In one quick sweep, he broke away from me, picking me up to pull me against his waist. His fingers tangled in my hair as he walked us in front of the fire and laid me to the floor.
“Fucking perfect, Gingerbread…better than I ever thought…” He silenced himself. That long, wide body strong, imposing as he kissed me again. He slipped down my body, cupping my ass again. He pushed my center to his mouth to tease me again and again until I couldn’t see anything but the stars that shot behind my eyes as my orgasm crested.
“Dale…” My voice throbbed. My heart slowed, but I still reached for him, needing him close. Still amazed that I had him here, with me, in a blaze of activity and heat and lust and impossible potential. None of this seemed real, but there he was, moving closer. Moving over me with the background of the forest in the glass doors behind us and the fire at our side.
“Gin…”
I held my hand over his mouth, scared what he’d say. I was terrified he’d give me some explanation my heart couldn’t bear to hear, but Dale didn’t try to make excuses. He kissed my fingers, pushing my hand aside before he moved up my body.
There seemed to be so much he wanted to say. I saw it all moving across his features, shifting the hard lines between his eyebrows and tightening the muscles in his neck. But Dale didn’t speak. He just moved closer, holding my face in his hand. He kissed me like he couldn’t get enough of the way I tasted.
It was heaven. A living daydream made real. I never wanted it to end. I wished nothing would stop this moment. I meant to pull him close. He was ready, I could feel as much in the hard outline of his cock against my leg and in the greedy way he touched me, like he was losing control and didn’t care that he was. I reached for him, ready to tell him I wanted him right then, just like that, raw and real right in front of that fire, to have him inside me, to feel him everywhere. He moaned, loud, a little desperate when I lowered his zipper. His thick bottom lip denting behind his teeth as he waited for me to release him. But when I moved my attention from that zipper and the warmth I cupped between my fingers, to the movement just over Dale’s shoulders, I froze. Two men moved around on the other side of the door, both with guns, running across the balcony. “Dale…”
He glanced at my face, spotting the twist I made with my chin. He jerked his attention to the glass door behind us. We were shadowed by the darkness in the cabin. Dale slipped off me, crouching as he adjusted his clothes. I hurried to pull up my jeans and lower my shirt. We crawled away from the exposure of the glass doors, to the back of the room near the stairs. We watched from the edge of the room as two large men with guns drawn looked around the doorframe—one fiddling with the lock, the other glancing inside.
Dale moved his lips against my ear. “Stay quiet and low to the floor.” Dale withdrew the Glock from the holster at his ankle and took off the safety. “I’ll lock the door. You stay out of the way. Get to Kane or Kiel if you can, but only if it’s safe.”
I opened my mouth, ready to argue, but he shook his head, silencing me.
“Please don’t argue with me, Gin. This is what I do.” He leaned closer, attention on the porch, lips on my cheek. “You know I don’t say it because…the words…they don’t mean much. But…in case the chance gets away from me, you gotta know, Gingerbread…” He paused, throat working like something had gotten stuck there. “I…you’re the only one who matters to me.” And then Dale disappeared through the glass doors and landed in the middle of chaos.
* * *
Dale
“Where is she?” I asked as I stepped into the cabin, happy to be alive and pick up where Gin and I had left off before my ass took a bullet. I waved off the bodyguards behind me, all of them leftovers from the mafia bullshit the Carelli family brought to this cabin. Kane stood, taking my quick slap to his shoulder as he and Kiel greeted me.
“Out there,” Kiel said, motioning with his head toward the balcony.
“Tread lightly,” Kane told me as I took a step toward Gin where she sat outside with Cara and Kit in front of the fire pit. Hell, she looked beautiful, and I stood there watching her, my head shaking as Kane went on telling me how my fuckup had messed with her. “She’s not in a good way.”
“Pfft,” Kiel muttered, saying something I couldn’t quite understand.
