Davina looked in the other direction. Even through the rain she could see that the road ended after few more houses on either side. At the very end was that curious gray fusion of water falling on water.
She looked back at the tree. It must have been forty or fifty feet high. Even leafless, it was an impressive specimen.
“Do we have any food in the house?” she asked.
“Not a lot, but we won’t starve.”
“Well, I gather there’s not much more to be done here. Unless you have a chain saw?”
Jack looked sour, then shook his head.
“Then let’s get back inside and dry off. I’ll make us another nice cup of tea,” Davina cajoled.
“Preferably with bourbon in it,” he said as he walked back down the driveway.
“I heard that,” she yelled. Sacrilege. Tea was the perfect antidote to crises like these. No wonder Americans were so stressed out all the time.
*
Shit.
Jack stalked back into the house, remembering almost too late to hold the door for his guest. After they’d stripped off the raincoats and stuck the umbrellas in the rubber-bottomed rack, he walked back into the kitchen.
Davina was already parsing the situation in her crisp, no-nonsense British accent.
“We’ll hear when someone takes a chain saw to the tree. In the meantime, I’ll see about making us something to eat. Do we have to worry about a power cut?”
“Unlikely. The wires are underground here. Preserves the view.”
“Ah. That’s actually standard in the U.K.,” she said.
“Too expensive to retrofit in most of the U.S., although newer communities—bluntly, wealthier communities—often bury them when the development is planned.”
Davina started to open cupboards, pulling out pasta, sauce, tuna, olives and a few other staples. “So we won’t lose the power but we can’t leave.”
“That’s about it.”
She gave him a sly smile. “I suspect we can find things to do to keep ourselves amused.”
Jack needed a drink. Did Dad keep any wine here? He went over to the sideboard in the dining room to check.
They didn’t talk much as he prepped the food to Davina’s specifications. Then she cooked and he drank a nice Petite Sirah. They didn’t talk much over dinner either. Jack deeply regretted inviting her though he had trouble ironing out the source of his regret. That she was now trapped in the house? Or the searing memory of her fingers on his scar?
She was so perfect, from the top of her head, still smooth despite the storm, to the tips of her feet, elegant with a wine-rich toenail polish. Smart, experienced and ambitious, Davina Gunn had earned her success.
Whereas it made no sense that Jack was alive in a uniform adorned with chest candy while some of the finest soldiers he’d known had flown home to Dover in flag-draped coffins.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally, before he started to clear their plates away. “I’m not usually so morose. And I’m sorry that you’re stuck here with me.”
“I’m not.” She lifted her chin a little. There was that sexy-secret smile, the one that made his cock respond.
He wanted to yell at her that she should be sorry.
“Do you have a boyfriend back in England?” he blurted out.
“God, no.”
He opened his mouth to ask another question. She held her hand up, palm out. Even her palms were pretty. And soft. His cock twitched again.
“Colonel,” she began.
“Jack.” He frowned at her. They’d discussed this. She wasn’t in his chain of command, she didn’t have to call him sir, and he wasn’t old enough to be addressed solely by rank. They’d just fucked; surely that entitled him to some degree of familiarity.
“I like calling you ‘Colonel’ when you scowl at me like that,” she purred. Then her shoulders went back. “What I was going to say, Jack, was that I’ll answer your questions on one condition.”
He wished she was in his chain of command. Then she’d have to answer his questions. Of course, if she had been in his COC, they couldn’t have had sex.
“Continue.” He rolled his hand.
“We play Truth or Dare.”
“What?”
“You know, the game. We take turns. You say if you want to tell the truth or accept a dare. If you say ‘truth’ then I ask you a question and you have to answer it truthfully. If you can’t or won’t answer it truthfully, you have to pay a penalty or accept a forfeit.”
“What is this, a version of Spin the Bottle or something?”
She grinned at him. “Afraid?”
“I get to ask you things, right? When it’s my turn?”
“Of course.”
He thought about it. There were a few questions he would love for her to answer. “All right, I’m in.”
