by Tawna Fenske
Janelle stood panting at the edge of the living room. Her breath was coming in little wheezes, and she knew the cat allergy had nothing to do with it. The taste of adrenaline was thick in her throat, and the smell of wet dog was strangely comforting.
She sagged with relief, her knees giving out beneath her. Schwartz lunged forward, catching her before she hit the ground.
“Easy does it,” he said, leading her to the sofa. “You’re okay now. You’re safe.”
She nodded against his shoulder as he set her gently on the sofa, then eased himself down beside her. The leather dipped beneath his weight, and she felt herself falling into him.
Falling for him.
She looked up, her eyes blurry with tears as she studied the man who’d just saved her life.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “You saved me.”
He squeezed her hand, then released it. “You saved yourself. You and your damn cat allergy.”
“If I’d been out there alone—”
“I’d never let that happen.”
“But if I had, I never would have known. The cougar would have been on me before I had a clue.”
“Probably. They’re silent hunters. They’ve been known to attack people.”
“I can’t believe you thought of the allergy,” she murmured. “I can’t imagine—”
“I can,” he said. “I can always imagine the worst-case scenario. Then I plan for it.”
She nodded, not sure they were still talking about cougars. “I owe you, Schwartz. I owe you my life.”
He shook his head, already distancing himself from her on the couch. “You don’t owe me anything. I’m just doing what I promised my family I’d do.”
“No, you went above and beyond.” She got to her feet, legs still shaky. “And I’m going to repay you. Right here, right now.”
“Janelle, you don’t have to—”
“I do,” she insisted, shrugging off her jacket and letting it fall to the floor behind her. “I have to because I want to. I really, really want to.”
…
Having Janelle smear mud on his face was not exactly what Schwartz had in mind when she’d pledged to repay him.
Then again, this was probably a whole lot safer than a blow job.
“Hold still,” she commanded. “I’m almost done.”
“Be sure to tell me when we get to the fun part. I wouldn’t want to miss it.”
“This is going to make you feel fabulous, I promise.”
“Yeah, I think that every time I go out and rub my face in the dirt.”
“Is your skin still tingling from the willow bark water?”
“I have skin left?”
She laughed, and he felt a warm kick of relief to know she recognized he wasn’t really pissed. Truth be told, he kinda liked this. Or maybe he just liked having her hands on him. Did it matter?
Janelle plunked down on the sofa beside him, angling up to dab more muck on the side of his cheek. Her face was covered in the same gray goo his was, and he wanted her to look ridiculous with her hair piled on her head and pale rings of flesh around her eyes and mouth making her look like some sort of homeless clown.
But she didn’t look ridiculous. She just looked beautiful. Beautiful and very, very scantily clad.
“You couldn’t wear a shirt to do this?” he muttered as she dabbed something cold on his earlobe.
“I’m wearing a shirt. It’s just a small one. A tube top. I don’t want to get clay all over my other shirts.”
“Who the hell brings a tube top to a remote cabin in the Montana wilderness?”
“I didn’t know I was going to be in a remote cabin in the Montana wilderness, remember?” She leaned across his body to swipe at his other cheekbone, giving him the opportunity to stare down the front of her shirt that wasn’t really a shirt. “You kept it so top secret where I was headed that I could have been going to the moon for all I knew.”
“Excellent point. I’m sure they wear a lot of tube tops on the moon.”
She sat back again and grinned at him. “Laugh all you want. At least neither of us is getting our clothes muddy.”
“And now I have the added bonus of finding out what it’s like to scrub clay out of chest hair.”
She laughed, then stood up and ran to the kitchen to rinse off her hands. When she trotted back to the living room, Schwartz forced himself not to pray for the tank top to go slithering down.
“Now what?” he asked.
“We wait about thirty minutes for the clay to dry.”
“What happens then?”
“We wash it off.”
“Are we to the fun part yet?”
She grinned and snuggled up next to him on the couch, not seeming the least bit perturbed by his grumbling. He felt grateful for that. Grateful and really, really turned on.
Dammit, what the hell was wrong with him? Since when did he find it sexy to have a woman smearing his face with wet dirt?
Since you met Janelle.
True. Hell, she could make him eat dirt and he’d still find her irresistibly sexy.
“Really, Schwartz, thanks again,” she said. “I’m still freaking out a little thinking about what I would have done if I’d been out there alone.”
“Wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “I’d never let you be alone.”
She looked up at him then, those pale blue eyes locking with his and making him think he should have chosen his words more carefully.
“Tell me another story,” she said.
“My tale of the ashtray condom wasn’t scintillating enough for you?”
“Tell me how you ended up in Montana.”
He started to protest, to tell her it was no one else’s business why he’d chosen to wall himself off out here in the middle of nowhere.
Then he realized she’d asked how, not why. It was a simpler question to answer.
“I grew up a military brat, so there wasn’t any one place I thought of as home,” he said. “After college, I ended up at Fort Irwin at the National Training Center. Grant was just a few hours away at Camp Twentynine Palms. ”
“What did you do at the National Training Center?”
