“Actually,” he said so quietly she barely heard him, “I know exactly how much you want me. I want you at least that much, too.”
She leaned in so close that the peaks of her breasts brushed against his t-shirt. “What are you planning to do about it?”
“I ought to do nothing.”
Her lips curved up in a reluctant smile. “Let me rephrase. “What are you going to do about it?”
He held his breath for a moment that stretched on for an eternity. And then all at once he exhaled and tugged on her hand, pulling her up against him. His arms swept around her and their mouths met in a kiss of carnal hunger that erased all rational thought from her mind.
“I’ve missed this,” he mumbled kissing his way across her cheek to her neck. “Something fierce.”
She plunged her hands into his hair, tugging his mouth back to hers. Between hot, wet, tongue tangling kisses, she panted, “I’ve missed you, too. I wanted to kick your butt, but then I wanted to have hot, sweaty sex with you.”
He swept her off the ground, cradling her in his arms, and stepped back into the boat. It rocked violently, and he lowered her quickly to the hull. Where he got a blanket from, she had no idea, but it was thick and wool and padded the hard metal ribs beneath her back as he laid her on it. He followed her down, covering her with his big body deliciously. She sighed in bliss at the weight of him.
He kissed her and she lifted to meet him, inhaling him as voraciously as he was inhaling her. He lifted his body far enough off hers to fumble at her pants and his, and to shove the clothing aside. A massive, hot erection sprang free against her belly and she nearly sobbed with need.
“This is a mistake,” he ground out as he positioned himself between her thighs.
She tugged his head down to his and captured his mouth with hers. “Shut up, Ford. You talk too much.”
A gust of laughter escaped his lips as he pierced her hungry heat. She groaned and reached down to grab his ass, urging him deeper.
“So impatient,” he chided.
“So damned slow on the uptake,” she retorted.
“Who, me?” he pressed up on his elbows to look down at her incredulously.
“Just make love to me, you moron.”
His eyes went dark and hungry, and he began to move inside her. She arched up into him, crying out as he stroked the fire in her to unbearable heat. His hips ground against hers and she hung on to him for dear life, doing everything in her power to communicate how much she wanted and needed him.
The boat rocked beneath their surging sex, adding to the chaotic magic of advance and retreat, thrust and counterthrust. Her legs crept around his hips and her arms around his torso. Everywhere she touched him, he was muscle and sweat and restless movement. And so damned deliciously physical. She reveled in his power and flung her entire being at him with abandon.
She couldn’t have held back if she wanted to. He drew forth orgasm after orgasm from her body and she was helpless to resist any of it. Not that she wanted to. She cried out against his shoulder, shuddering in ecstasy. He was tearing her apart from the soul out, and she never wanted it to end.
“You make me crazy,” he gritted out from between clenched teeth. “I totally lose control around you.”
“Perfect,” she panted back. “I hate self-control.”
“I noticed.”
“Don’t hold out on me, Ford.”
His hips moved faster, and the glide of slick, hot steel within her made her scream with pleasure. “Oh my God,” she cried out. “Yes!”
“Jesus, you’re perfection,” he gasped.
“Give it all to me. I want all of you. Good, bad, and ugly,” she exhorted him.
His entire body arched into her, pressing her down hard, and she didn’t care at all. It was glorious. She adored the wildness, reveled in the not quite violence of it, loved the fact that she could pull this passion out of him.
His hands speared into her hair, pinning her down beneath him. He stared down at her, his eyes glazed with pleasure, lost in lust. But he saw her. He stared straight into her, stripping her bare and laying her soul wide open. Mesmerized, she couldn’t look away as terrible tension built between them, building, building.
A climax clawed its way toward release from inside both of them by slow degrees that Ford seemed to fight every step of the way. Why he tortured himself like this, she had no idea, and she coaxed him with every ounce of her being to let go and let the beast fly.
With a shout, he capitulated all at once. His body spasmed violently against hers and she met him thrust for frantic thrust as epic orgasms tore free of their straining bodies and soared, taking them along for the ride.
They crashed back to earth all of a sudden, in a tangle of sweaty limbs, panting breath, heaving chests, and incredulous smiles that had no need of words.
She stared up at him in amazement, while he stared down at her in something akin to awe. After what felt like a long time, she finally was able to string a few words together. “That was even better than I remembered.”
He just shook his head.
“What? You don’t agree? Please tell me that’s not average in your world.”
He laughed shortly. “Honey, that would be mind blowing in any man’s world. That was the Olympic gold medal of sex.”
A smile unfolded across her face as relief unfolded inside her chest. “Really?”
“I would not kid about something like that,” he said with a touch of reverence in his voice. “That was off the chain.”
She smiled up at him, and her heart sang when he smiled back at her. “Please promise me something, Ford.”
He rolled onto his back and took her with him, drawing her across his chest with an arm casually around her shoulders. He was infinitely more comfortable to lie on than the hard boat. “What’s that?” he murmured.
