Was that possible?
Sound had traveled better through the door than through the wall. While she’d definitely heard Declan talking to Tracy in the hallway, nothing Emmy had heard had been distinct once the couple went into Tracy’s room. A male voice. A female voice. It could have been Declan and Tracy in the hallway, and Tracy and another man in the room.
Or Declan could just be thinking fast and inventing a plausible lie.
But she remembered that he had ignored or rebuffed Tracy’s advances earlier that night. And that seemed to lend credence to his claim that her flirting hadn’t gotten her any further with him in the hallway than it had previously.
Emmy stared at him, seeing how completely unflustered he was—nothing like she would have expected from a guilty man—and it made her wonder if she’d jumped to a mistaken conclusion.
It had been a logical one, given what she’d heard, she consoled herself. But still...
Was it possible that she’d misconstrued something again? This time taking it to an extreme negative rather than an extreme positive?
“You didn’t take the Brazilian bombshell up on what she was offering?” she said dubiously because if he was lying, she didn’t want to seem too easily swayed.
He laughed lightly. “The Brazilian bombshell?”
That had been a slip of the tongue. Emmy had only ever referred to her sister’s friend like that to Carla, and it was a little embarrassing to have Declan hear it.
She didn’t know quite how to handle that, though, so she merely gave another indifferent shrug. After all, the name really did fit Tracy—who was from Brazil and most definitely had the body and the fashion sense of a Las Vegas showgirl.
It worked because Declan went on to answer her question. “No, I did not take the Brazilian bombshell up on her offer. I wasn’t interested before I left you at your door, and I wasn’t interested after either.”
He said that as if it was a plain and simple fact, without any desperation to convince her. Which gave his words more of a ring of truth.
Emmy was uncomfortably aware of her penchant for letting her imagination run away with her. And as she sat there studying him, she thought about how perplexed—and slightly peeved—he’d been when they’d encountered each other in the hotel lobby the next morning. About his questions as to why she hadn’t shown up for their breakfast date. About his claim that he’d waited for her for over an hour.
Even at the time she’d been surprised to learn that he hadn’t lingered with Tracy for too long to make the date.
It made more sense that he hadn’t had an all-night romp and had merely left his own—empty—bed in time for breakfast.
It also made sense that he hadn’t slept with Tracy after the way he’d failed to show any interest in her despite her flirting throughout all the wedding events.
Plus Emmy couldn’t say that there was anything leading up to that muffled encounter outside her hotel room door, or anything after it, that pointed to Declan being the kind of man who would say good-night to her and then hop into bed with someone he’d been shunning the rest of the evening. Nothing that said he was any kind of a sleazeball, let alone a great big fat one.
“You really didn’t spend the night with her...” Emmy said, more statement than question.
Still, Declan answered it. “I really didn’t spend the night with her. Or with anyone else. I went up to my own room and hit the sack—alone, and looking forward to breakfast with you...”
Simple, clean, no more to it than that. But as was her pattern—the pattern she was trying so hard to break—she’d taken it much, much further than that in her own imagination. And thanks to the way she’d jumped to conclusions, she’d missed out on having breakfast with him.
You pay some high prices for building things up in your mind, Em, she silently said to herself.
Then it occurred to her that he’d been the one not to do anything wrong, which meant he hadn’t earned the rude rebuff she’d dished out when they’d met in the lobby after she’d stood him up...
“I guess I owe you an apology,” she said with a bit of embarrassment.
“For leaving me hanging for breakfast? Yes, you do,” he responded lightly, clearly without any lingering offense.
“I’m sorry for that,” she said by rote.
“And for thinking I’m—”
“A great big fat sleazeball for four years,” she finished for him, knowing where he was headed.
He grinned. “And how about that crack you made last night? Something about how maybe I should take Mindy Hargrove to Kinsey’s wedding—unless I’d just be looking for another bridesmaid... That was a jab at what you thought I’d done with Tracy, wasn’t it?”
“Kind of.”
He nodded knowingly. And waited.
So she sighed, once more took a tone of forced patience that she might use on Trinity, and said, “I’m sorry for the jab, too.”
“Apologies accepted,” he decreed.
Emmy wanted to change the subject and avoid any more talk of the wedding and her mistake, so she said, “Now I have a question for you.”
“Shoot,” he said as if he had nothing to hide.
“Last night when you asked me if Bryce was a sore subject and I said aren’t most breakups, you said not in your experience...”
“Yeah...” he said.
“Does that mean that your breakups aren’t sore subjects?” Because she couldn’t help being curious about his past relationships—and if they weren’t sore subjects for him then maybe she could do a little digging.
He shrugged both of those brawny shoulders. “I don’t know why they would be.”
“Because breakups can be painful and ugly?”
“I haven’t had any of those.”
“Come on,” she cajoled dubiously.
