“Mommy, can you hear me?”
Susan’s eyes opened. “I can hear you just fine, Baby.”
“Are you hurted?”
“Not now that you’re here.” She moved her arm and snuggled him close. Susan had her backpack next to her. She fumbled with it. Miranda helped her pull out a sweatshirt for Jeremy to sit on.
“When was the last time you saw Hope?” Miranda asked.
“I don’t know. When I woke up, she was gone. I couldn’t go look for her. I’ve called out a couple of times when I heard people, but nobody has come by to help until you.” Then Susan did a head tilt toward the crumpled seat to her left. For the first time Miranda noted that a baby blanket was covering something. Now that she looked, she realized that Susan must have covered a body with Hope’s blanket.
“I would have kept calling, but it hurts to yell. Then I heard you calling out for me, so I called back. Thank God you had Jeremy.” She reached out and clutched Miranda’s wrist. “Can you find Hope?”
“Of course.” She’d also try to find Scarlett. She prayed that the two of them were together and healthy.
Please, God, let them be safe.
Please, God.
It took a moment for Miranda to realize she wasn’t on the train. Instead, she was in her living room in San Diego three years later with Griff holding her so tight that she was having trouble breathing.
“Jesus, Miranda, I never knew.” Griff was actually trembling.
“Hey,” she crooned. “It wasn’t that bad.”
He sat up, taking her with him. “What the fuck do you mean it wasn’t that bad? It was a fucking nightmare.”
She pressed her hand against his lips. “Griffin, we got through this.”
Her breath caught when she saw the sheen of wet on his brown eyes.
“It was so close. So close. I almost lost you.”
His fingers tangled in her hair and he tilted her head. His lips slammed down on hers. He devoured her. In their three years together, he had never kissed her with such need. Such intensity. It was as if his life depended on it. Miranda’s nails clawed at his shoulders. His mouth bit at hers, possessing her body, ruling her soul.
Miranda capitulated. His dominion soothed her, it let her know that in this moment she didn’t have to be in control, that she could entirely trust someone else to take care of everything.
Griff ripped off her sleepshirt, flinging it over the side of the chair. He ripped her lace panties. Actually ripped them off her body. A thrill raced down her spine.
Miranda whimpered her need.
Griff’s head whipped up, his eyes seeking hers. “You with me?”
“I need you,” she ground out hoarsely.
He waited a beat.
“Now,” she demanded. “I need you, now.”
“You can never as much as I need you.” His hands were everywhere, touching, caressing, setting her skin on fire. He slipped to the carpet and he stroked his hot hands up the insides of her legs, stretching her wide.
“Beautiful.” His voice was guttural.
She believed him. He parted her flesh with his thumbs, and feasted.
Miranda grabbed for the back of the chair, but she missed, her hands flailing uselessly as spirals of heat and passion hurtled through her body. How was this even possible?
Griffin was relentless. Every stab of his tongue touched off another jolt of sensation that had her crying his name. She was frantic with want, but as he adjusted his hold, pulling her closer, she heard him.
“Mine.”
Her face was wet, her head whipped back and forth, her hair sticking to her tears.
“Mine.”
He rose up and jerked down his sweatpants. She looked up greedily. At last, something to hold onto. She tried to touch his cock, but he grabbed her wrists in one hand, and looked down with an intense smile.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
“With my life.”
He guided himself to her entrance and thrust home.
She moaned her pleasure, wrapping her legs around him. Biting his shoulder, hard. Too hard.
Never had it been like this. She looked up at the man she loved and barely recognized his face. “Griff,” she gasped out.
“It’s okay, I’m here. We made it.
“Mine.” He swooped down and laid claim to her mouth. She opened, welcoming, taking him into her body. She knew that Griff needed to feel, needed to believe that she was here, that she was whole and his.
She broke their kiss, wrestled her hands from his grasp, and cupped his cheeks. “I’m going to be here. Always, Griff. Always.”
He surged high inside her, and Miranda about lost her mind.
“You can’t leave me. I couldn’t live without you,” he whispered.
“You won’t have to,” she breathed against his mouth.
His strokes changed, gifting her with pleasure. Her head rolled side to side. It was too much.
Griff bent his head and curled his tongue around her nipple, then suckled as he drove her even higher.
“Now,” she begged.
His dark eyes glimmered with a hint of a smile. “Patience is a virtue.”
“Fuck virtue,” she cried.
He laughed.
Thank God, he was her Griffin again. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and arched against him, then gently bit the pulse in his neck as he gently bit down on her nipple.
Ecstasy.
5
“Griff, you don’t have to do this,” Miranda laughed.
It amazed him that after this long together, his wife could still be self-conscious around him. He could mention the fact that he’d been in the delivery room with her, but he wasn’t a foolish man.
“Hush, this gives me pleasure,” he said, as he stroked the wash cloth down her pale skin. God, her beauty blew him away. It always had.
“You’re the one who said she didn’t want to get her hair wet in the shower,” he reminded her.
“You know the blow dryer always wakes Livvie up.”
