by Serena Bell
He wanted to get it right this time. He wanted to be buried in her so far she could taste him.
And his dick was totally, completely, 100 percent on board.
It just went to show that dicks were stupid, stupid, stupid.
He’d been staring at the smooth expanse of her skin above where the silk flirted with her breasts, and when he lifted his eyes, they met hers. She stared back. Curious. Watching him watch her.
For a long, frozen moment, he couldn’t look away.
Finally he forced himself to look down at his hands, which, he discovered, were in fists.
Fuck.
This wasn’t a place where he could afford to mess around. This wasn’t a part of his life where he could make dumb mistakes. This was a situation that called for him to be a grown man with big balls who stuck to the program.
The exact opposite of how he’d been three days before he got his leg blown off, in fact. The exact goddamned opposite.
“This is too complicated,” he said.
“I know.” But she stepped closer, close enough that she violated some magic boundary line, and his chemical world shifted, every hair on his body rising to attention. Along with some other things.
“We need to keep it simple.” But it was possible he’d taken a step forward, too. More than possible. There was almost no distance between them now, and he could smell her shampoo. It reminded him of new leaves.
“I know.”
“This is a bad idea,” he told her. Then he gave up, let his fingers find the thick softness of her hair, and lowered his mouth to hers.
Chapter 8
His lips were cool and soft, but the rest of his mouth was hot, and something about the contrast lit Mira up.
It was too much, all at once. And there was the unfinished business in their far-off past, which was part of her excitement, twined up in it in a way she couldn’t untangle. Way back then, at the lake, she’d made him want her so badly he’d forgotten caution. And she had too, because no one had ever made her feel quite like that. Nothing before him had given her that sense of possibility, that rashness, that raw, sweet achiness.
The way she felt now, all eagerness and daring.
And here they were, his mouth not demanding but suggesting. Here are a thousand lovely, dirty things I would like to do to you. I will start here with this slide of tongue over tongue, slow and sure. As if he had all the time in the world to get that one caress exactly right, as if they weren’t grumpy asshole, injured soldier, and beleaguered mom, woman in search of herself. His kisses were long and sweet, came to an end, began again, blurred together.
“You taste exactly the same.” He said it so close to her mouth that she felt his breath, his words, on her lips.
She pushed her mouth against his, trying to get closer, to fall into what he was telling her. That he felt it, too, the connection to that weird, splintered moment in the past, one long thread, her desire and willingness, his response.
He made a dark sound into her mouth and kissed her harder. He drew her lower lip in, sucked on it. The sensation pulled deep, tugged at her core. Caused heat to pool, to rise, to spread in her limbs.
She whimpered.
“Shh.”
He was kissing her jaw now, her throat, the hollow between her collarbones. His hair tickled her chin. She clutched his arms as his mouth brushed the curve of her neckline. “Jake—”
“Shh,” he said again. He drew back, his eyes dark, his mouth red and slightly slack, his breath quick. “Sam will hear. And how would you explain it to him? Can you imagine at school? ‘I saw Mommy kissing the babysitter.’ ”
Was that what this was? Just Mommy kissing the babysitter? If so, it should be easy to stop, to make the right decision and pull away. But her body refused the idea. It was begging for more, liquid heat between her legs, her breasts tight, her breath still searing her throat. Even parts of her that by all rights shouldn’t be involved felt jacked up. The backs of her knees. Her earlobes. The skin all over her body, hyperactivated, wide-awake.
“What is this? What just happened?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
He didn’t say it like he was cutting off the conversation. He said it like he wanted more information. Like he wanted her to give him the answers.
“Just crazy chemistry?” She tilted her head.
“It feels crazy.”
“Crazy good,” she said.
He was looking at her that way again. Like he could barely keep himself in check, like he was thinking about every possible thing he wanted to do to her. It did terrible things to her self-control. It overrode caution and common sense and the absolute conviction that, yes, this was too complicated.
“Sam won’t come down,” she said. “I promised him snuggles if he stays up, and snuggles are important to him.”
He kissed her again. Slid his mouth over hers, his hands down her body, over her breasts, to her waist, up again. He pulled her close and sealed her mouth with his. He licked her and bit her lip and made her moan. Loudly. He found her earlobe and sucked the heat there to the surface, and her hands got out of her control and started wandering all over him. Over the hard muscles of his back, into his soft hair, across the rough landscape of his face.
Her thumbs described his pecs, and then she slid one hand down across the ridged plane of his belly and grabbed the waistband of his jeans. Held it in her fist. Her hands didn’t feel like hers. They felt like they belonged to someone else and like they might do something she’d have to apologize for afterward. Also, she thought she might bite him, right there, where a thick cord of muscle connected his neck to his shoulder—she did it, and he groaned, deep in his chest. He grabbed her ass, hard, as if to tug her against him, but he lost his balance and fell backward, barely catching himself with a hand on the counter.
“Motherfu—” He put his head in his hands.
“Jake—”
“No, don’t. I sometimes forget. My head was somewhere else, I forgot who I was, I thought I could do something the normal way for fucking once. My bad.”
