“Ah, but you’re the only one with real security experience,” Craig said. “You know what to look out for.”
“So you’re saying our best option is for me to move in with the guy who alternates between hating me and hitting on me?” The ferry bumped against the dock and the other passengers got ready to disembark. “Is it too late for me to say we should just let the stalker get him?” She was only half-kidding.
“Just think of it as one of the challenges of the job.” His eyes twinkled, the corner of his mouth twitching.
“What are you playing at?”
“Nothing. I just know that you’ll be a lot more likely to get him to agree to this if you’re the one in the next room.”
Gwen pulled a face. “You’d be surprised, actually, how much better that doesn’t make me feel.”
Craig followed her up the gangplank, still laughing at her.
***
“I’ve already had self-defense instruction,” Lucas complained.
“Did you practice what you learned before?”
“Some.”
They were standing in the living area of his suite. Gwen reached up and grabbed him by the arm, twisting it behind him. Not hard—at least, not much harder than she had in the green room.
“Hey! Ow!”
She stepped up behind him, pressing close, pulling him down so she could speak into his ear. She wasn’t above flirting a little to convince him to let her train him. “I’m not hurting you, you big baby. Get out of the hold and you don’t have to train with me.” Lucas tugged his arm ineffectually, tried to turn around, but couldn’t get free. “I did learn this stuff already.” The pout in his voice made her smile.
If her lips happened to brush against his ear, it was purely by accident. “That’s why you need hands-on practice with someone who knows what they’re doing.” He took a deep breath and leaned back against her. Goose pimples dotted the skin of his neck. She released him and stepped back. “That’s why you drill. So when the time comes, you don’t have to think.”
Freed, he tried to crowd into her personal space. She let him, tilting her head to smile up at him. “You’ve convinced me,” he murmured, and leaned down with the obvious intent of kissing her. She was tempted to let him, but that would defeat the purpose of coaxing him into practice. So she turned and headed for the door.
“Great. Go change and meet me down in the hotel gym. I’ve cleared some time for us. Come on.”
“But—we aren’t going to train here?”
She glanced back over her shoulder and smiled. “Of course not.” She didn’t trust herself for a minute to grapple with him in the privacy of his suite.
He was still muttering under his breath when she closed the door.
The machines stood silent in the hotel gym, the television in the corner off. Gwen wiped her sweaty palms against her yoga pants and tried not to pace across the gleaming wood floor. They had half an hour, and she wanted to start simple.
The door creaked open and Gwen’s mouth went dry, caught by the sight of Lucas in a black tank top that skimmed over his chest and abs, revealing a pair of wiry and sleek shoulders. The top barely met the waist of a low-slung pair of gray training pants. She didn’t need to see him turn around to know they were molded to his arse. The way his pulled-back hair exposed his neck made her go a little wobbly.
Damn it, he’d said something. “Sorry, what?”
“I said, why not just teach me to shoot?”
“Americans. You and your guns.” Gwen tried to gather her thoughts. “First of all, you don’t have a gun”—she raised her hand when Lucas opened his mouth—“and you’re not getting one. There’s no time for you to learn proper gun safety. Second of all, you’d likely be the one getting shot when it got taken away from you. Any other questions?”
Lucas eyed the floor dubiously. “Shouldn’t there be a mat or something?”
“No. You’re not going to throw me, and I’m not going to throw you. Not today. This is much more basic than that.” Hotel gym or not, she wasn’t about to sprawl on the floor above or beneath him, not while he looked like that.
He folded his arms and settled into a wide-legged stance, and she tried not to be distracted.
“The first thing to remember is this: Don’t be a hero. Your only goal is to get away. So anything I show you is to do just that. Break free, incapacitate enough to get away. Nothing else. Got it?”
Lucas nodded.
“If you want to make someone lose interest in you in a hell of a hurry, you want to aim for the eyes, the nose, the throat, or the groin.” He winced, and she said, “Exactly. You’re not trying to play nice here, Lucas. If someone’s coming after you, you fight dirty.” She demonstrated, swinging a hand slowly up toward Lucas’s face, fingers out.
