“Coyote reads the papers.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Come again.”
She swallowed hard. Talking had never seemed so difficult as now with Zeus. She smirked to herself. Talking to a god is not my everyday job. “Coyote reads the newspapers. The Washington Post to be exact.”
“And?”
“He reads more than you do.”
“I assume that this is not a comment on my IQ or my general lifestyle.”
Testy man. His attitude broke through her reticence. “Correct. It is a statement about chance.”
“Chance.” He threw up his hands. “What the hell?”
“The day he called to tell me where your team would be this weekend, he mentioned that he had seen a piece in the Post about me. And he asked if it was true. And I told him it was.” She looked at the ceiling, the floor, his bare feet, and then his eyes. “I’m not going back overseas.”
He took a step forward, his gaze searching hers as he grabbed her elbows and brought her next to his massive body. “Why not?”
She curled her arms around his waist, so thrilled that he wanted her even now. She could tell him about the doctors and their demand to observe her platelet count long term, but she would save that. Right now, she didn’t want Zeus’s pity. She wanted his love and, by damn, she wanted him. Just him in her life. “I’ve accepted a new job.”
Threading his fingers through her hair, he cupped her face and kissed her lips gently, sweetly as if he were discovering her for the very first time. “What is it?”
“I’m hosting a Sunday talk show. Interview. Live from Washington. Half an hour every Sunday of me talking to D.C.s movers and shakers about the Middle East. I know so many politicians and experts and professors,” she told him in a rush. “Plus because I speak Arabic and Hebrew, I can get some people on for interviews who might not come otherwise for fear of misinterpretation. Well, don’t look at me like I have two heads. Help me out here. You know it’s a good gig.”
“Wow, lady. You speak Hebrew, too? Hell, honey, what else don’t I know about you?” Zeus grinned like a fool and picked her up to swing her around. “My baby, the television star.”
Chuckling with him, she rubbed her breasts against him, overjoyed he wasn’t pissed at her for telling Coyote about this before she told him. Zeus clearly liked the explanation, too, because he rucked up the T-shirt, cupped her bare ass cheeks and rocked his nice hard cock against her hungry pussy.
She reached inside the elastic waistband of his shorts. As ever, he went commando. Her fist was so full of him. Her body needed to be. “Want to celebrate my new status?”
“I do. With you.”
“Now.”
Murmuring her name, he bent a little, found her slit with his stiff shaft and zeroed in on her core. Burying himself deep inside her, he murmured crazy shit.
She opened her mouth, the word for ecstasy escaping her. Spreading her thighs, she urged him to take more of her, all of her. With her new job, they could meet more often, do this more often.
“Wrap your legs around my hips,” he said, helping her so that they never lost the lock they had on each other. “God, baby, when will I get enough of you?”
“Don’t ever have enough.”
“Tough job, loving you,” he growled, his teeth bared with his powerful thrusts.
She froze. Was it tough? Hadn’t she fixed their lives so loving each other was easier? Didn’t he get it? Didn’t he see that her new position meant they had a better chance of being together? But if he didn’t want to, what would she do? Not cry. Not scream. She’d have to leave him. Before she lost her cool and it was too late.
He paused in mid-stroke of her cunt. “Look at me. Kim?”
She examined him. Had she misjudged this affair? His devotion to her? Why had she thought they might stand a chance at a long term relationship?
She struggled to be free, and gentleman that he was, he let her down to the floor. He slid his cock from her and her pussy wept and pounded in protest of the emptiness. She swayed on her feet at his loss.
Then he lifted her chin. “Baby, what’s wrong?”
“I didn’t take this job totally because of you. Let me correct that. I have wanted a show like this for years and years. In fact, I often talked with the station’s management about it becoming a reality sometime in my future. The news coverage I got when I was kidnapped and you rescued me made me in to a media hot button. When I got home to Washington and recuperated with my folks, I got this offer from the network. It came the same day you came to see me there.” The next part of her story was more difficult to tell, but hey, he was a SEAL, he would take all kinds of shocks, couldn’t he? “I took the confluence of the two on the same day as a sign.”
