Ethan was such a puzzle, the tea-drinking poetry reader who also happened to be a combat-decorated officer with an almost deific status among those he commanded. Every aspect of him was as fascinating as it was unlikely, and that was a huge part of what had scared her off. He wasn’t a one-dimensional, impenetrably self-assured asshole she would have no qualms dismissing if things went too far. He was complicated, unusual and caught up in a web of hurt that would take patience and compassion to untangle.
She could do that. She could take him by the hand and lead him out of that dismal labyrinth. For him, she could have strength for two. She could find the courage to love him.
Love him?
The arrival of Ethan’s warm fingers beneath her wash-softened UPenn T-shirt jerked her thoughts to the present, to the palm caressing her stomach and the vitally male bulge pushing against her thigh.
Okay, we’ve been kissing for a while now. We’ve done the whole tongue thing, and he’s made the under-the-shirt move. Should I take it off? Should I unzip his jeans? Maybe I should just keep kissing him a little longer…
“Fuck this,” Mia muttered against Ethan’s lips, putting a stop to the detached, fretting inner monologue that always accompanied her intimate situations. It was the voice of a woman terrified of losing control of the sequence of events, for whom her partner was little more than a faceless exam board ready to grade her performance.
Not anymore. Not ever again.
Ethan pulled back, color high in his cheeks. “What did you say?”
Mia tossed her hair over her shoulder like the sex-savvy vixen she’d never been. “I told you to fuck me.”
Then she pulled off her shirt and tossed it to the ground, exposing her bare breasts to the unforgiving overhead light.
“Okay. Wow.” He nodded vaguely, eyes wide. “Good. Excellent.”
“I’m glad you approve.”
“I didn’t mean it like—”
Mia had to smile at his stricken expression. “I know. And thank you. Over the years I’ve had mixed reviews.”
“Such as?”
“Apparently I’m flat on both sides.”
He clucked his tongue. “Where do you find these guys?”
“Scientific journals.”
“Then I need to disprove the hypothesis.” With a mischievous grin he captured her waist and tugged her facedown onto the bed, then yanked down her cotton pajama shorts to expose her rear.
“Perfectly round,” he announced. “Have that man’s PhD revoked.”
Mia giggled and squirmed in his grip, and when she managed to flip onto her back to look up at him her shorts were at her knees.
The smile vanished from Ethan’s face as he looked her up and down. Finally he laid his hand on her abdomen, his pinkie just brushing the edge of her patch of dark curls.
“Tell me yes,” he urged roughly.
“What?”
“I want to make love to you now more than I’ve wanted anything in a long time. More than any battle commendation, more than a ticket home from Afghanistan. You’re a hell of a prize, but I have to know for sure that tonight I’m the winner. I need your consent. Give me your yes and I’ll give you everything I am.”
She grinned up at him, at his serious expression and keen gaze. She had none of the usual urges to cover herself, to find an excuse to turn off the lights, to apologize for her body or her technique or her unwaxed bikini line. There was no criticism in Ethan’s eyes, just gratitude and excitement and a bald hunger that mirrored her own, and that combination made her heart swell and trip with a rush of emotion she couldn’t quite name.
“Yes,” she breathed, grabbing a fistful of his shirt with one hand while she used the other to push his fingers lower on her pelvis. “Yes, yes, yes.”
That brief, simple word took on so much significance that soon it was all she could say, the only scrap of her vocabulary she retained as she lost herself to visceral physical awareness.
She said it when Ethan pulled his shirt over his head and she ran her fingertips through the crisp, straw-blond hair on his chest, and she said it when she freed him from his boxers and held the long, hot length of him in her hand.
She said it when he moistened her with his tongue, then raised his eyes to hers wearing a delighted, boyish grin. She said it when he asked if she was ready, and she said it while he rolled the condom over his rigid flesh.
She said it when he was poised at her entrance, propped up on his elbows, blue eyes asking her permission, and again when he pushed inside, filling and stretching her until she understood how completion really felt.