He barely blinked, focusing with an intensity she hadn’t seen anywhere except the stage.
“You want to jab at the eyes, or at the throat. Aim is tricky, but if you hit, it’s effective as hell.” Another swing, flat palm forward. “Flat of your hand against the nose—you’ve got a good chance of breaking it. As to the groin”—she gave a faint grin—“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that any sort of hit will work, but grab, twist, and pull generally works best.”
He didn’t so much as twitch the corner of his mouth. “Anything else?”
“Well, sure—anything that’s soft and exposed will do. But remember: you’re not in this for the whole fight. Incapacitate, and run.”
He nodded. “How do I—”
In one smooth movement, she reached her left arm across and grabbed him by the wrist, trying to catch him off-guard, test his reaction.
Then she had to duck when a set of long fingers came jabbing at her eyes. She grinned up at him, swallowing around a burst of pride. “Well done.”
“Too slow.” He frowned. “And you’re still holding on to me.”
“Maybe I can’t bear to let go yet,” she teased.
“If that’s what you have in mind—” He turned his arm and ran his fingers up her forearm.
“Your instinct is a good one,” she interrupted. His fingertips tickled her arm with their featherlight touch, but she couldn’t find her voice again for the pounding of her heart. She broke their shared gaze and cleared her throat. “Now, speaking of this,” she said, nodding at her hand on Lucas’s wrist, “the weakest point of any hold is right here.” With her free hand, she pointed at the space where her thumb and forefinger met. “Take advantage of it. I’ll show you.” She let go of him and put his hand around her wrist. “Hold on tight.” He did, the heat of his fingers tingling against her skin. With a few twists of her arm, she was free.
“Show me again.” She did. They went back and forth several times, Lucas watching intently, then practicing breaking free himself.
“What about the hold you had me in earlier?” Lucas asked. “In my room. How do I get out of that?”
Gwen laughed at him. “I thought you said you trained on this stuff.”
“Maybe it’s been a while?” He grinned sheepishly.
She shook her head and stepped behind him, grabbing his right arm and twisting it up again. “Easiest thing in the world,” she said. “Turn toward me.” He tried to turn to the right, but the pressure in his shoulder stopped him. “Other way,” Gwen said. “Towards your free arm.”
He did, and something clicked in his face, because then he raised his free elbow as if to strike her.
“There, you got it,” she said, feeling ridiculously proud of him. “Again.”
After a few rounds, he stopped. “Do you really think I’ll need this?”
“I don’t know.” She wished she had something more reassuring to say. “Probably not.” Meeting his eyes, she gave him a short smile. “I might have a small tendency to overplan.” Which made for an awkward segue for what she needed to say next. “Lucas, I’d feel a lot better if you had someone with you all of the time. Just until this gets resolved.”
“When you sa
y ‘with me all the time’ …”
“Staying in your suite with you, that sort of thing.” She said it fast, to get it over with.
“Well.” The grin was obvious in his voice; she didn’t even need to look up. “If you wanted to move in, you could have just said so.”
Gwen rolled her eyes. “I didn’t mean just me, but it looks like I’ve drawn the short straw for now.”
“I guess I won’t complain,” he said.
She cleared her throat. “Back to work—we don’t have much time.” She reestablished the hold she’d had around his wrist. “Now. Tell me what you’d do if you were facing more than one attacker …”
***
An hour before dinner, Gwen brought her things down to Lucas’s suite. She took a breath and pushed the door open. Moisture hanging in the air and the patter of water from the bathroom turned her errand into a race to see if she could get settled and out of the room before Lucas finished his shower.
When she was halfway through making up a bed on the large sofa, the bathroom door opened. Lucas stood in the doorway, barely clutching a towel around his narrow hips. God, this was going to be more difficult than she’d thought. “Uh, hi.”
“Oh. Thought I heard you come in,” he said. He walked over to the minibar and Gwen tried to ignore him, tried not to stare. The towel sat low enough to reveal the top of his arse. Her face flushed and her hands clenched like she wanted to hit something. Or someone.
