard asked.

  I froze. I felt my eyes widening, giving away my shock, but I couldn't hide the sudden emotion. Was he crazy? Why in the world would he want me to serve as his best man, the one who was supposed to push this whole idea of them getting married, when I didn't think that it was a good idea at all? It was like asking me to endorse smoking heroin to impressionable young teenagers!

  But I needed to say something. Anything. Don't just sit there in silence, Teddy! The longer this goes on, the more obvious it will become that you're not a fan of marriage, that you are about to break Richard's heart by turning him down, just as he's finally claiming to have found something to make him happy-

  "Of course I will," I finally managed to get out, even as my mind shouted out that no, this was an awful idea. "Richard, I'm honored."

  Richard said something else, something about the wedding being a lot of hard work, but I didn't really hear it. Inside my head, I was screaming "No!" at myself, already regretting my decision to take on this role. How had he gotten engaged so fast? I'd gone abroad for a few months, working in London on an engineering project that required reaching out to the client across the pond. When I left, Richard had made some noises about seeing this woman, but it hadn't sounded serious.

  And then, when I returned, I found a ring on her finger, and the two of them asking me to be the be
st man at the wedding.

  Now, I realized, Linda was the one speaking. She was telling me something about how she also had her maid of honor, how we'd be working together on planning the wedding. We were planning the wedding? I'd never run a wedding before – why in the world had they decided that I should be in charge?

  I needed to keep them from catching wind of my inner thoughts. I held up my hand to forestall more conversation about this. "I'm sure that I can handle it," I said, projecting confidence into my voice, just like how I talked to engineering clients on the fence about hiring us. I cast about for something light-hearted to say, some way to lighten the mood and hopefully shift things away from this. "Besides, consider the alternative. Seb, as a wedding planner? Imagine the chaos."

  That got a smile from them. They knew how my younger brother shied away from all forms of responsibility, no matter how small. It was probably the first thing that anyone noticed about the man, apparent within minutes of first meeting him.

  "Speaking of whom..." Richard said, looking up over my shoulder.

  Great. Sebastian, my younger brother who insisted that he never needed to outgrow adolescence, had arrived. He came breezing in, slumping into the seat next to me at the table and immediately requesting alcohol as he regaled us with stories about how he'd been partying well into the early hours of the morning.

  Was I supposed to be impressed with this, with how he squandered himself on booze and slutty women and drugs and parties? My brother was a disgrace to our family name, I considered privately.

  The conversation bounced around from that point, Sebastian bragging about his irresponsibility while Richard and Linda just kept sneaking glances at each other, squeezing each other's hands and acting ridiculously in love. Did they not realize that the rest of us had to see that as well? I ordered a coffee and buried my face in it, trying to distract myself with the rich, almost burned taste, the little tingle of caffeine as it hit my tongue.

  Once or twice, I tried to raise hints that I, perhaps, wasn't the most suitable person to put in charge of the wedding planning. I pointed out that I'd never done anything like this before, that my project planning usually focused on shipping, manufacturing, and metalwork and engineering rather than on... what even went into a wedding? Flowers, cake, and getting some priest to stand up and make a lifelong bet on a single person sound like anything other than an awful idea?

  I wasn't going to get through to Richard and Linda, I soon realized. Every time I mentioned the slightest possibility of this wedding being anything but perfect, they just tuned out. They sent dopey gazes at each other at every opportunity, acting like a couple of teenagers who just discovered that their private parts felt good when rubbed together. Sebastian, meanwhile, egged them on during the few minutes when he wasn't caught up in bragging about himself.

  I just sat there, mechanically eating the brunch that I ordered. Eggs and toast, with a side of bacon. Simple, although the fat from the bacon meant that I'd have to spend a bit of extra time on the treadmill this week. I made a mental note to up my exercise regimen for the next few days to compensate.

  Seb kept bragging, Linda and Richard kept on sending dopey glances at each other, and I waited for this monthly Stone brothers lunch to be over. I still wasn't sure why I bothered coming to these things. Yes, I loved my brothers, but this just felt like another way for me to keep seeing all the obvious mistakes that they were making with their lives.

  When the check came, I quickly reached for it, put my card down. Seb looked over at me as I handed the leather folder back to the waiter.

  "Let me guess, you're still trying to avoid using your shares of the trust fund?" he guessed, his tone making it clear that he considered this a mistake.

  Here we go. The age-old argument that we've fought over, a thousand times before today. "I am, yes," I said calmly. "Unlike you, I prefer to actually do something productive with my life, and I'm rewarded accordingly. I don't need to use money that was handed to me, just for being born into this family."

  "And that's the dumbest thing that I've heard," Seb snapped back at me. "You feel ashamed of being born into this family? You're ashamed of being rich?"

  I cringed a little at the words, but rallied my strength. "It's nothing that I've earned," I countered. "I help people, Seb! What do you do for anyone in the world besides yourself?"

