One Warm Winter

by Jamie Pope

  She moved her hand so she could feel the scars on his back. He stiffened slightly, almost as if he were in pain, but she wasn’t hurting him. The scars were nasty, but they were old. He was still a young man. He must have seen so much in his short life. “Who hurt you?” she whispered, her lips grazing his ear.

  “Don’t ask me that.” He looked her in the eye and she could see hardness there. “You don’t want or need to know.”

  Chapter 6

  Cullen lay in his bed later that night, unable to sleep. He should be passed out. Wyn was. She had fallen asleep right after they came back from dinner. A day in the sun and water had a way of draining the energy out of a person and lulled them into a good, deep sleep. It was what Wyn needed. She looked so sweet when he went to check on her and so vulnerable, her body curled up in her bed.

  He had the urge to kiss her face and pull the blankets more tightly around her, but he didn’t, because he knew he could touch her no more for the day. He had filled his quota of her.

  The next few weeks were going to drive him mad. He couldn’t get the image of her in that bikini out of his head. She was a beautiful woman. He had thought that from the day he had met her, but he never imagined her to look like that beneath her clothes. Not model-like beautiful like Jazz. But naturally gorgeous. Unassumingly sexy. The kind that snuck up on you and gut-punched you.

  And she had worn white. White against that light brown skin that had grown increasingly sun-kissed as the day went on. And that bikini top that was tied in a bow, right between her breasts, just begging to be untied, begging for a revelation.

  He grew hard every time he thought about it. She had shocked him at the beach when she undressed. He felt like a randy teenage boy again, but more than that, he didn’t want anyone looking at her. He didn’t even want to see her, so he took her deep into the water, thinking that would cool him down, but it was probably a bigger mistake, because he got to feel her breasts pressed against him and her legs wrapped around him. He got to feel her fingers graze down the scars on his back and her lips on his ear. He had been so incredibly erect then. She hadn’t known. Her legs were wrapped too high around his waist.

  There was no denying his attraction to her or the heavy guilt he felt experiencing it. She was supposed to be his principal and to want to touch her, to peel her clothes off, to run his lips all over her curves and bends, broke every rule.

  What made it worse, what made his guilt pound in his chest, was that he had spoken to her father tonight.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  “She wants to hear from you, sir.”

  “I can’t speak to her.”

  He wanted to ask why, but it wasn’t his place to question his boss. “She is used to working. She doesn’t know what to do with herself.”

  “I know . . . She’s like me that way. I worked my ass off until I got to where I needed to be. She doesn’t need to work. She needs to play.”

  “She needs to know the truth, sir. From you.”

  “Whelan, are you telling me what I should do with my own daughter?” There was an edge in his voice.

  “No, sir. Wyn is no biddable girl. She’s smart. She’ll find out.”

  “She won’t have time to dig if you keep her distracted.”

  Cullen felt his gut clench. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Whatever you have to do, damn it. I wired money into your account. You give her what she needs, even if she doesn’t know she needs it.”

  She needed her own damn father to speak to her. She needed reassurance. But Bates was garbage. “How long do you think it will be, sir? I can’t keep her here forever. She’ll get restless. You know her.”

  “Just until I get to the bottom of the leak and sort this thing with her birth mother out.”

  “She wasn’t adopted, was she?”

  “She’s mine. But I suspected you knew that already. You were former military intelligence.”

  He shouldn’t care. His job was to keep Wynter safe, to keep her occupied. Not to care about the details of her life. He had never cared about the personal lives of anyone he had worked for before. But for some reason he did care about Wyn’s and he was more than curious about what the truth was behind the scandal.

  He had hung up the phone with his boss hours before, but sleep never came. Just thoughts of Wynter and how he was going to get through the next few weeks.

  There was a knock on his door. He hadn’t locked it tonight. He hadn’t even closed it all the way this time.

  He sat up, placing a pillow on his lap to hide his manhood and he opened a book that he kept on his end table before he told her to come in.

  He was glad he had the pillow over him because her nightwear almost caused him to groan aloud. It was a simple baby blue nightie, but the material was so thin that he could nearly see through it. He could see the outline of her breasts and that her nipples were hard and standing at attention. His eyes scrambled up to her face when he realized that he was staring at her body just a little too long. “What’s the matter, Wyn?”

  “I didn’t mean to bother you, but I saw that your light was on and I was wondering if you had an extra blanket.”

  “Are you cold? You can turn down the AC. You have full run of the house.”

  “I sleep better when the room is cold. I just like to swaddle myself in blankets.”

  “There’s a little closet in my bathroom. You should find a blanket there.”

  She nodded and he watched her walk away. He would have gotten up and gotten it for her, but if he did she would see how affected he was by her. He’d rather her think he was inconsiderate.

  “You’ve got a huge tub in here,” he heard her say.

  “I do. I told you, you should have taken this room.”

  “My room is more than lovely,” she said, reemerging from the bathroom. “I wasn’t taking your bed.”

  “But I feel like shit every time you go into that room and I come into this one.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you deserve better.”