Lucas showed no signs of going to get dressed, and Gwen knew she was being watched. He said, “Sorry, am I making you uncomfortable?”
“Nothing I haven’t seen before.”
“Oh, well in that case.” The towel hit the carpet. She rolled her eyes, but she looked anyway, as he meant for her to—and forgot to breathe. Seeing him in the tank top hadn’t prepared her. There was barely an ounce of fat on his body, muscles long and agile and defined. He wasn’t bulky, like some of the Yank soldiers she’d known, but lean and defined, a dancer’s body instead of a warrior’s—and gorgeous, all pale skin and dark hair. The monochrome was marred by only two things: the vivid blue of his eyes and the darkening red of his cock, which lingered in that tempting space between fully flaccid and fully erect.
She raised her eyes up the length of his body until their eyes met and held. One breath, two. Her pulse pounded in her temples as Lucas parted his lips as if to speak. Gwen’s left hand clenched tighter at her side, fighting down a sudden curiosity to find out what the hair on his chest felt like.
Lucas stayed still. If he’d smirked, if he’d so much as raised an eyebrow at her, she would have rolled her eyes and turned away. He didn’t. I could do this, Gwen thought. This wasn’t a power play, like in the green room. This was an invitation. She could accept. Hell, she wanted to accept. She felt the pull in her belly as they stood looking at each other. He was waiting for her to make a decision, letting her set the terms. What would change, if she gave in? She crossed the room slowly, then raised her hand and touched his chest. His eyelids flickered as if he were fighting to keep his eyes open.
Her fingertips caught in the moisture on his skin, the coarse hair covering it curled with humidity. Gwen closed her eyes and let her hand move up along his collarbone, then back down in a slow, sweeping stroke. When she opened her eyes, Lucas was watching her with intense curiosity in his eyes. It was unfair, how beautiful he was. He leaned down, but didn’t kiss her mouth as she’d hoped, instead placing one light kiss on the side of her neck, making her shiver. Water from his hair seeped through the shoulder of her shirt as he kissed her once more, over her pulse. He reached up and unfastened one of her buttons.
Her heart raced beneath his lips and fingertips. She should stop this before it went any further, but her head spun, her palm tingling where it lay flat against his chest. His heart was pounding too. Lucas unfastened another button, and nuzzled aside the collar of her shirt, away from her shoulder … and gasped. It was the scar—the violent, livid starburst pattern that proved her survival.
Gwen swallowed and pulled away, breaking the connection before re-buttoning her shirt. “Get dressed.” She refused to meet his eyes, afraid of seeing disgust, or worse, pity. “We’re meeting the others downstairs for dinner at seven.”
She left before he could say anything.
***
Lucas got into a long argument about prog rock with Craig and Sally after dinner, and by the time they dropped him off at his room, Gwen was asleep on the sofa—or feigning sleep remarkably well. They had a flight to Washington to catch in eight hours. Gwen had packed already, her belongings stacked together. His clothes were scattered everywhere, flung haphazardly each time he got dressed. He gathered them up and started packing, pausing now and then to look at the woman sleeping nearby.
Gwen was sprawled on her back like an extravagant child, legs a jumble under the covers. Her right arm was thrown up over her head, face turned into the crook of her elbow. The line of her neck stretched taut under her skin. Lucas had a sudden overwhelming urge to lean over and lick it. The thought stopped him where he stood, and he breathed deep for several moments, mirroring the steady breathing of Gwen asleep.
God, he wanted her. Even more so now, after everything that happened earlier. As a tour manager, she was getting better, there was no arguing that, but when she was training him, he could see she was truly comfortable, in her element. In the gym, he was on her turf. More than once he’d nearly regretted wearing the pants he had, worried that she’d see or feel his reaction to her as she touched him, pinned him in place.
It wasn’t the first time he’d met someone that made him want to kneel, to crawl, to submit, but it was the strongest reaction he’d had in a long time. And she had no qualms about manhandling him. His wrists still ached from where she’d grabbed him, and he wanted to savor that.
