by Rian Kelley
“You guys know of a good deal on tires?”
“No need,” Genny replied. “His message was, ‘You’re good to roll.’”
Ivy felt her eyes flare. There was no fixing that tire, but maybe Jake had managed to find a spare. He’d gone out of his way to do it, too. Again. And it made her a little uncomfortable. It must have shown on her face.
“In the world of man-woman relationships,” Genny said, “this kind of thing is done all the time.”
“But we don’t have a relationship,” Ivy protested.
“Yet. This is the best part,” Genny warned, “when he’s working to win you over. He’ll do the unthinkable—leap tall buildings and all of that. Make a record of it, so you’ll have something to fall back on later. It dries up, all this romance.”
“Now that’s not true,” Stan said. “I still buy my wife flowers for no obvious reason and tell her everyday how lovely she is.”
“That’s why you’ve been married twenty-something years,” Genny pointed out. “You’re a rare breed, Stan.”
“He fixed my car,” Ivy was still stuck on it.
“You’ve got to do better than that, honey,” Genny advised. “Expect the sweet, the nothings and the somethings.”
“This is a something.” It was pretty big to Ivy.
“This is definitely a something. The man knows how to take care of his woman.”
But I’m not his woman. Not yet.
Ivy said good-bye to her friends, grabbed her purse and walked off the floor. She boarded the elevator still feeling that Jake’s gesture was one of trespass. But that was ridiculous. His act of kindness seemed too close, too personal, she argued with herself, because no one, other than Holly, had ever extended themselves so much for her. And maybe she was putting too much weight into Jake’s actions. Fixing her tire was an extension of the man himself—that honor and follow-through she’d already noticed about him—and probably had very little to do with her. Maybe.
By the time she got to the parking garage she was feeling better about the situation.
Jake was a soldier. He helped. He rescued. He restored. It was who he was.
Ivy had never been rescued before. She didn’t realize that it was all-inclusive. That the job wasn’t considered done until the problem was solved. She accepted that. Just as she accepted that people raised in loving homes were conditioned to expect it and that she and Holly, and a whole lot of other people, had to get used to it. And it’s not that Ivy didn’t extend herself in similar ways. Loaning her spare is what got her in this predicament to begin with.
But all that reasoning evaporated when she arrived at her car.
Her Patriot was sporting new tires. Two of them. Not a single, donut-sized spare, but replacement. New tread, shiny black. And her car had been washed, too. The film of dust coating the black paint was gone; the bird spatter, the streaks of desert across her windshield cleaned.
For a moment Ivy lost her equilibrium. She actually felt the world around her tilt a little.
She was overwhelmed. And she didn’t like it.
She felt threatened, but why?
Was it her independence that she’d fought long and hard to achieve and came to covet that she felt was under attack? Or was there more to it than that?
She felt her feet slipping. She leaned backwards to compensate for the sudden change in gravitational pull.
More. There was more going on. Genny’s words fluttered across her mind. Expectations. She was supposed to have them. From the sweet to the grand. Most women not only had them, but made them clear. Ivy knew this. Every time she picked up a fashion magazine there was at least one article addressing ‘what a woman wants’ or ‘how to set and expect…’ Was that part of the problem? Ivy had no expectations?
She definitely had no prior experience with this kind of care. Maybe Jake’s gesture was one more thing to chalk up to ‘the norm,’ as she and Holly called it. If they’d lived a normal childhood, Ivy’s world would not be so rocked now by this extension of kindness.
Yes, she decided. She often found herself tracing emotions back to her childhood. Since leaving Trace and rebuilding her life, she’d gotten much better at identifying them and assigning them the right amount of weight. Baggage—she had to remember when she felt that dread rearing its head, to check her baggage. Like with anything else, she would get better at it with practice.
Ivy took a deep breath and her lungs felt looser. She opened her hand and looked at the key resting in her palm. And after checking her baggage, she decided, she was going to find a way to enjoy her new destination. That would take some practice, too, but she was worth it.
And the thought struck a chord with her. She felt its soft vibration from within, rolling out to her fingertips and down to her toes. Worth. Value. That was the more. Jake treated her like she possessed both. It was also the same old struggle. She’d thought she’d beat that into submission. She could tell herself ten times a day that she had value, that she was a good person with lots to give, but believing it required consistent reminders.
New situations came with new tests. But she was a quick study. It’d only taken her a few hours to get Jake straight in her heart: she was wildly attracted to the man and maybe that was a good thing. He was certainly worth exploring. And that thought thinned the air supply and made her slightly dizzy.
Ivy pressed the button on the key pad that released the door locks. Her headlights flashed and she opened the driver’s door, slid behind the wheel, and sank into the soft upholstery. A car that worked well, that got her from A to B no problem, was a gift. So she took a moment to appreciate it. The Patriot was her first vehicle. When she was a kid, they rarely owned a car, which was probably just as well as her mother was too drunk to drive or to know better. Trace had been stingy with the keys to his pick-up, but he had taught her to drive. When she was still in high school, and had completed the teen driver course, he’d taken her on the back roads until she was ready for her test. Driving was a gift of freedom, of autonomy. And Jake had restored that. That was the complete opposite of threatening her independence. Another way of looking at the situation. A positive spin. Why couldn’t she have gone there first?