Her heart hurt, and she reached out to offer him comfort.
He drew back. “This is a dumb fucking idea,” he said. “In every way. I can’t even catalog all the ways this is a dumb idea.”
It was, she knew, and yet this thing, whatever it was, with Jake felt different from anything she’d ever known. Definitely a whole different ball game from what she’d felt for Aaron.
Aaron, despite whatever weakness had compelled him to accept her father’s money, had been a terrifically nice guy. He played games with Sam, he got along great with her parents, he treated her right without fail.
In bed, he was attentive, creative, and energetic. They had a lot in common—they enjoyed going to the movies together. Reading similar books. Hiking, kayaking, biking, either alone together or with Sam in tow.
If she had stayed in Florida, she was pretty sure he would have proposed. Even after their fight, even after she’d broken up with him, he’d insisted he wanted to earn back her trust. He said he’d keep an eye out for jobs in the Seattle area, because he’d miss her like fury. He said he’d find a way to show her how much he loved her, that her father’s money had meant nothing to him.
She’d expressed doubt, but his pleading had softened her and she hadn’t told him not to bother trying. Because the truth was, Aaron would make a good husband and a good father.
Even if he had sometimes bored her to tears.
Kissing Jake had been, as Jake had so eloquently put it, a dumb fucking idea. But the furthest thing from boring. It had woken her up—not just the eager dampness between her legs, not just the tight demand of her nipples, but something else. The way it had been that night at the lake, the physical connection reaching deep into her, grabbing at some emotional truth she wanted to but couldn’t hide. How much she liked him. How deeply she felt him.
He took a step toward the living room. “I should go.”
She should l
et him go. She should let him walk away, for so many reasons. And yet her pulse beat hard, at her throat, in her wrists, between her legs, an insistent rhythm, a vibrant counterpoint to good sense.
Jake shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mira. It’s not you.”
Had he really said that? The thing about that cliché, the thing she had always hated most, was that it worked so damn well. There was no argument against it. It was the perfect put-down, the definitive end point.
“It’s me. I’m—a mess,” Jake said.
Don’t argue with him. Tell him he’s right. Tell him you’re a mess, too, and you’re in no position to be involved with anyone. For, say, the next five years. Let alone someone who comes with the baggage he does. Let alone someone whose DNA is in a Gordian knot with yours.
But what came out instead was, “You’re going to have to do better than that.”
“What?”
God, what was she doing? She hadn’t jumped out of her father’s frying pan to fall into some other alpha asshole’s fire.
Words were somehow still coming out of her mouth, and they had the pressure of truth, the heat of conviction behind them. “You look at you and you see a mess. I look at you and I see a good-looking guy, a guy who was badly injured but who is obviously doing a great job of rehabbing. A guy who helped me out of a fix today.”
He was shaking his head again, but she kept going. “I see the stuff I read about you online yesterday, which was all about what a good soldier you were. I see the emails you sent me, which told me you’re good with kids, good with your mom. So if there’s something else I’m supposed to be seeing, you’re going to have to spell it out for me.”
“Fine,” he said. He crossed his arms, his face grim. “I’ll spell it out. I’m here today, but barely, because it practically killed me just to haul myself out of bed and get myself here. I haven’t done anything since I left Afghanistan except eat, sleep, and learn to use this hunk of metal, because it’s a full-time job figuring out how to be human.”
She waited. Because she knew there was more. Because she could see it in the coiled, angry set of his shoulders, in the rage behind his eyes. Because she knew—she wasn’t sure how—that he hadn’t said these words to anyone before, and that his saying them to her was the beginning of something that mattered. To her. To him.
“You think you want me, but if you knew, you wouldn’t.”
“Try me,” she said.
That only made him angrier, the words coming rapid fire.
“I don’t have a job. I don’t want a job. I’ve only ever wanted to be a soldier. I don’t know how to want to be anything other than a soldier. I drink too much, but not too much too much because I don’t want to be my father. And I can’t get it up, except for when some psychiatrist at Walter Reed put me on antidepressants and I got hard-ons for three hours at a time and couldn’t get myself off.”
She winced. Yowch.
She hurt for him. For the boy he’d been that night at the lake, for the soldier who’d lost his leg, and something much bigger. For the man who had laid out in raw detail all the ways he believed himself not a man. She wanted to wrap him in her arms and stroke his hair and move her lips against his cheek and his ear, whispering words of comfort she couldn’t even articulate yet.
He wasn’t done. His breath was coming as fast as it had when she’d grabbed his waistband. “So I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I am bad fucking juju. I’m not what you want in your life. And I am most definitely not what you want in Sam’s life.”
The echo of her father’s words brought her back. To the world she was trying to build here for herself and Sam, one where bossy men didn’t tell her what to do or what to feel. One where her father didn’t get to decide who she should sleep with, who she should expose her son to, how she should live.