“Don’t retreat into your emotional fortress of solitude, again. If you need me to back off, just say so. But you don’t have to shut me out totally for me to give you whatever space you need.”
“Aww, Zee. It’s not you. It’s my head that’s fucked up.”
“How’s that?” She would dearly love to press up onto her elbows and look at him, but she was leery of such direct contact with him. Better to stay where she was and keep the conversational tone light. Non-threatening.
“I’m not ready to quit the teams. But I don’t know if I can get my body back into good enough shape. It—” he exhaled hard before continuing. “It scares the hell out of me.”
“You handled yourself pretty well in the grocery store. Your knee seems to have come out of that just fine.”
He shrugged beneath her ear. “They were amateurs. I was able to use my hands to drop them. No strain on my knee.”
“What about doing some sniping? Those guys don’t usually engage the enemy up close. And you’re a hell of a shot.”
“Maybe,” he said doubtfully.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’ve got a wee bit of operational experience with shooting under pressure, and I’ve seen you on our practice range. You never miss. I don’t think you’d have any trouble extending your effective range of fire. We could work on it together. I need the long-range practice, too.”
He went very still beneath her. Crap, crap, crap. Had she overstepped her bounds with him? Was she doomed always to stick her foot in her mouth with him? She hated this uncertainty. A little voice in the back of her head warned her that she couldn’t hope to sustain a long-term relationship with him if she always had to guard her words and measure what she was going to say before she said it.
“Been thinking about hits, have you?” he asked.
“Maybe,” she replied cautiously. “Could you use a spotter?”
He pressed up on an elbow, dumping her on her side and bringing them eye-to-eye. “You volunteering for the job?”
“Somebody’s got to do it.”
“It wouldn’t be bad experience for you to get the training,” he said sl
owly.
Elation leaped in her gut.
“How are you at mental math?” he asked.
“Fantastic. I won every multiplication bee in the fourth grade.”
He grinned and leaned forward to kiss her fast and hard before pressing to his feet and holding a hand down to her. She took it and he lifted her up into his arms and a long, lingering kiss.
“Just promise me one thing, Trina.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t fall for me.”
“Why the hell not?” she exclaimed.
“A future together for you and me is probably not in the cards. We have no control over where we’re sent or how long we’ll be apart. I don’t want to see you get hurt. Keep your heart out of this.”
Too late. Her heart was already totally involved.
Chapter Nine
‡
Ford followed Trina into the house admiring the way her tush twitched as she jogged up the steps. One thing he could say about letting women onto the teams—the scenery would be a hell of a lot better with them around.
But the other complications…not so much. He knew better than to have sex with her again. The first time had been business. Part of her training. Today, however, he had no such excuse. He’d been unwilling to corral his lust and resist her. Dammit.
Not that he was having any success working up any real regret for having had sex with her. She was arguably the hottest female he’d ever had the pleasure of making love with. But therein lay the problem. It wasn’t just sex for him.
He was neither stupid nor unobservant. They had something more between them than just smoking hot sex. They connected. Hell, they fit each other. Not just physically. She got him. Knew how he thought. Understood his world more than most woman he’d even been around. And that was only going to intensify as she continued her training.
Grimly, he helped her unpack the groceries and stack cans in the cupboards. He’d love to refinish the old cabinets someday. He caught Trina studying him thoughtfully, and an urge to kiss her until she couldn’t think straight enough to psychoanalyze him any more came over him.
Irritated all to hell with himself, he went outside, picked up a paint scraper, climbed a ladder, and vented some of his frustration on the side of the house. He figured while he was staying out here, he could do a few repairs on the place. Get a head start on his retirement, a voice in his head commented bitterly. He was not ready to hang up his SEAL trident just yet, damn it all.
Trina came outside wearing that sexy little muscle shirt she’d had on the day he brought her here. Without speaking to him, she picked up the other paint scraper, climbed the second ladder, and silently got to work beside him. Aww, hell. Now he wasn’t going to get any relief from his fixation on her.
What was she doing out here? Was this a demonstration that she could separate work and play as well as the next guy? Or was it a blatant reminder to him of how hot and irresistible she was? Surely, she wasn’t trying to get inside his head and mess with him…or was she? If so, it was bloody well working.
He thought about her every waking second, it seemed. If he wasn’t thinking about the many ways he’d like to have sex with her, he was thinking about her training, about things he needed to teach her, weighing her mental toughness. It was as if his whole world revolved around her.
Which was weird as shit for him. He’d never paid any attention to women. Sure, he’d picked them up in bars on the rare Saturday night he had off, and he liked sex as much as the next guy, but he’d never had any reason to care what was going on inside one’s head or how one felt, before. No wonder his teammates griped all the time about how impossible women were to understand.
Trina worked hard alongside him. Whether she was working off stress of her own or engaging in some private competition to keep up with him, he couldn’t say. But they nearly finished scraping the house before the light began to fail.
He fed the fire under the water distiller while Trina opened cans of chili and poured them into a pot. She set the pot on the grill he’d rigged next to the distiller and sat down to wait for their supper to heat up. Forcing his mind away from kissing her, he sat down beside her.
