by Amy Andrews
And Ava didn’t need to be told twice.
* * *
A couple of hours later they stirred again. Blake dropped a kiss on her neck. ‘We really do have to get going at some stage today,’ he murmured.
Ava’s eyes fluttered open. ‘Why?’ she asked as she turned in his arms, one arm sliding over his waist, her head resting against the soft pillow of a pectoral muscle.
Blake propped his chin on top of her head. ‘Because I’m on a schedule, here. I can’t stay on holiday for ever.’
Ava smiled. ‘You’re a schedule kind of a guy, aren’t you?’
He nodded. ‘And proud of it. That’s what over a decade in the military does for you. That’s what got you your reno on time,’ Blake reminded her. He looked down at her head. ‘I’ve seen those behind-the-scenes-at-a-fashion-show docos on the telly—those things run to tight schedules too.’
‘They do,’ Ava conceded. ‘And I can run to a schedule as professionally as the next model. But when I’m on holiday...’ she glanced up at him ‘...schedules go out the window. That’s the point of a holiday. It’s all about being flexible.’
Blake smiled down at her. ‘Oh, you’re very flexible.’
Ava rolled her eyes. ‘Why can men never resist an opening?’ But she kissed him anyway because he was right there and he looked even more tempting this morning than he had last night.
‘My point is,’ she said, pulling back from the kiss, ‘you’re on holiday. You don’t really have to do anything or be anywhere. For instance, we could stay here in bed all day together. We could kiss and cuddle, have lots more sex, doze off, wake up, watch some telly, eat gourmet snacks I can prepare. You know...just have some fun?’
Blake felt the usual clench of his gut at the word fun. He knew it shouldn’t affect him, that he had as much right to a full happy life, to fun, as the next person, but it still felt wrong to be enjoying himself when so many guys he knew couldn’t.
‘We can do whatever we want,’ Ava continued, oblivious to Blake’s consternation, ‘because we’re on holiday.’
Blake forced himself to smile and push the downer thoughts away. He was allowed to have fun. His shrink had told him that over and over.
‘Ah, but you’re not on holiday,’ he reminded her, injecting a deliberately teasing tone into his voice. ‘You’ve just hijacked mine. Bribed your way in if my memory serves me correctly.’
The thought was sobering but Ava refused to let it get her down. ‘Well, it feels like it. I haven’t had a lot of idle days since turning fourteen.’
Blake heard the pensive note in her voice and stroked his finger down her face. The last thing he wanted was to drag her down too. ‘Okay, then, you win. A rest day.’
Ava laughed. ‘In that case I better get us something to eat. Cos I don’t think either of us are going to be getting much rest.’
Blake smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Allow me.’
Ava quirked an eyebrow. ‘You? You can cook? You who only had a six-pack of beer in the fridge two days ago?’
‘I can manage coffee, toast and fruit,’ he said indignantly as he rolled onto his back, then swung into a sitting position and flicked the wall-mounted telly on with the remote, handing it to her. ‘See what the media is saying about your situation and then check in with Ken.’ He reached for his leg propped against the wall. ‘I’ll get us some breakfast or brunch or lunch...or whatever it is.’
He went through the motions of getting into his prosthesis as Ava flicked through the news channels. He could have had crutches just to get around the boat, a lot of amputees used them for domestic purposes, but he hadn’t wanted to become reliant on them, preferring to always use his leg.
Blake looked around for his clothes but as he had no idea where they’d ended up last night he figured he might as well just throw on some new ones.
Ava’s gaze was drawn to him as he skirted around the bed, briefly interrupting her view of the telly as he strode to his wardrobe. His brawny masculinity wasn’t diminished by the prosthesis, if anything it emphasised it—a silent testament to his heroism. But there was just something kind of surreal about it and she couldn’t help but laugh.
