‘No one could talk Randy out of anything, you know that,’ I said, words the only comfort I could offer for now. ‘He was doing what he wanted to do.’
‘That’s just it, Cele. He was doing what he wanted to do. He changed things up on us at the last moment, ignored intel, decided to go in four hours early to take out the key players, when there were two sets of bodyguards on duty, when there were civilians crawling all over the place.’
‘Why?’
He shook his head. ‘Hell if I know. He had a fucking death wish, is what it seemed like. Pardon my language.’
I waved him off and poured myself the last glass of wine. ‘Please. I lived with a SEAL for a long time. There isn’t anything you could say to shock me.’
‘Sorry, yeah, I guess you’ve heard it all.’
I hadn’t, not yet, but I would before this dinner was over. ‘So why did y’all follow him?’
‘Your southern drawl comes out when you’re drinking,’ he said, ignoring my question. ‘It’s cute.’
I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks. ‘And you get more personal when you’re drinking,’ I said. ‘It’s sexy.’
Hell. I hadn’t meant to say it, but the words just slipped out.
He laughed. ‘Uh huh. I guess I’ll have to take a page from your book about remaining impersonal.’
‘Sorry,’ I muttered. ‘I really do need to know the rest.’
He sobered immediately. ‘It was rough. We fought over it, Randy and I. We’d lost radio communications with HQ and our people back here. It was our call and Randy took the lead. And I let him.’
‘You were a good friend.’
‘No, I was too fucking weary to fight him on it. He said it was easy, we’d done it before. In and out, before they knew what hit ’em.’ He swallowed the last of his wine and eyeballed the bottle. ‘I’m going to need more alcohol to get through this.’
It was an admission of weakness and I wondered what it cost him in pride, but I didn’t ask. I had another bottle of wine on the counter and motioned for him to continue as I poured it.
‘I believed him, Cele. Honest to God, I believed his bravado. He seemed so cocksure that he knew every inch of the compound, that he’d combed over the intel and was certain the bodyguards would be clustered in the front and leave their back wall exposed …’
His words trailed off and I could see in his drawn expression that he was reliving it. I was making him relive it. I hated myself for that, but I needed to know.
‘Fortification,’ I said, raising my glass in a toast. ‘To the difficult stories, may they be told quickly so the happy memories can begin.’
I don’t know where it had come from, but it eased the tension between us. Jason came back to me then, away from the haunting memories of that day in Kabul, and told the rest of the story in as quick and dispassionate a tone as he could. Randy’s insistence that he knew what to do, the SEAL team’s belief in their captain, Jason’s support of his friend. The ambush by the guards, the civilians caught in the crossfire, the four wounded and two dead and one dying – Randy – as they hauled ass to the chopper.
‘I thought he was going to make it,’ Jason said as he filled in the details the officials hadn’t told me. ‘But a bullet nicked his aorta. He probably wouldn’t have had a chance even if he’d been in a hospital when it happened.’
‘Was he in pain?’ It was the first time I’d spoken in a while and my throat felt rough and dry, despite the wine. ‘Was he conscious?’
‘In and out. I know he was hurting, but I’ve seen him in worse pain. He was relaxed when he finally went. Even smiled at me and shrugged, like he knew he’d fucked it up.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘For telling me. I know it isn’t easy.’
Randy shook his head. ‘I’m a bastard for saying this, but the hard part then was knowing that someday I’d have to tell you and that I’d have to say I failed to save him.’
‘It wasn’t your job to save him. And he sure as hell didn’t want to be saved,’ I said. I reached across the table and ran my fingertips over the back of his hand, stroking the knuckles, scarred from who knew what battles. ‘Trust me, I know what you were dealing with.’
He turned his hand palm up and caught my fingers. ‘Yeah, you do. Now you tell me what it is I need to know.’
I took a deep breath. ‘It’s not as dramatic as yours,’ I said. ‘Randy was cheating on me. He asked for a divorce about two months before he left for that mission.’
