by LJ Evans
I’d forever associate the perfume with a man who’d worshipped my body, making it vibrate with pleasure I’d never known a man could bring. As he proved he was right, that he knew a woman’s body just like he knew his guns. He knew how to take them apart, oil them with gentle hands, and put them back together. I just hoped he’d do that with me. Put me back together and not leave me in pieces as he moved on.
Nash
I DON’T WANT TO MISS A THING
“I could spend my life in this sweet surrender,
I could stay lost in this moment forever.”
Performed by Aerosmith
Written by Diane Warren
I spent the night trying to prove to Dani I could be what she needed. That she didn’t have to show me, as she’d had to show others, what pleased her―what made her moan. And every time she gasped and her body trembled, I felt the same way I had the day I’d finally gotten my Trident. Proud. Fulfilled. Like having reached the summit of the mountain.
I made her body shake with longing and release over and over with my hands and my tongue and, finally, all of me. Until she was saying my name like a chant. Until she fell asleep, curled with her back up against my chest. Her body quiet and at peace. Like the night I’d watched her sleep in the hotel.
I breathed in the scent of her. Her own lemon and honey fragrance that had once brought back memories of this place, of my childhood, before we’d ever stepped foot on the estate. I buried my face in her neck and her dark tangle of hair, silky and soft, trying to keep my heart from leaping away as a new fear seized me. Fear of losing her like I’d lost my parents. Fear of losing her like I’d lost my brothers in arms.
As my eyes started to drift closed, I realized I had to teach her to defend herself. To defend herself better than anything she’d been taught before, because I couldn’t afford to lose someone else I loved.
That jolted me awake.
The word love circled in the air like an owl hunting its prey.
The clarity that had hit me at the cemetery filled me again. I wanted a reason to come home. Even more, I wanted that reason to be her. And yet, the possibility of embedding my life with this stunning woman’s was still problematic. It was more than the idea of Mac beating me to a pulp that held me back. It was the thought of her feeling what Tristan had each time Darren had left on a mission―as if she couldn’t breathe. How could I do that to her? To anyone? The only reason I wanted her breathless was because of what we’d just done. Because my body was demanding a response from hers.
I didn’t know what that meant for me, or us, or the future I’d always seen as a SEAL. But I wanted her more than I’d wanted anything else in my life. That meant I had to look at the entirety of my world and, perhaps, reimagine it. Adjust the strategy mid-game. Find the path through the rock-strewn hillside.
Those were my last thoughts before sleep finally took me.
When I woke, she’d turned in my arms to face me. Her hand was on my hip and slowly swirling, almost absentmindedly, as if she didn’t even know she was doing it. But my body certainly did, and I came alive, pushing against her stomach. Her clear blue eyes turned up to my face, leaving behind my tattoos and my scars, the parts of me which were so torn that they’d bled together.
“Good morning.” I kissed her forehead, tightening my arms around her.
She smiled a smile I’d never seen on her before. Slow, lazy, full of mischief and desire all at the same time. “A very good morning, indeed,” she said softly.
I couldn’t help the chuckle that rolled through me.
She closed her eyes again, leaning so her forehead was against my chest.
“What?” I asked, worry filling my heart.
She shook her head.
My hand ran up and down her back, trying to soothe her. I twisted my fingers in her hair, gently pulling, forcing her face up so I could examine it once more. She kept her eyes closed at first, and I scoured her beautiful features. Smooth and strong. Quiet and brave.
“Tell me,” I said, knowing it sounded like a demand. A demand that would normally have Dani whipping out her fingers and tongue to give me a lashing, and it only worried me more when she didn’t. She seemed to be fighting emotions, and I didn’t want her to fight them. Just like last night with her body, I wanted her to give in. To surrender to the feelings like I was. So we would surrender together.
She finally opened her eyes, searching mine before saying, “You going to run away again, Otter?”
The Otter let me know she was trying to be flippant, as if it wouldn’t bother her either way.
“If we’re being literal, I wasn’t the one who ran,” I taunted, knowing it would cause her to react, and it did.
Her face flashed with annoyance. She pushed against my chest, but I refused to let her go. She groused at me, “I didn’t run. I left—after you asked me to leave.”
The hand still tangled in her hair tugged again, and my free hand trailed over her cheek and onto her lips, tugging at the bottom one. Full and luscious and red from the amount of kissing we’d done the night before.
“Are you sure I did?” I asked. “It sounds like a rookie move.”
She rolled her eyes, but in many ways, I was a rookie. A rookie to these feelings that bound us together. Emotions I’d never given any woman. I’d never given them to Angie even when I’d dated her the longest. I’d practically moved in with her, and she still hadn’t had the pieces of me Dani now owned.
She searched my face and must have seen the truth there, because she relaxed back into my embrace. Her hand on my chest returned to the slow twirl which had woken me, her fingers tracing the tattoos and scars.
“What does this one mean?” she asked. I glanced down at the ancient knife tearing its way into a book.
“Turn your wounds into wisdom,” I told her.
She looked up at me as if surprised. “It’s a quote? Who said it?”
I laughed. “Oprah Winfrey.”
