by Ava Ashley
“And even if that’s true,” asks Nate, “how does that help us walk free?”
“I recovered those files,” I say. “I’ll give them to a trusted friend in a sealed envelope, addressed to my former admiral from my Navy SEAL days. I will leave instructions to send them if we don’t get back in forty-eight hours. In the meantime, we’ll go turn ourselves in and tell them they’d better either let us and Nikki off, and never bother us again, or we’ll turn them in.”
“Blackmail,” Nate whistles. “Not such a golden boy after all, are you, Cooper “Veni Vidi Vici” Quin?”
“I get it done,” I say.
“Sounds risky,” Nate says.
“If Cooper thinks it’s what we should do, I say yes,” Savannah says. She has been pretty quiet throughout the talk, but now she sits up straight and says it confidently. There’s that strong girl again, the one who walked into my apartment and gave me a more assertive handshake than half the guys I know. “I’m on board with it. He knows what he’s doing and I trust him. With my life.”
I give a small nod. “I won’t let you down, babe.”
I turn to look at Nate and see Savannah shift in her peripheral vision to look at him, too. He looks at me, then her, for a moment, then sighs.
“What choice do I have?” he asks. “I’m in.”
Chapter Nine
Savannah
This incredible man never fails to surprise me in the most wonderful ways. Cooper is wonder after wonder. He is strong, brave, sexy, sweet to me, and so intelligent, too. He always knows just what to do, even in situations like this where it seems like there cannot possibly be a solution that will work out well for everyone.
Quite frankly, it makes me want to rip his clothes off and have my way with him right now. There’s a growing damp spot that, let’s be honest, is more of a big wet spot in my panties, and I really wish Nate would just disappear for a little bit so that I can have Cooper in me, filling my ready body, right now.
Alas, we aren’t done here yet.
“So,” I say, shifting in my seat and crossing my legs to try to keep it together a little better, at least physically. “What do we do next?” Nate and I both turn to Cooper, as it just seems natural that he would be in charge. If there is one thing that the man has written all over him, other than flat-out sexy, it’s alpha male. I never even get catcalled when I am out with him, even when I’m just in a sports bra doing stretches in the park, because other men can smell the alpha on his from a quarter-mile away.
“First,” says Cooper, getting up, “we are all going to get a good night’s sleep. Then tomorrow, we’re going back to Chicago to pay my pal a visit and make the delivery.” Cooper barricades the door to the hallway solidly with more furniture, piling the living room table and a few shelves on, and then finally pulling the television stand with the large flat screen TV still on it, in front of the pile. He moves the furniture like it’s made of fluff and I squeeze my legs tighter together. At this rate, I’m going to stain the couch.
What is it about this man that awakens every carnal instinct in my body, including many that I would never have even expected to be there? Why is it that I seem to lose all control over my body and turn into a walking sex-starved hormone when I am anywhere near him?
Cooper turns back to face Nate. He didn’t even break a sweat.
“You can sleep out here,” Cooper says. “Make yourself comfortable on the couch. But don’t try any funny business. If you try to leave, I will hear it and I will come out here and make you hurt like you have never hurt before.”
“Chill, bro,” Nate says. “I’m in this with you guys, remember?”
“I am not your ‘bro,’” Cooper says, coolly, “and I am not going to chill. Our lives are at stake. Savannah’s life is at stake. I am not going to ‘chill’ about this and I am not going to hesitate to mess you up so bad you’ll never see straight again if you try to fuck with our plan.”
“Understood.” Nate stops smiling and gets up, his face serious. He extends a hand. Cooper looks at it for a moment and I realize I’m holding my breath.
“Have a good night, we’ll see you in the morning.” Cooper shakes Nate’s hand, man to man, and I finally breathe out in relief.
Cooper walks over to where I am still sitting on the loveseat, exhaustion crashing over me now that all the tension of the absurdly eventful day is temporarily released. He holds out a hand to me and I take hold of it, grateful when he pulls me up to my feet. I suddenly feel so tired that I can barely move.
Cooper puts his arm around my waist and half-carries me to the bedroom, closing the door behind us. The he swoops me up into his arms and carries me over to the bed. He gently places me down, like a friendly bear, and climbs over me to lie down by my side.
“How are you doing, babe?” he murmurs, tucking a strand of my hair behind my ear and resting his hand gently on my face. It’s a warm, reassuring weight.
“Mmmm,” I murmur in response, snuggling up closer to him. I rest my face on his strong, hard chest and listen to the steady beat of his heart.
“It’s been a long day, Savannah, and I know you’re taking a big risk by trusting me so fully,” he says, softly. “I appreciate it.”
“Of course,” I murmur, basking in his special, intoxicating man smell. It isn’t body odor and it isn’t soap; it’s just pure, sexy Cooper.
“It’s not an ‘of course,’” he says. “It’s not a given and I appreciate it. And before we go any further, and before anything happens tomorrow, I need to tell you something.”
