Read Online Jake: The Sinner Saints #3 by Adrienne Bell - Free Book Online

what you want.”
    Verity didn’t try to hide the wide smile that spread across her face as she plopped down on the mattress beside him.
    “Thank you,” she said, as she leaned in closer to the canvas of his skin. “This is amazing. It must have taken a long time to complete.”
    “A few months.”
    The detail of the piece was just as amazing as she’d hoped. She reached out with one of her fingertips and traced the line of one of the intricate flower and frond swirls that decorated the shoulder cap. It was just like she remembered.
    Verity followed the piece around to his back, crawling around on the bed as she went. And she was glad that she did. The backside of the work was just as amazing as the front. He even had the harness straps that ran around the middle of his ribcage.
    And the shading—it was phenomenal. Everything was so well done that, if it weren’t for the warm feel of Jake’s taut skin under her fingers, she would be tempted to believe that it was the real thing.
    “You know, I saw real pauldrons like this back when I was in college. I thought they were gorgeous then, but this is exquisite. So much more alive,” Verity said. “What made you want to get it?”
    Jake cleared his throat. The line of his shoulders stiffened as she came around to his other side.
    “Same,” he said shortly. “Saw it. Liked it.”
    “Come on,” she said with a laugh. “There has to be more to the story than that. You didn’t sit through countless hours of a needle poking into your skin on a lark.”
    A second later, Verity ran out of mattress to crawl on. She lowered herself down onto the carpet to get a close up look at the finely crafted image of the archangel Michael with his sword held high that emblazoned the front.
    Jake’s chest expanded as he drew in a deep breath, and Verity’s eye was caught by how the artwork moved with him. She spread her fingers out over the chest plate as it slowly fell back into place.
    “I came across a similar piece of armor back when I was stationed in Europe, and I kind of fell in love with it,” he said. “It was light and strong. Made for real battle, but still someone took the time and effort to make it beautiful. I felt a connection to what it symbolized.”
    “Which is?” Verity asked, looking up into his eyes. They were dark with an emotion she had a hard time putting her finger on.
    “What it means to be a warrior living in a civilized world.”
    Well, that sounded interesting. She cocked her head to the side.
    “Please. Tell me more,” she said, lifting herself up a few inches higher on her knees.
    Jake’s mouth went hard and flat for a moment, as if he were deciding how much to tell her, but his gaze never left hers. Eventually, Verity could tell that he’d decided to share, because his lips parted and he drew in a long, slow breath.
    “War…combat…it changes you. There’s no way around that,” he said, his voice soft but even. “It has a way of stripping you bare, of forcing you to confront what lies behind all your carefully constructed masks.”
    “And what did you discover about yourself?” Verity asked, honestly intrigued.
    “Many things,” he said cryptically. “Most importantly, I believed in what I was doing. That I felt a calling inside me to keep innocent people, to keep my country, safe. But that didn’t make what I had to do any easier. To this day, I carry the weight of every decision, every action, every drop of blood around with me. Over time, that weight became a burden, one that threatened to drag me down to the ground.”
    “I can’t even begin to imagine.”
    “Then, one day my team and I found ourselves in this Italian castle, and I saw this old piece of armor hanging on a mannequin. At first, I didn’t understand why someone had taken the time to make it so beautiful. A battlefield is a terrible place for a work of art. But then I realized that the armor wasn’t just meant to protect his body.”
    “It was also intended