“Talk to me about today’s incident,” he said.
She glanced at him sidelong, and his dick stirred hopefully. Down, boy.
“What do you want to know?”
He studied her closely. “How did you drop those guys? I was tied up with the two who jumped me and didn’t see what you did.”
She shrugged, and even that casual movement was sexy. “I shoved the cart into one’s gut and punched the other one in the stomach.”
“You dropped Jimbo Kimball with one punch?”
“I tried to tell you I had martial arts training, but you wouldn’t listen. You were busy going all caveman, protect-the-little-woman on me.”
Chagrin coursed through him. She was, of course, correct. It hadn’t dawned on him in the heat of the moment that she might be able to protect herself. “What kind of martial arts training do you have?”
“Eight years of Krav Maga. My instructor was Israeli Special Forces.”
The Israelis invented Krav Maga, so her training had probably been the real deal. It was a combination of ancient and modern hand-to-hand combat techniques designed to be efficient, violent, and deadly. The SEALs used a variant of it in their own training program. No wonder she’d taken out those two thugs so effectively on her own.
“We may have a bit of a problem with the Kimball boys going forward,” he commented. “People who cross them have a history of going missing or turning up dead.”
“Who exactly are the Kimball boys?”
“Locals. Low-lifes and troublemakers.”
“And meth dealers,” she added.
“Why do you say that?” he asked quickly. The Kimballs had been hard drinkers and pot smokers in high school, but they hadn’t messed with the hard stuff back then.
“Did you see their teeth?” Trina retorted. “Not to mention I smelled lye on their clothes. As in sodium hydroxide. One of the main ingredients in production of methamphetamine. Trust me. They’re cooking meth.”
“And you know the smell of a meth lab how?”
Her gaze slid away from his. “Let’s just say my mom didn’t have the greatest taste in guys.”
Ahh. The crappy boyfriends who made her so hinky about being overpowered by men. Anger seethed in his gut on behalf of the scared, victimized little girl she must have been. A need to track down those old boyfriends of her mom’s and beat the shit out of them made his fists clench.
Although, had it not been for those assholes, Trina probably wouldn’t be sitting here beside him, today. In point of fact, he supposed he owed the assholes a thank-you…and then he would beat the shit out of them.
“You know these Kimball boys, how?” Trina asked, startling him out of his violent thoughts.
“Went to school with a couple of them.”
“Hah. So you are from around here!”
“I grew up in this house. How else do you think I knew of its existence, way out here in the middle of the swamp?”
She looked over her shoulder quickly at the remains of the one place on earth he’d been loved and happy and safe. Not that he was going to share something personal like that with her. She was already way too far inside his head. He was not letting her in any further.
“Problem is, the Kimball boys know I’m from around here. If they don’t where this place is, they’ll be able to ask around and find out easily enough where it is,” he explained.
Trina leaped to the obvious conclusion. “Which means we should be expecting them to show up and try to finish the fight from the grocery store.”
He shrugged. “They don’t take kindly to losing, nor to being made to look foolish. We did both today. It’s not going to sit well with them that we kicked their asses so publicly.”
Trina grinned over at him, and he couldn’t help grinning back. It had been kinda fun to
drop several of his main tormentors from his childhood like that.
“What’s the plan?” she asked. “We gonna set up a watch rotation and perimeter defenses?”
“We could. Or we could think like SEALs.” He left the comment dangling to see where Trina would go, thinking on her own.
She stared into the fire for upwards of a minute before she spoke again. “They’ll keep coming for us until we eliminate them entirely as a threat. Instead of sitting around here waiting for them to find us and attack, we could do some hunting of our own. If we make a statement of our own first, we could back them off for good.”
Now she was thinking like a SEAL. “What kind of statement did you have in mind?” he asked.
“What if we find their meth lab? Blow it up. It would be a major financial blow to them. Vastly reduce their resources. Distract them from hunting us as they deal with suppliers, customers, and potentially, law enforcement. And,” she added with an impish smile, “last time I checked, it’s not illegal to blow up a meth lab.”
“Well,” he drawled, “it’s not entirely legal, either. But the sheriff isn’t going to complain if an unfortunate accident happens to remove a drug production facility from his jurisdiction.”
“Do you have any idea where the Kimball boys would hide a meth lab? After all, this is home for you.”
He leaned forward, thinking back to his childhood haunts. “There are a couple of spots isolated enough to hide a meth operation, but with water access good enough to haul in chemicals and supplies.”
Trina glanced over her shoulder at the house. “Are we going to stay here tonight, or go to ground?”
“What would you do?” he countered.
“I’d hit the woods. Surround this place with traps and tripwires, and lay back in the woods to see who comes calling.”
“You may just make a decent SEAL, yet, Zarkos.”
She grinned at him across the fire. “When I was selected for SEAL training, a couple of Marine demolitions guys showed me a few things about setting tripwires. Wanna go play with stuff that goes boom?”
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