Wings of Gold Series

by Tappan, Tracy

  First time having sex with a man she truly, deeply loved, and it created a glorious joining between her sex and her heart. The fuller she got down there, the fuller her heart felt. Bliss down below equaled a heightening of the sunny feeling her heart had grabbed hold of when she’d kissed Kyle moments ago.

  First time having sex with a man of Kyle’s heavy, solid physique. In the past, she’d mostly dated liberal hippie types who didn’t bicep-curl anything heftier than a laptop. She’d never known what she was missing by not having a significant amount of man to hold onto. She’d never known how erotic and masculine muscles could be until Kyle weighted her down with his power and strength.

  First time having sex with a man who was so well-endowed…besides Kyle himself, but this time, unlike behind the Jebel Ali Club, she was well prepared. Her sheath had bloomed to take his deepest penetration with pleasure, yet she was still stretched so tight and wet around him that the friction of his thick, velvety shaft plunging inside her pushed her as close to orgasm as she’d ever come without added stimulation. But…she was still a step away from the pinnacle.

  She gave Kyle’s shoulder a nudge. “Lift up,” she gasped.

  Obediently, he rose up on braced arms, his hands gripping the wooden slats of her cot.

  She reached between their bodies and stroked her clitoris, her feet linked tightly over Kyle’s butt, feeling the hard labor of his muscles. Oh, my, she was closer than she’d realized, and, oh! She cried out in surrender as liquid pulsations came swiftly over her. “Oh, God!”

  Kyle increased his speed, his dog tags swinging between them, lightly tapping her chin on each forward thrust of his hips. She almost laughed. Between her orgasmic crooning and all the noise her cot was making, she wouldn’t be surprised if an audience had gathered outside her tent. But there was nothing she could do to quiet herself. Being sent into climatic orbit Kyle-Hammond-style was just too much of an impossible pleasure.

  As her pulsations faded, she wrapped her hands around Kyle’s nape and pulled him back down to her.

  With a low rumble, he latched onto the upper part of her breast with his mouth and sucked hard on her flesh as he thundered toward his own finish line.

  She caught her breath at the sharp pleasure-pain. He was…giving her a hickie. She hadn’t had one since high school, but…this wasn’t any sort of adolescent fooling around. Kyle was marking her, as if to say mine.

  She dug her fingers into his shoulders as tears welled. Yes, yours.

  Kyle began to jerk and shudder. She felt the pulsing strain of his shaft inside her, and in the moment of his climax, his expression was absolutely magnificent, his face a beautiful mask of carnal ecstasy. He let out a guttural bellow of release, then collapsed on top of her, his hips still rocking slightly as he bit into her shoulder.

  She jumped. The bite was so unexpectedly barbaric, another orgasm ambushed her. She yelped, and—Wow. She hadn’t needed added stimulation.

  Gasping for air, she lay beneath him, just gazing at the tent ceiling through halfway closed lids. Her bones had melted into warm honey inside her skin, and—

  A loud siren went off.

  She popped her eyes open wide. What—?

  Kyle’s head bolted up.

  The door to Max’s tent flew open.

  “Incoming wounded!” Kitty called out. “All hands are needed to—oh, my dear Lord!” Kitty whirled around, putting her back to the entwined couple.

  Kyle sprang off Max and fumbled for his clothes.

  “I’m so sorry!” Kitty apologized.

  Max scrambled off her cot, too. “It’s okay,” she gulped out, grabbing her underwear and bra. “We’ll be right there!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Kitty wearily shoved the surgical cap off her head as she shuffled out of the medical tent and plopped down on a bench next to Max. The moment her rear hit the wood, the nine hours straight she’d spent on her feet handing medical instruments to Dr. Barr in surgery caught up to her and the last of her energy trickled away. “I don’t smoke,” she said, gazing at the first weak streaks of sunrise seeping up from the horizon, “but times like this, I feel like I could use a cigarette.”

  Max released a long-drawn-out breath.

  If Kitty was plumb tuckered, her roommate had to be feeling wrung out as a dishrag. Kitty was used to running all over Hell’s half acre with this kind of work. Max was probably more used to sitting at a desk and plonking away at computer keys.