“Okay. So why are you mad at me?” He lifted a hand. “I’m lost.”
“I want the opportunity to stay in D.C. for a long time. I even think I might write a book. Always wanted to. And so I thought, hey, now I’ve got the chance. I won’t live out of a suitcase. Won’t be dodging bullets and getting trampled in street riots.” She stepped back, farther away from him, to tell him this last part and not appear like she was pressuring him to do something he didn’t want. “I’d also be closer to Virginia.”
“Little Neck. Yeah, you will be.” He blinked as if he were confused. “Home base for Arapahoe Team.”
Was he happy? Mad? Why couldn’t she read his expression? Always so good at interpreting body language, suddenly her skills failed her. And so did her courage. But her pride had her spinning on her heel, snapping her fingers for her dog and running for the kitchen door.
****
Zeus tackled her on the sand not ten yards beyond the deck. Harry didn’t mind, but pranced down to the waves and frolicked, trying to catch seagulls.
“Let me go!” She struggled but Zeus had her nice and tight, by the wrists, by the thighs, his body clamping hers.
“No. You and I aren’t done yet.” He drove her hands to her sides, her wrists sinking into the dunes.
“You keep saying that, but we’re more than done, SEAL man, now that we’ve screwed.”
“Ah, ah, ah. No dirty words for what we do.”
“Stop this.” She turned her head to the side.
“Aw, honey.” He kissed a tear from her cheek. “I don’t think you’re done telling me about this new job.”
“I am,” she said petulantly. “Get off me.”
He ignored her to do what he had in mind in the kitchen. He was going to fuck her and love her, then fuck her and love her once more. For a long time to come. Nuzzling behind her ear, he whispered, “Fine. I’ll talk to you then.”
She tried to buck him off, to no avail.
He stifled his chuckle, knowing she’d knee him. He had to get on with this. “I love you.”
She did not even breathe. He smiled, knowing she had heard and registered his declaration.
“I might have loved you from the second I saw you in that godforsaken hellhole in Egypt. You were so brave, so eager to please me, so happy to see me. So weak, so sweet. I loved you.”
Although she didn’t turn her head to look at him, she was breathing again. A very good sign.
“For two days, you and I worked like we’d been born to each other. Little did we know then, we’d been born for each other.” He kissed the corner of her beautiful quivering mouth. “You knew it. I felt it. I could see it in the way you never argued with me.”
“Ha!”
A little bit of sass was a good thing. Meant she was herself again. “I could see it in the way you obeyed me.”
“Cooperated,” she corrected him.
“Yeah, baby, cooperated. Just like now, you’re always ready to cooperate.”
She took a glance at him then, all fire and smart ass broad in her large green eyes.
“I love you, Kim. I love that you realized we had to be together.”
“You did, too,” she offered, sounding amazed. “You didn’t have to come see me in si
ckbay. You could have just written me off as an operational detail.”
“You, sweetheart, are no detail.” He tilted his hips, showing her proof with his stiff shaft. “I didn’t have to come visit you in Washington, either. But I had to see you again. Had to see with my own eyes that you were well. Had to see my how my beautiful hostage had recovered and become her gorgeous self again. I’m glad you arranged this. Glad Coyote helped you.”
“You wouldn’t have come to visit me again, would you?”
“No.”
Tears dribbled down her temples now. “Oh, Zeus. Don’t let your job get in the way of living the rest of your life.”
Hell, he felt moisture sear his own eyes. “I see now I don’t have to do that. Correction. With you I don’t have to. You’re strong enough to do this with me.”
She choked back any more tears, her green eyes twinkling in the brilliant sunlight. “We’re a helluva pair, Zeus.”