Jason’s sharp intake of breath answered the one question I couldn’t ask him. He hadn’t known. He squeezed my hand tightly, shaking his head as if to negate my words.
‘Randy was cheating? Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. He admitted it when he asked for the divorce. He was leaving me for someone else.’
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Damn him.’
‘Damn me. I knew it. Had always known it. I knew it when I married him.’
Jason didn’t react this time. I hadn’t expected he would. ‘I’m sorry, Cele.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ It was a ridiculous question – I had always known Randy was a womaniser and he didn’t cover his tracks well. But the root of the question was why Jason hadn’t ever told me he knew about Randy so I could confide in him.
He shook his head again. ‘I don’t know. I wanted to, but then that seemed like a betrayal to him.’
‘He was betraying me.’
‘And you – we – betrayed him. I felt like a jackass for justifying it like that, but I did.’
I swallowed hard past the bitterness lumped in my throat. It was an emotion I’d fought long and hard against in the past year, the past sixteen years, but it still tinged my feelings toward Randy. And Jason. ‘I justified it the same way. Only I had more of a conscience than he did and I guess you did, too, or you would have come after me for more.’
‘He told me he was done,’ Jason said. ‘Every time I caught him talking up some chick in a bar or getting a phone number from some file clerk, he said that was the last one.’
I nodded. ‘I know.’
‘And how was I supposed to come to you, after what I’d done, and tell you what he was doing?’
‘You should have.’
He pushed back his chair, the legs scraping loudly on the tile floor. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you knew?’ he asked. ‘I felt like shit for not telling you, for taking advantage of you that night, for not being fully committed to my marriage because –’ He broke off there, shaking his head the whole time.
‘Because?’ I asked softly, knowing the answer to this question too. ‘Because you were in love with me, the way I was in love with you, the way we were both in love with Randy. And he could hurt me, and he could hurt you, but we couldn’t hurt him. So we pretended it never happened, but you could never fully commit to your marriage because you were in love with me and I could never leave Randy because I did love him despite his flaws, but also because the only man I truly wanted was married to someone else.’
He stared at me. Just stared. ‘Yeah. That.’
‘I love you, Jason. I always have. I married the wrong man.’
He’d already pushed his chair away from the table, so it was one quick move for him to stand and pull me from my chair. There was nothing awkward about the way I fitted into his arms this time, maybe because there was nothing between us now. Not regrets, not questions, not the past, not Randy. It was just us now. The way it always should have been.
He kissed me hard this time, his lips angling across mine like they were meant to be there, nothing soft and tentative about him. He was the SEAL he was trained to be – no, born to be – and he knew all the intel about what I was offering and how to meet my needs.
I kissed him back the way I’d been fantasising for the past fifteen years. Not the way I had that one fateful night when we’d gotten drunk on much cheaper wine and tumbled into his bed in a crappy little apartment in San Diego. Not tentative and nervous, not guilty o
r lonely. No, I kissed him back like a woman who has tasted the world and knows what she wants. This time I was going to get it, come high or hell water. I kissed him with years of pent-up passion and hundreds of unrealised sexual fantasies pent up in a body that had gotten softer with age, but not less passionate. I kissed him like a woman who was available, attainable and willing, because I was all of those things. For him and only him.
We made out like teenagers in the middle of the kitchen floor. I braced my hand against his chest and pushed him back, giggling. ‘We need to take this elsewhere. My neighbours can see in my kitchen windows.’
‘So? They won’t be watching.’
I thought about looking out that very same window just the night before and catching a glimpse of Rachel and Nathan going at it on the counter in their kitchen. The fact that they’re about ten years older than me wasn’t the shocking part – the shocking part was they had just gotten divorced and were in the process of moving out. Lust and love are a powerful thing when they collide – earth-shattering and all-encompassing. Unforgettable.
‘Let’s go to the bedroom anyway,’ I said, my cheeks flushing hotly at the idea of being watched by anyone. My passion was for Jason only.