“Okay, I take that back. I did have one bad breakup. My first one,” he admitted, sobering slightly. “With Hanna Sandoval.”
“Your first love? If you tell me you were in preschool and that that was the only bad breakup you’ve ever had—”
He cut her threat short. “I was seventeen—old enough that I should have known better,” he said ominously.
“Why?”
“By then things between me and the ‘good’ people of Northbridge weren’t all neat and tidy the way they were last night. And Hanna... Well, she was the sheriff’s daughter—a cheerleader, homecoming queen two years running, she volunteered with the elderly and at the hospital, babysat the mayor’s kids. As much as I was the town devil, she was the town darling. I should have known going in that it was doomed, that being with her could only make things around here worse.”
“But you got together anyway.”
“She picked me as her study partner in chemistry.”
“And study partner turned into first love and she became your high school sweetheart?”
He scowled at that and it delighted Emmy that he hated her putting a sappy spin on it.
“Study partners was where it started and yeah, it grew into more than that,” he said, using the terms he obviously preferred.
“It grew into a lot more,” she guessed.
“We were hot and heavy. But in secret.”
“Why?”
“Because I was the town devil and she was the town darling,” he repeated as if that should have been a given.
“Was that the attraction—the secrecy, the forbidden love? Or was it real?”
His eyebrows arched again. “Seemed real. Felt real. Having to sneak around was just...lousy. But her father was the sheriff and we both knew he didn’t have any use for me, so we kept it quiet.”
“Until?”
“We had a pregnancy scare.”
Emmy’s delight at goading him disappeared. “You had a baby with her?”
He shook his h
ead. “It was a false alarm, but before we knew that she felt like she had to tell her parents and...” He shrugged once more. “It was definitely ugly,” he said, referring to Emmy’s earlier comment about breakups. “Even uglier than I thought it would be, to tell you the truth. Her old man didn’t just hate me because he thought I was a troublemaker. When Hanna told him she’d been seeing me, he went berserk, threatened to throw me in jail, get me expelled, run me out of town. He said he wasn’t letting one of Alice’s—Alice was my mom’s name—one of Alice’s bastards ruin his daughter—”
“He was in the Greg Kravitz camp.”
“Apparently so. I knew he didn’t like me, but he’d taken me down to the station after fights a dozen times before and never once had he said a word against my mother. I guess he couldn’t keep his prejudices under wraps when he thought I’d gotten his daughter pregnant. It did kind of explain why he was always so ready to believe things between me and Kravitz were my fault—he considered me the scum of the earth.”
Declan paused, then went on, “Anyway, thank God for Hugh. He threw back as many threats to the sheriff as the sheriff threw at me—abuse of power and unlawful restraint and a lot of stuff that I’m not sure was even real—but it kept me out of jail and in school.”
“And when the pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm?”
“Sheriff Sandoval laid down the law with Hanna—she wasn’t supposed to ever so much as say hello to me again. But it didn’t really matter. She told me that before the scare she’d been about to break up with me. That I was just her bad-boy phase—the gist of it was that she was finished slumming...”
Emmy flinched. “No!” she said, hating that the Camden issue had come into play with his first love on top of everything else it had infected.
“Yeah, made me feel pretty stupid for thinking there was any more to it on her part,” he admitted.
Because there had been more to it on his part, Emmy thought. But what she said was “It must have hurt.”
Declan shrugged that off, too, but Emmy didn’t believe it had been easy for him. “I only had about six more months here after that. I went to school, stuck even closer to home the rest of the time... It did make me all the more happy to get the hell out of here when graduation day finally came, though.”
“I’m sorry, Declan.”
He chuckled. “This is ancient history we’re talking about, you know?”
“Still. Do they live here now?” she asked.
“They actually moved out of town a couple of weeks before I left—Sandoval got a job somewhere in Idaho.”
“Good,” Emmy said.
But hearing about the rocky road of his first love didn’t satisfy her curiosity about his adult relationships. In fact, it made her wonder how that rocky road might have influenced them. And since he was intent on not making a big deal out of that long-ago romance, she moved on with her questioning.
“What about once you left here? Have you not let anyone get close to you since then?” she asked, thinking that she couldn’t blame him if he hadn’t.
“Hanna didn’t scar me for life, if that’s what you’re thinking. There were a couple of girls in college and I’ve had my share of relationships since then. Just nothing that’s gotten too serious.”
“Because you haven’t let it?”
“Just because it hasn’t happened. It’s not like I come across a lot of women on a daily basis—there are some that I work with, but there are regulations against fraternizing with anyone under my command. When I do meet someone and something starts...well, about the time it gets going I deploy, and there’s a long gap with pretty sparse contact. By the time I might be able to pick things up again there just hasn’t been anything left to pick up. Being involved with someone in the military means a lot of waiting around for them.”
