by Geri Krotow
She turned away from him and hoped he couldn’t see the color of her cheeks.
“We’ve established that Sanders doesn’t trust either of us. Great. So much for my ego, thinking he put us on the case because he thought we were the most able officers to get the job done.”
“So we both agree that Lydia’s telling the truth?” Miles asked the most important question.
“Yes. As completely crazy as it sounds, I believe every word of her story. I’m not sure, though, that she’s told us everything.”
“Right—just enough to keep it clear that Perez didn’t commit suicide as far as she’s concerned.”
“Hmm.” Ro finished the last of her tea.
Miles set his mug down on the hand-carved wooden chest Ro had brought back from a brief detachment in the Azores. She’d had a glass pane cut and beveled to place on top of it, making it a coffee table.
“When did you say your sister and brother-in-law are coming back, Ro?”
His eyes glittered and she realized he wasn’t focused on their work anymore. Not navy work, anyhow.
She blinked.
“Um, Krissy left a note saying they’ve decided to spend the night in Victoria. She confirmed it with a text while we were at dinner.”
Miles took the empty mug from her hands. She watched his lean fingers as they set it down on the glass, so gentle and particular. His caresses would be like that—deliberate, careful, focused.
“So we have tonight.”
“Yes, but, Miles, I’m not sure we’re ready for this. Are you, really?”
“Yes.” He closed the gap between them by slipping his hand around her neck and pulling her face to his. “You are, too, Ro. You’re just scared. Let me keep you safe.”
When his lips met hers she already had her mouth open. She couldn’t fight it anymore—she was willing to take whatever he’d give her.
In the end it didn’t matter how many times she told herself it was a bad idea. No matter how many times she went over her reasons to stay out of complicated relationships. No matter how evident it was that once she’d been with Miles, she might never be satisfied with another lover.
Their chemistry was unavoidable.
It started sweetly enough. Miles sat up straight on the couch and leaned in toward her. She leaned toward him and their lips met. After that, all bets were off.
His fingers traced her cheek so softly.
“I don’t want to hurt you.” His shaky voice sent a bolt of awareness through her. He wanted her as badly as she wanted him.
“You can’t hurt me, Miles. You’re kissing my mouth, not my eye.”
“Oh, sweetheart, I’m kissing more than your mouth tonight.” He followed up his declaration with action. Ro loved a man of action.
His lips trailed down her neck and he nipped at it, sending ripples of gooseflesh down her spine. She reached for his chest, his hips. His belt was easily removed, but while they were both sitting, she wasn’t going to get far with his jeans.
“Let me help you.”
He stood and dragged her up with him, his mouth still on hers in possession and bare need. Pops of lavender and green light seemed to explode behind her closed lids as she accepted his tongue fully into her mouth and answered with her own.
“How do we, um,” she gasped as she reluctantly pulled her lips from his.
“Make love with my fake leg? We don’t.” He kissed her deeply, pressing her hips into his. He lifted her fully off the ground, and she had no choice but to wrap her legs around his.
“Miles!”
“Relax, sweetheart.” He pressed her up against the wall and pushed into her. “I’m going to make you crazy. We’re going to go to your room, and take off my jeans and my leg. Then we’re in bed for the rest of the night.” He sucked on her earlobe.
“You seem to have done this before.” She licked both of his lips before sucking on the lower one.
“Only practice, Ro. I’ve never had the real thing until tonight.” Again, the raspy need in his voice made her hot all over.
He was good. Very good.
After what seemed like endless kisses and urgent fondling, they went upstairs to her room. Ro lit two small votive candles she kept on her dresser, in front of a small angel statue she’d found in Ephesus, Turkey. The flames flared up and she turned back to Miles.
He lay naked and apparently ready for action across her knitted coverlet.
“You do have fast moves, Warrant.” She smiled.
He held out his hand. “Come join me.”
“In a minute.”
For the first time in her life, Roanna was completely aware of every emotion she felt, every sensual move her body made. She shrugged out of her cardigan and pulled her tank top off over her head.
Her gaze stayed on Miles’s. The flickers of candlelight kept his eyes a mystery to her, but she saw the desire and blatant lust in his expression. She knew they were mirrored in hers, too.
Her jeans fell on the floor.
“You’re killing me here, Ro.” But his hands were behind his head and Miles clearly enjoyed her interpretive foreplay.
“I thought you’d appreciate my underwear.” She turned around and heard him hiss as she showed off the black lace bra and panty set she’d pushed aside her sexual timidity to purchase. She’d imagined the lingerie would be for a clandestine rendezvous with an unnamed future lover. A man with whom she’d have uncomplicated sex...
Fate had the last laugh as Miles was the first one to see her in the black thong panties with the pink bow that nestled perfectly at the base of her spine.
She unhooked her bra while she had her back to him and let it drop. As she turned around she sought his reaction.
“Come here, Ro. Now.” The shaky need had been replaced by a predatory growl.
Ro walked over to the bed and before she could tease him any more by taking off her thong he had her on her back, his erection pressed into her.