She said it when he reached between them, circling the pad of his thumb over her swollen nub. And she said it as she crossed her legs behind his hips, tightened her fingers in his short hair, arched her back against the swelling wave she didn’t want to crash, not yet, not just yet.
When the shuddering began, when the spasms took over, when her legs shook and her eyes rolled and her fingertips dug desperately into his back, there was only one word capable of escaping the tight, strangled cries ripping from her throat. Luckily it encapsulated everything she wanted to say to him, all the joy and freedom and abject pleasure she was experiencing for the first time.
“Yes.”
Chapter Nine
“Corporal, you stay here with me. Let’s give the taxpayers a return on all that expensive comms training.”
Even the trees were creepy in this forest—tall, thin firs that seemed to huddle together and stare down at the cluster of camouflage-clad men scurrying along the ground.
Just dirt underfoot—no grass. No light for it to grow through those conspiring trees.
But there was something else now, someone else, too many of them, clothes rustling and whispered commands and panicked voices crackling over the radio and, oh shit, was that Hernandez crying in the background? He barked at Wright to watch the perimeter and snatched up the handset.
No air support—trees too thick—engaging too close to strike—he had to move them to open ground. McKinley shouted his acknowledgements down the line, his pauses punctuated by gunfire.
The edges of the map fluttered in the breeze. He pinned them with his elbows.
“Grid Mike-Charlie four seven three, nine—”
A twig snapped, a branch swayed and AK-47 rounds poured into the clearing. The handset clattered against a rock as he dropped it. He hoisted his weapon, rose on one knee, shouted commands on autopilot, giving over to the serene disembodiment of close combat.
Ahead of him Wright crumpled and then Ethan was on his back, pain throbbing between his eyes.
He stared up at the strange, gray sky. Was he asleep? Was this a dream? Was he dead?
The trees stirred and bent toward him, mocking, menacing, screaming, he tasted blood on his teeth—
“Ethan?”
He gasped like he was drowning, bolted upright, remembered that time in Boy Scouts when his kayak flipped over and he had to swim out from under it.
He squinted, frowned at his surroundings. Where the hell was he? The angles were all wrong, he could smell orange liqueur on his skin, and he was naked as a jaybird.
“It’s okay, you had a nightmare. You’re here with me. You’re fine.”
Mia.
Hot shame poured through his veins like boiling water, scalding his cheeks and his ears. He was drenched in cold sweat. The sheet beneath him was soaked. He prayed he hadn’t been screaming.
“You’re safe,” she soothed. “You’re in my house, right next to yours.”
He nodded, too choked with embarrassment to trust his voice. All that time listening to her talk through her fear, feeling so empowered by her trust, promising to protect her and truly believing he could, for what? To wake up shivering and disoriented, having to be told where he was. He bet she used that same tone in one-on-one therapy sessions, or when she had to talk some poor grunt down from a ledge.
He thought he was so much better, so much farther down the road of reco
very. He was stupid to assume he could handle this much intimacy. And she was wrong to trust him.
“Is it all right if I touch you? I’ll just put my hand—”
He rocked to his feet, snatched up his boxers and jerked them on, found his jeans with the belt still in the loops. His right hand shook so badly the metal buckle rattled and he cast the jeans aside, exhaling in disgust.
He whirled to face her, hating the words forming on his tongue but unable to stop them. “Two hours ago you were perfectly happy to put your hands wherever you wanted. I have one nightmare and now you have to ask if you can touch me?”
Guilt sliced through his gut like a rusty bayonet at the way she pulled the sheet up over her bare breasts. “I didn’t want to startle you, or crowd you if you needed space. I was trying to respect your—”
“Cut the psychobabble bullshit, Mia. I’m not your patient. Unless you make a habit of sleeping with every head-case soldier who cries in your office?”
Nice, Fletcher. Why not call her a slut and get the slap you deserve?
She pursed her lips. “I’m going to do you a huge favor and forget you said that.”