Emmy couldn’t dispute that. “Yeah, sometimes I didn’t know how Mandy could do it.”
“Topher was lucky,” Declan concluded. “And then, too, I can’t say I’ve put a lot of energy into finding anyone who might be interested in making it work. I’ve always just figured it’ll happen or it won’t.”
“Don’t you want it to?”
“I’ve been okay just coasting, I guess. Up until now I’ve thought of the marines as my family... I mean, along with my siblings. And I guess so far it’s filled the bill.”
He was looking out at the farm and there was something in his expression, in the almost fondness for the place that she thought she saw there, that made Emmy wonder something else. “There are a lot of past tenses in that—you’ve been okay coasting, up until now you’ve thought of the marines as your family. So far other things have filled the bill...” she said. “Are you changing your mind?”
“I don’t know. I’ve put everything into the service, into where it feels like I belong. To tell you the truth, the idea of getting too serious with anyone has always seemed like signing on to answer two masters. I wouldn’t want my wife—or kids if I had them—to feel like they weren’t my first priority, you know? So instead I’ve just devoted myself to the marines and enjoyed casual relationships with women. But seeing for myself what Topher had? What he would have come home to?”
He turned to look at her, the small smile returning, his eyes holding hers. “I gotta say—now that I think about it—being here, seeing all Topher had... What I’m going back to doesn’t seem as... I don’t know, as full, I guess. Or maybe that’s just because Topher won’t be there...”
He’d been in such a better mood recently, and Emmy didn’t want to see his doldrums return, so she quickly moved on from his reference to his lost friend. “You could go back and look for someone willing to wait around for a military man,” she suggested quietly, hating the idea of him with someone else but wanting to present him with something hopeful to counter his darker feelings.
It worked, because he laughed the laugh she liked. “I haven’t thought about anything but getting myself in shape to go back.” But then he was looking at her with something new in his eyes. Something that seemed all about her when he added, “Until lately...”
Emmy warned herself not to read too much into that. But just as she mentally cautioned herself, he closed the small distance between them and kissed her.
He kept his hands to himself and only his mouth found hers in a kiss that was more like a first kiss than their actual first kiss had been. At least that’s how it started—lips barely parted and the unspoken question in it that left the opportunity for her to cut him off.
But that was the last thing Emmy wanted to do when she’d spent the past twenty-four hours just wanting to kiss him again.
And now there they were.
So she answered that unspoken question by leaning into the kiss.
And when that was the answer she gave, he took the kiss a step further and once again sent his tongue to play, his hands to cup her head.
She’d tried all day to tell herself that their first kiss might not have been as good as she remembered. But she realized now that she’d only been kidding herself. The man could definitely kiss! And that tongue of his? He rolled it just so and made it a little wicked, enticing her all the more.
Her hands had ached to reach for him again so she did, laying her fingers on his chest until he dropped his to her back, wrapping her in arms that pulled her toward him and urged her arms around him, too.
Not that having his broad shoulders and sinewy back under her palms was a letdown because it so, so wasn’t. Any more than having his hands splayed on the flat of her back was.
Those big hands held her with just the right amount of pressure, of command, his long fingers pressing into her in a sublime massage as his mouth opened even wider over hers and the kiss grew hotter and hotter by the minute.
Hot enough to burn away Emmy’s better judgment and leave her a mass of quivering, yearning flesh crying out for his hands on
more than her back.
Her breasts swelled to the limits of the lacy bra she’d put on after her shower, feeling as if they were threatening to burst through the cups with the hard points of nipples shouting for attention from him.
Even her thighs seemed to have a mind of their own, spreading enough so that when Declan pulled her nearer still and up onto his lap, there was a place for him as she straddled him.
On they went, kissing with abandon. Emmy found the bottom of his T-shirt, sliding her hands underneath it so she could feel not just his powerful back but the warm, sleek skin that contained the muscles that made it so powerful.
That initial meeting of her hands to his skin caused him to groan faintly, a sound of pleasure that made her smile.
And want even more from him.
Which she thought he might give when he took his own turn at sliding his hands under both layers of her shirts.
He delivered, boldly unhooking her bra and bringing both hands around to cup her breasts as if he’d read her mind and knew she wanted him to.
Kissing wasn’t his only talent as he showed her the skills of hands that had no timidity, hands that kneaded her flesh and teased her nipples into diamond-hard crests that screamed for even more attention.
And then there was more after a moment when he took his hands away, clasped her hips to pull her tight against him and then deserted her mouth and finessed her shirts and bra up above one breast to kiss his way to her nipple.
The cool night air was chilly on her bare skin, adding an even greater component to her arousal. Her back arched and there was a moment’s delay before she realized that the moan she heard had come from her this time.
The Marine's Family Mission Page 15