The Problem with Peace: Greenstone Security #3

by Malcom, Anne

  “But will you stay, just in case?”

  “Sure, babe.”

  I decided that I loved Duke.

  The walk into the building and the ride up the elevator was strange, because it was familiar and foreign at the same time. I’d unwittingly replayed the night Heath and I first met tonight, well, sans Heath. I wished I’d had more beer since sobriety was coming as fast as the numbers on the elevator climbed.

  The doors opened, and I stared at the empty hallway for a long time before I stepped out. Long enough for the doors to almost close, to almost save me from making a dangerous decision.

  But this was a time I didn’t need to be saved. I didn’t want to be saved.

  So I found a strength that had a lot to do with Dutch Courage, but more to do with Heath and I walked out into the hallway, all the way to the door I remembered in stark detail. It was a plain door, of course. But plain things become extraordinary when connected to the memories of someone we loved with all of our being.

  Before I could let the thought of him not being alone inside the tiny apartment poison my mind anymore, I knocked.

  My hand was shaking as I did so. My heart was in my throat. My breathing was shallow.

  Luckily since the apartment was small, I didn’t have to wait long for Heath to open the door.

  He opened the door shirtless.

  Shirt. Less.

  My mouth dropped open.

  I couldn’t help it. I had memories of his torso. They etched into my mind with as much definition as his abs. So I’d known his body was good.

  And though he’d been clothed since I’d seen him lately, I know he’d gained more muscle. A lot more. And I did fantasize about what exactly the muscle looked like when I was alone at home with my vibrator.

  But the reality far exceeded any fantasy.

  He was wearing sweats, slung low on his hips, so I could see that delicious ‘V’ that pointed down to an equally delicious appendage.

  My core pulsated with need. Hunger. It had been to years since I’d had sex. I couldn’t stomach any kind of romance while I was gone. Not like before, when I’d used some form of lust to pretend I wasn’t heartbroken. The mere thought of another man’s hands on me was sickening. Plus, I was too busy trying to figure myself out to even give someone unimportant my energy.

  And every man who wasn’t Heath was unimportant.

  I snapped my head up, realizing I was staring at his crotch, not speaking after I knocked on his door at almost midnight.

  “I don’t know why I’m here.”

  His eyes were dark and not and all blank how I’d come to expect them to be. There was a glimmer of hunger as he roved his gaze up my white sundress, cowboy boots, and denim jacket. My hair was plaited into loose pigtails.

  “Didn’t ask why you were here,” he said. He didn’t say anything else.

  Neither did I.

  We both stood there, staring at each other silently.

  I knew this was a moment that Heath was deciding what to do. If he stepped aside and let me in, it was more than in the literal sense, it was a tiny glimmer of hope that he might let me into places other than his apartment. Or if he closed the door, it was the final and heart shattered close to what had turned into a saga between us.

  I expected him to close the door. I deserved him to close that door.

  The seconds yawned in like years.

  He stepped aside.

  * * *

  I was awake for a long time before I opened my eyes. I didn’t want to open my eyes. Because then the person whose arms were tight around me would know I was awake and most likely his arms would not be around me and then I’d have to abandon the fantasy that this could be every single morning.

  “Know you’re awake, Sunshine,” a throaty voice said.

  Obviously my tactics were extremely flawed.

  But his voice wasn’t cold, cruel or detached.

  So I opened my eyes.

  I’d been using his chest as a pillow, my leg cocked up at his hip and sprawled across his body. Barely any of my body was actually on his mattress.

  He didn’t seem to mind since both of his arms were tight around me, clutching me to his body. They loosened slightly so I could move my head to meet his eyes.

  “You sober?” he asked.

  He caught me off guard, so it took a couple of moments to answer. “Yes.”

  “You hungover?”

  A strange question, but I took stock of my body. I had a slight headache that was likely more to do with dehydration than a hangover. I’d drank enough to get me tipsy, to give me the courage to come over here, but not enough to take me out of my head. Or to make it throb the next day—though it was still the early hours of the next day.

  My memories of the night before were stark and lucid.

  After he’d let me in he hadn’t spoken, he’d taken my jacket, his hands ghosting over the bare skin of my shoulders.

  My entire body shivered with the simple contact.

  Because nothing was ever simple between Heath and me.

  I stepped inside the apartment. Barely anything had changed since the last time I was here. There weren’t any photos in the living room. He’d upgraded his television and sofa. The coffee table was the same black glass top. It had a couple of neatly stacked paperbacks on top. There was a laptop open on the sofa.

  His kitchen had a couple of new and expensive appliances. The counters gleamed. There was a beer sitting on the breakfast bar. Nothing else. Because it was Heath and he was all about order.

  The differences between his stark, empty, clean apartment and my cluttered, mismatched and messy one were comical. Or they would’ve been if they weren’t metaphors for the differences between us.

  “Beer?” the offer echoed through the empty apartment.

  I turned to see him watching me wander around his living room, looking for something to grasp onto, some sign that he had finally found a home. Found peace.

  “No,” I said, my voice a little more than a whisper. “I’ve had enough.”

  “You drunk?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  He nodded once.