“Whatever,” he muttered, losing the fight against a sudden, consuming impulse to flee. “I’m going.”
He shoved blindly out of her bedroom, the door handle clattering under his trembling hand. He pounded down the stairs, realized at the bottom that all his clothes were still on the floor, and pivoted to stomp through the kitchen to the backyard. He threw open the sliding door and stalked across the grass to the latched opening in the fence. He was out and over and had his palm on the wooden slats of his own door when he remembered it was locked. It could only be opened from inside.
“Goddammit,” he growled, slamming back into Mia’s yard. He couldn’t go back out the front door. What if someone saw him? Echo Company’s commander leaving a female DoD contractor’s house in his underwear in the middle of the night—it could end his career.
But he couldn’t go back upstairs for his clothes, either. He couldn’t face Mia’s questions, her care not to upset him, her calm voice and her encouraging smile. If she asked him to come back to bed, tapped the mattress and drew down the sheet, he wouldn’t be able to say no. He would tell her his secrets, accept her quiet attention, shrug on his false sense of manhood as he licked that place between her legs and smiled at her shuddering climax and moaned his own release in a way that betrayed how utterly, hopelessly in love he was.
“No way,” he muttered, dropping onto the grass and hunching over his knees. He wasn’t in love—he didn’t even know how it felt. It was lust, that was all. A quick lay with a woman who would get on a plane in a few hours and fly out of his life forever, a distraction from all those other awful feelings that plagued his waking hours, nothing to do with her quick wit or her adorable smile or her uncanny ability to disarm him so thoroughly that he practically forgot his name.
The tremor in his hand was so severe it seemed to spread up his arm, and he squeezed his right wrist tightly in an effort to keep it still. The ground was cold beneath him, and the bite in the air was a reminder that summer was over. A chilly breeze cooled the sweat still clinging to his skin. He shivered.
He heard the sliding door open and close behind him, didn’t turn to look as the grass rustled beneath Mia’s approaching feet. She draped a patchwork quilt over his shoulders. He closed his eyes and breathed in its citrusy scent, relished its warmth as she settled cross-legged beside him.
“I wish I could tell you some sweet, poignant tale about this quilt, that my great-grandmother made it by hand or that I stitched it together myself. Truth is my parents love modern, minimalist furniture and primary colors. I bought this quilt at a thrift store when I was on a project at Fort Benning.”
“Fort Benning,” he echoed hollowly. “We lived near Macon when I was in high school. Robins Air Force Base.”
“That’s not so far away, in relative terms.”
“A lot of my dad’s postings were in that area. Georgia, Louisiana, the Carolinas. My mom said it was because the air force didn’t dare send her north of the Mason-Dixon.”
“I’m not surprised. You know you have a little bit of a Southern accent?”
“I do?”
“It’s subtle, but it’s there. It’s nice.”
Her fingers were in his hair, pushing the inch allowed by the regulations off his forehead. It was probably still damp with sweat, but she didn’t seem to mind.
“How are you?”
He pulled the two ends of the quilt together over his chest. “I’m sorry about what I said in the bedroom.”
“I know. It’s okay.”
“When do you have to be up for your flight?”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ve got plenty of time.”
He shook his head. “We don’t. Our time is up.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” She hesitated. “Can I tell you something scary?”
He nodded. She slid closer, her bare thigh brushing against his.
“I think I could love you, Ethan. Maybe I already do.”
He was shaking his head before she finished speaking. “No, Mia. Not me. I’m not the right guy for you. Not for that.”
“What are you saying? You’re the right guy for me to have sex with but I shouldn’t develop real feelings for you?”
“I mean you shouldn’t love me. Enjoy the sex, enjoy the time we’ve had together, but find someone else to love. Someone who can handle it.”
She slipped her hand under the quilt, lay her palm against his back. “You’re handling it.”