  “Or a very bracing gin and tonic,” Max commented.

  Kitty glanced at her roommate. While Kitty was dressed in blue surgical scrubs, Max was in a T-shirt and shorts. Sweat had formed twin rings under Max’s armpits and in a huge oval down from her collar like a bib. Her T-shirt was also smudged all over with blood. So unless Max liked gruesome tie-dye, her shirt was ruined.

  “You okay?” Kitty asked. Max had been in charge of managing triage as best as she could, bandaging up those folks wounded by crossfire and stabilizing them. It was grisly work for anybody, but especially a greenhorn. “Seeing people wounded in battle can be hard the first time.” Or all the time. It never ceased to amaze Kitty what all damage a bullet could do to the human body.

  “I’m mostly tired.” Max knuckled her right eye.

  That was probably true. Her roommate did seem to handle most matters with a quiet confidence Kitty admired…and ached a little with longing over. If only Shirleen had been a calmer person—instead of always het up about one thing or another—maybe Kitty would’ve turned out more like Max, calm and confident.

  “Whhhhat”—Max yawned out—“time is it, anyway?”

  “Zero-five-hundred.”

  “We’ve been up all night.” Max propped the back of her head against the tent wall, her throat arched, her eyes half-closed. “How many wounded came through?”

  “A good fifteen or so. Over half the beds are full now.” Kitty reached back and checked her bun. As suspected, it was in tatters. She probably looked like ten miles of bad road. Smelled it, too. “Lieutenant Whitmore left the ward to go roommate with Lieutenant Hammond.”

  Max nodded vacantly, her head still pressed back against the tent wall.

  “Sorry again about earlier…with you and Lieutenant Hammond.” Kitty’s cheeks tinged with heat. As embarrassed as she’d been over barging in on two naked people engaged in the act of love, it’d also been a rush to see.

  Max twisted to look at Kitty, her eyes still partially closed.

  Kitty smiled tentatively. “I guess we should’ve come up with a signal…a sock tied to the door handle or something.”

  Max straightened. “I wouldn’t have remembered to put it out, anyway. What happened between me and Kyle was…sudden.” A gusty sigh came out of her. “And too passionate to stop for a signal.”

  Kitty’s blush deepened at the thought of such lose-yourself-entirely passion. Been a long time since she’d slept with a fella, going back a good two months, right before she’d deployed on the Mercy, when she’d been home on leave in Plainview.

  She tried to make it back to Texas once a year, and even though the purpose of those visits was to see her parents, she never stayed in Shirleen and Howard’s house, not since the day they’d kicked her out. She bunked with her old high school friend, Mary Beth, from the Dairy Queen. On this last trip, Kitty and Mary Beth’s brother had shared a six pack of Lone Stars one night in the kitchen, then Kitty gave him a poke on the living room sofa. A couch spring had jabbed her in her butt the whole time, and she’d heard Mary Beth snoring softly in the next room. No surprise Kitty hadn’t orgasmed, but it’d been good to have a man inside her, and Billy had smelled nicely of wood chips. “Should I be asking you if you know what you’re doing?” She turned toward her roommate.

  Max laughed unevenly. “I appreciate it, but, no. What happened with me and Kyle wasn’t a mistake.”

  “You sure? I mean…how can you be sure?”

  Max came more awake. “I feel it in my heart.”

  Kitty
ran her surgical cap through her fingers. “You’re lucky you can trust such feelings.” She peered down at her cap. “My own heart appears intent on always leading me astray.”

  Max didn’t say anything, just regarded her steadily.

  Some people did that, merely waited patiently for a person to make her confessions, no pushing or pulling about it. “Seems like I always believe fellas like me,” Kitty admitted, “then turns out they don’t. It’s a real blind spot.” She smiled weakly. “I suppose there’s a part of me that’s always wanting to feel like I belong with someone, if you know what I mean? I don’t think I had much of it as a child.”

  Max blinked a couple of times. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m always making stupid decisions because of it.” And Kitty would guess Max didn’t. Sighing, Kitty gazed at the horizon again. “Shane was my worst mistake. I was so sure he was the one.” Why couldn’t she ever see anything for how it truly was? Lord, if brains were leather, she wouldn’t have enough to saddle a June bug.