  She tilted her head and studied him. “Why do you think that? I’m comfortable and I have everything I need. Why do I deserve more than anyone else? Because my father is paying you? The luck of the draw is the only reason I grew up having what I have. I’m no better than you. You’ve risked your life to protect others. For the last twenty-eight years I have simply existed.”

  And that right there was why he liked her. She wasn’t entitled. She could have been. It seemed almost impossible that she wasn’t. He wasn’t a fan of her father, but maybe he had raised her right. He had raised her to be kind and generous and sweet. “You’ve more than existed. Don’t sell yourself short.”

  She gave him a little smile. “I don’t want to bother you. I’ll get out of your hair now.”

  “You aren’t bothering me. I can’t sleep.” It sounded, even to his own ears, like an invitation to stay. But he didn’t want her to stay. Hell, he didn’t want her in the same house as him. She looked too alluring. She smelled too sweet. She made his hands ache with the need to run themselves all over her body.

  “Is something on your mind?”

  “Yes.”

  You.

  She set the blanket down on the edge of the bed and climbed in next to him. He wished she hadn’t done that. His body became even more aware of hers. He wasn’t sure what was wrong with him. He had been around her before. He had seen her every single day for the past year, but something had changed. Or maybe nothing changed. Maybe these feelings just intensified. Maybe they had been dormant inside of him. Maybe seeing her at her most vulnerable made him want to protect her even more.

  “You want to talk?”

  “About why I can’t sleep?” he asked, looking at her.

  “About anything. I’m surprised you stay awake during my lectures. If you need to get to sleep fast I can tell you the etymology of some words.”

  “I quite like your lectures. Especially the one about the evolution of word
s over time. I never went to university. I feel like I’m getting an education.”

  “You were just a kid when you joined the military. Were you scared?”

  “I was, but anything was better than living with my arsehole father.”

  “Was it that bad?”

  “Yes,” he simply said.

  “Do you miss Northern Ireland?”

  “I grew up in Belfast. There are parts of my country that are so beautiful that you’ll want to cry, but I didn’t grow up there. It was poverty and violence where I lived. I haven’t stepped foot back there since I left.”

  “There’s no family there you want to see?”

  “I think about the little ones every now and again.” He shook his head. “I guess they aren’t so little any more. They’re in their twenties now.”

  “Your siblings?”

  “Yes. Maeve and Liam. My aunt took them out of Northern Ireland when my mum died. They lived a very nice life.”

  “And she didn’t take you?”

  “No, I was fifteen. I could look after myself. Besides, my pop wouldn’t have let me go.”

  “Why not?”

  “He didn’t want to be alone.”

  She made a soft noise and inched closer to him, her shoulder brushing his. “Will you take me to the market tomorrow?”

  “I’ll take you wherever you want to go. Just say the word. You know that.”

  “You’re saying that as if nothing has changed in the past forty-eight hours.”

  “What’s changed?” he asked, already knowing.

  “We’re in bed together in the middle of the night and neither one of us is wearing many clothes. You know things changed the moment we arrived on this island.”

  “I’m trying to pretend they haven’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it makes things more complicated.”

  She surprised him by getting on her knees and cupping his face in her gentle hands and pressing her lips to his forehead. They lingered there for a long moment. He shut his eyes briefly. Warm, soft lips on his skin. He had been kissed before, but never like this. At least not since he was a kid. It was odd . . . It was comforting . . . And because it was her, he found it arousing.

  “Sometimes things just have to be complicated,” she whispered.

  She climbed off his bed and left the room with the blanket she had come for, closing the door behind her. He sat there for a moment, his skin still tingling from her lips, his body buzzing from her nearness.

  He wanted her. There was no denying that. But he would have to deny himself the pleasure of her body. She was his to protect. To take care of. She wasn’t there to satisfy his needs. He would have to find somebody else for that. But tonight he would have to take care of it himself. He slipped his hand into his underwear and took his erection in his hand. He touched himself, thinking about her, wanting things he knew could never have.

  “How long do you think we can keep this from her?”

  Wynter sat on the floor in the hallway just outside of her father’s study, straining to listen to the discussion on the other side of the door.

  Her father had finally come home. This year he would be there for her birthday. He had promised this time. He was to be her birthday present. The only thing she had wanted was one weekend with him and her mother as a family. She had been so excited when she had heard from their housekeeper that he had arrived. She stopped her violin lesson and ran down to his study to meet him, but the door was closed and she heard her mother’s muffled voice coming through the wall. Mother never raised her voice. Wynter wasn’t even sure she had ever heard her yell, but now she was yelling. The walls were thick in the house, but Wynter could hear her.

  “She’s going to want to know where she came from.”

  Wynter couldn’t hear her father’s reply. He didn’t yell back. He wouldn’t yell back. But she wished he would. She wanted to know what he was saying.

  Were they talking about her? They had to be. Who else? She had been asking her mother if they could go to South Africa this summer. She wanted to see the orphanage where she was rescued from. She wanted to meet the people who had taken care of her. And she hoped . . . even though she had never said a word about it to anyone, that her parents would see another child there, one who was just like her and take them home.

