by Angel Payne
“Right.”
“So he was a ‘special’ specialist?”
“Hell, no. He was another government tool, like the rest. Standard-issue haircut, standard-issue personality. His name was Homer, for fuck’s sake. He ate Bacon Bits on everything, including his cereal. But when he and Mom hit the lab together, I guess something pretty cool happened.”
“I assume it wasn’t Tait’s beloved bomb.”
“To our minds, it was way better. The entrenchment of Homer also meant we got a new fringe bennie.”
“Which was…?”
“A menagerie.”
Zoe blinked. “For real? As in, animals?”
“Yeah, for real. They came and went, of course—and at first, T and I were a pair of kid-power protesters, thinking the creatures were being used for ‘nefarious’ purposes—but Mom ensured us they were making the animals better with their research, not worse.” He gave a lopsided grin. “We were pretty damn relieved when she was right.”
“So Homer and the menagerie became fixtures.”
“Bingo,” he confirmed. “One week turned into two, then three, then a few months. Mom and Homez—that’s what T and I finally started calling him—literally invented a geek-speak language of their own around the project.”
She leaned toward him, more fascinated by his story with each minute. “Do you remember any of it?”
He grimaced. “I’ve tried, but we were kids. If it didn’t mention Transformers, Nintendo, or the Husky we hoped Homez would let us keep as a pet one day, we weren’t into the grown-up chatter. But I remember their excitement. They were onto something big.” Though his tone was steeped in pride, his tight frown lingered. “Dad saw it, too—so much that he actually invited the guy over for dinner twice a week.”
Zoe didn’t hide her surprise. “That was generous.”
“He wanted to make Mom happy, even if that meant gutting his sanity to make it happen.” He deepened her bewilderment by ticking up one side of his mouth. “And she kept loving him, though the drinking got worse.”
“So things were a teeny bit dysfunctional.”
“We’re all a little dysfunctional, Zoe. The goal is to simply find someone who balances yours out.”
For a long second, she couldn’t decide whether to smirk in cynicism or frown in disbelief. “Okay, so they were…balanced. Right up until the day Homer left, right?”
“Right.”
“And she left with him.”
“No.”
“What?”
“No.” There wasn’t a note of hesitation in his voice. “Gotcha, didn’t I?”
She surrendered to a baffled smile, instead. “It’s not a very typical story.” She paused for a moment as another though struck. “Though nothing’s been very ‘typical’ since the moment I met you, Shay Bommer.”
She knew better than to get used to the name—both their lives might depend on her keeping up with the ruse that he was Shane Burnett—but the sampling felt nice on her lips. Probably too nice. The man himself was no help for her resolve to put it away, responding with a look of at least four feelings she couldn’t decipher. It was best to quit while she was ahead than try to play through the puzzle, simply enjoying the intensity of the emotions of his features, making her more than ready for the moment he moved a hand to her cheek, caressing the sensitive trail of her hairline. Beautiful shivers came, racing all over her scalp, but why’d they have to find their way to the expanding bud between her thighs, too? She swallowed hard, forcing herself from moaning at him in abject need…then bucking her hips up in open invitation…
“You’ve been so damn brave, Zoe,” he finally murmured. “So strong. Just like Mom was…especially after Homer left.”
“What happened?” You can now return to the innocuous part of our programming, everyone. Thank God. “Did they finish the project? Or did Washington just summon him back?”
“Neither.” He spoke it with certainty. “My research doesn’t bear it out and neither do my memories.”
“Okay,” she returned. “What do you remember?”
“Fights. Bad ones.”
She pressed her hand over his when shadows took over his face. “Ugh,” she whispered. “So your dad and Homer finally had enough of the gentleman’s agreement?”
“Oh, no. It wasn’t my dad and Homez. It was mom.”
“And Homer?” She didn’t hide her bafflement. “But why? Weren’t they going to be the new Fonteyn and Nureyev of science?”
Again, his face angled into different reactions. Every one of them was steal-her-breath gorgeous but perplexity seemed to finally win out. “Who and who?”