I open my eyes, which had fallen shut as I snuggled up to his chest and look up at his face. It is suddenly deathly serious and I feel a pit of fear form in my stomach. Has this all been too much? Is this finally the point where he is out? Is he about to tell me that he thought he could handle all of this and still want me, but after seeing Nate, the man I was supposed to marry, he can’t feel that way about me anymore. My stomach clenches. I take a steadying breath, inhaling his intoxicating, soothing scent, and try not to let the fear creep into my voice. “Shoot,” I say. “What’s up, babe?” I keep a hand on him for comfort, even though I know that what’s making me uncomfortable is that he will likely not want me anymore. Fuck. This is it.
“Savannah, you have intrigued me since day one,” Cooper says, looking me directly in the eyes. “I always wanted to know more about you and the more I knew, the more I wanted to know. And Savannah, after spending all that time with you, I started to fall for you. You’re a really special girl.”
Is this the slow let down? It isn’t what I was expecting him to say, but I refuse to get my hopes up now, just to have them crushed in a moment when the inevitable ‘but’ comes.
Only it doesn’t come.
“Savannah,” Cooper says, instead, “I love you.”
It is what I have been waiting for since I was little girl and I found out that my mother and sister were dead and that my life would never be the same. And I cannot believe that it is happening now, with this man that I love. But I know how I feel and I don’t even have to think about it for a moment. Though I haven’t let myself put it into words, not even in my head, until now, I know exactly how I feel.
“I love you, too,” I say.
Then Cooper takes my face in his hands and kisses me, soft and deep and slow and long. It is the most perfect kiss that I have ever had in my life and I never want the moment to end.
Even though I might die as soon as tomorrow, I am happy to be able to spend what might be my last few happy hours with Cooper. My love.
Chapter Ten
Cooper
After Sarah, I never thought that I could love another woman again. She broke my heart into a thousand jagged shards and I thought I would never heal from her betrayal. I didn’t even think that I wanted to heal. I was done with love. I was done with giving someone else the power to hurt me.
That all changed with Savannah. Even though I only told her now that I love her, I have been feeling
it for a while. Hell, I started falling in love with her the very minute that she walked in my door. It was a gradual fall, the kind where it seems like nothing is happening at first and then before you know it, all you want is to see her beautiful face and feel her, warm and soft, in your arms.
“I love you, Savannah” I murmur again. “I love you.”
“I love you so much, Cooper,” she says, her face millimeters from my own. “I love you so much that it almost hurts.”
I close the small gap that remains between us, finding her soft lips with my own. Normally, I am not that big on the whole kissing thing. I get in, I get off, I get out. With Savannah, I finally understand all the hype around kissing. I could kiss her all day. Her subtly sweet feminine smell, her soft lips, having her beautiful face right there on mine, and having her wrapped up in my arms is bliss. It almost beats sex.
Wait. Fuck that. No, it doesn’t. Sex with her is like nothing else.
Thinking about having sex with her, while she’s wrapped up in my arms, gets me hard. I know I don’t have to worry about Nate, because no matter how distracted I get, there is no way in hell I won’t hear him trying to move the furniture blockade that I put up in front of the door out. My member, which has gone from zero to rock-hard in a fraction of a second, presses against her supple thigh. She breaks the kiss and smiles at me. Then she takes my hand in hers and guides it between her legs. She’s sopping wet.
“I need you, baby,” she whispers. I slide one finger, then two, into her ready sex, throbbing with heat and longing.
“Ohhhh yes,” she moans, her eyelids fluttering shut with pleasure as I start to play her gently, from the inside, like a piano.
“You like that?” I ask. I slide in a third finger.
“Oh, baby,” she breathes. “Yes, yes, oh yes!” She is ready for me, but I am going to make her come so many times that she quivers with pleasure and exhaustion by the time that I finish. I pull her on me, so she’s sitting on my face. I start by teasing her, stroking all around her clit with my tongue. I have my hands on her waist and can feel her back arch with pleasure when I finally take her clit in my mouth, sucking on her delicious juices as her body rocks with pleasure. I am as hard as granite, about to burst with desire, but I focus on making her come once more, fingering her g-spot while tonguing her clit.
“Cooper,” she gasps. “Baby, I want your cock. Please.” How am I supposed to resist that? So I don’t. I put on a condom faster than a politician puts on a blue collar worker persona come election time.
Then I pick her up by the hips and move her down to hover with the entrance of her wet pussy directly above my throbbing member. I look her deep in her beautiful, brown eyes before thrusting up, her back arching as I penetrate her. We are flesh on flesh, moving together as I thrust deep into her. She moans, her fingers digging into my back as she folds over forwards, the new angle letting me hit her g-spot with each deep thrust her stroking her clit with my full length every time I pull back out. Her body heaves as she climaxes again. She digs her fingers into my back. “Cooper!” she screams, voice breathy with ecstasy, and I can’t hold on anymore. I yield to the need for release and give in to my own need. We come as one, entwined in the most intimate of all embraces. When she finally collapses onto my chest, both of us completely spent, I feel the deepest, most permeating satisfaction of my life.
She is the only woman I will ever want.
Chapter Eleven
Cooper
Savannah is lying in my arms, her beautiful, naked little body snuggled up against mine. Already exhausted from her day, her multiple orgasms took the rest right out of her. She is always cute when awake, but she looks purely angelic when she is sleeping. She looks so sweet and innocent and I want to do everything within my power, and more, to keep her safe.
