No Surrender

by Sara Arden

  Why should she let that stop her now?

  Why, indeed.

  She inhaled a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

  The life she’d hardly ever let herself dream about was right in the palm of her hand. All she had to do was close her fingers around it and say, “Yes, this is mine.”

  But she didn’t.

  Instead she lay in silence with him, holding his scarred hand.

  The rest of his recovery passed quickly and when he was discharged from the hospital, he took a room at a motel.

  That felt wrong, but what felt right was wrong, too.

  She wanted to offer to take him home with her, but she knew that would only lead to something they’d both regret.

  All of this would’ve been so much easier if he were an asshole. Then she could just hate him and never think about him again.

  No, that was a lie. She wouldn’t stop thinking about him, but maybe she could stop longing for him. Stop missing the way his lips felt on hers, the warmth of his body next to hers. That utter divinity when their bodies were joined…

  He came over a few days after he’d been discharged with Chinese food.

  When she saw him walk through the door of her garage, her insides melted into a happy glow. The very sight of him was a balm.

  She grinned and waved at him. “Is that for me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” His grin morphed into a smirk.

  “What’s got you making that face?” She arched a brow as she took the bag from him, inhaling the scent of the crab Rangoon and egg-drop soup. Her mouth watered.

  “You’re going to be so cute in those coveralls once you really start showing.”

  “I’m going to look like a blue beach ball.”

  “It’ll be the cutest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “Are you going to be here?” At the look on his face, she realized she shouldn’t have asked. He’d been the one to keep to her rules. No pressure. Now here she was asking if he was going to stay, which would lead to one of those deeper, emotional conversations that she’d said she wanted to avoid. Why couldn’t they just enjoy their Chinese food?

  Because, that voice answered her, that’s not how these things work.

  “Actually, I have made a decision.” He followed her upstairs to the apartment and set the table. “I thought about what you said, about giving up my dreams. And you’re right—I don’t want to do that.”

  “See?” Why did that make her stomach sink?

  “But if I did, it would totally be my choice. It’s something I would choose with open eyes. Eric’s offer means I don’t have to. I can have both things I want. Time to be a good father and serve my country, while making much better money. So I’m going to tell him tomorrow and file my paperwork.”

  “Are you sure this is what you want?”

  “One thousand percent.”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”

  She didn’t like the sound of that.

  “It’s just an idea.”

  Kentucky sat down and stared at him, mouth pursed. She didn’t know why she was already feeling so defensive. He’d been nothing but supportive and encouraging. He actually hadn’t tried to push his agenda at all.

  “Okay, go ahead.”

  “I think you—we—should consider buying a house.” He studied her face for a long moment before replying again. “Your apartment upstairs is only one bedroom. That’s not viable long-term. If we buy a house, we can afford more together than alone. We could give the baby a more stable environment instead of shuffling back and forth to each other’s houses. And I really don’t need a house to myself if I’m taking ops.”

  She stared at him, unsure of what to say. His words made sense, but the idea was scary. It was relationship territory, even if he denied that was what he was doing.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’d each have our own rooms. I’m not trying to push anything that way. I can’t say I’d like you dating anyone else. In fact, it would kill me, but I’m not going to interfere in your life. I just want to be close to the baby.”

  “Sean…” What was she doing? This man she loved said that he wanted her, wanted to build a home and a family with her.

  Why was she so afraid to say yes? Anything could happen. She knew that. Anything bad. Anything good. Why couldn’t she just say yes?

  “Just think about it. We have some time.”

  “What about the garage? I like the security of someone living here.”

  “We could rent it out. Hire someone to help you and make that part of the salary.”

  “I don’t need help.”

  “You might. I want you to be able to take as much time as you need to and having someone you trust in the shop will give you that freedom.”

  “What, no offering to cover all of my bills?” That was the last thing she wanted, but it was as though he had this whole thing all planned out with no thought as to how it made her feel or what she wanted. She knew he thought he was doing the best he could for all of them in the situation but he needed to learn to talk to her about it instead of getting all gung ho as if he were the mission commander and she were the grunt.

  “Kentucky, if I thought for one second you’d let me, I’d be all over it. But I know how important your independence is to you.”

  “I really wish you’d stop being so damn perfect.” She sighed.

  “You know I’m far from it. I’m fighting my own selfishness every day I see you, Tuck.”

  She bit her lip. She’d wanted to hear it, wanted to know that he was still just as affected by her as she was by him.

  She knew that was just as selfish. “I guess I am, too.”

  “Will you indulge my selfishness? Just this once?”

  She licked her lips. “How?”

  “Let me kiss you.” The plea in his voice was devastating.

  “Just a single kiss?”

  “I told you, when I was in that hell, all I thought about was kissing you. Coming back to you. I couldn’t stand the idea I’d never touch you again, never feel your lips. I touched your face, just like I’d dreamed about. Now let me kiss you.”