“Good. You’ve already gotten an answer from me, so it’s my turn. Truth or dare?”
“Truth.” He wasn’t sure what she’d dare him to do, whereas he couldn’t think what she could ask him that he couldn’t answer.
“How did you lose your virginity?”
Good grief. That had to be twenty years ago. He marshaled his thoughts. “Junior prom. I went with—well, I’ll change the name to protect the innocent, so let’s say her name was Debbie.”
“Go on.”
“We were part of a group, and someone had rented a limo and some rooms at a hotel for after the dance. I hadn’t planned to, uh, do it, but I’ll admit that I had condoms in my pocket just in case.”
She licked her lips, which were curled in a coy smile. He’d make her sweat, when it was his turn. See how smug she looked then.
He went on, “We’d had champagne in the limo, so when we got to the hotel, Den—I mean, Debbie—tugged me into her room and started to kiss me. We’d only been dating for a few weeks and all we’d done was a lot of heavy petting. Still, I was game and she seemed willing, so we took off all our prom clothes and fooled around on the bed until I’d worked up enough nerve to stick it in her. I lasted slightly longer than I should have, given how amazing it felt. I suppose I had the champagne to thank for that. Then I went down on her and gave her an orgasm.”
Jack skipped over his intense embarrassment at his virginal efforts at oral sex, the way Denise moaned loud enough for the rest of the hotel guests to hear, or his massive relief when she either came or faked it just to spare him. They never dated again.
“Oh, good show, Colonel. I’m impressed. And you hardly blushed at all.”
“My turn. Truth or dare.”
“Dare.” Her smoky eyes glinted at him, as though she knew he’d been counting on asking her a question.
What sort of things did one dare in this game? Jack’s imagination went wild at the idea of getting Ms. Davina Gunn to do something embarrassing.
“I dare you…” he began.
Her eyes flared just for a split second. Gotcha!
“…to pretend you work in a strip club and give me a lap dance.”
“How long?” she asked.
“Two minutes,” he said. He set his watch as a timer.
Davina folded her arms and bit her lips, giving Jack hope that she’d refuse the dare. Then she stood up and took off her blouse and skirt, revealing the black lace undies again.
“There should, by rights, be music now, something raunchy with a thumping bass line, but you’ll just have to imagine it.”
Jack’s mouth went dry. “Okay,” he choked out.
Davina did a little shimmy with her chest that almost got her nipples free. Now he was salivating too much. He swallowed.
Her hips rotated in a remarkably adept imitation of a stripper. God, if strippers near army bases had ever looked like Davina Gunn, Jack might have gone more often.
“How about it, luv,” she said in what he guessed was a Cockney accent. “Fancy a bit of a private dance, do you?”
Jack pushed his chair back from the table. “Sure.”
Davina—“You
can call me Davy, luv”—put a hand on his shoulder as if to steady herself, but she seemed completely in control. Her body was undulating in a slow, steady rhythm suggesting that thumping bass line. His eyes met hers and he was lost. She was Davy-the-Cockney-stripper.
Jack’s mouth went dry again.
With her left hand still on his shoulder, she used her right hand to stroke his cheek, her thumb brushing his lower lip as she licked her own, combing through his hair as she jerked her head back to flip hers out of the way. Then she put both hands up to his face, moving his chin down so that he had to look at her breasts, scant inches away from his nose. He could smell her scent: sex plus that perfume she used in the office. He shifted in the chair, trying to find a comfortable position.
“I’ll get that for you, dearie.” She reached down and used her whole hand to adjust his cock. Jack’s hips lifted off the chair without a conscious decision. Anything to prolong the contact. He groaned.
She started to move up and down, mimicking coitus. “Oh, that’s so good, baby. Give it to me. That’s right, all the way in. Ahh, yes.” Her eyes started to close, just as though she was actually about to come.