  I wanted to say more. To say everything, but even with this empty apartment, there wasn’t enough room for it all. I didn’t have enough energy for it all. Weariness settled suddenly on my shoulders and I struggled to stand under it.

  “Tired?” he asked, seeming to see the wave of tiredness that had hit me.

  I nodded.

  He drained his beer, rounded the kitchen, threw it in the trash and then came to stand in front of me.

  “Let’s go to bed then.”

  And we did.

  Went to bed. To sleep.

  He handed me a tee. I went to the bathroom to change and brush my teeth with his toothbrush.

  He was in bed when I came out. We didn’t speak. The covers were set aside for me. His eyes held invitation that he didn’t articulate.

  I didn’t hesitate to curl under the covers and into his arms.

  “Home,” I whispered.

  He jerked.

  But he didn’t speak.

  And I fell asleep.

  “No,” I said once my mind had finished going over the events of the night. “I wasn’t even that drunk—”

  I didn’t get to finish since Heath hauled me up his body, grabbed the back of my neck and wrenched my mouth down on his. I should’ve worried about morning breath and about how scary I looked with my curls escaping from the braids and wild around my face.

  I didn’t think about anything but his mouth on mine and the fact his tee had ridden up, like all the way up since my legs were splayed on either side of his hips and my panties were grinding against a definite hardness between his legs. He let out a fierce growl into my mouth as I moved against him out of instinct out of pure hunger, out of desperation.

  He pulled my head back to stare at me in a way that had wetness pouring into my already soaked panties. “I’m not gonna be able to be gentle,
Sunshine,” he rasped. “Not now. Not even the second time around. I can’t promise you I will be able to fuck you gentle for a long time.”

  My stomach jumped as my pussy clenched at his words. “I don’t need you to be gentle,” I said. “In fact, I couldn’t stand gentle right now.”

  My words were swallowed by another brutal kiss and his tee was no longer covering me. Heath’s hands were everywhere all over my naked torso, and then his mouth was right there, right on my nipple. I cried out as his teeth grazed the sensitive nub, my orgasm threatening to bowl me over with his mouth alone.

  Just as it became too much to bear, his mouth was gone.

  “You’re gonna ride me, Sunshine,” Heath growled, yanking at the sides of my panties. “And it’s not gonna be sweet. There is no sweet left for us, Sunshine,” he said. “There’s no more of that kindness left for us. Because we’ve chipped away at us, at this, until there was only the truth left. And the truth isn’t kind or sweet. But sweet doesn’t fill you up, babe, no matter what you tell yourself. I’m going to fucking fill you up.”

  The tear of the fabric echoed through my brain like a roar. It mingled with his words, the literal enforcement of his words. Of the truth in them. The beautiful, ugly, fucking hot truth. He had just ripped my panties from my body.

  I struggled with his sweats, desperate to free him. Desperate to free the both of us from all the shackles that had been strangling us.

  He lifted me enough to pull them past his hips. His gaze bore into me as he hovered me above him. “You ready, baby?”

  “You know I am,” I whispered, my voice throaty and low.

  “Don’t you take your fuckin’ eyes off me,” he commanded.

  As if I could.

  He didn’t move me and my blood ran hot through my body as the need for him to be inside me drove me wild.

  “Tell me you won’t take your eyes off me as you ride my cock, Polly,” Heath said.

  My pussy clenched. “I won’t take my eyes off you,” I said.

  His eyes darkened with a command.

  “As I ride your cock...Marine,” I finished, the last word barely out of my mouth as he slammed me down.

  Slammed me down on his cock and he filled me up.

  Completely and utterly.

  White clouded my vision and I cried out. I was primed and ready for him, of course. But the angle, the tightness of my pussy, my wild need for him had me almost blacking out.

  Heath’s hands were tight on my hips, maybe to the point of pain, but I could not feel pain, not at this moment. Pleasure was the only thing in my system.

  Heath was the only thing in my system.

  I blinked away stars.

  I focused my gaze on Heath, whose jaw was hard, veins protruding from his neck with the force he was keeping himself still. I placed my hands on my spot, on his chest. And then I moved. And then I rode him.

  “Fuck, Sunshine,” he ground out as he yanked my head down, pressing our foreheads together.

  I continued to move.

  Continued to slam into him.

  “My Polly,” he growled, his voice guttural.

  My orgasm was about to take me over, snatch all my sense and words. “I was always your Polly,” I whispered, my voice fractured. “And I always will be.”

  Then I shattered.

  And I’d never felt so whole in six years.

  * * *

  I didn’t remember going to sleep.

  I must’ve, since I was waking up.

  And I must’ve gone to sleep with Heath inside me since the last thing I remembered was him growling his release into me, his mouth on mine. His eyes devouring me with a hunger and an intensity that I’d been certain was gone forever. That I’d been certain I’d killed inside him.

  I’d been ready to carry that around with me for however long it took me to get over him. In other words, forever.

  It was almost too good to be true to have it back. But then again, it’s not like things had been easy up until now. So maybe I needed to be like the old Polly, take the good without bracing, without believing the worst. Because when you believed the worst, the worst tended to happen. If you believed the best, better things came.