  “You’re kind of a bastard.” His words drove daggers into her heart.

  Maybe he really had meant everything he’d said to her. That just made it worse.

  “I’m a lot of a bastard,” he agreed.

  She stepped closer to him and put her hands on his shoulders, staring up into his familiar face.

  Oh, how she loved him. She was practically brimming with it. He had new lines around his eyes, a new depth to the darkness, and damn if she didn’t find that even more appealing than when he’d been the golden all-American boy next door.

  She drank him in, standing there before her with his heart on his sleeve and that one small request on his lips. Kentucky reminded herself of how she’d felt when she didn’t know where he was, when she knew he was injured.

  She reminded herself how she’d felt when she didn’t know if he was going to wake up.

  She reminded herself that they’d made this child inside her together.

  The reality of him standing there, it wasn’t something she’d ever thought she’d have.

  “Kiss me, then.” The way she lifted her chin made it almost a dare.

  His lips descended slowly and hovered over hers, their breath mingling, and for a single moment, they breathed as one.

  She swallowed hard, anticipation tightening into desire. “Aren’t you going to?” Kentucky whispered.

  “I want to remember this.” He brushed her lips with his. “I want to remember the arc of descent as your eyes close and you tilt your face up to me. The way the light from the setting sun highlights your hair. The smell of your skin, the taste of your breath.” He pulled her closer. “The soft press of your breasts against my chest.”

  Emotion was like a vise and it squeezed her until she couldn’t breathe. “Why did you ever say that you had
no pretty words to give me?”

  “When did I say that?” His crooked thumb grazed across her cheek.

  “At Mossy Rock. Before we had sex. You said I deserved pretty words but you had none.”

  “I still don’t.” His breathing had become more ragged, as had hers as the intensity of their intimacy notched each feeling higher.

  “Those you just gave me were beautiful.”

  “It’s how I feel, but I guess maybe it is beautiful to feel those things. To share them. But that’s not what we’re doing here, is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m giving you everything—all I have. All my darkness, my fear, my weakness. I’m confessing it all. And you’re giving me a kiss.” He pressed his lips to hers softly again. “But it’s okay because that’s all I asked for. All I know I can have.”

  “You want me to rip my heart open and spill all my guts on the floor in front of you?”

  “No. I just want to kiss you.” This time the press of his mouth was hard and almost punishing, but there was something just so erotic about the blatant expression of his need. “I want to kiss you until the last star has burned to nothing.”

  Dear heaven, he should’ve been a poet. He knew exactly what he was doing, the way his words affected her. He was a smart man. She broke away, panting. “You said you wouldn’t push.”

  “And I’m not. I’m just kissing you. You said I could. I’m going to kiss you all the ways there is to kiss another person and I’m going to tattoo them into my memory so I don’t ever forget. So I can keep each one with me.”

  What could she do when faced with that?

  She could burn.

  She could melt.

  She could surrender.

  Kentucky wrapped her arms around his neck and tilted her face up to meet him. Her lips were swollen from the onslaught, bee-stung and tingling. But she wanted more—no, she needed it. She needed it more than the blood in her veins, the heart in her chest or the air in her lungs.

  She clung to him, remembering what he’d said about feeling her softness against him, the contrast of his firm chest, the heat of him burning her through their clothes. He was so strong, so vital—so very much alive.

  It was as if all of those possibilities that kept her afraid, that kept her from taking everything that she’d always wanted, began to melt.

  So she kissed him back.

  She kissed him with all the need, all the passion and all the love that had welled up within her, heavy and earthy and somehow effervescent at the same time.

  He tightened his grip on her, enveloping her in all that was him.

  But she wasn’t ready to step off the ledge.

  He broke the kiss and held her against him for a long moment before letting her go. “Our Chinese is getting cold.”

  16

  STOPPING WAS ONE of the hardest things Sean had ever had to do, but he knew it was what Kentucky wanted and needed. So he broke the kiss that burned his soul and acted as though it hadn’t happened.

  Acted as though it hadn’t mattered.

  But surely she knew that it did.

  She walked, seeming slightly dazed, to the table.

  Good. That meant there was a chance she’d been just as affected as he was.

  He didn’t understand how to fix whatever this was that was wrong between them. She’d always been the girl who told him to drive faster; she was the one who slid down Mossy Rock in her underwear. She was the one who ate moonshine cherries and dared them all to try them. She was the first one up for an adventure and he was sure that was exactly what life together would be like—an adventure.

  “I’ll buy a house with you,” she said softly as she spooned out the spicy chicken onto her plate. “But I have a few conditions.”

  Relief washed through him. He’d thought she’d really fight that and if he had to trade never touching her again to be close to his child, he’d do it. He wouldn’t like it, but he’d do it. Of course, she could always still drop that on him.

  “What do you need?”

  “That we go into this as equals. With your new job, you’ll be making a lot more money than I will. I’m really torn between trying to find something that’s going to be best for the baby and something I can afford, too.”