The doctors at the hospital had me so hopped up on pain meds, I didn’t remember a damn thing from the last few days. I’d finally put my foot down and refused any more medicine because I needed to get myself straight to face Gin after the shit Kane told me I’d said in front of her. I caught Kit’s attention first when she stood with Gin’s empty glass in her hand, appreciating the smile she gave me. It gave me a small boost of encouragement, but it wouldn’t be enough to clue me in on exactly how Gin felt. Kit gripped my hand as she passed me but didn’t speak, and I moved to the door, inhaling as I glanced at Cara before I pulled it open.
I tried to keep my expression calm. Tried like hell not to rush out there and get Gin to face me, but the look on her face stopped me cold. I felt Cara watching me as I looked down at Gin, knew the woman was likely judging me. But my attention was on that beautiful redhead and her full mouth, the smooth skin and those sweet features that I’d made go all tight and hard with the bullshit I’d caused.
Gin didn’t turn around as I stepped onto the wooden balcony. She sat still in the chair, body curled and rigid, and when I spoke one word, managing a low, soft “Gingerbread,” my best friend jerked her gaze right at me. She stood, pushing the chair behind her, and I readied myself for the shitstorm I knew I had coming.
She leveled one long look my way, glaring down at my hand when I offered it to her.
“Say…something,” I tried, trying to reach for her and getting nothing but her hard stare. When Gin’s mouth tightened even further, I shot for laughter. “Reckon you can call me pincushion. Got another hole punch…” I motioned to my gut, even forced out a loud laugh, but I still got zero response.
The air around us blew against her hair, and I picked up the scent of wine from her breath when she exhaled. Something deep inside me wanted to get drunk on her, wanted to taste her, just a little, but Gin curled her arms over her chest, the movement like a shield to keep me away as she shook her head, grabbing the door before she took off into the cabin.
She didn’t want an audience. I knew that. Stepping into the house, grabbing a beer from Kane when he offered it, I knew that. But I could wait. She’d expect me to. That was how we’d played this thing between us.
We’d wait until the time was right.
* * *
Three a.m. was the witching hour. Gin never slept then, something she’d clued me in on the first time I’d recovered from a bender on her sofa and woke up to find her out on her front porch drinking coffee.
“Foster asshole number six used to come in at three a.m., drunk, mad at the world, and looking for a punching bag. We’d have to see who was smartest, fastest, and quiet enough to avoid his fists,” she’d explained like it was a fact that she recalled, not a bad memory that kept her up at night.
“You always won?” I’d asked her, still drunk.
“Still here, ain’t I?”
At 3:05, I found Gin in the living room, sock-footed, with her ankles crossed as she sat in front of the roaring fireplace. Her eyes were unfocused as she watched the flames, and I moved behind her, exhaling only when she didn’t flinch as I slid an arm around her waist to hold her. “I’ve missed you,” I whispered in her ear as I inhaled the sweetness of her red hair.
When there was no response, I brushed the hair away from her neck and pressed my lips to the soft spot just below her ear. She shivered through a long sigh.
“Ginger—”
“Stop,” she said, cutting me off.
Anger pulsed from her, and something sharp splintered in my gut. This would take more than an apology. Seemed that kiss I remembered giving her had done more damage than I thought. But what else had I’d done? Run my mouth about my stupid ex in the hospita
l, yeah, but she had to know that was the medicine talking. Gin knew me. She knew what she meant to me even if I hadn’t found the balls to admit how I felt. This reaction? Her anger? It should have dimmed by now.
“Do you know how badly you hurt me?”
I ran my fingertip over the curve of her shoulder. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
I knew my getting shot would set us back some. Watching fellow soldiers take a bullet had done something to me; I couldn’t imagine how it would’ve felt if it had been Gin instead of me. That would’ve been a heartache and a guilt I never would’ve overcome.
“Scare me?” she whispered, but not in that sweet, gentle way either. “Are you shitting me right now?”