‘Whatever the lady wants,’ he said as he started walking me backwards into the foyer and toward the stairs. ‘Bedroom upstairs?’ he mumbled against my lips.
‘Yes,’ I gasped back as his hands found my breasts and tweaked my nipples through my blouse. ‘Upstairs, end of the hall.’
‘This house is too damned big and I’ve waited too damned long,’ he said, pushing me up against the wall in the narrow front hall. ‘I need you now.’
I didn’t argue. There was no reason to. No one to come home and catch me doing something wicked right there in the front entrance. No one to judge me or criticise me. For the first time in my adult life, I could do exactly what I wanted to do with exactly the person I wanted to do it with and I was going to enjoy every minute of it.
‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘Yes, now, here.’
He already had his hand up under my skirt and was tugging my simple cotton panties down and out of the way. They slipped to my knees and I used my foot to push them down the rest of the way and step out of them. His fingers slipped inside my wetness, his thumb on my clit. I didn’t need any more than that, a few strokes of his callused thumb on my clit and two fingers gently massaging my pussy and I came, braced between the wall and his hard body, my voice echoing up to the vaulted ceiling and falling back on me. A woman in the throes of passion. I wondered if the neighbours could hear me. Suddenly, I didn’t care who could hear or who might see. I just wanted Jason. Now.
‘I need you inside me,’ I said, reaching for his belt.
Impatient, he pushed my hands out of the way. ‘I can do this quicker.’
‘As long as that’s the only thing you’re quick at,’ I teased, tugging my blouse out of the waistband of my skirt and unbuttoning it.
He paused long enough to watch me shrug out of my blouse, release the clasp on my bra and let both fall to the floor. I stood there in only my skirt, my heavy breasts swaying, watching him drop his pants. He slipped out of his shoes, stripped off his socks and pushed his pants and briefs off in one smooth stroke, his eyes never leaving my near-nakedness.
‘You are so fucking beautiful,’ he said, taking me in his arms again, the thick hair on his chest rubbing sensuously against my sensitive nipples. ‘I have wanted you ever day. Every single fucking day.’
‘You can have me. Here. Now. Upstairs. Anywhere you want.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘We’ll start here and work our way through the rest of the house.’
What would have sounded like bluster from any other man sounded like a promise from Jason. A promise I desperately wanted him to keep.
‘We have all night.’
‘I hope we have every night for a very long time.’
I shivered, my longing for him so overwhelming I could barely stand still. ‘We do. Oh, God, we do.’
I hooked one leg around his hip and reached between us to take his cock in my hand. I moaned at the thickness of it – how could I have forgotten? – and rose on tiptoe to guide him into me. Even as hot and wet as I was, it was a tight fit. I hadn’t had sex in … I couldn’t remember when. Well over a year, and then it had been by rote, married sex with Randy because he felt the need to keep up the pretence he was a faithful husband. At that point I had known he was cheating again and he’d already known he was going to leave me, so neither of us enjoyed it much. And neither of us had said a word.
This time, this time, I had a lot of words to say. A lot of sounds to make. A lot of positions and tricks and techniques to try. This time, I was with the man I loved. Had always loved. And I told him so as I slowly lowered myself onto his erection, taking the full length and breadth of him inside me, filling me. We stood like that for a long moment, simply absorbing the reality of it. We were together. He was inside me. Nothing had ever felt so right in the world.
‘I love you, Cele,’ he said, cupping my ass in his hands and pulling me up against him, sinking deeper into my wetness. ‘I love you.’
I echoed his love, and his lust, crying out as he drove into me with increasingly hard thrusts. I loved it. I loved his rough hands on my bottom, his hard cock buried inside me, the low moans that sounded like growls in the back of his throat, the way my breasts rubbed against his muscular chest. I loved it all.
I arched my back against the wall and clung to his shoulders, careful not to dig my nails into his flesh, until he growled, ‘Don’t hold back. Never hold back with me. I want all of you.’