  “Shane…?” Max asked.

  * * *

  Two years ago. Imperial Beach, San Diego

  Kitty upended the cooked spaghetti into a colander, then strained to open a fresh jar of Ragu sauce. “I don’t have parmesan,” she called out to her boyfriend from the kitchen to the living room. “I hope it’s all right.” She mixed the tomato-and-meat sauce into the noodles with a large spoon.

  “Yeah,” Shane called back. “Long as you got bread.”

  Uh-oh, shoot. Kitty grimaced at the can of Pillsbury French Bread she’d forgotten to pop in the oven. Well, darn it, why in tarnation did Shane need to eat pasta and bread for dinner? Because he was a SEAL, that’s why, and he carbo-loaded like nobody’s business. What such massive amounts of carbs would do to her body, she didn’t even want to consider.

  On Shane, every single calorie he put into his mouth became rock-hard muscle. Like every other SEAL Kitty had ever met, Shane was built tough, but as much for speed as strength. He was massively bulked across the shoulders and biceps for the incredible amount of gear he regularly carried, but the rest of him was rangy and lean. It was a body type that just so happened also to be built perfectly for sex—such well-defined muscles were a complete turn-on to feel in bed, and his agility made itself known with skilled hip movements. No two ways about it, Shane Madden was the most exciting man she’d ever slept with…at least back when they used to have sex.

  Sticking a couple of pieces of sourdough bread in the toaster, Kitty brought the pasta out to the dining room, then set the table. She and Shane lived together in a two-story, two-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath apartment in Imperial Beach Gardens, a neatly landscaped complex of beige buildings with a community pool. Imperial Beach was located at the southern tip of a narrow length of Coronado Island known as “the strand,” and was one of the southernmost towns in San Diego County; IB was about eight miles away from the border into Tijuana, Mexico. But IB was also only a little over seven miles from the Naval Amphibious Base on Coronado where SEAL Teams One, Three, Five, and Seven were stationed. Shane was a member of the Team Three “Punishers.” And so Imperial Beach was a favorite place for the commandos to live. Coronado itself was through-the-roof expensive.

  Their apartment was decorated with masculine, square-shaped furniture, and posters on the walls instead of artwork, and smelled vaguely of man stuff, like a logging compound, maybe, chainsaws and sawdust and thick-soled boots…although who could guess why. Before her, Shane had roomed with a Navy buddy, but when the fella left for an extended deployment, Shane had asked him if it was okay if Kitty moved in to take his place. He’d said yes, and so here Kitty had been for the last year, playing house.

  Returning to the kitchen, Kitty buttered the sourdough toast, then brought it out to the table along with a tossed salad, which mostly she’d eat. She stepped into the doorway leading to the living room.

  Shane was sprawled on the couch watching football, dressed in a pair of black nylon basketball shorts and a dark T-shirt with the SEAL insignia—a US Navy anchor, a flintlock-style pistol, and an eagle clutching a trident—over the left pocket. A bottle of Schlitz beer was propped between his open thighs.

  “I’ve set up supper in the dining room,” she told him.

  “I want to watch the game,” he said, his attention never leaving the television. He took a draw on his beer.

  When Shane was on standby, he was allowed two beers. He also wore his dark brown hair longer than standard navy regulation permitted, and kept a rugged five o’clock shadow on his jaw so he could travel anywhere in the world at the drop of a hat and not be recognizable as military.

  She crossed her arms. “Shane, I’ve barely seen hide nor hair of you lately. I think it’d be nice if we spent some time together.”

  He turned to level a stare at her, revealing the left side of his face, where the scar of an old wound slashed his cheek from left temple to chin, narrowly missing his eye and the corner of his mouth. Brown eyes the color of an ancient oak were icy and flat.

  “Get your plate,” he said slowly, as if talking to a particularly stupid child, “sit on the couch, and eat suppah here with me.”

  Shane was annoyed—his South Boston accent only peeked out when he was—but he looked beyond annoyed…more like meaner than a snake right now. If anyone else were to see him, they’d think he was on the verge of hitting her. He wasn’t, but…what in thunderation brought on these dark spells? What kind of man lurked inside Shane? Not for the first time Kitty wanted to shake him to rattle loose whoever it was.