I tightened my arms around her waist, because we were going to hash this shit out and move on with our lives. Get back to the sweet spot we were heading toward. That kiss was the first step. I wanted more. A hell of a lot more. “Well, yeah. I mean, I know how it feels to watch someone take a bullet. I think we…”
She wiggled out of my arms and spun to face me. “Do you love me?” she asked.
“I…” Damn it. I hadn’t whispered those words to another soul since Trudy ripped my heart into a million pieces with her cheating ways. “I…” I repeated with the words hanging on the tip of my tongue. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make them come.
“Dale, I thought we were going somewhere. Becoming something bigger. That night,” she said, her eyes glassy with tears, “before all hell broke loose, and you…we… When all that happened…” I frowned, wondering why she’d gone all shy on me about a little bit of kissing. She paused, swallowing hard before she shook her head. “For a moment, I thought I felt something bigger than friendship and lust.”
“You did.” I reached for her, but she moved too quickly for me to catch her with the number of fucking stitches lining my torso.
“Standing here.” She stepped forward and touched my face so softly I thought she was about to forgive me.
I’d always been able to read people, especially Gin. She was my best friend, helping me through more shit than I wanted to remember. She’d seen me at my worst and my very best, never judging me because that was how we were with each other.
She moved her mouth close to mine, and I could feel her warm, sweet breath as it rolled over my lips. “I can easily say I love you. But you can’t seem to find the words.”
“Gin, you know I’m not good with any of that.”
She shook her head, and her soft eyes narrowed, growing icy. She dropped her hand to her side, and her warmth vanished. “You had no problem saying it to Trudy. In fact, you said a lot of shit to Trudy right in front of me.”
“I didn’t mean any of that, Gin. You know that.”
She stood, curling her arms to her chest again, putting as much space between us as she could. “You didn’t mean them then, but they rolled right off your tongue. Now, I’m here, asking you to tell me how you feel about me, and I get you’re ‘not good with any of that’?”
“I was so drugged up, Gin. I didn’t know what I was saying.”
“I get that medicine doesn’t make you right in the head, Dale, but you could’ve said those words to me anytime. Hell, you could say them to me right now.” She crossed her arms, and I knew that look in her eyes.
I was fucked.
Battles were my game. I fought because it was in my nature not to let shit stand, not shit that broke people. Not shit that was unfair or unjust or on the bad side of brutal. My job as a SEAL had made me hard. It had demanded that I set aside thought, consideration, and just get the mission completed. Me and battle, we got tight. We stayed tight through Fallujah and Afghanistan. We got damn indistinguishable during the Congo extraction.
They’d all been battles I’d fought, ones that leveled me so low, I thought I might never recover from the fall I took.
Guns and glory came easily to me.
Emotions, entanglements, and mustering the nerve to say I’m sorry? Not so much.
But this right here? This was a clusterfuck I was sure I wouldn’t survive.
“It was the medicine…honest, Gingerbread.”
“No,” Gin said, crossing her arms tight against her, like she needed to keep herself back from me, like there was some sort of danger in standing three feet away from me. “You don’t get to call me that. Not anymore.”
I felt like an asshole for the shit I couldn’t say. For the shit I wanted to say every second of my life.
Her face got redder, her temper surfacing, and I held my breath, angling a look over her face, hazarding the level of pissed off she was. Could have been “Might not wanna talk to me,” but was most likely “Motherfucker, I’m gonna cut you.” I wasn’t a stupid man. I damn well knew to keep my paces, measure the mood when a woman was itching to snip your balls.
“I…don’t get to call you the same nickname I’ve used for two years now?”
“No. You dang sure don’t.” The eastern Tennessee twang surfaced, a sure sign Gin was twisting a few loud curses and her lethal temper below the surface of all that smooth, pale skin.
“Because I got friendly with my ex?” She didn’t answer but gave her lips a twitching snarl. Close enough to a “yeah,” for me. “Because I got…friendly with my ex while I was hopped up on morphine…” Another snarl, but this time, the twitching quickened. Had to be careful here. “Because I got…friendly with my ex while I was hopped up on morphine…after getting shot by some mafia roughneck?”
