by Jade Alters
It was frustrating. Here I was, a fully grown woman, and I was acting like a flustered teenager over these four men. I could barely settle down to rest without thinking about the way Stone had looked at me. It felt like he was about to kiss me.
Whether it was true or not, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. I imagined him just on the other side of the wall beside my bed, and swallowed hard.
If I didn’t ignore the heat beginning to pool between my legs, things were quickly going to get out of hand.
In the morning, when I finally dragged myself out of bed, I didn’t feel a whole lot different. As I heard Stone getting his morning shower and head out to greet Blake, I realized in a jolt that they’d be leaving within the hour. Sure, Preston and Hale would be coming back — but for the better part of the day, there would always be at least two of them out there in danger, trying to complete their mysterious government task.
I couldn’t help but feel afraid for them. Of course, they were more than capable of looking after themselves, but I was attached to them now. I couldn’t imagine how I’d feel if anything should happen to any one of them.
“You know where you’re going out there, don’t you, Blake?”
“Hm?” He looked up from his maps, jolted out of a train of thought. “Sorry, Jessica. Jess.”
“I just don’t want you all to get lost, or stumble into some trouble, or… anything like that.”
Blake smiled, folding his hands together. There it was — that rare flash of softness. “We’ll be fine; this is not our first rodeo. You don’t need to worry about us.”
“If you say so.”
He nodded to my hand. “Stone was telling me about your hand. Maybe it’s us who should be worrying about you…?”
“I swear I’m not completely incompetent,” I insisted, hiding the wounded hand with the other one. “It was hidden in the water, and I feel really stupid about it, and-”
“I’m only teasing you,” said Blake. Now that he said that, I could see the lightness in his eyes. Maybe he wasn’t all seriousness after all. It would just take a little time for me to learn how to read his body language. “How does it feel this morning?”
“It’s not so bad,” I lied, flexing my fingers. “I’m just going to have to give up on the hand-weights for a few days, I think.”
“That’s probably for the best,” he agreed. At that, a damp-haired Stone walked into the room, a towel flung over his shoulder. I felt my ears burn red and rushed to the counter to bring his breakfast over.
“Hey, morning, Stone,” Blake continued. “I was just looking at the route. Considering the good visibility today, I was thinking of diverting us to make sure we’re not left too open across the valley…”
I felt grateful for the excuse to be silent, giving them the space to discuss more important plans. This wasn’t like me, but I didn’t trust myself to have an eloquent conversation with Stone right now. The dreams I’d had last night were one thing. Having to see him look like that in person was quite another — and it didn’t help that Blake was equally easy on the eyes.
My life had taken a strange turn over the past few weeks. I could never have seen myself taking this job just a month ago. I certainly couldn’t have guessed I’d be spending my time ducking away from making eye contact with really attractive men.
Not least because it was usually in my nature to catch that eye contact and wink.
I caught a few words of their conversation, even as I tried to block it out. They were words you couldn’t help but hear. Explosives. Radicalized. I shuddered, even with my hands under the warm water of the kitchen sink. We all heard those words way too often on news channels today, and now here we were in the midst of some operation or other that faced it down directly. I was more than likely safe in here, but the North boys would be staring it down every single day.
“Jess…?”
I jumped, looking back over my shoulder. “Hi. Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” said Stone, giving me a particularly stomach-melting lopsided grin. “Just… wasn’t sure you should be soaking your hands too much. Gotta keep that bandage on nice and tight until your hand’s had a chance to heal, right?”
“Right,” I said, shaking the water off my hands. “Yes.”
He paused, folding his arms. “So. You’re just going to go straight back to doing that as soon as we leave, aren’t you?”
“No,” I lied. Badly.
“I’ll take it with me,” he warned. “And when that excess weight leads to the failure of the entire mission, this one-” he pointed at Blake, “will be real mad at you.”
I managed a smile, leaning back against the counter. This was the really difficult thing about Stone. He was gorgeous, but he was also so easy to get along with. He didn’t make my stomach flip with intimidation like Blake did.
He just… made it flip another way.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll leave it. I promise. But I hasten to remind you that this is the whole reason I’m here.”
“Can’t hurt to leave it for 24 hours,” said Blake, standing up from the table. His smile was fainter, but just as sincere. “Alright. Thanks for breakfast.”
Stone was already wolfing down his food, so I took a few steps after Blake instead, feeling compelled by force to ask the question bubbling up inside me. I knew it was stupid. Still, I couldn’t help but say it.
“Blake…? You guys will be careful out there, right?”
His smile softened a fraction, glancing over my shoulder at Stone and then back to me again. “We’ll be fine,” he said. “Careful might not be the right word for this job, but we know when to take the risk and when to pull back. I can promise you that.”
I nodded, suddenly embarrassed. He didn’t seem to think I was an idiot as he nodded back and walked away, but I felt like one.
After all, what kind of domestic assistant cared so much about her employers after mere days that she needed to ask them to take care of themselves outside, as if they weren’t professionals? As if they hadn’t done this before a thousand times, without me there to warn them?