Jack had a vague sense he was pumping his hips in time with her movements. Before he could think clearly, his watch timer went off. Davina immediately stood up, stepped away from his chair, flicked her hair neatly over her shoulders and went back to her clothes. She was dressed and back in her seat before his brain could comprehend what had happened.
“My turn, I believe,” she said. “Truth or dare?”
The image of being dared to do a Chippendales-style striptease flared in Jack’s brain. “Truth.”
“What happened the last time—before today—that you had sex?”
Jack’s cock was still hard, his hands ached to touch Davina, and now he had to tell another sex story. This wasn’t going down as one of his favorite games.
“A medic from Charlie company. Cherry.” He looked up. “Yeah, I know, but that actually was her name.”
Davina smiled. There was no trace of the lusty Davy.
“We had some leave so rather than use all fifteen days getting to and from the U.S. we went to England.”
“Really?” Davina seemed charmed by this detail.
“Yeah. A buddy had told me about a hotel in Cornwall, right on the beach. It was amazing, like staying at a country house for the week. No need to leave the hotel. Cherry and I dressed up for dinner, where we were absolutely the youngest people there, walked on the beach, went into town only when we needed something.”
“The sex?” Davina prompted.
“Right. Last morning there, we woke up early and watched the dawn. I don’t remember the sex so much, you know, positions and all. I remember we had our curtains open so we could see down to the beach. Hopefully none of the septuagenarians were taking their ‘morning constitutional’ along the terrace outside our room. They’d have gotten a shock.”
Davina tapped a forefinger against her lips. “Okay, I’ll accept that as compliant. I wanted more detail, but I’ll consider it an honest answer.”
Jack thought about it. Why couldn’t he remember more of Cherry? The trip to Cornwall had been a few weeks before the accident, so in theory they could have hooked up a couple more times, only they’d returned to Kabul, rejoined their units and settled for a couple of vaguely suggestive emails. She’d called him after he landed in Landstuhl for the first operation when he’d been doped up, and he never called her back. Now—Davina’s vivid beauty in front of him—he could barely picture Cherry.
“Your turn,” Davina prompted.
“Truth or dare?” He really wanted her to pick truth. That last dare had nearly killed him.
“Truth,” she said with a smile.
Now, what did he most want to know? He thought about the underwear. Either she wore that stuff all the time—Really? Butt floss? That couldn’t be comfortable, could it?—or she’d planned to seduce him. Why would she have done that? And what about her sexual history? Who was the last guy she’d fucked?
Yeah, that was what he wanted to know.
“What was your last sexual encounter, before today?”
She laughed. “Sauce for the goose, eh? Fair enough.” She took a sip of her wine. “Last autumn, I broke up with my boyfriend, Mike. Nice fellow, good family. In fact, I think my father would have liked to see us make a go of it. I knew, however, that I was on the list to be assigned to the Pentagon, and I really wanted that secondment.”
Jack opened his mouth to get her talking about the sex, but that last word caught his attention. “A second what?”
“Secondment. Temporary posting. Latin, I think, or French.” She lifted an eyebrow. “Anyway, by Christmas I had word that the orders were working their way around Whitehall. So I took Mike out to dinner, brought him back to my place, fucked him into a stupor and then broke up with him.”
“A bit harsh, don’t you think?”
“Oh, the sex was quite civilized. Plus, I’d learned Mike was seeing Lady Emilia Talbott, and as her father outranks my father, I’m fairly sure Mike was thrilled to be cut loose.”
“Wait—outranks?” Jack asked. “As in, lords and ladies?”
She inspected her fingernails carefully. “You’ll have to wait another turn to ask that question. For now, truth or dare?”
“Dare.” The word was out of Jack’s mouth before he could pull it back.
Davina didn’t miss a beat. “I dare you to show me your scar for, let’s say, five minutes.”
Fuck. Jack drank a restorative slug of the wine, then set his watch and stood. He kicked off his shoes, pulled off his socks, then stripped down to his boxers. Thank God his dick was more or less behaving. He even looked at the sunken patchwork of flesh and collagen where the IED shrapnel had carved out a chunk of his leg, leaving a messy divot cross-hatched with snaky red lines from the operations.