And I gave it to him as he thrust into me. I dug my nails into his shoulders, crying out as I felt myself on the verge of another orgasm. He sensed it too, dropping his mouth to nip at my neck, whispering in my ear, ‘I can feel you, so tight and wet around me before, but even tighter now. You’re going to come for me, aren’t you, Cele?’
I nodded, unable to string words together. It didn’t matter, I was right there already and I could tell by the way he went rigid against me that he was close, too. My pussy rippled around him, tightening as my orgasm rocked us both. He pulled me up off the ground then and pressed me against the wall. I wrapped my legs around his waist and hooked my ankles, just holding on for the ride of my life. I screamed out my second orgasm, more powerful than the first, almost painful with how full I felt and how hard the thrust, and heard his responding moan, softer and deeper, the sexiest thing I’d ever heard in my life.
I clung to him, resting my head against his shoulder as he slowly lowered me to the ground, worn out from my release, both physical and emotional. He cradled me against his chest, so strong and yet so gentle that I felt tears slipping down my cheeks.
‘What is it?’ he asked, taking my chin in his hands and tilting my head up so he could see my face. He wiped my tears away with his thumb. ‘Cele, did I hurt you?’
I shook my head and smiled. ‘No, sweetheart, you didn’t hurt me. You healed me.’
Coming Home
I knew I shouldn’t be there. I mean, hell, it wasn’t like I had even been invited. I’d broken in, for God’s sake. I’d broken the law – and for what? To sit in the dark and wait for Quentin to come home so he could throw my ass out. Not for the first time, I wondered if he even would come home. It was 3 a.m. and I’d been sitting at his kitchen table for two hours already, running my fingers over the scarred surface and planning what I was going to say to him. Two hours in – make that two months – and I still wasn’t sure what words were going to come out of my mouth when I saw him. For the hundredth time, I reflexively pressed the keypad on my phone and watched it light up with the time. 3:17.
Quentin and I were a lot alike. Both of us slung drinks for a living – alcohol for him and coffee for me – and we were both quiet and introspective, which made us good listeners for other people’s issues but not too good at sharing our own problems with each other. Quentin was stoic i
n dealing with life’s curveballs, whether it was his father’s unexpected death or a tree falling on his truck, and he could get focused on work or helping his brother rebuild that old Mustang of their dad’s, or repairing the fence on that piece of property out in the country, until the crisis passed.
Me, I was more inclined to run away from anything I couldn’t face head on – and sometimes that meant skipping town for a few days. Or a few weeks, in this case. I’d told my boss I had a personal crisis and needed to take as much of my vacation time as he could give me. He said my job would be waiting when I got back. All I could do was hope he was telling the truth. I was going to need a steady paycheck. Especially if Quentin bailed on me.
I knew he was still bartending at Kayla’s – but this wasn’t a city where bars stayed open until dawn. One or two, maybe, but it was getting on to the time when I needed to pack it in and go – that, or plan to make a night of it and hope he didn’t call the police when he found me on his couch in the morning.
I was still debating my limited options when I heard the distinct snick of a key in the front door lock. I threw a quick prayer up to the patron saint of stupid, lovelorn women that he hadn’t brought some chick home from the bar, and waited.
I hadn’t wanted him to call the police as soon as he pulled up, so I’d left the place dark when I’d helped myself to the spare key I knew he always kept tucked under the mat. He didn’t turn on any lights either, so he was just a shadowy figure standing in the doorway. Could’ve been anyone, I guess, except I knew it was Quentin. Five years with a man will make you remember the tilt of his frame and the cant of his walk. And a whole lot of other things I didn’t want to be thinking about just yet. It was Quentin all right, and by the tight way he carried himself he had either jacked up his back again or he knew I was here.
‘Little late for a visit, ain’t it, Rebecca?’
He knew it was me. ‘Hey, Quentin.’
Two months of trying to sort through the mess that was my life and two hours sitting at his kitchen table and that’s the best I could come up with.
Seduce Me Tonight (Mischief Books) Page 8
