by Mary Wine
Something shiny was lying next to her head.
She picked up the wrapper for the condom, her head clear enough to question why it had been such a pressing concern.
“That’s for your protection, Kalin.”
Devon was watching her from the doorway of the bathroom. She sat up and fought the urge to pull the sheet over herself. He was buck naked and she’d been a very willing participant. It was just before sunrise, the light in the room not quite daylight but no longer pitch black.
And he was here.
“Your point is valid.” His words warmed her, even if he was blocking her out of his thoughts. Instead of it feeling like it had for the last week, now she was just struck by a sensation of uncertainty.
Well, they had that in common.
His expression tightened and he moved toward her and pulled the condom wrapper from her fingers and tossed it into the trash can next to the bed.
“If you conceived, the lab rats would probably make you have it.”
“Excuse me?” she said, his words banishing the last of sleep from her mind.
He grabbed his pants and stepped into them. “Being pissed at me won’t do you any good. I wouldn’t get a vote.”
She rose up on her knees and cupped his chin with her hands. “I’m pissed on your behalf. You’re not some kind of prize bull.”
For a moment, their thoughts mingled. She felt him and the happiness her words gave him. But it was a fleeting moment, one he cut short by doing up his pants with jerky motions.
He reached for his shirt and shrugged into it, stepping back from her. “Grace has an older child and he’s already a proven tracker like her. That would be all the evidence needed to make sure you carry any child I father to term.”
She sat back on her knees, watching him put on his layers. He was tightening up with each item, becoming more detached from her with every snap and buckle. Once he had his gun belt secured, his thoughts were hidden completely.
“I’ve got to fall in for PT.”
He turned, reaching for the door handle.
“Do you want to know what I’d like to do if I conceived?”
He froze and turned back to look at her, but he was maintaining his mental wall.
“I doubt you would be asked your opinion, Kalin.”
She walked into the bathroom but felt him lowering his defenses to feel her out.
“You aren’t asking me how I would feel because you’re afraid of me telling you I wouldn’t mind having your baby. Why?” she asked.
He didn’t like her question. She felt something flash through him before his expression tightened. Something was churning inside his head. She sensed it before he shut her out, and left.
He didn’t slam the door, but the soft click of it closing felt like a gavel pounding.
Devon headed out of the house and down the porch steps. Garrick was watching for him but he shut the man out.
“I wouldn’t mind having your baby.”
He stopped, the words bouncing around inside his skull.
“We’re going to have a baby.”
No, that wasn’t what Kalin had said. Was it what he wanted? His heart was pounding, accelerating as sweat began to trickle down the side of his face.
“You aren’t asking me how I would feel because you’re afraid of me telling you.”
He was afraid of something. It was lodged in the remaining shadows, that place he could just make out where the last of his memories were stuck. Making him stretch until it felt like he was going to rip in two.
“Devon?” Garrick’s voice was far away. But it pulled on him, yanking him away from the last straw that needed to break to allow everything to flow once again.
“Leave him.”
Grace’s voice was there with Garrick’s but she pushed into his mind. He felt her and something else. Another presence, one that was soft and young.
Her baby.
Her son.
It frustrated him unbearably. He growled before opening his eyes and staring into Grace’s. Her emerald eyes were dilated, but his frustration pushed her back. Somehow, he’d ended up on his knees and she fell back onto her butt before thrusting up her defenses.
“God damn it,” he swore. “It was right fucking there.”
And now it wasn’t. Everything had settled back into place, that teasing hint of what he couldn’t recall irritating the hell out of him.
“You’re afraid of something,” Grace muttered softly, still sifting through whatever she’d pulled out of his head.
Devon snorted but she fixed her gaze on him and he felt the blaze of her confidence. “That’s why you can’t remember. You won’t admit it.”
He wanted to scoff at her, but he felt something from her that was familiar. He lowered his mental defenses, trying to pick up the threads of what he’d almost remembered.
It remained elusive. The scent and the feel of it were familiar but nothing else.
Grace suddenly stiffened. She pulled back from their link, shutting him out.
“What?” he demanded.
Grace didn’t answer him. She climbed to her feet and held up a finger to warn him back. “It’s not my place.”
“God damn it, Grace, tell me what it is.” The last two weeks’ worth of frustration spilled out as he reached for her. Lunged toward her.
Garrick and Jacobs both slid between them. Boots skidded against the packed dirt as the two majors pushed their Operatives apart. Devon growled and set his shoulder against Garrick.
“Tell me, Grace,” Devon insisted. “I know you know.”
Garrick didn’t give an inch.
“So do you.” Grace surprised him by answering. She peeked around Jacobs’s huge form, moving back as Jacobs refused to let her stay too close to him. “You have to face yourself.”