Griff loved the way she arched into the warm cloth. When he was done he blotted her with one of their new, soft bath towels.
“Okay, Missy, it’s way past your bedtime. Let’s get you under the covers.”
When they were under the comforter, he pulled her into his arms and tried to blot out what she had told him. How come he wasn’t surprised when she gave him that look?
“Okay, I told you mine, now it’s time for you to tell me yours.”
“I have,” he said, trying to shut down any more talk of the train wreck. It would take a long time for her words to work their way out of his system.
“Griffin, I told you how it was for me. It’s only fair that you return the favor. I vaguely remember you telling me about it after the fact, but now I want to really know. What happened? How was it actually?”
“Well, I told you that all I could think about was you and getting to you. I was with Josiah, and his need to get back to Scarlett was just as bad. It was like looking in a mirror. I’ve been on some hairy fucking missions, but nothing, not one damn thing, has scared me like that day.”
Three Years Earlier
“Josiah, can you hear me?” Griff shook the older man. Except for the cut on his arm, he looked okay.
Josiah Hale’s eyes popped open. “We crashed?”
“Affirmative.” Griff breathed easier, seeing that his Captain, a fellow SEAL, was going to be working with him.
“How bad?” Josiah asked.
“Bad. We’re right outside of Del Mar, beside the cliffs overlooking the ocean. This car is leaning over. When I looked out the window, I could see the car with the women was on its side, and it doesn’t look stable.”
“How not stable?” Josiah bit out the question.
“Can’t tell from here. Worst case? It’ll take a hundred foot drop at any minute.”
Just saying it made bile rise in Griff’s mouth.
“Do you know why we crashed?”
Josiah pushed himself off the floor, giving a quick glance to his arm. Griff thrust a towel that he’d found from the café at Josiah so that he could staunch the bleeding.
“We were going too fucking slow for it to cause something this bad. It’s got to be an explosion. We could have unfriendlies,” Griff said grimly.
“Fuck.”
Josiah pulled out his phone and pressed a number on his speed dial. He waited.
He looked at Griff. “She’s not answering.”
He placed another call.
“Liam, I have a situation.” His voice was calm and commanding. “Amtrak train crashed heading south to San Diego outside Del Mar. I’m on it with Scarlett, she’s in another car that could fall into the ocean. It’s going to be a cluster for the emergency workers to get to us, we’re not near a highway.” He looked for Griff for confirmation.
Griff nodded.
“Which teams are in-country?” Josiah asked.
Griff watched the older man squint as he listened. “Have Mason and Gray get their men here, stat. Also see about help from Camp Pendleton. If I don’t answer,” he finally said, “text me.” Then he hung up.
Griff felt a hell of a lot better knowing that Lieutenant Commander Liam McAllister was on point to gather up his SEAL team and another one. He knew that the men on his team could work miracles.
As one unit, Griff and Josiah turned and surveyed the interior of the café car. There were five people other than themselves inside. One commuter was already helping a woman. They looked like they were going to be fine. The older Vietnamese gentleman who ran the diner was currently trying to apply pressure to another man’s arm to stop the river of bleeding coming from his deltoid. The last passenger in the car was a woman lying against the wall. She didn’t look injured. Josiah veered off to the bleeding man, Griff crouched down next to the woman.
“Are you okay, Ma’am?”
“Did we crash?” she asked softly. Her brown eyes were wet with tears.
“Yes, are you okay?”
“Can you get me off the train? I want to get off the train.” She gripped Griff’s arm.
“Ma’am, I need you to remain calm. Help is on the way.” He’d already called nine-one-one, as had many others, according to the operator.
“Ma’am, do you have your phone?”
She grabbed her purse and pulled out her phone, then she nodded.
“Why don’t you call your family and tell them that you’re all right?” he suggested. “My friend and I are going to go look for other people who are injured, okay?”
She wasn’t paying him any attention, she was already dialing. He looked over his shoulder at Josiah. It looked like things were under control. Good. They needed to get to the car where the women were. There was no exit on the bottom level of the dining car like there had been on the one the women were on. If they wanted to get to the women, they would need to go upstairs and go through the passageway. But when he checked the electrical, it wasn’t working.
“We need to climb out the window,” Griff said to Josiah. He pointed to the big window that overlooked the ocean. It was severely cracked, and even though it was made of safety glass, there was a hole in the bottom left hand corner where a piece had broken out.
“People, I need you to move away from the window,” Josiah yelled as he strode over to the jumbled mess that had once been the café. He picked up the sturdy steel microwave off the floor and yanked the plug out of the wall socket. He took aim, and hurled it close to the hole in the window. It crashed through, bringing in the fresh ocean air.
The woman who had been talking on her phone screamed. “What are you doing?”
“Ma’am, we need to get out to help the people in the other car,” Josiah calmly answered.
Without being asked, the man who ran the diner was beside Griff with a handful of towels. “Here, put these down over the glass so you don’t cut yourselves when you climb out.”