  She was born during apartheid. According to what she had been told, she had been born a crime. It had been illegal for black and white people to love each other, illegal for them to create a life, to even live near each other. It sounded so horrible to her. It had sounded like a horrible place, but it was a beautiful one and she wanted to see it. See the nice people there. She wanted a brother or sister. Someone to play with. Someone else to love. She didn’t want another horse, or some expensive thing she would never use. She wanted to not feel so lonely. Or so very alone in the world.

  But no one would take her to her homeland. No one would even talk to her about it. Wyn kept asking. But maybe she should be asking why they wouldn’t take her there instead.

  She strained to hear her parents’ voices, but her mother had stopped yelling. Heavy footsteps came pounding toward the door. She scrambled to her feet and ran around the corner, her heart pounding. She didn’t know why she ran. She should have been braver. She should have walked into that office and demanded to know what they were talking about, what was the truth. But she hid around that corner, too scared to confront them. And she hated herself for it.

  Wynter smiled at Jack as he sat at the counter in the kitchen of the community house. Cullen had taken her to a supermarket that morning, where she stocked up on vegetables, spices, and healthier snacks for the community house. They all seemed to eat like teenaged boys there, even Jazz. It made her wonder how Jazz kept her body looking so incredible. It also made her a little bit jealous in more ways than one. No one was ever alone here if they didn’t want to be.

  She loved the idea of a community kitchen. Of sharing what they had with each other.

  The story of how this place came to be was one she still didn’t know, but she would like to. They needed each other, it seemed, and they needed this place because they didn’t fit anywhere else in the world.

  “You’re going to spoil us, Miss Wyn,” Jack told her with his gleaming white smile. “King is the only other one who likes to cook here and there’s just so much grilled meat a man can take. Plus, no one likes to stare at his ugly ass in the kitchen. You are a much more beautiful sight.”

  “I’m not ugly,” King complained. “I just ain’t a pretty boy like you. Throw a wig and a dress on you and half the men in my unit would have tried to date you.” King, who was in charge of chopping the veggies for the pasta salad she was making, popped another piece of cucumber in his mouth.

  “King,” Wyn said, “I don’t think you’re ugly, but if you keep eating everything you’re chopping, there won’t be anything left to make the salad with.”

  “I’m sorry, love,” he said bashfully. “I’m just so hungry all the time.” He had arms the size of tree trunks and the height of a basketball player, but she thought he was awfully cute in that moment.

  “Yes,” Darby chimed in, “the man needs to consume a small family’s weekly food supply in a day to maintain that kind of bulk. If King gets hungry and there’s no food around, we have to lock him in a cage so he doesn’t go pillaging in the next village for sustenance.”

  “Don’t be dramatic. I just get a bit grumpy, is all.”

  “I bought plenty of food. There’s cold cuts in the refrigerator. Cullen and I stopped at the little bakery in town and got some really beautiful bread. Make yourselves a sandwich. The pasta salad will be ready soon.”

  “But I’m not finished chopping,” King told her.

  “You are relieved of your duty. I will finish.”

  Wyn took over the rest of the chopping while Darby and King went to the refrigerator. She smiled as she heard the men exclaim over the food she bought. Cullen told her it was too mu
ch and that she didn’t have to buy anything for the community house. But she had ignored him and piled the cart high. This was just a small way of paying his friends back. They had all been so kind to her since she had arrived. She knew it must be strange for them to have an outsider here.

  “Tell me about yourself, Wyn,” Jack said to her. He really was devastating to look at, especially when he turned that smile on. It was easy to see how women fell for him. He probably didn’t need to seduce them at all.

  “I’m very boring,” she said truthfully. “I teach at a university and do some translating for the local and federal government.”

  “You’ve got to be more than just your job. We all are.”

  “True,” she said, but her career had defined her the last six years or so. There was no real life for her outside of it. It was all she had. “I’m pretty sure that I am the dullest person in this community. All of you have lived so much more life than I have.”

  “What about your family? Are you close?”

  She paused before answering him. There was pain there, right under the surface, a short jab in the chest. “No. We aren’t very close. I’m an only child. My dad worked a lot. I never saw much of him. My mother is nice, but my father was the center of her universe.”

  And he had cheated on her, she didn’t say. Probably more than once.

  It must be such a slap in the face for her mother. But she knew her mother would never leave him, because she had grown up in poverty in the south and Wyn’s father gave her everything she could ever want. Her mother had felt rescued and she excused all the inconsiderate things he had done over the years.

  “I had one of those fathers too,” Jack said.

  “What are you two talking about?” Cullen said, walking in.

  “I was just trying to get to know Wyn better,” Jack said. “Her father is a workaholic. So is mine.”

  “Yeah.” Cullen walked around the counter to where Wyn was and wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her bare shoulder. It was a pure possession move, a message for Jack. A show for the others, but Wyn still got tingles on her skin. She leaned into Cullen, liking the way his body felt against hers. “I’m guessing when your father is a four-star general there isn’t much time for play.”