  Law of Attraction and all that.

  An ethos I lived by.

  I stretched out like a cat, my muscles delightfully sore with evidence of just how much time was spent getting biblically reacquainted with each other. And getting reacquainted to this new roughness between us. To this new violence. Because Heath was right, there was no room for sweet between us anymore. And me, the hopeless romantic who read Nicholas Sparks books should’ve been disappointed with that. But there was no way in hell that I could be disappointed with what happened last night.

  It turned out I didn’t want sweet. I liked sour. Bitter. Because that’s what it was. That’s what we were. But it tasted like ambrosia.

  I was surprised I wasn’t using Heath as a pillow, surprised that his arms weren’t tight around me, as they had been in the short periods Heath wasn’t fucking me last night.

  I was even more surprised that me stretching out didn’t encounter warm and hot naked and muscled flesh.

  I was also very disappointed with this.

  “Heath?” I called, my voice croaky with sleep. I creaked my eyes open to find an empty bed. The sheets were rumpled with the evidence of last night. His scent still clung to the cotton, mingled with the smell of sex.

  My core pulsated with the pure memory of it.

  Even though I was aching in every area in my body, I needed more than a memory. I needed Heath to show me that last night wasn’t a dream. That it wasn’t a one-off. Because it was more than sex. It was always more than sex with us.

  That’s what started all the trouble.

  All the pain.

  I knew that the trouble and pain wasn’t over. It was never going to be over. Not with our history. Not with the things Heath knew and, more importantly, the things he didn’t know.

  My heart clenched at one specific thing. The specific thing that had me fighting everything since my divorce.

  I pushed it aside.

  For the morning at least.

  I sat up, the sheet falling with me to expose my naked skin to the morning light.

  The curtains were open. As they had been all night. Because Heath knew that little detail that I didn’t like sleeping with curtains if I could help it. I liked looking upon the beauty of the universe in the night sky—what little I could see in L.A. anyway—and I liked the soft rays of the sun waking me up on the rare occasion I wasn’t awake already.

  The sun was high in the sky, and I wasn’t one of those people that could read the time like a fricking sundial, but I knew it was late. That was something. I didn’t sleep late. Even though I was up most of the night and I should’ve slept late to compensate, I didn’t. My body didn’t stay unconscious when there was a new day, a new adventure. A new escape.

  But in Heath’s arms, where I was having an adventure, when I’d stopped looking for an escape, I finally gave my body the sleep it needed. Never had I felt so well rested.

  But there was one problem.

  “Heath?” I repeated, this time louder, though the size of the apartment that if he was here, he would’ve heard my low croak.

  Something settled in my stomach. An unease with the knowledge I was naked and alone in Heath’s apartment.

  “Don’t believe the worst, Polly,” I muttered to myself, getting up and snatching Heath’s tee from the floor, smelling it first. The scent of him and I mixed together was calming. “He’s probably gone for muffins or tea,” I continued muttering to myself, looking to the bedside tables for a note.

  Heath was a man who left notes. Because he was also the man who had an alarm clock directly in the middle of the bedside table, despite the fact he woke automatically at dawn. Well, he had before. I assumed that something they took such trouble to drum into you at basic training was something that was hard to shake.

  A
nd that’s because who Heath was.

  He wasn’t as ordered or groomed on the outside as he had been in the Marines, but his apartment told me he still was on the inside.

  Hence me looking for the note.

  There was no note in the bedroom.

  I padded into the kitchen, guessing it might be tacked on the naked fridge. But that didn’t even have magnets to pin it on.

  Who the heck didn’t have fridge magnets?

  The counter was clean, wiped down, mail stacked neatly to one side.

  Again, no note.

  That uncomfortable feeling settled in my stomach as I snatched my purse from the sofa I’d dumped it on last night.

  I scrolled through my numerous messages and voicemails. Something that was the norm for me since none of my friends operated on the same timeline.

  Nothing from Heath.

  I sucked in a breath.

  Was he doing it again? Was this his final revenge for everything I’d done to him? To use my body and soul and leave me the next morning without a goodbye, without anything?

  I deserved it.

  But Heath wasn’t that man. To do such nasty things.

  Craig was that man.

  Heath wasn’t one to act. Last night couldn’t have been an act, what we’d shared. It was too bone shaking. Too visceral.

  Craig was the one who perfected acts.

  But then again, Heath had perfected the hatred toward me since I’d been back.

  I couldn’t even call him.

  Because I didn’t have his freaking number. I’d had it before I met Craig. In one of our many arguments about us, he’d snatched my phone, programmed his number into it and demand I use it “when I got my shit together.”

  I would lie in bed at three in the morning after hours of staring at that number, wishing I could get my shit together and press call.

  You’d think I would’ve memorized it by now.

  Heath would’ve had the same number. Because Heath was not like me and did not lose phones at least once a month. So even if I hadn’t deleted his number when Craig and I had gotten engaged, I wouldn’t have the same phone to call him on. I could’ve called Lucy or Keltan to ask for it. But then of course, they’d realize what me asking for his number would mean and they’d make a big thing of it.