Jaw working into a tight clench, Gin looked out over the balcony, going rigid when I took a step closer to her. She was probably the best friend I had. Used to be able to say that about my kid brother, Anthony, even about our baby sister, Jazmine, but everything went to hell when Tony got messed up with some dealers back home in New Orleans. We all went to pieces when we lost our mother.
Shit went sideways with Gin a year back. One too many times of her picking my ass up off my floor. One too many mornings of me waking up from a drunken stupor with my head in her lap and her fingers scrubbing away the pounding ache in my head. She was good to me when I was nothing but trouble for her. She mattered to me. She mattered a lot, but I’d figured out when people mattered to you, they got hurt. Couldn’t have her hurt. Not ever.
“Gin, please let me just…” Words weren’t my thing, never had been, but there was some desperate, irritating throb down in my gut that wanted me to spew out fucking poetry if it meant she’d forgive me. I was a SEAL. I didn’t do the sweet-talk bullshit. When it came to women, I’d relied on the way I looked, counting on the rugged roughneck thing I had going to get me some company.
But I wasn’t looking to fuck Gin. I was looking to get her forgiveness. I just wished to God I could remember everything I’d done to warrant me needing to ask for it. A bullet to the gut and a three-hour surgery sort of messed me around. That shit made my head fuzzy, and I had no real memory of what happened. There’d been a fight, a bloody one from what Kane told me, then bullets flying, then me hopped up on morphine. But hell if I could remember anything from the day I left the set the Friday before until the morning after my surgery. Short-term memory loss they called it. Something to do with a bad reaction to the anesthesia. Go figure.
“There isn’t anything to say.” She sounded tired, like the shitshow that had been our lives for weeks now was one she just couldn’t handle anymore. She seemed to like her anger. Seemed like it kept her company better than I ever had. “Doesn’t matter, does it? You saying that shit. You saying that shit to her. She was your wife.” She looked at me then, her face twisted into tight lines and hard points. “When it comes down to it, Trudy is the one you married. That doesn’t die easy.”
“It does when she did her best to kill it every day.” I got closer, holding up my hands when she jerked back. I held my breath, hoping my attempt at surrender kept her calm enough not to bolt on me. Gin did that when she’d crossed the “Motherfucker, I’m gonna cut you” level and hopped right into the
“You are dead to me” zone. Breathing helped. At least, it helped settle the tension between us before I continued. “You know better than to think I’d still want her, that I want anyone but…”
She waited. Took her turn at controlled breathing. I saw the question as it worked between her eyes. Gin needed me to admit the thing… I just couldn’t. She wanted me to say the words I hadn’t been able to utter to a soul since my cheating ex-wife had ripped them from my heart.
“You know…” I rubbed my neck, hating that everything I wanted to say got clogged in my chest, like something pushed it further and further into my stomach the longer I stood there searching for words I couldn’t make come out of my mouth. “I’m…sorry, Gin. I just…”
The words died right there, somewhere between the frozen stare she gave me and the breath she held as she waited for me to finish speaking. But I couldn’t. Nothing would come. Things got twisted inside me when I thought about her in any way that wasn’t friendly. I squashed what I wanted because I knew anything else would end badly. It always did.
Just then, I wanted her to reach inside me and extract the words. I needed a little help, but I knew she’d probably gotten sick of helping me figure out how to navigate my fucked-up life. Just then, I think my best friend gave up on me.
Gin shook her head, temper firing back up until her cheeks were nearly the same color red as all that wild, ginger hair that circled her head like a mane.
“You can take your apologies and shove them right up your narrow behind!”
The woman wasn’t kidding. Cheeks brightening, I knew Gin meant business.
She was off the balcony and down the hall before I could catch the door. I angled around it and went after her, waving off Kane and the others. I needed her to hear me out. I needed Gin to understand why I couldn’t say the only thing that mattered to her.
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