“I’m not. Mia, I’m—” He paused, struggling to keep his voice steady, to maintain some control over the pain spinning and throbbing in his chest. “I’m broken, okay? I’m too screwed up, too far gone. I don’t know if I can love anymore, no matter how much I want to. You don’t deserve all my mess. Save your love for the man who can honor it, because I’m not sure I’m capable.”
For several minutes they sat in silence. Leaves whispered as a light wind moved through the trees, the sound of an engine swelled and receded on a nearby street. Neither of them moved.
Then Mia plucked the edge of the quilt out of his right hand. She pulled it open and pressed her body against his side, then drew the blanket over the two of them. She crooked her finger under his chin and guided his face toward hers. He met her eyes reluctantly at first, and then gladly, as if he could draw strength from their unyielding depths.
“With respect, Captain Fletcher, I disagree.”
She kissed him. It was chaste and gentle and fleeting, but it was the most important kiss of his life. It was an offering and a promise. It showed him everything he could have and told him how to get it.
It was hope.
“I believe in you, Ethan,” she murmured, smoothing her thumb down the side of his face. “I know you can regain whatever you’ve lost and become the man you want. I’ll love you now and I’ll love you then—that’s up to you. I can’t make your choice, but I can promise to be there when you’re ready.”
Abruptly she was on her feet, extending her hand. “Come back to bed.”
He didn’t move, immobilized by the weight of her words and the future they presented. Could they actually make this work? Could she really see through this banged-up version to the man he hoped was still underneath? Could he conceivably make her as happy as she deserved to be—as happy as she made him?
He exhaled, looked at the ground, made his decision. Then he grabbed her outstretched hand and stood up.
Chapter Ten
Ethan’s jaw was tight with anxiety as he put the rental car into park and cut the engine. He’d been thinking about this moment for weeks, and his nervousness had only intensified with each step that took him closer to it. The plane touching down at Reagan National Airport, checking into the hotel room the night before, buttoning the jacket of his dress uniform that morning, pulling out of the parking lot knowing the significance of his destination—that
series of events had finally culminated in this short driveway on this unremarkable residential street.
The clock on the dashboard said ten o’clock. Time to go. He was expected.
The walk up the flagstones to the front door was unhelpfully short. He paused on the stoop, allowing himself a second to look around the yard, glance up into the branches of the thick oak on the edge of the property, note the American flag woven into the autumnal wreath hanging behind the screen door. It was almost Halloween, but the weather was still warm and the orange and red leaves jarred with the bright sun hanging overhead.
Enough stalling. He pressed the doorbell.
Within seconds the door swung open to reveal a short, plump woman and a mostly bald man whose broad shoulders and paunchy stomach suggested he used to play football but now preferred to watch it. They were in their early fifties and had clearly dressed up for his visit, both wearing outfits that were more suited to a Sunday service than a Wednesday morning at home.
And to his indescribable relief, they were smiling.
“Captain Fletcher.” The man stuck out his hand and Ethan returned his vigorous shake. “I’m Jim Wright, and this is my wife, Trish. We’re so honored that you’ve come all the way out here to West Virginia to see us.”
“I’m honored that you’ll receive me.”
“Don’t be silly, we’re delighted to have you,” Trish gushed. “Please, come on in. What can I get you? Coffee? Juice? I don’t know if you’ve had breakfast, but I baked a fresh batch of banana-nut muffins this morning, or I can—”
“A muffin and a cup of coffee would suit me down to the ground.” Ethan removed his hat as he stepped over the threshold, keeping his smile in place even as he caught sight of a photo of their son hanging just inside the entrance, the corporal’s expression stern and serious as he posed in his dress blues.
An hour later he was perched on the couch in their brown-carpeted living room, his elbows on his knees as he reached the end of his grim tale.
“So that’s why the responsibility ultimately lies with me. I chose to hold him back at my position, I moved him off the radio, and I told him to watch the perimeter.” He raised his chin to look at the two of them, in separate recliners across the coffee table. “He was an outstanding soldier and a good friend. I’m sorry.”
Alive Day: Homefront, Book 2 Page 9