“Whoa, where’d you learn that move?”
“Shut up, Ro.” This time he teased her. He moved back a fraction of an inch and hovered over her, his eyes blazing with lust in the candlelight.
“Do you want me, Ro?” He leaned on his side and held his head up on his hand. With the other he made his way over her breasts, pausing at each nipple to swirl around its taut peak.
“Miles, please.” Her heart pounded in her ears and she felt the blush of her orgasm waiting in the wings. And he hadn’t even touched her everywhere.
“Shhh. Just enjoy this. Answer my question, Ro.” His hand pushed aside her panties and his fingers plunged into her. “Do you want me?”
She screamed as her heat clamped down on his fingers. Her breath felt far away, her vision blurred.
“Miles, how on earth,” she panted, needing more. Needing all of him.
“Answer the question, Ro.”
“Yes, yes, Miles!”
“Yes what?”
“I want you. Now!” She pushed down her panties and kicked them off as though they were on fire.
She was on fire—for Miles.
Their eyes met and she knew it would never be like this with anyone else. He’d put on a condom when she’d taken her thong off and wasted no more time.
“Oh, Ro.” He thrust into her and she gasped. He was large, strong, hot. She raised her pelvis to meet him stroke for stroke.
It was a marvel to watch his chest above her as he took her again and again. She allowed herself to fully feel him against her, inside her. He tensed and she waited for his release.
He only came after she screamed and he’d clamped his mouth back on hers.
* * *
“YOU DON’T TALK a lot about yourself, Ro.”
She curled her toes under her bedcovers,
needing the down-filled quilt against her skin. Her head was on Miles’s chest as they lay in the predawn dark. They’d made love again, just hours after they’d fallen into a deep slumber in each other’s arms.
“There isn’t a lot to talk about.” She played with the springy hair on his chest. “I work. I come home. I knit. I work out. Sometimes I fool around in my garden. What else do you want to know?”
“Why you kept refusing to go out with me, when it’s pretty clear we’d be great together. Why you’re hosting your sister and her new husband when the guy jilted you.”
He turned to face her more squarely. “Those are the things I’m interested in, to start with.”
She fiddled with the duvet cover she’d knitted out of a brilliant blue merino—the same color as Miles’s eyes. She ran her fingers through her hair. For some reason she wished, at this moment, that she had long lustrous hair, the kind men loved.
“I’ve told you twenty times that I didn’t want to go out with you because I didn’t know you well enough to risk dating someone I worked with, no matter how peripherally.”
Did he notice she’d used the past tense?
She wrapped her legs around him and put her chin on her hands, folded on his abdomen. The scent of their lovemaking lingered and she closed her eyes to savor it.
“As for Krissy and Dick...” She wasn’t sure where to begin.
“Dick and I ended long before we, well, ended. I was hanging on to a dream, the hope that someday I’d stop needing to travel, to go after the next hard assignment, to conquer the world. It was also the way I kept my mother off my back.”
“How so?”
“My mother is...difficult. To her, having a man is the mark of success. It’s all about landing the right guy, marrying the best husband possible.”
“Did she?”
“Did she what?” At his stare, Ro laughed. “God, no. She’s only ever been married to my father and to Krissy’s. She’s hosted a string of nutso boyfriends, if you could call them that. In retrospect I’m grateful my sister and I weren’t ever abused or molested—certainly that was a risk with all those different men. But most of them didn’t last past a weekend of fun for Mother.”
She heard the words, knew they were part of her story, but felt so dissociated from it all.
“So you and Dick?” Miles was relaxed. He looked like he’d be willing to listen to her all night.
“Dick and I were an arrangement of convenience. We met the summer after high school. You know, teenage hormones and all that. He had college and then med school, I had the academy and owed five years to the navy afterward. So those first ten years together flew by, with romantic meet-ups all over the world. But...it got old. We’d spent too much time apart, and more importantly, we weren’t the same kids we’d been when we met at eighteen. He was too nice and I was too much in denial to break it off properly.”
“So he did it by getting engaged to your sister?”
“In a nutshell, yes.” She smiled at him and tried to suppress a giggle. “I can’t believe I’m laughing over this when just last week I threw the engagement ring off the bridge.” She stopped. Had she said that aloud? Really?
“So that’s what you were doing, all batshit-crazy that morning.”
She sighed. “Yes, that’s what I was doing. It was long overdue. And I shouldn’t have done it—I should have at least donated the ring to charity.”
“Was it a big ring?”
“No. It was tiny, all we could afford as college kids. But I was sentimental about it, I didn’t want anything bigger.” Maybe she’d known all along that they weren’t going to last. They weren’t going to ever take the next step.
“You know what, Miles? Krissy did both Dick and me a favor. And the kicker of it is, I think they really love each other. Krissy’s immature as hell, and Dick is a slave to his work, but there’s a spark there that he and I never had.”
“Like you and I do?”
She sucked in her breath. “Physical attraction isn’t reason enough to start a relationship, Miles.”