Then before dinner, they were so close, both of them obviously ready for more, and he’d bungled it again. He hadn’t questioned why she left the service so young. Until he saw the scar on her shoulder—visible, tangible evidence of the violence in her past—he’d always assumed her enlistment was up. He’d reacted badly. She took his surprise as disgust, and that was why she’d pulled away and gone cold.
From here he could see the tattoo on her left shoulder. She’d shown it off one night after a show, everyone tipsy except him. He knew now it was her unit’s insignia, and that night she’d explained the meaning of each part. In Arduis Fidelis. “Faithful in Adversity.” The words had new meaning for him now, after tonight. The idea that someone had lifted a weapon and fired at her, had caused her injury, shocked him. And she wanted to go back; that was obvious from the way she talked about it. She wanted to go back, even though he didn’t think she was entirely okay—the first night, when she ran from him, he wasn’t sure it was him she was running from.
It was one thing to think about the idea of military combat. It was something else entirely to see its aftermath.
Lucas threw his clothes into the nearest suitcase and pulled on a pair of shorts to sleep in. He wasn’t tired enough yet, so he took his guitar out of the case. He turned off all the lights but the one by his bed and settled back against the headboard, cradling the instrument. He played almost silently, needing more to go through the movement than to hear the music. Muscle memory quieted his thoughts as his fingers moved, the sound of skin hitting strings louder than the music itself. It was a long time before he was able to get to sleep.
Chapter Four
Gwen woke to her alarm the next morning with the uneasy sensation of having done something unutterably stupid the night before, as if she’d got drunk and danced on a table—oh. Not twelve hours before, Lucas had been parading around the room naked, wicked, and tempting, and she had nearly given in. Thank God she’d come to her senses.
She’d tried to go to bed early, but it hadn’t done any good; she was still exhausted. During the night she’d jerked awake, sweaty and breathing hard, at least three times, certain at one point she’d sc
reamed in her sleep. She wished she knew what would set off a bad night, so she could start avoiding it.
Lucas growled something unintelligible in the next room. He’d left his bedroom door open after she’d fallen asleep. Gwen reached across and turned off her alarm and he quieted. She shook her head and went to shower.
The flight to Washington was blessedly quiet, and this time, she remembered to nap.
She was getting the last of her things put away in the suite when the front desk rang to say Maggie Creighton had arrived. She brushed a quick hand over her hair, grabbed her phone and keys, and went to start the busy day in earnest.
The first order of business was to get Ms. Creighton settled. Gwen ran through the information Sam had emailed her. She went to school with Lucas. They’d been in a band, Altered Oblivion, five years before, and had made a small splash, cracking the Top 40 once or twice. The two of them split up, and she left Altered Oblivion for a solo career and hadn’t looked back since. Some of the fans accused her of ditching Lucas for more money, but it hadn’t seemed to hurt her career, nor had her unconventional approach to … pretty much everything.
“Ms. Creighton?” Gwen crossed the marble floor of the hotel lobby, her hand extended. The petite blond woman turned around and smiled expectantly. “Gwen Tennison, tour manager. Welcome to Washington, D.C.”
She shook Gwen’s hand. “Maggie, please. So you’re the new one?” Before Gwen could bristle, she added, “The new tour manager?” Her green eyes glinted with amusement. “Lucas has told me about you.”
“I shudder to think.” Gwen returned the smile. She wished she had changed into something sharper than jeans and a T-shirt and done more with her hair.
“Not at all. He was quite complimentary.” Maggie looked Gwen up and down and released her hand. “Not without reason, I see.”
Gwen returned the appraisal: Maggie made the olive green hoodie she wore look like it came off a runway, perfectly following her curves and unzipped enough to show some cleavage, and those blue jeans made everything Gwen had ever owned look like it belonged in a rubbish bin. The pictures of her days with Altered Oblivion did nothing for her—back then she’d been dark-haired and dressed in black. She’d completely reinvented herself since then. “I’m hoping you can tell me some good stories,” Gwen said.
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