She couldn’t help a beguiled smile. He really was such a big, burly military hunk. Her imagination went off like a sparkler, thinking about all the classic dance videos she wanted to make him sit through. “Maybe one day, I’ll have the chance to enlighten you.”
“Maybe one day.” His gaze turned a soft butterscotch, threatening her focus yet again.
“What happened?” she forced out. “Between your mom and Homer?”
The softness dissolved from his gaze. Then his whole face. “I really don’t know,” he admitted. “They were loud enough to wake Tait and I, but the dialogue itself…either it was too muffled by the lab walls or I just don’t remember.” He shook his head. “But after the dustups, Mom would bawl and Homez would leave.”
“Back to DC?” she ventured.
“That’s what we assumed.” He pulled his hand away to rub the back of his neck. “It got to be that his time there outweighed his days in the lab with Mom. She was miserable.”
A huge fist lodged beneath her ribs. “And your dad definitely noticed.”
“Every second,” he confirmed. “Finally, after one really bad blowup, Homez bugged out for good. Took everything except Scout, the dog. By that point, we were all kind of relieved. Even Mom.” His shoulders clenched. “But Dad didn’t see it that way.”
The fist punched hard, banishing her breath. “Oh, no…”
His shoulders clenched. “He was drunk,” he muttered. “And she was distraught. Conclusions were reached. His temper blew.”
“Shay,” she rasped. “Lo siento. I’m so sorry.”
“It wasn’t the last time.” He flattened his lips, as if berating himself simply for the defensive tone, before going on, “But for some reason, every time, she just took it. Fuck, Tait and I were so angry—at her as much as him.”
She gulped. At least there were no tears to worry about this time. The grief in her heart tore past the realm of tears. She ached for the little boys he and Tait had been, forced to become men far too fast. “And I’ll bet you both tried to stand up to him.”
“Fuck, yeah. Of course. But one time, she actually screamed at us to stop. She said—”
“What?” she rasped into his lead-heavy pause.
“She said we were only making it worse.”
“Ay.” She shoved back her bitterness to ask, “What did you do then?”
He squeezed his neck harder. “What could we do? We moved the hell on and tried to stay out of Dad’s way as much as possible, especially after she disappeared in the middle of the night, about three months later.”
For a second, she let her jaw plummet in freefall. “She just left? No note? No good-bye? No explanation?”
“Oh, there was an explanation. It came from Drake Bommer, who was happy to tell us about the ‘stone-hearted bitch’ who’d left us and him for Homer, the hunk of scientific hotness. Thanks to his new bestie, Mr. Jim Beam, we had the treat of hearing that one over and over—and over.”
“Higueputa,” she spat. Son of a bitch.
“It wasn’t an easy time for him.”
“Are you making excuses for the cabrón?”
“You think that’s what this is?” He dropped—make that nailed—his stare back into her. “He was a shit, okay? No pardons for that. But he was also a Bommer—and if I’ve come to understand anything about that while growing
up, it’s that his pain ran through deep fucking canyons.” He pulled in air through his nose, bitterness still gleaming from his gaze. “Thanks to Cameron Stock, I almost lost my brother to those same canyons last year.”
“Don’t forget the fine example your father set,” she grumbled.
“Well, Tait pulled through. He let his heart, his character, his stubbornness—and yeah, the love of a great woman—take him to a better place. I’m damn proud of him” The light in his eyes dulled. “Just wish I could tell him that, dammit.”
Zoe pulled his hand down and tangled their fingers again. “You will,” she encouraged. “Soon.”
He lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles. “I know. But thanks for saying it.”
Her heart clenched once more. He and Tait were as tight as she and her sister. Like Ava and her, they’d had to be. Would she be as strong if she’d lost Ava’s devotion, even temporarily? Would she be strong enough to keep such a huge secret from her sibling? The conflict had to be tearing at Shay.
She could help him. Refocus him. “So what did you two do then?” she queried. “You had someone to go to, right? Someone to talk to?”