A smile curled her full lips upward.
“Okay, what about this one?” she asked, landing on a mirror that reflected the word “live” written in sand.
“Life can only be understood backward; but it must be lived forward,” I told her. The words had meant something different when I’d had them scored on me, and their meaning slammed into me in a new way in the morning light with Dani in my arms.
“Is that Confucius?” she asked.
I grinned. “Soren Kierkegaard.”
“Don’t know him.”
“He was a philosopher.”
She landed on the branch of a lemon tree. The fruit was surrounded by vines that were squeezing, but the liquid dripping from it was tears instead of juice. “This?” she asked breathlessly, as if knowing it would cause me pain. And it did. More than when it had been etched with needles and ink.
“Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.” My voice clogged on the emotions. “George Elliott.”
“You’re pretty smart, Otter,” she said, the tease of the words not matching her tone. I didn’t respond. She continued to run a hand over each tattoo, taking them in and memorizing them like I memorized so many things in my life—strategies, numbers, words, mission plans. She asked me about many of them; others she didn’t.
She finally landed on the chess piece near my heart, the knight so similar to the one in the library downstairs, but this one was nailed to its board with thorns.
She didn’t ask about the tattoo, but Kierkegaard’s words, “This piece cannot be moved,” still echoed through my brain. She smoothed her hand on the small scar that twined into the piece. The scar was jagged—not quite round, not quite straight.
There were so many scars on my body—some under the tattoos, some over them—that they seemed just another way of telling my history, each one a learning moment at the academy, or at BUD/S, or on a mission. And it was strange that she’d focused on that one little scar both the night before and t
his morning.
“Did you get this at the same time?” she asked, moving from the small scar to the huge one along my shoulder and collarbone.
“No,” I said, and I would have stopped there, except Tristan’s words were haunting me. Tell her everything. Anything. It required a different sort of bravery to give the things inside me and trust, like my SEAL brothers who looked after my body, that she would look after my heart. “That’s from my blood wings.”
“Blood wings?” she asked, a confused frown appearing on her face that I attempted to rub away with my thumb.
“The day you pass the Trident board and they finally give you your bird, the team congratulates you by pinning it on and then proceeding to pound their hands on it. All of them. Repeatedly. Over and over again until it’s embedded into you as it should be. A way of life. Something you can’t ever change. You are a SEAL whether the actual piece of metal is there or not.”
Her eyes widened, and her fingers ran over the scar softly again, as if she could sand it away with a gentle touch. But she couldn’t. It was me.
“That must have hurt.”
There was nothing to be said to that.
“I’ve played with the idea of getting a tattoo,” she told me.
“Why haven’t you?” I asked.
“It seemed so… clichéd. Getting a tattoo to remember that you… survived.” She said the word survived as if it were a snake or a rat. As if it were something you were supposed to run from.
“Surviving isn’t nothing, Athena,” I said. She rolled her eyes. “Nietzsche says, ‘To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.’ I’ve forgotten that recently. You’re reminding me of it.”
She twitched in my arms, almost as if I’d stabbed her, and I wanted to apologize for it. To apologize for every hurt I’d sent her way, starting with the one I’d given her when I’d asked her to leave.
“I’m sorry I asked you to walk away that morning at Tristan’s.”
Saying Tristan’s name was like flicking the shutters closed on a window. Dani’s soft look was replaced with business Dani. Daniella. The ever-efficient professional. She pushed against my chest again, and I let her go.
“I have a lot to do today,” she said, moving to the edge of the bed. I sat up, leaving the sheets behind and wrapping my legs around her middle and my arms around her chest, trying to figure out how to bring back the woman who’d spoken my name like a prayer.
“You’re running,” I said, a whisper in her ear, before nibbling on the soft lobe and then placing kisses down her neck and onto her shoulder.
The tension in her body eased slightly, and she relaxed back against my chest, placing a kiss on the arm I had around her. I slowed my kisses at her neck, moving a hand to her breast, kneading, twisting, pulling. I was rewarded with a gasp and her breath coasting over my arm.
“Shower with me?” I asked.
She stilled before nodding, and I took it as the step forward it was. Her staying, me staying. I led her into the bathroom where I made her come apart with my hands and my body a few more times before we had to face the world.
As I dug through my dresser to pilfer any clean clothes I could find, she wrapped her arms around my waist, watching me shuffle through the old clothes. I pulled out an ancient pair of sweats and an even older Green Day T-shirt. She snaked out a hand to take an Aerosmith T-shirt. They were all from a time in my life when I thought concerts and skateboarding were my future. She slid the shirt over her head, and the look of her in my shirt was enough to make me want to take her back into bed and forget there was anything she had to do today.
A rumble escaped my lips, and she kissed me before laughing and pulling herself away. “I have to get to work.” She gave me a once-over as I slid on the beat-up clothes. “What is this look?”
“It’s the I-have-to-do-laundry look.” I grinned at her, searching for my clothes we’d tossed around the room and placing them in the hamper I’d set by the door.
“I have things to wash as well. When I’m done for the day, maybe you can show me where the laundry room is at?”