He turned and quirked an eyebrow at her and she clamped a hand over her mouth. Way to be sensitive, Ava. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, embarrassed by her behaviour. ‘I’m not...I don’t—’
‘What’s the matter?’ he interrupted and she could see the teasing light in his indigo eyes. ‘Never seen a naked man with a fake leg?’
‘You look like Bionic Man,’ she blurted out, still clearly suffering from foot in mouth. But he did. His broad chest and shoulders and his narrow hips were perfectly proportioned. The hard, powerful quads and calves of his good leg balanced out the hard moulded plastic and titanium lines of the prosthetic. He looked half man, half machine.
Strong. Super strong.
Ava kicked the sheets off and swung her legs over the side of the bed. ‘It’s kind of a turn-on actually.’
He watched her walk towards, him, one hundred per cent naked, one hundred per cent up to no good, staring at his body as if she wanted to eat him. His groin fired to life.
‘You’re not going to be one of those chicks who has a thing for amputees, are you? Hangs out on all the forums and dating sites?’
Ava shook her head as she sank to her haunches in front of him. ‘No,’ she said, looking up at him, past the rapid thickening happening before her eyes. ‘Just for you.’
Blake’s heartbeat pounded through his ears as her gaze feasted on the jut of his now fully fledged erection. ‘Ava,’ he warned as the muscle fibres in his belly and his buttocks turned to liquid. ‘Food...Ken...’
‘Later,’ she dismissed as she raised herself up, her hands gliding up his legs and anchoring at the backs of his thighs, her mouth opening around him.
Blake’s groan came from somewhere primitive inside him as hot, wet, delicious suction scrambled his brain of any rational thought. He reached for the cupboard and held on for dear life.
* * *
Later that afternoon, Blake was sitting propped against the headboard of his sleigh bed, idly flicking through channels as Ava dozed by his side. It was another warm day and they’d kicked off the sheets a long time ago so she was lying on her back stark naked, completely comfortable with her nudity.
His phone vibrated on the bedside table and he checked it. Charlie. Still hanging with the supermodel?
Blake smiled. Yes.
The reply was fast. Slept with her yet?
Blake’s gaze wandered to her naked body, his chest filling with something akin to contentment. His fingers slid across the touchpad. You are a pervert.
Another fast reply. So that’s a yes?
Blake gave a soft snort as he typed his reply. Goodbye.
A little yellow face with a dripping tongue hanging out its mouth appeared on the screen and Blake shook his head at his brother’s juvenile wit as he returned the phone to the bedside table.
He flicked his gaze back to the telly just as an ad break came on. He was about to change the channel when Ava came on the screen. ‘Hey,’ he said, giving her a gentle nudge. ‘Wake up, you’re on the telly.’
He couldn’t believe he was in bed with a woman whose face was on the telly. Her celebrity had been easier to wrap his head around when he’d just been the guy renovating her house.
Ava stirred, opening her eyes to see the cologne commercial she’d shot last year. ‘Oh, yeah.’ She smiled, half sitting, wriggling back, insinuating herself between Blake’s thighs, snuggling her bottom in and draping her back to his stomach, her head under his chin. His arms encircled her waist and they watched it together.
Ava was proud of the commercial and had had a lot of fun filming it with one of England’s most dashing young actors. It was moody, edgy, very dark
and sexy, suiting the bouquet of the cologne.
Blake wasn’t so enamoured as Ava, showing almost as much flesh as she was now beneath a transparent white hooded gown, was chased and then caught, her dress ripped open down the front and her neck and parts distinctly lower thoroughly ravaged by a dark, brooding, shirtless man.
The voice-over said, ‘Beast. For the animal in us all.’
Okay, no actual prohibited-for-PG-viewing bits could be seen, but it was a very fine line and the subliminal messages were heavily sexual.
‘What do you think?’ she asked, turning her neck to look at him as the commercial ended.
Blake cast around for something to say that wouldn’t annoy her when clearly she was pleased with the results. ‘I think if I owned these,’ he said, his hands sliding up her belly to her breasts, ‘I wouldn’t want anyone else touching them.’