He actually laughed. “We were boys, Zoe. The sons of an alcoholic abuser, at that. We sucked it up and moved on because we had to. We were old enough to know that ‘talking to someone’ would likely mean being placed into separate foster homes faster than you can say ay caramba.”
His words forged new hardness in his face. Zoe watched the transformation with a mix of fear and wonder. She and Shay had to be near each other in chronological age, but he suddenly seemed eons older and generations sadder. “So you clung to each other for strength,” she whispered.
His grit was suddenly infused with wariness. He reeled back a little. “Don’t get carried away, Miss Tiptoe Tulips. I don’t ‘cling’ to that dork-ass for anything. He smells like a goat and he snores.”
Just like that, the man again melted her like a brick of chocolate in the sun. She gazed up at him, hoping her face conveyed the depth of her gratitude for his honesty in revealing his past, and his bravery in confronting it for himself.
“Thank you for clearing that up, Sir.”
He grinned and bestowed a deep kiss to her mouth. “You’re most welcome, baby girl.”
She yanked on his shirt, keeping him near for one more moment. “I mean all of it.”
He kissed her again. A little longer. A lot deeper. “I know.”
“So, what happened then?” she asked. “How did you two little men do your not clinging to each other thing?”
“We carried on. Went to school. Kept our damn noses clean. Worked hard. We had one angel on our side, our Uncle Jonah, who took care of crap like signing the school papers and making sure we even got to school.” As he shook his head, the old man she’d seen on his face abruptly disappeared, and he sped to the other end of the spectrum as an eye-rolling teen. “You didn’t want to ditch when Uncle Jonah was around. We made that mistake only once. Shit wasn’t pretty.”
She brushed her knuckles down the side of his face. “Did you get to have any fun?”
“Hell, yeah. Mrs. Verona, our neighbor, sometimes let us help her bake cookies. We had a dog, Scout, who was like a lab mascot for Mom and Homez during the good days. And when we got older, maybe we met the Jernigan twins a couple of times at the donut place in town. Those girls were…really sweet.” The reemergence of his naughty grin widened the melted puddle of her senses. “But the one treat we always gave ourselves was a weekly trip to the half-price movies. They didn’t show the latest shit, but they showed the best. Every Saturday, we survived on a cultural diet of Stallone, Willis, Cruise, and Schwarzenegger. Take a wild guess what we both wanted to be when we grew up.”
She added her grin to his. “Special Forces?”
When Shay nodded, somberness stomped back across his face. “It was good timing for both of us. In Tait’s senior year of high school, Dad’s liver finally gave out. By the middle of that summer, I took the equivalency exam and became a grad, too. Uncle Jonah put us up for six months while we sucked raw eggs for breakfast and trained like goddamn Olympians, preparing for the physical requirements of the job.
“By the time we signed up for the big green machine, we were ready. We didn’t make it a secret to anyone that Special Forces was our ultimate goal. They all told us we were crazy to think we’d both make it past the cuts, but we did.” His gaze sobered by another degree. “It was harder for Tait than me—I saw it in every step he trudged and test he took—but damn, I was proud of him. He hung in there, sometimes literally by the skin of his teeth. He’s a stubborn fucker.
“For the next few years, life became a blur of working hard and playing harder. When I wasn’t training for or actually out on an op, I was increasingly fascinated by the connection that BDSM offered.”
Zoe slipped her hand to his neck and squeezed. “Connection. I like that description, too.”
He scraped his fingers across the back of her hand. “I know.”
Before she succumbed to the longing to pull him down and mash their mouths again, she probed, “So what led you to start looking for your mom?” The question was hard to get out. There was a good chance he’d explain that he’d been involved with someone else, and the importance of that relationship led to the desire of completing his psychological circle with his mother. Despite the Freudian flawlessness of the theory, dammit if it didn’t drive in a stranger-than-strange spike of jealousy. Though she was certain he’d never have slept with her last night had he still been involved with someone else, she didn’t enjoy even the concept of Shay with somebody else, period.