  "I help people, too!" he insisted. "When I'm spending all this money, instead of letting it sit in a bank vault somewhere, it helps other people!"

  "Drug dealers," I snorted.

  "They're people too, you dick. And how about the women that I meet at parties? I certainly help them!"

  "Giving them chlamydia is not helping them!" I shouted, only realizing too late that my voice had climbed to a yell, that almost everyone else in the restaurant could hear my words. Sebastian looked shocked for a second, finally feeling a little hit of embarrassment, but he quickly recovered and opened his mouth to snarl something else at me.

  I didn't give him the chance. I saw the waiter coming towards me with the bill, and I snatched it out of his hands even before he reached the table to set it down. I flipped the billfold open, calculated out a fifteen percent tip with a glance at the total, and scribbled the number and my signature at the bottom of the receipt. I thrust the bill down onto the table and turned, stalking away and getting out of the restaurant before Seb and I started swinging at each other.

  He, as usual, wasn't content to let the argument go. "And there he goes, the smartest man in the room, walking away!" he shouted after me. "You think you're better than us because you work, because you got some fancy engineering degree? It just makes you a nerd, a stuck-up fucker who can't pull his head out of his asshole long enough to realize how anyone else feels!"

  My muscles bunched, and I itched to spin around and tackle him, knock him to the floor, beat the shit out of him until he finally saw sense – or stars, whichever came first. I dug my fingernails into my palms, but kept my mouth shut. My teeth ground together as I headed out to my car, getting away from the constant sources of fiery frustration that were my family.

  Between Sebastian's self-centered inability to consider even the immediate effects of his actions, and my older brother's tumble into senseless, stupid love that was all but certain to end in tragedy, I felt like everyone else around me was going crazy. And here I was, Theodore "Teddy" Stone, caught in the middle and dragged unwillingly along with them.

  Chapter Two

  TEDDY

  *

  I arrived back at my house, pulling my car into the little one-car attached garage. I climbed out, looked around at the carefully hung tools on the garage walls – rakes, shovels, everything that I needed for proper yard maintenance, all organized by season.

  I headed into my house and sighed, already feeling a little better. Stepping into my homes always helped put my mind at ease. I'd picked out every piece of furniture, every little item that stood on the shelves that I'd built myself, and looking around at the perfectly assembled decorations brought back fond memories of when I acquired each piece.

  Over the fireplace in my living room hung my MIT degrees, the bachelor's next to the masters. Both were framed, side by side. I reached up and ran my finger over the top lip of the frame of my bachelor's degree, checking for dust.

  Nothing. Good. One sign of an engineer, I considered, was the devotion to neatness. If an engineer had sloppy clothes, a sloppy work area, it would be reflected in the effort that they put forth.

  I couldn't abide the thought of sloppiness.

  From the mantle, I picked up a framed photograph, showing me standing in front of one of the Air Force jets that I maintained during my tour of duty in the military. Despite not wanting to touch my inheritance, I still carried out the requirement of our family, the stipulation that every Stone boy needed to serve in the military for at least one term. I served for two, gaining practical experience in maintaining jets even as I fulfilled my obligation. I enjoyed my time, and knew tha
t I was helping my country.

  But even after finishing my time in the military, I didn't want to sit back and just ride on the coattails of my trust fund like my brothers chose to do. I wanted to earn my way in life, not accept the free ride that just happened to have fallen into my lap by virtue of my birth. I could never quite explain it to anyone else, but I needed to earn my keep.

  Now, my life was comfortable, made all the better by the knowledge that I built it for myself. I earned enough money working at my mechanical engineering firm to pay for the mortgage on my house, to let me fill up my car and buy groceries without needing to fret over how much money remained in my bank account.

  And best of all, I wasn't tied to anyone else.

  Richard once asked me if I ever felt lonely. I'd frowned at him, not really understanding the question. Why would I feel lonely? I had my own life, my own pursuits, and I worked hard at them. I hadn't put work into finding a wife, someone to constantly live with me, spend my money, restrict my choices – and I had no intention of ever acquiring one.

  "Weddings," I snorted to myself out loud, looking around at all the trappings of my life in my living room. "The whole thing is ridiculous."

  I grabbed my laptop, dropping down onto my sofa and opening it up. Now I, the man who wanted nothing to do with a wedding, had been thrust in charge of planning one. If there was a God up in the clouds, he was grinning down at the cruel twist of irony that he'd just inflicted on me.

  But there had been something else that Richard and Linda mentioned. Someone else, rather. Hadn't they said something about how I wouldn't be planning this alone?

  I pulled out my phone, sent Richard a message. Thankfully, I saw him starting to type out a reply immediately. "Callie," he texted back. "She's Linda's best friend since forever, the maid of honor. She'll be helping."

  Wonderful. I wondered whether I could convince this Callie person to take on all the responsibilities, take them off my shoulders. It wasn't that I didn't think I could handle the organizational challenge; I just found it hard to put my best effort into a cause which I didn't believe was valuable.