“Yeah, only one thing more we need now to make an incomparable team.” He narrowed his eyes at her, urging her into the admission.
“Let go of my hands, Zeus.”
When he did, she wrapped her arms around him, her legs, too, and surrounded him with all the tenderness he wanted in this life. “I love you, Jesus Rodrigo Calderon. I love you. As you are, what you are, wherever that takes you. Always, I will love you.”
He took her mouth in a ravishing claim, hard and deep, fast and sweet. “Welcome to Team Calderon, Kimberly Stansfield.”
Epilogue
A freak three-foot blizzard had stopped all traffic, pedestrian and mechanical, this afternoon in the nation’s capital. Zeus stood at the window of his and Kim’s fifth floor condo on Connecticut Avenue and stared down at the deserted street. The snow had started soon after six a.m., just after Kim had left to go to work eight blocks away. On Sunday mornings, her network would send a car for her, but today was a Tuesday and she had decided to walk. Arriving safely, she had called him to let him know she was at the studio and fine.
“Don’t worry!” she had chided him. “I liked the exercise. Needed it.”
“You’ll call me after your appointment with the doctor?”
“I will! Promise!”
But she hadn’t. Couldn’t. In this storm, cell phones were dead and landlines were on the fritz, too.
He had wanted to go with her for the check-up, but she’d firmly refused. “I am not an invalid. I just have to have my blood work done. I don’t faint. I don’t cringe. I am a brave ball-buster.”
Yeah. His brave ball-buster was tearing up the Sunday morning airwaves, too. Her ratings were off the hook, inspiring her network bosses to offer her an anchor’s job on weekday mornings. For that, she would have had to move to Manhattan. She had refused.
“To stay close to me,” he acknowledged.
He had not persuaded her to do it. In fact, she had told him from the day she got the offer, she was turning it down. “I want this marriage. I love you. If I can do work I prize and be with you, I am not giving anything up, but adding to the quality of my life and yours—and ours.”
He smiled, then took a sip of his coffee with his good arm and searched the street for signs of a tall blonde lady in a cashmere grey coat and black boots. But there was only a speck on the horizon walking up the sidewalk. He squinted at the sight. Couldn’t tell if it was her.
“Make dinner. Be useful, Calderon.” He strolled into the kitchen, Harry on his heels before plunking down by the floor-to-ceiling window. This room never failed to send a big shiver up his spine every time he came home from a mission. His mother called the room catedral gigante. Gigantic cathedral. His sisters shook their heads and told Kim it was a good thing the place was huge so he could fit in.
He had been surprised how well the two of them fit together into her world. Careful to introduce him as a member of the regular Navy, Kim kept his profession suitably on the down low. They never told anyone he was the SEAL who had rescued her in Egypt, which followed Navy regs for mission secrecy. He mingled well with her friends and acquaintances.
She, except for seeing his Arapaho Team in whole or part over the past two and a half years, had always fit into and accepted his world. Hands down, she was his prize for living well. And for hazardous duty. He glanced at the sling cupping his broken arm and winced.
Eyeing the veggies he had taken from the refrigerator, he told himself he better get chopping so that his caldo would be ready for dinner. A chilling day like today was the best to eat his soup. But the arm, broken on the last op when he misjudged a climb up a rock face and fell, was slow to heal. Coyote and Jagger had pulled him to safety, jabbing him with enough pain killers from their crash kits to hold him until they got onto a carrier.
“Smashed in three places,” the doc had told him later in sickbay. The next doctor he’d seen in Little Neck had told him it was healing nicely. But. Big But. “Writing you out for three months until you heal. Go home, see your wife and check in at Bethesda Naval Hospital for checkups and rehab, where they will decide when you’re fit to return.”
Now here he was, cocooned in snowy D.C., cooking, even knitting and getting regular loving from his smoking hot wife of two years.
He picked up a knife and set to work on the meal.