Maybe it was the wine, but the moonscape on his leg didn’t make him nauseous the way it normally did.
“Okay. Your turn,” she said.
“Truth or dare?”
“Truth.” Her look was a dare in itself.
Jack realized he’d consumed most of the bottle himself. Had to have, ’cause he was having a hard time holding on to coherent ideas of strategy. Fuck it. He’d ask what he wanted to ask.
“Why’d you dress up in black lace today?”
“I wanted to seduce you.”
Hence the black lace thong on a Saturday. “Yeah, I got that. Why?” he persisted.
She stopped, her lips parted, then her eyes shifted to the window. She adjusted the collar of her blouse and smoothed the hem of her skirt.
When she spoke, she didn’t look up at him. “I’ve been here for over three months. I’ve had men ask me out. I’ve even gone in a couple of cases, but the job came first. Then you walked through the door and I thought…” She glanced at him, her face soft and vulnerable. “I thought you were the handsomest man I’d ever seen.”
“I’m too old,” he blurted out.
“I’m thirty-three.”
“No fucking way.”
She grinned. “Thank you. That’s a lovely compliment.”
“I’m thirty-eight.”
“I know.”
Jack sat completely still, focused on Davina. He used to be a good-looking guy, only after the injury that had all changed, leaving him hollow inside, dried up. Only—Davina was no one’s fool. If she thought he was handsome—no, it wasn’t making sense. Something wasn’t making sense.
“My turn. Truth or dare,” she said, almost in a whisper.
“Truth.”
“Tell me about the IED.”
Oh, shit. There it was. No one had asked, other than a stupid army shrink making the rounds at Walter Reed. Jack had fobbed him off with a strictly factual account, as though he was reporting in to his CO after a failed mission.
It hadn’t been the truth, and Jack knew it.
He owed Davina the truth, that w
as the rule. And he owed it to his men, to Foley and Gargles and Tompkins, to be honest about it.
“It was a transport convoy. I was in the next-to-last truck. They detonated the IED to hit the one behind us. They do that so that everyone else in the convoy can’t find the guy with the detonator. The armor did its job—no one got killed—but the truck rolled when it got hit. Our truck stopped. We’d gotten the guys out of the rolled truck and were heading back when the Taliban detonated another IED, which exploded part of the rolled truck and turned it into shrapnel. HQ told me later that arming two IEDs so close to each other is rare.”
Jack drained the bottle into her glass, then drank the last of the wine in his own glass. “I lost two men, and another’s in bad shape.”
“When was this?”
“Last May. I keep thinking if I’d ordered them to stay in our truck, if I’d investigated on my own, they’d be alive now.”
Her frown challenged him to be honest.
Jack grimaced. “Okay, so that’s not how command works. I hate—hated—that part of the job. I was expected to send my troops out while I stayed safe at HQ, unlikely to suffer more than a paper cut.”
“Instead you led three soldiers into an improbable and unpredictable second IED attack.”
Jack heard scorn in her dry-as-dust recital. Or maybe he just wanted her to blame him.
“I’ve gone over it every day. What would I have done different? Standard procedure was to call for choppers and get the rest of the convoy out of there but no one does that. You don’t leave soldiers behind.”
“Did the army blame you?”
“They gave me the Bronze Star. Two men died and I get a fucking medal.” Jack looked at the empty wine bottle. Worth getting a new one?
Davina leaned in, capturing his attention with her cleavage.
“What about the men in the truck that rolled?” she asked.
“They’re fine.”
“Could they have gotten out without your soldiers’ help?”
Jack shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Which was the problem. If they escaped fast enough and Jack’s truck stayed put, the second IED would probably kill no one. If the troops on that last truck couldn’t escape, they’d be toast. They said their injuries made them sitting ducks, but Jack wasn’t sure. Maybe they told him what he wanted to hear.
Love Letters Volume 2: Duty to Please Page 9