“Just give them to me; I’ll throw them in with mine,” I said.
She laughed at first, but then, noting my lack of a smile, said, “You’re serious.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“They’re female clothes. Some of them can’t just be tossed in the washer and the dryer without a care.”
“Athena, I’ve been doing female laundry for a while now. Even before living at Tristan’s, I practically lived with Angie.”
Her brow creased, and I realized I’d said the wrong thing again—other women’s names coming off my lips after hers had been on them all night. She turned and headed for the door, but I leaped over the hamper and grabbed her, pulling her hard to my chest.
“Ask me; don’t run,” I growled.
“What if I don’t want to ask you?” she said, chin up, confidence hiding her true feelings.
“You do,” I told her, and it caused her to bristle.
“You and your SEAL ego. Even if I did want to ask, I don’t have time right now. I have things to do. I’m already hours behind,” she said.
“Fine, give me your laundry, go get things done, and then we’ll work on your self-defense skills. Afterward, you can ask me all the things you need to ask.”
“Excuse me? Did you say self-defense skills? Because I will have you know my father taught me plenty of self-defense skills. I’ve even drawn blood a few times.”
She did have moves. She’d escaped Fenway in an elevator when he was twice her size, but thoughts of the asshole senator only made me more determined to teach her.
“Trust me, I’ll be able to show you things he didn’t.”
Her eyes flared. “Challenge accepted.”
I laughed, and she left my room in nothing but a T-shirt. I followed, glancing both ways down the hallway to make sure that neither Carson nor Maribelle were there to witness her nearly naked body walking three doors down.
When we got to her room, she grabbed a hamper from the closet that matched the one in my hand. As she passed it over to me, she said, “No one has done my laundry except me since my mom taught us all as teens. Is this some strange way of trying to charm me more? You already got me in your bed.”
“Maybe I want to continue to charm you,” I said as I took her hamper and stepped back into the hallway. She looked both directions down the length of it like I had moments before.
“What?” I asked.
“I was just wondering what you’ve done with the real Nash Wellsley. If you find him, can you remind him I’d really like him to repeat that thing he did with his tongue and my―”
I kissed her, dropping the hampers and pushing inside her mouth to let her know I remembered exactly what I’d done with my tongue. I stabilized her before stepping away, removing all my body parts from hers. I grabbed the hampers and headed down the hall.
“Remind Dani that this real Nash expects her to be ready for class in exactly three hours.”
“You can’t time me. I have actual work to do,” she hollered after me.
“Three hours,” I said and whistled my way down the stairs as she slammed her door in response. There was a grin on my face that hadn’t been there in much longer than a year. Maybe never. Maybe since I was thirteen.
♫ ♫ ♫
Exactly three hours later, I walked up the veranda steps from my check-in with the security system in the basement and opened the French doors off the library. She was sitting at Carson’s desk in my T-shirt, but she’d partnered it with a pair of leggings she hadn’t given me to wash. She was barefoot, one foot curled up under her on the desk chair, the other tapping away to something she was listening to in her earbuds.
I slid up behind her and kissed her on the top of the head.
“Holy shit,” she said, jumping a mile and banging my lip into my teeth hard enough to draw blood.<
br />
She turned, hand to her heart, and watched as I stuck my finger on my lip.
“Well, damn, you were the first one to draw blood,” I teased.
She put her finger on my lip as well. “I’m so sorry, but Jesus, you need to stop scaring me like that.”
I held her finger, kissing it.
“Self-defense rule number one: always be prepared for the sneak attack.”
She rolled her eyes, and I looked back to the book she had open on her computer screen. I smirked. “That doesn’t look like work.”
“Well, someone gave me a time limit, so I hurried through everything and finished early. If I get fired for doing a sloppy job, it’s on you.”
“You’re never sloppy,” I said. She shrugged away the compliment.
I pulled the computer closer to read the title, and she tried to swipe it away before I got a look at it, which only increased my curiosity. I pulled it over her head and laughed upon seeing the words.
“Why are you reading this?”
“Research,” she said, one hand on her hip, the other stuck out for the laptop.
“About snipers?”
She nodded. “You know. Get-to-know-your-enemy kind of thing.”
“Now I’m the enemy?”
I took a step toward her, and she moved away from the desk. “Well, for the purpose of this activity you are.”
“And you think you can figure me out from a book?” She was still backing away, but I was a hunter. I’d been a hunter long before I’d become a sniper, but the two skills had merged, and I knew exactly how to give chase.
“You’d be surprised,” she said and then turned and ran.
I dropped the computer onto the desk and pursued her. She darted up the stairs, and I followed while images of me racing another woman filled my head. Images of my mother, with her long dark hair streaming behind her just like Dani’s. One thing was sure, there would be no doubt about who won this race. Dani was giving it her best shot, but I was stronger and faster. I caught her around the middle before she even reached the top step.
She kicked and threw her arms around wildly, and I held her until she stopped, and then I turned her and kissed her until my heart—that was normally even during any kind of chase—was beating a wild pace that matched hers. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement and quickly placed myself between Dani and the unknown. When I looked up, it was just Maribelle with a huge smile on her face.