She pushed back from her C.O. and warned him off with a flash of her open hands. He planted himself squarely between her and Devon. For a moment, her attention settled on Devon. He felt her fighting the urge to renew a link with him so he pressed forward, earning a short word of profanity from Garrick.
Grace stiffened, withdrawing completely. She turned and started walking toward the tree line. Her pace was familiar and Devon stood back, disengaging as he recognized his fellow Operative’s customary prowl. Grace moved almost constantly. When her mind was full, she walked as she sorted through her feelings. She was climbing out of the clearing the houses were set in and into the tree line without a backward glance. Taking whatever she’d discovered in his mind with her.
“Shit.”
“A fitting sentiment,” Garrick agreed, watching Devon with hooded eyes.
“I don’t fucking know what she’s talking about,” Devon responded. “So either get out of my way so I can go after her or leave me the fuck alone.”
Garrick turned and looked in the direction Grace had gone, but he shook his head. “Trying to rip your memories out of her head isn’t the answer.”
Defeat washed through Devon, but he had to nod in agreement. The other Rangers were lined up for morning PT. “I need to think,” he growled before turning and walking away.
Garrick ended up left with Jacobs as they both tried to decide what to make of the morning.
“I need a drink,” Jacobs quietly announced.
“Make mine a double,” Garrick answered.
Target practice was an excellent way to tighten his mental discipline.
At least, it always had been in the past.
Devon lined up the sights on the end of his rifle and ignored the two rocks stabbing into his hip. He needed to make the shot and being comfortable came second. The rifle felt familiar in his grasp, the machine something he was accustomed to cradling.
Unlike Kalin.
He squeezed off the shot but had allowed the sights to come
out of balance. Three rounds went whizzing over the ten o’clock corner of the target.
“Maybe you need a break, Devon.”
Devon lifted his head and glared at Garrick. His C.O. shook his head.
It was subtle, but the reprimand strung. He got off the ground and took the rifle back to the munitions locker.
His focus was refusing to tighten.
Grace and Kalin’s words were bouncing around inside his skull. It was driving him insane. So he hiked up and out of the clearing that the houses sat in. It wasn’t much of a clearing at all. Brice Campbell hadn’t cut down any more of the forest than needed to build his house. The second house belonged to Jason Jacobs and the major had also left as many of the trees in place as natural cover.
By sunset, he stank. But he crouched down and ignored his physical condition.
It was his mental state that needed attention.
He’d stopped close enough to see Brice Campbell pull up in front of his house. Grace came out of the forest, crossing the clearing as her husband got out of the black and white SUV. She was distracted and her mental wall slipped as she went into her husband’s embrace.
Exactly the same way he was with Kalin.
That idea tormented him. It refused to be plucked out and discarded.
Grace looked up, finding him even though he knew she was too far away to see him.
She felt him. The contact between their minds was clear. Through the link, he felt her emotions. The pure happiness she experienced in her husband’s arms. It was bliss and completely lacking in discipline. Her emotions flowed, creating a peace he couldn’t recall feeling except for the stolen moments he’d spent in Kalin’s embrace.
Even his memories of Heather didn’t compare. He’d always kept his mental wall up because of the panic his abilities caused in her.
Kalin matched him. Reached out for him just as often as he pressed in on her.
Something surfaced in him as he witnessed Grace enjoying her husband’s company. He felt her basking in the love coming from Brice. It needled him. Sharpening the frustration that had been gnawing on him all day until all that was left was a hollow, aching longing.
It stunned him.
Partly because of the sheer intensity of it, but also because it was a weakness he’d forbidden himself since the day he’d first felt fear coming from his wife. He’d locked something away, something he’d thought long dead.
It wasn’t.
It was stretching, struggling against the walls he’d encased it in. Seeping through the cracks and infecting his entire being. There was no way to run from it because it was inside him, his own feelings. Those unpredictable things that he’d spent half a lifetime trying to control.
The door on the Jacobs’s house opened and slammed shut as Kalin came out and didn’t stop. She took the porch steps at a jog before making it into the driveway and stopping. She stood there for a moment, tipped her head back and started rotating slowly until she was staring at him.
He felt her reaching out to him. He should have raised his defenses. Should have shut her out for her own good, but he just couldn’t do it. She was reaching for him and, God forgive him, it soothed the thing inside him that was so hungry for companionship.
So he let her in, soaked up the feeling of her as she started toward him. He was moving down the hillside, cutting around the trees as their link strengthened and became deeper. When they reached each other, it felt like two waves crashing into one another. The force was jarring, but they fused into one living force.
“I need you.” His arms shook as he held her tight.
“I know how you feel,” she admitted.
He grabbed her hand and pulled her after him, into the house and behind the door of her bedroom. The frustration and uncertainty that had tormented him for most of the day finally vanished. She completed him in some way that he didn’t fully understand, but he knew he was empty without it.
Devon groaned and rolled over some time later. It felt later than his watch told him it was. Half an hour had never been so renewing. “I should have showered first.”