  He saw exactly what she was worried about and wondered what he’d ever done to make her think that he was that kind of asshole. “Do you think that if you let me shoulder the majority of the payment, I’ll use it against you?”

  She placed her palms flat on the table and breathed. “Maybe not at first. Or maybe you won’t even mean to, but—”

  “Everything we agree to, we can have legal papers drawn up accordingly.” He fought his instincts to take her hand. “There are new houses being built in the Pleasant Grove school district.”

  “I can’t afford that.” Her voice was quiet, as if she was ashamed to admit it out loud.

  “You can if you let me take care of the down payment.”

  “Sounds like you already have this all planned out.”

  “Not all of it. There’s room in my plan for what you want. It’s why I’m asking you.”

  “Have you already looked at a house?”

  “No. Nothing in depth. I just drove by the new development. I thought we could look at one together when we have time. See if it’s something you like.”

  “I never thought I could live somewhere like that. I mean…”

  “Look, before you freak yourself out, living there would be to give our child a good home. It will be our house and I don’t give a damn about what the neighbors think.”

  “How did you know what I was thinking?” She closed the distance between their hands. “I’ve always been poor white-trash Kentucky Lee. This feels like putting on airs that don’t belong to me.”

  “You’ve never been any kind of trash, Kentucky. And anyone who told you that was just trying to keep you down. They probably didn’t understand that wild innocence you’ve got.”

  “Wild innocence? When have I ever been innocent?”

  “Sometimes I think you still are in a way. When you take those dares, when you leap both feet first, there’s an innocence in that. A sure belief that everything will be okay.”

  “I guess I’m not so innocent anymore. I can’t seem to make this leap,” she confessed quietly.

  “What if I told you that I knew you would? That it might not be today or even tomorrow but you will? Would that scare you?”

  “A little.”

  He brushed his thumb over hers slowly. “Why?”

  “It would mean that my future is already set and no matter what I do, I can’t choose.”

  “You can choose. You can always choose. I’m just confident you’re going to choose me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I love you. Because you love me. Because after all of this, we’re family.”

  “I guess we are family, but there’s a ghost between us.”

  “No—”

  “Let me finish. The ghost of who you were and the ghost of who you will be.”

  “I could say the same about you. About anyone.”

  She took a bite of her food and she didn’t answer him for a long while, until she said, “When is your first op?”

  “Not until after the baby is born. I told Eric I needed to be here and he understood. The army gave me a medical discharge, so I’m here until I start working with Eric.”

  “How can you take DOD contracts on a medical discharge?”

  “Mercenary work is different.”

  “Aren’t you going to miss being spec ops? I mean…”

  “No. I don’t care what anyone thinks about me. I know a lot of those guys get caught up in what it means to be spec ops. They start letting it define who they are.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “No. Being a pilot was my job. There’s more to me than that. Just like you’re more than a mechanic.”

  “Aren’t you oversimplifying? Spec
ops is a way of life. It’s a calling.”

  She knew him better than he gave her credit for. He wasn’t looking for a cookie for his sacrifice, recognition. He just had an end goal that was more important than the rest of it. “That I answered only because of you. When are you going to figure it out, Tuck? It’s all about you.”

  She opened her mouth, seemingly to say something, but then snapped it shut again. Kentucky pushed her food around on her plate.

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem real. I’m going to wake up and it’s all going to be some dream I had the night before high school Winter Royalty.” She stopped playing with her food and looked up at him, her eyes clear pools. “And do you know what’s going to wake me up? Eric on our doorstep, ringing the bell with his face a mask of grief and regret. He’s going to tell me that just like everyone else I loved, you’re dead. Stop trying to make me love you. I already do and it’s like a shredder chewing on my insides.”

  “You loved me then and I didn’t die.”

  “I loved you like a little girl loves the lead singer in a boy band. I loved the idea of you. I loved how pretty you were, how you looked down from on high and saw me. What I feel for you now is earthier, deeper, something real.”

  “That’s good. I’m a bastard to live with. Nothing will take the shine off loving me like seeing my laundry on the floor.”

  She laughed but sobered quickly. “That’s just it. I won’t see your laundry on the floor. It’s going to be in your own room. I’ll stay in mine.”

  That idea sounded so foreign to him—wrong.

  He wanted to tell her that she was just being stubborn. There was no reason for them to be apart. If something happened to him and they still hadn’t defined their relationship in a certain way, that wouldn’t change how it was going to hurt.

  But it wasn’t a given something bad would happen. Lots of people did the work he did and nothing happened to them. No one could predict how much time he had on this earth, regardless of what job he had. He could be a librarian and fall off a ladder and die tomorrow.

  He wanted to say all of this to her, but he understood why she felt as she did. She needed to feel some semblance of control. He knew that as a teen, strangely enough, she’d found control in rebellion. No one could control her actions but her. But now that she was an adult, it was a little bit different.