“Staff sergeant. I ran tactical training exercises for units that came there to certify before deployment. I got damn good at it.”
“Did that feel like home?”
“Not really,” he said, mulling the question. “But I liked being near my brother. I liked following my family’s military path. And then I met a girl.”
He waited to see if she’d respond. Grant had told him that he’d shared bits and pieces of this story with Anna. It would have been Grant’s version of things, not Schwartz’s, but still. Had the details traveled from one sister to the other?
Janelle looked up at him, her blue eyes curious and encouraging. “Tell me about this girl.”
He shrugged. “Not much to tell, really. I’d actually forgotten her name until Grant brought it up a couple months ago. Jenny something. We had a whirlwind romance and got engaged.”
She blinked at him, surprise registering in her eyes. “You were engaged to be married and you don’t remember her name?”
“It wasn’t important. Not for long, anyway. Things came unraveled in a hurry when she set out to fuck someone else and—well, anyway, that part of the story doesn’t matter.”
Janelle nodded, waiting for him to continue. Waiting to see where he was heading with this story.
He was kinda wondering the same thing.
“Anyway, after the shit hit the fan, I needed a change. I needed to be where the action was.”
“What did you do?”
“I gave up my gig doing tactical training at the NTC and volunteered to join a unit headed to Anbar Province. In a matter of weeks, I was down there in the thick of it. The danger zone. It’s where a lot of the fighting was happening at the time.”
“Did that—um—did that feel like home?”
“Home,” he repeated, rememberi
ng how they’d started this path of conversation in the first place. “No, not exactly. Not the physical location, anyway. But being there in a combat zone, surrounded by some of the bravest men and women I’d ever met, it was the first time I’d really felt—”
He trailed off there, not sure what he meant to say. This was getting ridiculously touchy-feely, and it would probably be best if he got up and washed this crap off his face and chopped some wood or skinned a deer or ripped a tree out of the ground with his teeth.
But he stayed put, with Janelle’s gaze fixed on his.
“You felt like part of your family,” she supplied. “Is that it? One of these things is not like the other. Only right then, you were like them. Like the whole legacy of Patton men and women before you.”
He nodded, too surprised to speak. Even before he knew where he was headed with the story, Janelle had figured it out. How the hell had she done that?
“That’s right,” he said at last. “Or something like that, anyway.” He hesitated, not sure where to go from her. Not sure how much more he was willing to share. She kept her gaze on his, waiting to see what he’d say next.
“So how about you?” he asked. “San Francisco always been home?”
She studied him a few seconds more, probably wondering whether to press him about the abrupt subject change. At last, she nodded, and Schwartz breathed a sigh of relief.
“San Francisco has always felt like home,” she said. “I tried staying with Anna in Portland once for a couple months, but I missed the big city. The bigger city, I should say. I’m sure Portland would seem massive to you compared with life out here.”
“It does,” he admitted. “I spent some time there one summer in college. Nice place. Not too many cities let you drive twenty minutes in any direction from the skyscraper-filled center of it and find yourself in the middle of the wilderness.”
“Yeah, that’s what a lot of people like about Portland. It’s a city, but with farms and forests on all sides.”
“And you didn’t care for that?”
“I don’t know.” She leaned back against the sofa, her body small and warm tucked up against his. “It’s been seven years since I tried living anywhere else. Maybe I’ve changed since then.”
“Since when?”
“In seven years or—well, maybe in seven days.” She laughed, and Schwartz felt the vibration traveling from her bare arm to his. “That’s stupid, isn’t it?”
“What’s stupid?”
“The idea that I could spend my whole life as a city girl and a week in the Montana wilderness, and suddenly decide I could be anything other than a city girl.”
“You can be anything you want to be.”
“You believe that?”
He hesitated, not sure what she was driving at. “People can change. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, sometimes just for the sake of doing something different.”
“Right.” She bit her lip. “Or sometimes you realize someone was a certain way all along, but you made yourself believe they were the person you wanted them to be.”
Schwartz caught the bitter note in her voice and took a moment to digest her words. Then he reached out and put a hand on her knee. “Like maybe you really want your new husband to be an upstanding, wealthy pharmaceutical distributor, so that’s what you convinced yourself he was?”
She looked up at him, her blue eyes wide and questioning. “How the hell could I not have known? I mean, seriously? What the hell is wrong with me?”
“With you?” He shook his head. “Did you run an international heroin importing ring?”
She frowned. “No.”
“Did you kill your business rivals in cold blood?”
“No.”
“Did you convince an amazing woman to marry you under false pretenses, then run around sticking your dick in other women and fathering an illegitimate child while your wife waited at home?”
She winced. “How did you—”
“Did you?”
“Of course not.”
“Did you refuse to let your wife go even after she divorced you, then stalk her relentlessly after she witnessed you murdering an unarmed man?”