Practice, she reminded herself.
She took another breath, opened her eyes, and moved her purse from her lap to the passenger seat. That’s when she noticed the invoice. It was folded neatly in half and propped against the console, where Ivy couldn’t fail to see it. She plucked it from behind the gear shift and scanned the type and numbers.
He’d left her the bill—of course he had. And that made her smile, which was like pulling
a ball of string—the remaining tension in her muscles eased. Jake understood there were boundaries. He’d proven that to her already on the drive to San Diego. When people show you who they are, believe them the first time. When was she going to take her own advice? Ivy dropped her eyes to the bottom line and was relieved to see that the total wasn’t bad at all, after a deep military discount.
Chapter Five
Ivy parked on the street three blocks from her apartment, which wasn’t bad. This close to the water, any kind of land was a premium. She pulled her overnight case from the back of the car and slid her purse over her shoulder before setting the alarm. Then she stood on the sidewalk, her face tilted into the salty wind. Her eyelids fluttered closed. She was tired. She was hungry. She had just six hours before she was due at the rehab center, but this moment was restorative. The damp sea air was like a spritzer.
This afternoon she would work an eight hour shift, taking her well into evening. It’d be midnight by the time she returned to her apartment. The moon would be a huge silver coin in the sky and the sultry air would wrap around her with comforting familiarity. She would sleep for five hours and begin her work day again. Ivy loved her schedule—it was demanding and rewarding and kept her moving forward.
Holly had started working again a year after the accident. Half days at first. She’d told Ivy that s
ome days she started strong but ended up using her cane. It disappointed her, Ivy could tell. But Holly was so happy to have some normalcy back. She was a counselor who dealt with addictive behaviors. Sometimes she helped teens through drug dependency, lately, though, she’d confided in Ivy that many of her clients had cutting or other self-mutilating issues. Holly had talked about an upcoming conference—three days in San Francisco—with keynote speakers whom she respected. They would lay out new strategies for helping adolescents deal with the challenges and pressures in their lives. Holly wanted to go. They had brought up the website and Ivy had encouraged her to sign up. It would be her sister’s first trip since the accident and there would be some unknown challenges to her mobility—things Ivy took for granted, like walking up the skyway. And even if they thought it through, tried to puzzle out every possible roadblock and its solution, they were sure to miss a few. Holly would have to deal with them alone. Ivy knew she could do it. Her sister was ready.
It didn’t surprise Ivy that both she and her sister had ended up in careers where they helped others. Sometimes it’s that shared experience—of having hit bottom, of having nowhere else to go but up—that helped pull another person out.
Holly got as much out of her career as Ivy did. She’d noticed a change in her sister’s spirits since she’d returned to work. And that was probably why Holly had recently moved into a more demanding schedule, adding hours and even home and school visits to support her clients. She had daily physical therapy or gym time with a trainer specializing in sport rehabilitation. Her body was getting stronger and she was getting better with her prosthetic—good enough that she was already being fitted for her sport leg. A plaster mold had been completed and her visits with the prosthetist were coming more frequently. As grueling as Ivy’s schedule was, her sister’s seemed far more exhausting.
Ivy climbed the stairs to her apartment and told herself that she was going to grab a quick snack then climb into bed without thoughts of Jake tempting her into a state of arousal. She’d spent much of her shift fantasizing about the man and right now she needed sleep.
There’s a thin line between confidence and casualty. Jake thought over his words—meant as cautionary advice to Ivy. He had no trouble applying the sentiment to work, and even to family, so why was it so hard for him to apply the sentiment to women? He was thirty years old and had had several meaningful relationships, a few of which he’d thought had the potential to become something more. No one was more surprised than Jake when they fizzled out. Most of the time, he’d come to realize that he had had very little in common with the woman he’d chosen to hold close. He’d moved too fast into relationships that had turned out to have no ballast.
It was the time between ports. It always moved at warp speed, leaving scant seconds to meet, to get to know a woman, and to build a relationship that lasted. So he jumped in like a damn paratrooper, expecting the best and treating any other outcome as nonexistent because failure wasn’t an option. And yet that’s always where they’d ended up.
But he was stateside now for twelve months. He’d peeled through three of those already. Still, it was the longest stretch home that he’d ever had since joining the Marines at twenty-two. He’d have maneuvers to figure in, but they were never played out for more than a week at a time, and a training at Quantico coming up right after Christmas that came with a month’s commitment. But these were obstacles that they could work with.
He and Ivy had common ground. Perhaps their experiences were different—almost certainly they were—but they had earned their emotional maturity.
With Ivy, his plan was to move with about as much speed as a snail. Easier said than
done. He’d never gone from zero to sixty with a woman so fast. Just thinking about her made his balls ache.