“Sure it is.” He gave her that blinding white smile that lit up his face and made her even more aware of his masculine features. He wasn’t the most handsome man she’d ever seen but he was definitely the sexiest.
“So we find out we’re compatible in bed. Then what? We enjoy it until we’re bored? Avoid each other at work once it becomes awkward?” She shook her head. “I don’t want to ever feel uncomfortable at work.” She’d invested too much of herself in her career.
“Do you really care about what everyone else says, Ro? We’re not breaking any laws or regulations. We have every right to be together. Unless you were thinking about getting it on in the hangar?” His eyes sparkled with his teasing.
“No, no. It’s hard for me, Miles. I’ve poured everything into my work up until now. I don’t know how to flip the off switch.” She closed her eyes for a moment.
“Before, I had Dick to cling to, to keep other men away. Now that he’s gone, I’m faced with not only starting a new relationship but wondering if I should start a new career. It’s been a long time since I considered any other option for my life but the navy.”
His chest rose and fell and when her eyes met his she saw the embers she’d stoked with her confession.
“You’ve got ‘work’ down, Ro. The way I see it, you need to put more effort in your personal life. You have, what, nine years in the navy?”
“Almost ten, yes.”
“So guess what? If you stay in until twenty—” the earliest she could retire with a pension “—you’re going to have to find a life. But by then some of the opportunities you have available now may be gone.”
“Like you? Are you threatening me, saying you won’t be here forever?”
It was his turn to laugh, and he did—lustily.
“Ro, you really are a sweetheart. No, I’m not talking about me—necessarily. I mean your chance to have kids. Do you want your own babies, Ro?”
Of course she wanted kids. She didn’t think about it too much and she’d always been able to push any maternal yearnings aside. She’d had time. But now, not so much. He was right.
And the way he said babies... “Um, yes, eventually, I’d like a baby or two.”
“In order to have babies, wouldn’t you want a father who’d stand by you and the kids?”
“Yes.” She so didn’t want to talk about this with him, not after she’d had the best sex of her life.
“It’s fair to say that a basic dating relationship would be the start of anything more lasting, deeper, don’t you think?”
He sat up against her headboard, her pillows supporting him.
“Miles, I get it. Remember you’re not a psychiatrist, okay?”
He chuckled. “I’m just Miles, and you’re Ro, a woman I’m interested in. It’s just us here. No uniforms, no investigations, no jobs.”
“No kidding.” She couldn’t help the zinger—they were lying there naked.
Their eyes met again and laughter switched to desire in a blink. As Ro practiced her newfound sexual liberation on Miles, her heartbeat echoed in her ears. She was a goner.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
KAREN SANDERS LISTENED to the hum of Leo’s engine until he reversed out of the driveway Monday morning. Not until then did she go to the pantry, where she pulled out her huge plastic container labeled Bread Flour. She opened it and reached under the soft bags of rye, whole wheat and barley. Her fingers wrapped around the familiar glass neck of the bottle of cognac she dug out of the bin. She had her coffee cup perched on the shelf below so it was an easy move to deliver a generous splash of booze into her morning brew.
She replaced the bottle and heaved the container back on the top shelf of the pantry, shoving it back into its spot between the sugar and
the oatmeal. In no hurry to leave the safe-feeling confines of the small walk-in cupboard, she drank her heavenly concoction.
It wasn’t as if she was an alcoholic or anything. Stefanie was at school and Leo was at work; this was often her only time alone during the day and why not have a warming nip?
The drink soothed her nerves. But it did nothing to ease the ache in her heart. Of all the people to have a stupid, pointless fling with, she’d picked a doozy. The subsequent pain and confusion from the brief affair had served to make her life even more of a mess than it already was.
You have to tell Leo.
Tell him what? That she didn’t like having sex with him anymore?
He’d figured that out. Their weekly Saturday morning in-bed gymnastics routine didn’t rate the difficulty level it had as newlyweds, but they both knew themselves and each other well enough to attain physical release. They’d settled for vanilla instead of rocky-give-it-to-me-road.
She stepped out of the pantry and into the morning light that flooded the sunroom, just off the kitchen. A lone bald eagle circled over the sound, a few yards from the edge of the cliff that her lawn backed up to. His high-pitched screech pierced the stillness and was sharp enough for her to hear through the glass-paned sliding door.
A mating cry.
A tear trickled down her cheek and she let it fall. Not only had she settled for vanilla, she’d settled for the wrong dessert entirely. Since she’d worked next to and spent hours with Daisy at the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society, she’d known the most intimate emotional relationship she’d ever experienced. And when Daisy’s casual touches became something she looked forward to like a teenager, she still fought the inner demons that told her something was wrong with her. Years of denial were hard to break through.
She sighed. Her family was all Louisiana born and bred, and unlike some of her distant cousins who enjoyed the relative open-mindedness of New Orleans, she’d grown up in the more conservative part of the state—the small-town, everyone-goes-to-church part. Being a lesbian wasn’t an option in her mama’s eyes. You lived and died by whatever the new preacher said in the regular fire-and-brimstone sermons.