Preston
In truth, I started feeling under the weather after the first couple of days at the cabin. I kept it to myself at first. Most of the time, these kind of head colds just disappeared on their own, and I knew how important this operation was. To duck out because I felt a little stuffed up would be useless cowardice.
When I woke up on the eighth day, however, it was a different story entirely.
My entire head was spinning. I couldn’t stand up from the bed without losing my balance a little, and I knew for damn sure I couldn’t close one eye and stay upright — let alone look through a sight on a weapon. I’d be no use to Hale like this, or to anyone.
I wasn’t planning on taking time out. I figured Stone would have something to patch me up with. Unfortunately, my partner had other ideas. Hale took one look at me and steered me back to bed by the shoulders.
“Nope,” he said. “No way. Sleep.”
“You can’t go out by yourself.”
“I’ll recon for Blake and Stone on their shift. Don’t worry about what I’m going to do. You just… get your head back down onto the pillow. You look like death.”
To tell the truth, I felt like it. To some degree, I was grateful to sink back down into the sheets — but before I fell asleep again, the dominant emotion was guilt. I wasn’t here to lie down and languish in the cabin. I was here to perform a task for our government, and in support of the rest of my pack. I was here to keep my country safe. I was…
I was asleep again within minutes.
When I opened my eyes again, the room wasn’t spinning so badly around me, but I was still disoriented. I had no conception of what time it was. With Hale’s bed empty beside me and the border of light around the curtains fairly dim, I could only assume that he, Blake and Stone were still out working. The cabin was quiet enough.
I slipped my feet out of bed, but soon realized I wasn’t
healthy enough to stand. The exertion of trying had me enveloped in a coughing fit.
“Preston…?”
I shrank a little as the petite, blonde form of Jessica Dorsey stepped in through the doorway. Her smile was soft and apologetic. “Sorry to barge in,” she said. “I don’t want to invade your privacy. Just… that’s a hell of a cough, you know? Had to make sure you weren’t dying.”
“Not dying,” I clarified, throat still raspy. “Just sick.”
“Uh huh. Hale said you weren’t doing too good,” she said, leaning against the wall slightly. I hadn’t spent much time with her yet, as much as I loved to hear her talk to the others. She was so bright and bubbly, and I didn’t feel like my quiet sarcasm quite measured up.
Okay, maybe I was a little shy.
“Here,” she said, ducking back out again. “This is silly of me. Let me get you some water.”
“I’m fine,” I insisted, but she had already disappeared. When she returned only a minute or so later, it wasn’t just water in her hands. She was holding a tray, complete with a couple of slices of toast and a chopped-up red apple. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“And you don’t have to eat it,” she insisted. “Not if you don’t feel like it. I just wanted you to have something, just in case. Sorry, the toast might be a little cold now. I did keep it under a little heat, but…”
“It’s perfect,” I assured her, already trying to sit up a little more in bed. Whatever Jess said, leaving this food uneaten was not an option. She’d gone to the trouble of making it for me, so I’d try to eat it. End of story. “This is sweet of you. Thank you. Please don’t feel like you have to play nurse.”
“Please,” she said. “I’m always the mom friend anyway.”
She hovered at the doorway. From the crooked twist in the corner of her smile, I began to realize that I wasn’t the only one who was shy. Knowing that made things a little easier, somehow.
“You don’t strike me as the mom friend,” I countered, leaning forward to adjust the pillow behind me. As I struggled, Jess crossed the room to take it out of my hands. “Okay, I take that back. Yes, you do.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, with playful sarcasm. This close to me, I could smell her perfume — light enough not to make my dizzy head feel worse, but still distinctively fresh and floral. She was summer personified, especially when she smiled. Like now. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Here I am telling you I don’t want to hijack your privacy, and now I’m fluffing up your pillows. I can’t help myself.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t be sorry.”
“I actually kind of figured I scared you,” she said. The shyness tugged her gaze out of mine, but she managed to pick it back up. When our eyes met again, I saw a flutter of attraction that took me aback. So far, I’d figured she had a crush on Stone.
Maybe I was wrong.
“I wasn’t trying to be unfriendly,” I said. “I hope it didn’t come across like that. And you don’t scare me, either. You’re great. I’m just… kind of quiet, I guess.”
“The strong, silent type,” Jess said. “I know it.”
She took a few steps back to sit in the armchair. I felt my whole body relax at the thought that she wouldn’t be leaving any time soon, and it took my breath away as much as the coughing fit had. I’d spoken to her so little so far that it had escaped notice, but… the way I felt in her company, particularly under the heat of her sole attention, was overpowering.
“Well, Preston,” she said, folding her hands. “Now you’re a captive patient, no more strong-and-silencing. I want to get to know you while I have the chance.”
It was much easier to ignore the lights on my vision and the room swaying around me with her pretty face to focus on. I shrugged, turning one of the rings in my ear and trying to play it cool.
“Sure,” I said. “What do you want to know?”
Jessica
It would be a lie to say I wanted Preston to stay sick. Obviously, I wanted him feeling at his best — but by the same token, I couldn’t honestly say I regretted his illness either. He seemed to be less uncomfortable every day, and in the interim I had plenty of time to spend one-on-one with him, learning his unique and playful sense of humor without the hustle and bustle of his three brothers-at-arms to distract me.