I cannot let her down.
It crushed me when I let my brother in the SEALs down, but letting Savannah down? That would destroy me. I am not going to let it happen. I lay an arm over Savannah’s sleeping body, my hand falling into that perfect dip where her lower back meets her perfect, inverted, heart-shaped ass. Everything about her personality and physicality is as perfect as if it was made for me. This is the woman I am going to spend the rest of my life with.
And it’s up to me to make sure that that’s more than just a few days or weeks.
I try to distract myself from thoughts about Savannah and the enormous responsibility that I have to make sure that she gets the long, happy, cared-for life that she deserves, free of all this motorcycle club stress, but it backfires. As soon as I stop thinking about Savannah, my thoughts turn to a topic I have not thought about in a long time and I do not think about often. My mother.
I haven’t heard from her since just after her third arrest on prostitution charges, this time tied in with Schedule I drug possession charges. It said she had two hundred fucking grams of ecstasy, for suspected sale, but the ecstasy wasn’t even hers. She was holding it for a married john who liked rolling for his visits. Why there was so damn much of it, I have no clue. But that amount of ecstasy, paired with the whoring charges and her prior arrests, put her over the edge. She was in jail during my high school prom and the last I knew of her, from some digging when I got top level clearance and data access as an active Navy SEAL, was that she joined a cult somewhere out in the deserts of Arizona, where she lives as part of some New Age, self-proclaimed prophet’s harem and takes biannual ventures out into Las Vegas to preach straightedge principles at unsuspecting casino-goers.
She was fucked up long before I was even born. Hell, for all I know she was born fucked up. But I couldn’t help feeling that somehow I had failed her by not being able to provide for her. I blamed myself for not being able to pull her out of her self-destructive pattern and, as illogical as I now know that guilt to be, I still cannot help but feel, at least a bit, that I failed her.
I am not going to fail Savannah. Whatever the cost, I will keep her safe.
When I finally fall asleep, it’s an uneasy, light sleep, interrupted by every little noise and even the slightest breeze.
Chapter Twelve
Savannah
I wake up to the warmth of a ray of bright autumn sunlight falling across my face. I’m pressed up against Cooper’s back, the big spoon in our spooning this time, and the first thing that I see when I blink the sleep out of my eyes is Cooper’s shoulder blade piece, glorious on his muscled upper back.
From a distance, it would seem identical to the beautiful, swirling pattern of my mother’s tattoo, with the same magical swirls and bursts, the same starspots that haunt my memory. Come a little closer and you’ll notice that the swirls are not made of block lines and complete marks. Come even closer and you will see that the lines are actually words. The pattern is a poem, dancing over his skin.
She had looked for his coming as warriors come,
With the clash of arms and the bugle's call;
But he came instead with a stealthy tread,
Which she did not hear at all.
She had thought how his armor would blaze in the sun,
As he rode like a prince to claim his bride:
In the sweet dim light of the falling night
She found him at her side.
She had dreamed how the gaze of his strange, bold eye
Would wake her heart to a sudden glow:
She found in his face the familiar grace
Of a friend she used to know.
She had dreamed how his coming would stir her soul,
As the ocean is stirred by the wild storm's strife:
He brought her the balm of a heavenly calm,
And a peace which crowned her life.
It’s ‘Love’s Coming’ by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. I read it when I was back in the tenth grade, in English class, and for some reason it just stuck with me. It was disturbingly beautiful and I could really connect to it. I was doomed to a life without love, so the thought of finding a love so perfect, and only just nearly unattai
nable, was the most fascinating thing to me. I fell in love with the poem, as I thought I would never be able to fall in love with a man.
And then I met Cooper. And even though I would not, could not, put how I felt about him in those words yet, it just felt right to give him that poem. It just felt right to share that with him.
Now I know why. I was falling in love with him long before I would admit that to myself.
Cooper shifts, still mostly asleep. I snuggle into him, pressing my face against his back. Today could be the day that everything comes crumbling down around our ears. I trust Cooper to know what our best option is, but I also know that we are in an incredibly difficult situation. Even if something is our best option, that does not even come close to meaning that it is a good one.
We could still be dead before we get the chance to sleep again. I knew my life would be hard. I knew I would not be happy as Nate’s wife. I knew that the world of the motorcycle clubs was very dangerous and that what had happened to my mother and sister could happen to anyone. But, even so, I never thought that I would be dead before my twentieth birthday. I was sheltered, even amongst all the danger, and I never thought that I would be dead before I would get the chance to be a mother myself. And now I may be. But, if I had a magical time machine that could transport me back to moments before I ran away, setting off this entire crazy chain of events, would I go back and change anything? Even if I were certain that I would die by sunset, would I go back and stay, just to save myself?
I ask myself these questions because I feel that I should, but I already know the answer. It is an unwavering no. I am a young woman with big dream, and I definitely do not at all want to die. Not now, not before I have accomplished everything that I want to. But having shared the time that I have had with Cooper, limited as it was, is worth so much more than a long, but empty, life without him would be. And, finally, I know that Cooper feels the same way.