Ava smiled. She wasn’t surprised by his reaction. People outside the industry didn’t understand how it worked. She glanced back at the telly. ‘I own these,’ she said, sliding her hands up under his, cupping her own breasts, his hands falling away.
She looked down at herself, at her hands, aware he was looking too before letting go.
‘Anyway...it’s all just make-believe. We did that shot about a hundred times, there’s a full set of people watching you, a director telling you a bit to the right, a bit to the left, hot lights, make-up people, a ticking clock. It’s not as sexy as it looks.’
‘So how do your boyfriends cope with that? Because, frankly, I’d want to punch that guy in the head.’
Ava laughed. ‘Well, that’s very Neanderthal of you.’ She knew she shouldn’t find that attractive but somehow it fitted with his whole ex-soldier, Bionic Man persona and she was secretly thrilled.
Blake guessed he should apologise for his prehistoric possessive streak but he didn’t. ‘I just don’t get how it works.’
‘Which is precisely why I don’t have boyfriends. Lovers, yes, boyfriends, no. Lovers are disposable, boyfriends tend to get jealous. And only from within the circles I move in because you have to be in the biz to understand how very little all that—’ she waved her hands at the screen ‘—means. Models, actors...they know how it works.’
‘Wow,’ he said derisively. ‘You really are slumming it with me.’
She glanced up at him but he was smiling down at her and didn’t seem to be too insulted. She ran her hand down his thigh. ‘I’m making a special exception for you.’
‘So, you don’t have...relationships?’ Didn’t all women crave relationships? Connections?
Hell, didn’t all human beings?
Ava looked down, following her hand as it absently caressed his thigh. ‘No. Best not to. Relationships require trust. I’ve had some major disappointments in that sector earlier in my career, a couple of guys talking to the press and with Mum and Paul...let’s just say I wised up pretty quickly.’
‘That sounds kind of lonely though...’
Okay, he wasn’t exactly King of relationships either, but not because he didn’t believe in them. He just wasn’t sure if damaged goods made very good partners.
Ava traced the outline of Blake’s quad with her index finger as she shrugged. ‘I don’t have time for men who want to hold me down...hold me back. I don’t have time for their petty jealousies. I have a finite amount of years I can do what I do and I’ll worry about relationships after. For now dating and the occasional spot of casual sex with a guy in a similar situation to me suits just fine.’
Blake absently rubbed his chin against the fineness of her hair as he absorbed her very definitive views.
Ava turned her neck to face him, unnerved by his silence. She’d come to her relationship conclusions a long time ago the hard way and it had never mattered to her before what anyone thought.
But somehow it did right now.
‘You think that makes me cold and unfeeling?’
‘No,’ Blake said and meant it.
Ava had to be the least cold and unfeeling person he knew. Sure, her snooty touch-me-not public image was meant to convey that, but if he’d learned anything about her at all these past three days it was that she was a strange mix of hot and cold. Strong and vulnerable. Public and private.
And he felt privileged to know the real woman beneath the distant haughty smile.
‘I think you’ve taken control of your life and you know what you want. A lot of people never do that.’
‘Damn right,’ she said as she looked back at her hand on his thigh, his chuckle vibrating against her back. ‘What about you and relationships?’ she asked. ‘You’re still single.’
Ava stopped tracing the quad on his good leg and drew a line with her finger down the thigh of his amputated leg, which seemed almost the same length as its opposite number. The quad almost as meaty. ‘Has this stopped you?’
Blake looked down at her hand. ‘No. But there’s a lot of...baggage attached to me...and I’m not much of a talker. So...that makes it hard to see past the outside to what’s underneath.’
Except Ava had. Ava had known him for three months before she’d even been aware he had a prosthesis. She hadn’t treated him differently—no pity for the cripple or reverence for the returned war hero. She’d been demanding and snooty and utterly self-absorbed. As testy with him as everyone else around her.