And neither did this guy, because he was too damn pathetic to get to make decisions for her. “You know, if you don’t want to have sex with me, that’s fine. I get it. Your life is complicated enough as it is. And yeah, I can see, getting mixed up with us would be a lot for a guy in your situation. But don’t tell me what I want. And don’t tell me what’s good for Sam. Just man up and say you don’t want this.”
He raked a hand through his hair. The anger and the wild hair conspired to make him look frightening, but she wasn’t scared of him.
“And for the record, you can get it up. I can definitely attest to that.”
He was on her so fast he startled her, backing her up until her shoulder blades hit the wall, pressing himself close so she could feel the long, hard line of his erection against her hip. He kissed her, fierce, hard, and mean. It hurt her, and she pressed back, needing more.
Then it was over. He stepped away, and the loss of his body heat, the loss of that long, solid line of muscle, felt like plunging into cold water.
“I gotta go,” he said.
She leaned her head against the wall and listened for the crunch of the front door easing shut, her heart beating a harsh, uneven rhythm in her ears.
Chapter 9
“You’re really quiet.”
That was Opal, Mira’s new friend at work. They were eating lunch on one of the benches outside the office, their paper-wrapped sandwiches balanced on their knees. They were in the middle of an unusually long run of sunny days, and it was warm, too, near 80, Seattle bliss.
Mira had met Opal on her first day of work after she’d been publicly disemboweled in her aurally exposed cube by her new boss for showing up a week late. Opal had launched a piece of crumpled paper over the wall to Mira:
“We want to be as accommodating as we can of your life. Just see that you keep your personal problems from interfering with your ability to get the job done.” Does she listen to herself? —Opal, next door
Mira had felt a thrill as sharp and poignant as she would have in seventh grade if a witty and popular girl had passed her a note.
I don’t think so!
She tossed the note back over the wall. She prayed she had its source correct—she thought it had come from the cube directly to her right. She’d noticed that desk was occupied by a woman about her age.
A head peeked around the corner. “Hi,” said the woman. “I’m Opal. I’m in the marketing department, and I’m supposed to work closely with you on the accessories launch.” Opal didn’t look like an Opal. She had a lot of red curly hair, like Little Orphan Annie, and freckles so closely packed on her face they were almost a continuous tan. She also had the nicest smile Mira had ever seen, big and totally unreserved. It was like a gift after Mira’s last run-in.
“I’m Mira.”
“Welcome.”
Opal was also, officially, the first person to make an overture of friendship to Mira since she and Sam had arrived in Seattle. Mira had met one old friend, who also had kids, at a playground the first week after the move, but then Sam had taken his spill, and that and unpacking had consumed most of her resources since. Mira had nearly forgotten how much fun it was to make a new friend.
“I can’t possibly express how relieved I am to discover that you’re normal-looking,” Opal said. “Do you want to have lunch?”
Mira smiled. “Sure.”
“I love your shoes. Are they ours?”
“Yeah.” One of the perks of the job was 30 percent off a new pair of shoes every month. These were Mira’s first—cork-heeled, strappy, red patent sandals.
“Do they come in any other colors?”
“Lime green, lemon yellow, orange, purple.”
“Would I be treading on your toes—no pun intended—if I bought a pair in a different color?”
Mira wanted to hug her. “No. I’ll send you a link.”
“Would you?” Opal grinned, a mouthful of straight white teeth. “Thanks. Hey, if you have any questions about anything, you know, how to do stuff, or just—well, you know where to find me.” And she ducked back behind the wall. A moment later, a crushed wad of paper flew over. Glad you’re here.
This was the fourth day she’d eaten on this bench with Opal, who was a relentless talker, an excellent feature at the moment since Mira hadn’t felt much like talking since she’d kissed and dismissed her emergency babysitter.
She was still having hot flashes of stupid shame several days after the fact. First, because she’d let anything happen in the first place. She had seen it coming, had seen the look on his face, felt the combustion when anger turned to lust. She could have backed off. She could have made herself busy, made excuses. And when he’d said those words, “This is a bad idea,” she could have said, “Damn straight,” and run the other way.
Instead, she’d let him kiss her. She’d more than let him; she’d dived straight into the center of it, thrown herself whimpering at him. Hmm, let’s see … I’ll fly across the country to get some space for myself and then serve myself on a platter to the most complicated man on earth.
And then, when he’d given her the perfect out, she’d gone and taunted him into one more kiss.
Gawd.
And yet, she couldn’t quite find it in herself to completely regret it.
It wasn’t like he was just some guy. He was that guy. That guy whose mouth she absolutely 100 percent shouldn’t stick her tongue into. That guy who’d always had the ability to make her abandon caution. And she knew that ability, multiplied by the effect of his being Sam’s dad, multiplied by his being an alpha guy who wanted to call the shots, would equal, like, 600 million.
“What’s going on, girl?” Opal asked. “And don’t lie to me. I know it’s not nothing. I just told you I could get you a pair of Louboutins for fifty bucks if you played your cards right, and you said, ‘Uh-huh.’ ”
“It’s complicated,” Mira said, and then thought, And I could have kept it simple.
“Maybe that works on some of your friends, but I like it complicated. Serve it up, hon.”