  “Watch the game with me,” Shane went on. “Then we’ll be spending time togeth—” His cell phone dinged the arrival of a message.

  Kitty’s throat spasmed in automatic response to the most hated noise in the world.

  Shane dug his cell out of his shorts pocket, already hopping to his feet as he glanced at the screen. “Gotta go.” He took off into their bedroom.

  Kitty quickly followed. She stopped in the doorway and watched her boyfriend slap open the closet and strip out of his shorts and T-shirt. “Work?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But…” A dull ache throbbed in her chest. “You just got back from a month of training.”

  “It’s how it is. You know that.” He was pulling on his military gear.

  Her lungs shrank down, cutting into her oxygen supply. “Where are you going?”

  “Don’t know. Hand me my socks from the draw’.”

  She didn’t move.

  He shot her a glance—more annoyance—then stomped over to the dresser and snatched a pair out of the drawer himself.

  Her mouth went dry. “Is it the real thing this time?”

  “Dammit, Kitty, I don’t know.” He sat on the edge of the bed and hauled on his socks and boots. “They don’t say fuck-all to me in a text, and even if they did, I couldn’t tell you.” He tied off a boot with a hard yank on the laces. “Quit acting like you’re stupid about shit like this.”

  She swallowed painfully. “It’s not fair, Shane. You constantly leave me at all hours, and I never know where you’re going or when you’ll be back. It’s not fair to the people in your life.”

  “Lodge a complaint with the CNO.” Shane thrust to his feet. “There’s nothing I can do about it.” He started for the door.

  Something snapped her on the inside; she felt it almost like a bee sting against her heart muscle. What woman went into a relationship to be alone? Not her. Yet that’s what she was all the time. “No!” She braced her hands on either side of the jamb, barring his way. She was so sick of taking a backseat to everything else in her boyfriend’s life. “I’m not letting you go!” She’d call his CO and tell him Shane had the stomach flu and was barfing his guts out, or…something!

  Shane halted in front of her, his hands on his hips, his dark brows low. “Move.” It was a hard command.

  The hairs on Kitty’s nape prickled. Shane would never hit her, she trusted him, but there
was…so much violence living within him. She sensed it came from more than just the requirements of his job, but she didn’t have a notion from where. She didn’t know anything! “There is something you could do about us, Shane, for damn sure there is. You could stop being more committed to those SEAL boys than you are to your own girlfriend.”

  Shane sneered. “You sound like a broken record with this jealousy bullshit you keep pullin’, Kitty. Why don’t you try changin’ it up and blame me fah cheatin’ on you with another woman?”

  Her chin trembled along with her lips. Shane would never step out on her with another woman—she trusted him on that, too. But it was more because of a strict code of behavior he followed rather than from undying love for her. Her breath started coming faster and faster: hyperventilation fast.

  Shane glanced rigidly at his watch. “I’m on a one-hour recall.”

  “You…” she choked out, wretched and gasping. “You…you have to… I need you to…”

  He leaned forward, his eyes mere inches from hers. “What do you want from me!?” he yelled into her face.

  Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I want you t-to talk to me.”

  Knots ran up and down his jaw. “You couldn’t pick a bettah time, Kitty.”

  “I’m not asking you to get all mushy on me,” she came back tremulously. “But you don’t talk to me at all, Shane. I’ve lived with you a year and I barely know you. What’s a typical day at work like for you? What were you like as a kid? Did you used to—”

  Snarling, he shouldered past one of her raised arms, forcing her to drop it.

  Feet scrambling beneath her, she raced to get ahead of him. She pressed her spine to the front door, blocking him again. “We don’t even sleep together anymore.”

  He studied her with dangerous eyes. “That sure as shit ain’t my fault.”

  “It is your fault!” she lashed back. “How can you expect me to make love to you when you give me nothing of yourself?”

  “Didn’t seem to stop you with all those other guys you fucked.”

  His words hit her with the force of a body blow. Her lungs collapsed around her next breath. She’d been used by those other boys. How could Shane not know she hated that? “Why, thank you ever so much for calling me a whore.”