When the soup began to simmer, he walked over to the bar and poured himself two fingers neat of scotch. The door opened a while later as he sat in the living room in front of the fire, one of his own hand-made afghans over his legs. Harry napped by the hearth. Zeus put aside the book he’d been reading and called to her.
“Hey, babe. In here.” He began to rise, his dexterity still off by the lack of use of his left arm. “Hang on, I’m coming.”
“Stay where you are,” she told him. “Let me get my boots off and go to the bathroom. I’ll join you in a minute.”
He sat back down and waited. He heard her make her way from the foyer to their master bedroom, heard the toilet flush and then…nada.
“Where are you?” he called. “I am lonely in here.”
When she waltzed in, wearing a forest green silk negligee and matching robe. Sans shoes, she did a full modeling job that had his cock appreciating her style, then she sat next to him on his right side and cuddled up close. “Missed me, huh?”
He flung his arm around her and pressed her to him. “You bet. You’re cheeks are all ruddy and, let’s see.” He kissed her soundly. “Your lips are cold as Alaska.”
She shivered beautifully. “I have other parts of me that are all hot and bothered. Interested?”
He pursed his lips, then ran his gaze over the curve of her breasts and down to the translucent folds of her sumptuous gown and robe. “Couldn’t fight me off with a bulldozer.”
“Good. Because I have a proposition for you.”
“No, no. First you need to tell me what the doc said.”
“I’m good. Platelets are normal. Still at pre-Egypt and kidnapping levels. That’s nearly three years now.” She seemed excited, but pensive.
Why? “What gives here?”
“I am healthy.”
“Good.”
“I have been for so long that I asked him today if I could do something rather adventurous.”
His heart raced. If she wanted to go back into the field, he was going to shit a brick. He would never say no or prohibit her from doing whatever her heart and head desired. Still, he had issues with her returning to roving reporter. He knew it was selfish of him, but when he went out on an operation, he was able to go with a clear mind that she was in Washington, safe and sound at home.
Okay, so Washington might be some asshole’s dream target city some day for terrorism, and Kim, knowing her, would want to cover the story. But if the boys over at NSA and the CIA and all the other alphabet soup organizations did their jobs well, Washington would remain a safe city. Here, Zeus never had to worry about her. Not beyond the ordinary stuff of traffic tie-ups and snowstorms.
“Adventurous, huh?” He tried to make light of the wo
rd. “What’s your idea of adventurous?”
“Well,” she said coyly, picking at her silk gown. “I have been offered a book deal.”
He snorted. “Love of mine, that’s not adventurous. That’s down-in-the-mines grunt work.”
“Yeah, but I want to do it. The first would be a look at Egypt. Not our story, no. Classified info, and all that. But a socio-political analysis.”
“Sounds wonderful.” He winked at her, then pressed her close. “Tell me more. I’m eager to learn so I can take you in the bedroom and strip this lovely stuff right off you.”
She beamed at him, her hands blazing a wonderful trail over his chest and down to cup his cock. “Terrific. My idea of a snowy night at home with my honey.”
“Keep talking, babe. I’m all ears.”
Unzipping his fly, she took his fully erect shaft from his trousers and bent over to suck him hard and full into her lush mouth. “I’d say your ears have nothing on this bad boy.”
“Yeah, and you’d better hurry with the your news or this bad boy will take over.”
“Hmmm.” She hummed on his shaft, driving him nuts, making him long to return the sweet favor and put his mouth on her wet pussy. “I didn’t tell you until I had more details about the offer, but it is a lot of money for sixty thousand words.”
He put a finger to her cheek and let out a laugh. “That, I know, is not why you’re interested.”
She decided to play with his balls, caressing them. “You do know me well.”
Yeah. I do. He shifted, allowing her more room to caress him. “Honey, you will have me shooting my wad before we’re done talking. Either stop this or quickly—quickly—tell me what is the draw?”
“The doctor says I am really well.”
Conquering Zeus (SEALs On Fire) Page 4