And despite what a pain in the butt she’d been, he suddenly realised how refreshing it had been. How deep down he’d looked forward to going to her place for a slice of equity in a world where everyone in his orbit treated him just a little bit differently than they had before he’d lost his leg. He knew they didn’t mean to or even realise that they were, but he was sensitive to the subtleties.
Would Ava have been so demanding and critical if she’d known he was an amputee? Or would she have made allowances?
‘Yep,’ Ava said. ‘I hear ya.’ She totally understood where he was coming from with that—people never looked past her outside package.
Her palm skated to the end of his thigh and tentatively cupped his stump. His quad tensed and for a moment she thought he was going to pull it away. But he slowly relaxed into her hand and she became aware of its rounded contours.
It felt so...smooth. So...healed. So...innocuous.
Nothing liked the jagged, shredded mess it must have been to have lost it. She shut her eyes against a hundred television images she’d seen over the last decade. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what he’d been through. The trauma. The pain. The loss.
‘Does it hurt?’ she asked after a moment.
Her hand felt cool against the stump and so pretty against the blunt ugliness of it, it took all Blake’s will power not to pull away. ‘No.’
‘Did it?’ she asked. ‘Sorry, of course it did... It’s just that I saw this documentary once, interviewing returned soldiers, and there was this one guy who’d lost a leg and he said he was in so much shock at the time he didn’t feel anything, no pain...nothing. He didn’t even realise his leg had been blown off until he woke up in hospital. He doesn’t have any memory of losing it at all.’
Blake’s screams, never far away, echoed in his head. Unfortunately for him, his memory had perfect recall. ‘It hurt,’ he said grimly. ‘A lot. I screamed like a baby.’
Ava turned at the blatant contempt in his voice. ‘Your leg was blown off,’ she said, frowning at him. ‘That must have been incredibly painful... I can’t even begin to imagine...did you think you didn’t have the right to express that pain?’ She lifted her hand off his leg to his face. ‘Do you think anyone’s going to judge you for that?’
Blake saw compassion and pity in her eyes. Just as he’d seen in countless people over the last three years. And, thanks to his shrink, he’d learned that it was a natural human reaction to a sad and shocking situation. But he still had problems accepting i
t at face value because the truth was he judged himself more harshly than anyone else could have.
‘There were other men injured in the blast, Ava. Men who were my responsibility.’
Ava didn’t need to be a psychiatrist to tell Blake was judging himself plenty. ‘Blake...are you telling me you still have to be a leader when you’re bleeding in the dirt somewhere with a severed leg?’
He stared at her. ‘They were my men. They looked to me.’
Ava’s skin broke out in goose bumps at the utter desolation in his voice and the bleakness in his eyes. ‘Even when you’re injured?’ she asked gently. ‘Wasn’t there some kind of second in command?’
Blake nodded. ‘Yes. He was dead.’ Colin, dead in the dirt beside him.
Ava shut her eyes. Not helping, Ava. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, twisting in his arms, moving, straddling him, settling her butt on the tops of his thighs until they were face to face. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she repeated.
Then she lowered her head and kissed him—slow and sweet. ‘So sorry,’ she whispered against his mouth as she pulled away, hugging him close.
It felt good to have his arms circle her body, bringing her in closer until they were flush, his head nestled against her neck, her chin on top of his head.
‘What was his name? Was he married?’
Blake shut his eyes, dragging in big lungfuls of her sweet-smelling skin, trying to block out the image. ‘Colin,’ he said. ‘And yes, he was married.’
Ava could hear the roughness in his voice and she held him closer for long moments. ‘Do you blame yourself?’ She pulled back to look at him. ‘For him dying?’
Blake looked up into her earnest gaze. That wasn’t an easy question to answer. There was the logical answer. And the emotional one. And they both blurred into each other.
Ava didn’t wait for him to reply. ‘Would he blame you? This...Colin?’