Stop it. Crazy circumstances aside, you’ve known the man less than twenty-four hours. He’s not your “instant soul mate” or “the other half of your heart.” It was nice with him. It is nice with him. But he’s a Special Forces soldier with a thousand other priorities higher than you on the totem pole of his life, including the mission he’s on right now. Get over it. Get over him. Now.
“It was an act of fate, I think,” he started, in answer to her question. Oh, great. An act of fate. Here it came. “My CO pulled some strings and secured me ten days of leave in order to be with Tait after the conclusion of that insane op they accomplished in LA. He was a train wreck. Just needed to talk about a lot of shit, including a lot of the shit that went down during the mission. Needless to say, Stock’s name came up a lot in the conversation. It stuck with me. Nagged at me. I knew I’d seen Stock’s name well before that.
“Well, one morning, the dots connected. A few months prior, I’d finally screwed up the nuts to go through the last of Dad’s shit. One of the boxes actually turned out to be Mom’s. It looked like a lot of old notes from the lab, pages of scribbled shit and scientific formulas that all could’ve been written in Chinese for all the sense they made to me—but there were lots of names in the notes, too.”
“And Stock’s was one of them,” she supplied.
He touched a finger to his nose, indicating she was right. “I didn’t think anything of it when I went through the box; just wrote him off as just one of the Pentagon’s financial guys. But one morning in the shower at T’s, everything slammed together, and—” He stopped when noticing her expanding grin. “What is it?”
“Sorry.” She couldn’t help the provocative bite to her bottom lip. “I’m stuck on the part where things slammed together in the shower. Can we review that again, please?”
His lips curled up, too. He trailed a hand to her hip while sliding his knee along her on the opposite side, trapping her body from the waist down. “Are you telling me you’re not such a good girl after all, Miss Chestain?”
“I have no idea what you mean, Sergeant Bommer.”
He brushed his lips across hers. “In any other time or place, I’d call your bullshit on that pretty hard, baby girl.”
The sandpaper he’d scrubbed over his voice rubbed her in so many new places, in so many right ways. Against her better instincts
, Zoe sighed, arched, and pushed her hip higher into his touch. Shay didn’t miss the opportunity to grasp more of her flesh, kneading her with spread fingers before heating every drop of her blood with his rough moan of appreciation.
“This is crazy, right?” she rasped.
When he responded with a silent nod, she knew he understood. Not just the word she used, but everything she encompassed with it.
Crazy.
Two syllables that stood for so much more. Like every electron that ignited the air between them. Every perfect minute of the power they’d exchanged with each other last night. And in a strange, sweet way, every day of every year that had guided their life paths to collide in that one airport bar, on that fogged-in night, in a city known more for fabricating connections than really having any. And a final twist, that fated flight, carrying them to the most secret section of desert in the world. Throwing them together once more.
Throwing them?
Or placing them?
Yes. Crazy.
And extraordinary. And incredible. And so damn good.
So yeah, she’d met him less than a day ago. In an airport bar. And he was a soldier, Special Forces at that, the kind of guy she always vehemently warned Ava away from. The kind of guy who also made all of Ava’s dreams come true—including the proposal, the ring, the doves, and the promises.
Okay, so things with Shay weren’t going to end with a marriage proposal aboard Air Force One. But things with Shay were also…unlike they’d been with anyone else. He saw every part of her. The good girl and the bad girl. The lioness who guarded her inner kitten. The everything’s-handled-She-Ra who so desperately craved the chance to be a submissive one more time.
Who yearned to be his submissive one more time.
“Shay?” Half of it was drowned in her breath instead of her voice.
He lowered his forehead to hers. “Yeah?”
“I’m technically still your hostage, right?”
Every tendon in his perfect muscles stiffened. He released the tension by measured increments, reminding her once more of a mountain lion. Carefully coiled. Strategically poised. Hypnotically lethal.
“Yeah, baby girl…you definitely are.”