“Waste of water,” Kalin teased. “Because we both need a shower now.”
She followed him out of the bed, leaving the bedding on the floor where it fell.
She was actually nervous, her belly knotting with uncertainty as she joined him in the bathroom. They’d never talked after sex. She felt a whole new level of exposure as he turned on the shower. She reached over and locked the door.
“Jacobs has master keys,” Devon informed her.
“Killjoy,” she accused with a pout. “My whole fantasy of the door being kicked in just died in a sizzle of reality.”
He offered her a half laugh that was completely unsatisfying.
“You’ve forgotten how to have fun,” she groused.
He reached in and tested the water.
“That sort of thing can be serious, you know.”
“So can getting caught with my guard down. You might have noticed that little fact when that acquisitions team showed up at your cabin.”
“You’re not an acquisition.”
“To some people I am.” He stepped inside the shower, retreating from her thoughts.
Well, she wasn’t in the mood to be shut out. She opened the shower door and stepped right in with him. He turned around, surprise flashing through his eyes.
“Enough cloak and dagger.” She grabbed the soap and began to apply it to his chest. “Let’s go back to being sex-crazed teens. We seem to be a little better at that game.”
His cock was hardening against her hip as she stroked the soap across his chest. But what she liked best was the way he flowed back into her mind and the lightness to his thoughts.
“Agreed,” he muttered in the tone that made her shiver. It was low and full of passion and it truly curled her toes.
Sometime in the early morning hours, Devon felt his dreams intensify. They rose up from the corners of his mind, in full color and so detailed he would have sworn he even smelled them. The pieces that he’d been trying too hard to grasp floated through his mind as sleep held him down and kept him from tightening his discipline.
Heather.
Missions.
Women he’d held who were nothing more than willing bodies to relieve his lust but who had left him empty when he was finished. Never satisfied. Not until Kalin.
Heather.
She was smiling, her eyes shimmering as she placed a hand over her belly…
He opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling as his memories settled into place. All of them in plain sight.
Rochelle.
Shit!
He’d done exactly what he’d worked so hard to avoid.
He brought his unit to the place Heather had hidden their daughter.
“So you remember.”
Devon jumped and had his gun out before his eyes focused on the person who’d spoken.
Grace didn’t even blink. She simply waited for him to identify her before moving any closer. “I wondered if you would.”
“You should have warned me.” Devon slid his gun back into its holster and returned his attention to the small cabin he’d been watching. “You promised me, Grace.”
“If you failed to remember her, I would have been keeping my promise to you.” Grace gestured him toward her. “She sleeps on the other side of the house.”
They hiked through the forest, circling the cabin-style home.
“How did you get Jacobs to take the tracking beacon off you?”
“My hand was swelling,” she answered before settling down and pointing toward a small window. “I might have dumped excessive salt on my dinner. That sort of thing doesn’t agree with pregnancy.”
But she was wearing a gun now. She had a chest harness on with a handgun nestled against her l
eft side since her belly was far too large for a standard gun belt.
“Jacobs is a little concerned about the way you lunged at me.”
“Garrick will have something to say about you shooting me.”
“I’ll aim low and let Kalin tend you. It will be so…sweet.”
“You mean Jacobs didn’t want to have to lock you down and figured dealing with Garrick was easier than facing your temper.”
“Maybe. I didn’t ask him to elaborate.”
He looked down on the sandbox sitting in the yard. There was a bright pink tricycle nearby and a swing set. He reached out his mind, searching for his daughter.
Grace had terrified Heather with what Rochelle would be forced to become. So his wife had hidden her pregnancy, and he’d allowed her to, convincing himself that she just needed time.
Heather had surprised him by making good use of that time. When she’d slipped away, no one had noticed until he returned from a mission. At least, he’d thought no one had noticed, but there had been a mole on base who had sent a team after his wife with only one goal. To retrieve his child. The mother was expendable. Devon had used the horror to tighten his mental resolve to make sure he never fell in love again.
“If we’re not back by sunrise, Jacobs and Gennaro are going to have a reason to look down here.”
Devon snapped out of his memories and nodded. “You’re right. Thanks for coming to get me.”
“You’re still determined to leave her here?”
Devon nodded. “Female Operatives don’t do very well.”
“At the moment, you’re the one not doing well.” Grace stood and sent him a confident look. “I am happy.”
“Would you be as happy if that was a girl?” Devon pointed at her belly.
“It would be more difficult,” she admitted and tilted her head toward her mountain-top home. “I look in on Rochelle from time to time.”
It was the best he could do for his tiny daughter. He savored one last moment of being able to feel her. That sensation of their minds mingling while she slept.
But he couldn’t stay. The realities of his life would rip that sweet little baby from her bed and thrust her into the world where sleeping with a gun was more important than snuggling with a stuffed animal.