Janelle shook her head, and looked down at her hands. Schwartz took his hand off her knee and reached for her hands, prompting her to look up again. “Honey, none of that was your fault. You’ve gotta believe that.”
“But what does it say about me if my judgment is so seriously flawed that I don’t realize the man I’d pledged to spend eternity with is someone who could do those things?”
“It says you’re a beautiful, trusting, sweet-natured woman who wants to believe the best about people. And you know what?”
“What?”
“That’s inspiring. For a lot of folks, anyway. It’s enough to make someone want to live up to your opinion of them. To be the sort of person someone like you can believe in.”
She blinked at him, her eyes relentlessly blue in contrast to the dried clay on her cheekbones. “Wow, Schwartz. That’s kinda deep.”
He snorted. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Seriously, you’re sweet.” She was smiling at him now, the easing tension making her shoulders drop. “And insightful.”
“Really, don’t tell anyone.”
She smiled. “I kinda want to kiss you right now.”
“It must be the mud. Very sexy.”
“We should probably wash it off.” She slid her hands out from under his and Schwartz felt a deep ache of longing. Of wanting to touch her again, not just her hands, but everywhere.
She met his eyes, and something inside him melted into a big, gooey puddle of love and desire and a whole lot of other emotions he hadn’t felt for years. Maybe ever.
Jesus. Why was he still fighting this? He’d honest to God forgotten, and seeing her sitting there with her breasts rising and falling under that tiny little tube top wasn’t doing much to jog his memory.
“You want to go first?” she asked.
“What?”
“In the bathroom. You want to shower first to wash the mud off, or should I go?”
He hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”
She cocked her head, eyeing him curiously. “It wasn’t a yes or no question, Schwartz.”
He got to his feet, then held out his hand. An invitation. She gave him a questioning look, then put her hands in his.
“I’m getting in the shower now,” he said slowly. “And I’d like to invite you to join me.”
She looked at him for a moment, her expression unreadable. Schwartz held his breath. Hell, maybe he shouldn’t have said anything. He could still take it back, just march off to the bathroom and take a nice, icy shower by himself.
Then a slow smile spread over her face, making tiny cracks in the gray clay, and Schwartz forgot all about taking anything back. Her eyes were warm and blue, and glinting with amusement and desire.
“Is this about water conservation, or something else?”
“Something else,” he said, closing his hands around hers and hauling her to her feet. “Something else entirely.”
Chapter Eleven
Janelle felt her heart thudding in her throat as Schwartz led her to the bathroom and let go of her hand just long enough to twist the taps on in the tiled shower.
He turned to look at her as the steam filled the space between them and the mirror grew foggy. “You’re okay with this?”
She nodded, a little shell-shocked by the whole thing. By the intensity in his eyes and the softness in his touch.
All this time, she’d thought any sexual encounter with Schwartz would involve frantic passion, something rough and hungry and urgent. She’d expected him to take her up against a wall with her legs wrapped around his hips and his massive hands pinning her wrists over her head.
But the man slowly skimming his palms down her waist and bending to slide her boots off was nothing at all like she’d expected.
He was better.
She rested
her hands on his bare back, savoring the muscles and warm skin and solid heat of him as he unzipped the right boot, then the left. She stepped out of them as he rose again and touched a finger to the buttons on her jeans.
“Are you sure?”
She nodded. “I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”
He smiled, the bristles of his whiskers breaking through the gray clay on his skin. He began unbuttoning her jeans, and she reached out to do the same for him. She pushed the denim down over his hips, feeling her own clothing sliding to the floor as the steam billowed around them.
She stood there in her panties now, and his hands went to the edge of her tube top. He seemed to hesitate, then tugged it down over her hips, taking her panties with it.
Then they were both naked, standing there on the rough slate floor with the scent of pine soap and warm earth drifting around them. She looked at him—really looked at him—and adored every inch of what she saw.
Some inches more than others.
“You’re sexy,” he said.
“So are you. But I think we’ll both be a lot sexier once we get this stuff off our faces.”
He laughed and took her hand again, reaching out with his other hand to test the water. Then he stepped into the shower, pulling her in behind him and moving aside to let her have the water.
“Ladies first,” he said as she turned her face into the spray and smoothed her palms over her face. The water was warm and Schwartz’s hands were solid on her hips, caressing her curves as she finished rinsing off and turned to face him.
“Your turn.”
She slid past him, her gaze dropping to the thick shaft of his cock. He was more than ready to get on with the business at hand, but he turned to the water instead, letting it sluice over his cheeks and forehead and hair. He closed his eyes, and Janelle let her gaze drift over his body, greedily taking him in. She was already familiar with the scar on his left cheek, but she saw others now. One snaked from the edge of his right hip bone all the way down to his knee. Another made a deep divot in his left calf. Big scars, deep ones.
But instead of detracting from the appeal of his body, they added to it. He was rugged and flawed and naked and glorious and all hers, at least for now.