Jake laced up his shoe and then burst into a sprint. Ivy was just getting home about now. She was ending her day and his was just beginning. He’d dealt with crazy work hours before, of course. The body adjusted. She’d probably shower, grab a bite to eat, and then fall into bed. He tried not to think about that too much. He definitely wasn’t going into his favorite game of what was she wearing. But damn, she was gorgeous. Long legs and lush breasts and eyes that met challenge, didn’t skitter away from it. She wasn’t afraid to look down the mouth of a lion. That kind of courage was developed over hot coals. It was earned, because it was tested. More than once. And so she was a little fearless and delightfully bold. Those two attributes made his blood quicken.
It was a big draw. He suspected that kind of strength in a woman transferred to other areas of her life. Ivy was a woman who told her man what she wanted and how she wanted it. She probably wouldn’t rely solely on words, would leave out enough details that a man had to make a few discoveries on his own, and was open to exploring some uncharted territory.
Nothing irritated Jake more than to try and figure out a woman who constantly submitted to what she thought he wanted. That kind of game always ended with both parties the losers.
Ivy needed time to decide what she wanted from Jake—aside from the physical. There was no way she could possibly know just minutes into hello. Well, hours really, but he had no intention of rushing things. It all came back to time, and how they used it. Revelations and confidences required trust and trust grew with exposure. If he could keep his dick in his pants they had a chance.
He rounded Hour-Glass Park, passing Marine cadets in their endurance run and college co-eds rushing onto campus. It was a perfect morning, the heat held off by a persistent breeze. In a few hours the sun will have bleached the sky to a paper white and curled the ends of the air, but right now it was as good as it gets end of August and Jake appreciated that. He decided to add a mile to his run, maybe more, let his body absorb the vitamin D and burn off the libido.
She had a handful of cereal at the bottom of the Rice Krispies box and no milk. Ivy poured it into a bowl, anyway, and added a container of vanilla yogurt—her last—and sliced banana. She really needed to get to the grocery store. She sat in a chair next to the open window and enjoyed the cool breeze while she spooned in what amounted to her breakfast. She’d showered and was dressed in a pair of comfy cotton pajama bottoms and tank top. She’d already set the alarm and pulled out a set of clean and pressed scrubs for her shift this afternoon. Still, she felt an electric hum just beneath the surface of her skin. Sometimes she got off shift and was too keyed up to sleep. Today, though, she suspected that Jake was the cause of her heightened senses.
She wondered if he’d felt as turned on as her. She’d witnessed the flush of his skin, the tension in his muscles, but how easy was it for a man to let something like that go? After all, a Marine had discipline. He had control. She had watched Jake use both on that long ride to Children’s. And it made her frown. Her thoughts about him grew talons. Oh, how she would love to break through that iron wall. Touch him and turn him into a shaking mass of need. It was no fun being in that maelstrom of passion alone. So, maybe she had affected him as powerfully as he had her. And he had taken himself in hand to ease his body’s discomfort. Ivy definitely liked that scenario better. Had he thought of her? Naked and beneath him? Or with her legs thrown over his shoulders and driving into her? She’d thought of them both ways and about a dozen other variations on flexibility and possibility.
She left her bowl on the table and spread herself out on the bed. She thought about Jake, dick in hand, eyes closed, as he thought about her, whispered her name, his voice roughened with passion. And in her mind, she replaced his hand with her mouth. He was big and she had to spread her lips wide just to cover his head. His eyes snapped open, liquid fire. His hands wove into her hair, keeping her on her knees before him even as fought for control. She was determined. She flicked her tongue against the velvety knob, swirled it around the ridge of his helmet, sucked him deeper into her mouth and listened to the need rip through his body as he came in a torrent that was red-hot and heady.
At some point Ivy had slipped her han
d beneath her undies and found her slick folds. She had pressed her fingers to her aching clit and then, when she’d had Jake deep in her mouth, she had plunged into her body with one and then two fingers. Plunged and swirled and came in a sticky mess she imaged Jake lapping up and then sharing with her in a kiss that was soul-searing.
She fell asleep promising herself that she would share this moment with Jake at some point. Whisper in his ear all the naughty things she’d done to him in her mind, and some of the things she longed for him to do to her.
Jake finished his run at seven miles. He stood on the balcony at the back of his apartment and drank deeply from a bottle of water while he watched traffic pass below. His view was about as concrete jungle as you could get—a four lane street, strip mall, gas station, a stack of freeway signs and a convenience store. But it was close to base and didn’t break his budget. A few years ago he’d grown tired of barracks living and rented the place, even though he spent a good deal of time out of the country. He needed the space, the distance from everything military. A place to decompress. As an officer, he pulled in a good paycheck. He saved for after, whenever that would be. For the first time in a long time, though, he thought only about now.
As in, right now Ivy was sleeping. Her skin was warm and pliant. And despite his run, his dick was at half-mast just thinking of her. Last night, he had stood in the shower and taken care of his massive hard-on. Only it was Ivy taking care of him and he had lifted her and braced her against the tiled wall and drove into her until they were both screaming with their release.