Blake and Hale’s handsomeness still intimidated me, and I could barely take my mind off Stone. Now I just happened to have another North man making me blush too, and this one was at home 24 hours a day.
It didn’t help that I seemed to make him shy too. The tips of his ears lit up red whenever I came into the room, and it put a crooked smile on his face that I couldn’t stop thinking about. As he started healing up and feeling a little better, it wasn’t far from my mind that we could be so much more than colleagues if one of us just made the first move.
It was four days later that I heard his bedroom door creak open behind me. I was standing at the hob, getting some bacon ready for his lunch, and when I turned around to check on the sound, I was pleasantly surprised to see him emerging from the room.
“Hey,” I said, beaming. “You’re up and out.”
“At last,” he agreed. “The cabin isn’t spinning around me. I feel pretty clear-headed, actually. Seems like I turned a corner.”
“Good! That’s what I like to hear.”
We shared a smile. I had to duck my head under the pretense of focusing on the bacon; I could feel my heart lifting in my chest.
“I’m gonna grab a shower while I still can,” he said eventually. I could still hear the smile in his voice. “Then, uh… that bacon smells really good.”
“It’s all yours,” I promised. “You get yourself clean. I’ll be ready to fill you up when you get back.”
The sound of the shower switching on had my heart racing. I was already flushed in the warmth of the kitchen, but now I was heating up in an entirely different way. An image of him standing under the stream of water, his pale, bare skin slippery with soap, hung around vivid and relentless in my head. I swallowed, giving up on shutting it out. Maybe if I embraced the thought, it would go away of its own accord.
I could hear blood rushing in my ears. This intensity of feeling was so unlike me that I was almost concerned. The last time I’d fallen so head over heels for anybody, I’d been a teenager. Now here I was feeling pulled towards Preston like I’d been drugged — only it didn’t feel like a bad thing. I wasn’t unwilling. Quite the opposite. It felt like I was coaxing myself into a state of desperate hunger.
How long had I been single? What had it done to me?
And when had the shower stopped running?
I leaned against the counter with both hands, blinking down at the wooden surface. My heart was pounding hard enough that I could see the shifting fabric of my shirt fluttering. In a minute or two he’d be coming back into the room, and I needed to get a hold on myself.
“Jess…?”
Too late. I turned to face him, trying to pull on a mask of normalcy. If it worked, I’d be surprised. I could feel my eyes raking over his handsome face, reading the concern on his features. Watching a bead of water drip from his pushed-back hair over the angular lines of his face. Seeing the way the light caught his premature silver streak.
Was I sick, I wondered? Was this how he had felt, days ago? I didn’t feel dizzy, but I didn’t feel like myself either. As he crossed the room towards me, eyes darkening as the concern left and something else, much deeper and more confident, replaced it.
“I just… I had this idea that you needed me,” he said, voice low and sincere. “I can’t explain it. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head.”
It was like he was explaining it to himself as much as to me. Maybe he felt the same strange pull that I did. Maybe it had just been way too long since I’d gotten laid.
He swallowed, and I watched the bob of his throat as he took another few prowling steps closer to me — then his tongue, darting out to wet his lips. Back against the cou
nter, I tilted back my neck to look up at him as he approached. He was so tall. Even as he reached me and I smoothed my hands up over his arms, I had to stand on my tiptoes to wrap my arms around his neck.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t want to push you. But there’s just… something about you.”
“You’re not pushing me.”
“No?” he said. His eyes were so careful and serious. “You want it?”
“I want it. Want you. Yes.”
A wave of relief hit both of us at once. He leaned down to close the gap between us, pressing his lips down against mine. I wasn’t sure how things had escalated so quickly, but now that they had I had no complaints. No regrets. I tangled my hands into the still-damp hair on the back of his head, moaning quietly against his lips at the pressure of his hips against mine. Already, I could feel how rock-hard he was against me; his hands scored a fire-hot line over the shape of my hips, down towards my thighs.
“You’re so beautiful.”
I groaned, head tipping back as his hands caressed back up my side. “Don’t.”
“You are,” he insisted, leaning down to press a line of not-so-gentle kisses on my neck. “Is it wrong to tell you I can’t stop thinking about you? All the time, ever since we got here. Right from the start.”
I felt like I was falling, even pinned between his firm body and the wooden curve of the counter at my back. My heartbeat was picking up by the seconds. “No,” I said, tipping my head back for his access. “It isn’t wrong. I — yeah. Me too…”
It wasn’t a lie. I just thought it best not to tell him that I’d felt similar things for all the North boys, in different ways. At different times.
I closed my eyes, feeling him take my weight.
“Shall I take you somewhere else?”
“God. Yes.”
My legs fastened tight around him. I could feel his heart pounding against mine, our chests pressed close together as he lifted me through the kitchen and to the doorway of the room he shared with Hale. As he laid me down on the bed and stepped back to pull off his shirt, I took one moment to drink in how surreal this was — as though a naughty dream had come to life.