“No need,” Griff said. “This is safety glass.” He pushed the entire remaining piece out of its moorings in one big chunk. He climbed out first and was surprised to see two lanky young men in wet suits making their way up over the rise of the cliff. It took a brief second for it to register with him that they had probably been surfing when they had heard or seen the crash.
“Hey, are you okay?” The first kid was a blond who couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen.
“Yeah,” Josiah answered. “We’re headed over to that car.”
Griff stared at where the captain was pointing and really took his first good look.
His stomach dropped.
“There was definitely an explosion,” Josiah said. Griff saw smoke coming from the two cars farther up the track, but the one that he was interested in was on its side. Part of it had been sheared off like someone had taken a gigantic can opener to it, but the thing that scared the shit out of him was that it was literally teetering on the edge of the cliff. It was easily a hundred-foot drop, and if it fell to the sand below, there probably wouldn’t be any survivors.
Griff and Josiah started toward the railroad car.
“Mister, don’t you want to wait for the emergency workers? They should be here soon, we called them,” one of the kids yelled after them.
Griff knew that it was going to be complicated for the first responders to get to this area because it was not accessible by road. Josiah had done the exact right thing by calling in the SEAL teams.
“My wife is on that train,” Josiah said, never breaking stride.
As they got closer, Griff perused the metal wreckage.
“What do you think?” Josiah asked.
As soon as the question was out of his mouth, a chunk of sandy cliff broke away from underneath the weight of the passenger car, causing it to shift a little more toward the ocean. Griff winced when he heard the faint sound of screams from inside. But he knew damn good and well there wasn’t a chance in hell it was Miranda or Scarlett who were screaming. Those two women were keeping their shit together.
He eyed Josiah. He nodded in silent agreement as he read Griff’s mind. Yep, they knew their women.
“If we go underneath and try to climb through a window, the train could shift again and we’d be flatter than a pancake.” Griff stated the obvious as they arrived at their destination.
Josiah nodded and grabbed a handhold on the back of the railcar and started climbing. Griff followed. Soon they were on top of the damaged car, which was actually the side. From that vantage point, they could see an opening near the back. It was small, but they should be able to work their way in.
Should.
“We need to stay near the edge, away from the cliff side,” Griff said. They were in mission mode, so ensuring that nothing was assumed was part standard operating procedure. Josiah nodded at his words.
They made their way swiftly to the far edge. Griff felt sweat trickling down his back. When they got to the opening, Griff wondered how in the hell they were going to fit. Not only was it a tight fit, the steel was knife-sharp.
Josiah pulled out his phone and deployed the flashlight feature, then peered inside. “Looks like a three to four meter drop, but the seats have unbolted so it’ll be a lousy landing.” Griff looked over his captain’s shoulder, scouting the terrain.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Josiah asked.
Griff nodded grimly. There were three people lying in the wreckage. It was clear that two of them were dead. One might still be alive. This was the upper deck of the train, business class, where they had all been seated. But according to Griff’s calculations, they had left the women on the other end.
Griff peeled off his jacket and placed it over the edge of the steel so that maybe they wouldn’t cut themselves on at least one of the sides of the hole. “I’ll go first,” Griff said. “You can lower me down. I’ll move what I can, so it’s a better landing when I help you down.”
“Affirmative,” Josiah answered.
“Hey.”
Gr
iff and Josiah’s heads swivelled. One of the surfer’s heads popped up where they had climbed over. He easily swung himself up and looked around, walking on the far side of the car, and swiftly made his way over to them. “I thought you could use this.” He thrust out his hand.
Griff recognized it immediately. It was a surfboard leash that the surfers used to connect their feet to their boards so that when they crashed, so they didn’t have to searching for their surfboards.
“Perfect, thanks.”
“I called my brother, he and some of his teammates are coming from Coronado to help.”
Griff looked closely at the young man as he wrapped the cord around his wrist, but he didn’t recognize him. “Who’s your brother?”
“Mason Gault.”
“Small world,” Josiah whistled as he looked up from where he was crouched. “Your brother’s a good man. What’s your name?”
“I’m Billy Anderson,” the teenager replied.
Josiah stood up. “I’m Captain Hale, this is Griff Porter, he’s on the Black Dawn team.”
“Doesn’t Mase work for you?” Billy asked.
“Yep,” Josiah nodded.
Griff handed the end of the leash to Josiah, then sat down on the edge of the hole. It was going to be tight.
“Griff?” Billy said.
Griff looked up at the kid and raised his eyebrow in question.
“Maybe I should go down. I’d fit easier.”
“No.” Griff and Josiah said in unison.
“You’re going to help me lower Griff down into the opening. Then, when the others arrive, you’re going to direct them to this opening. Got it?” Josiah said.
Billy nodded.
It was a tight fit. But Griff worked his way through the hole and the leash ended about six feet above one of the upended seats. He easily dropped down, and as soon as he was clear of the wreckage, he unwrapped the cord and Josiah pulled it up.
Griff used his phone flash light to start checking things out. His first order of business was to check on the woman that he’d been hoping was alive. She wasn’t.
Her Honorable Hero (Black Dawn Book 7) Page 6