by Hill, Teresa
His head fell back against the chair and he moaned at the sensation of her head in his lap, teasing him. He closed a hand around her head. He slipped his fingers into her hair, and fought against thrusting against her mouth.
She wrapped a hand around the base of his cock and squeezed firmly. Finally, she took him into her mouth. Nothing else in the world could feel that good. It wasn’t just the sensation, the heat, the wet stroke of her tongue, the pressure as she sucked. It was how eagerly she did it. Like she wanted him so badly and couldn’t get enough of him. Like in that moment, she lived to please him.
“Dani.” He had to stop this. He had to be inside her.
His hand in her hair tried to tug her head away, but she took him deeper, put her hands on his hips and pulled until he was thrusting into her mouth. He was going to lose it. He was going to come in her mouth. He didn’t want that. Not this time.
“Dani, please,” he said.
She finally let him push her away. She knelt between his legs, bare from the waist up, with her hair all mussed, her cheeks flushed, her lips swollen. She tugged his pants down and off.
She looked crazy beautiful.
“Condom, in the nightstand behind you,” he managed to say with his last functioning brain cells.
She reached back and grabbed one, insisted on putting it on him, while he clenched his teeth at the feel of her hands on him. Then he pulled her up to her feet and tugged down on her shorts and her pink lace panties.
“So pretty, sweetheart.” He dropped kisses on the outside of her thighs as he pulled her panties all the way to the floor and waited for her to step out of them.
Then it was his turn to torment her. He pulled her forward until he had his legs between hers, then wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her onto him. She held his shoulders to keep her balance. He tucked one of her bent knees against the side of his chest and hooked his other hand beneath her other thigh, opening her up wide to him. She ended up with the upper half of her body draped over his shoulder and the thick, cushioned back of the chair.
“Mace!” she cried out.
He finally got his mouth between her legs. She tensed against him, whimpered, panted, gasped.
“Oh, sweetheart. So good. You taste so good.”
She clutched his hair hard and tugged.
“Too much? Not enough? Tell me what you need.”
She just cried out and came hard against his mouth. He eased up, but kept his mouth on her. He wanted this to last, wanted to bring her down slowly, draw out the pleasure. Finally, she got so sensitive she could hardly handle him touching her at all.
When she fell limp against him, he helped her slide down his body, kissing her as she went. Her belly, her rib cage, her breast, her neck, her mouth again. She kissed him back, and through the condom, he felt the heat of her body rub against him.
“Give me a minute,” he pleaded. He needed a minute to cool off a little.
She wouldn’t. She found the strength to rise up just an inch and wriggled her hips until she had his cock at her entrance and slowly … so slowly … she eased down and took him inside of her.
“God, Dani!” he protested.
One of his hands pressed against her back, trying to hold her still, keep her from getting him any deeper. She gripped and pulsed around him. She showed him no mercy.
His cock throbbed, and he gave up, palmed her hips and moved her against him, grinding into her. It felt exquisite. The heat. The pressure. How wet she was. The little sounds she made. How her body went boneless against his.
They kissed greedily. He tried to slow things down, but it was no use. He barely got a hand between them, barely had time to let his thumb make little circles on her clit, barely held out himself before he felt her tense and her body clamp down on his.
Wave after wave of pleasure shot through him. He felt it move through her. He came with a shout, his hands gripping her hips so hard he feared he’d bruise her. His mouth was still pressed against hers, but he couldn’t even manage to kiss her. He just held on. The feeling went on so long. His cock throbbed inside her with a hard, heavy pulse,. For a long moment, the whole world fell away.
Her head fell to his shoulder. Vaguely, he thought he felt her lips stretch out into a smile against his neck. He locked his arms around her and held on as they slowly came back down to reality. To the chair in his bedroom in his condo, their bodies plastered together, so much skin on skin, both so tired and loose and relaxed and happy.
He found the strength to lift his hand and stroke her hair because he couldn’t stand to stop touching her, and he didn’t want her to move. He wanted to stay inside of her as long as he could.
Suddenly, the run the night before, the workout tonight and the sex hit him hard, and he was utterly exhausted. She kissed him, the side of his neck, his cheek, his mouth, softly.
“Mmm,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Thank me?”
“Uh hmm. I didn’t want to wait any longer.”
“I guess I should always let your have your way.”
“You should.”
She hid her face against his neck, and he thought she couldn’t possibly be turning shy now, but maybe she was. Or maybe this was her reaction to something that had been as intense for her as it had been for him.
He felt raw and exposed in a way he never had before. Like she saw right inside of him and knew how much he’d been hurting, knew what the last few days had taken out of him, and wanted to make him feel better.
Which she had, beautifully.
“That was perfect,” he whispered. “You feel so good in my arms. And you wore me out. I have to get up now and get us to bed, or we’ll end up in this chair all night.”
“But I love this chair.”
“So do I, but you’ll love the bed, too. Promise.”
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Five
Dani
She barely remembered him lifting her out of the chair and into his bed. She slept tangled in his arms. He woke her sometime very early in the morning with his mouth on hers and his hand between her legs. She wanted more of those good things, but when they woke up again at mid-morning, he insisted they had things to deal with first.
He went to his truck for something he said he needed for this talk, and she told herself not to freak out.
What could he possibly have found that would change anything? Aaron wasn’t coming back. She was slowly coming to trust herself, to trust Mace. She wasn’t the devastated girl she had been, stuck in a job she endured, living in a depressing place with a roommate whose boyfriend scared her.
She was moving on. Good things were coming into her life. She was going to use her teaching degree, one way or another, and she had Mace, a very good man.
She refused to be nervous.
Was that possible? To simply refuse to feel an emotion she didn’t like? Life would be so much easier if she could.
While she waited for Mace to get back, she fiddled with her coffee, adding more sugar, a tad more cream, like getting it absolutely right was important, and then she had to fight the urge to pace.
She wanted to be back in bed with him, kissing him, her body draped over his. She wanted to feel him moving against her and inside of her. She wanted to be alive and happy, not sitting here with nerves firing in disquieting patterns that left her feeling like she’d had a dozen cups of coffee.
Why did she feel like this?
Mace couldn’t tell her anything that would change her present, only about her past.
He finally reappeared, and the sight of him hit her hard. There was a reason all those women kept showing up at his door. He was so good-looking, all that gorgeous dark hair. She hadn’t been able to keep her hands off it last night, had finally gotten to run her hands over so much of his beautiful body. It had been had been like a dream.
She didn’t find it easy to let herself go completely, to push every worry, every caution away and give in to pleasure. It required a degr
ee of trust she’d seldom been able to summon with anyone.
But Mace was so solid, so good down to the core.
She saw life unfolding in front of her for the two of them, and it looked not like some crazy, far-off dream, but like it was so close she could touch it, could grab onto it, and she’d never have to let him go.
He smiled at her, the look in his eyes so warm and reassuring. He was all the promise she’d seen at one time in Aaron, but all grown up into a man, and she felt ridiculously lucky that Mace had barged into her life.
She met him half-way as he walked toward her. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him soundly.
He put a box on the counter so he could tighten his arms around her for one of those perfect hugs she so loved. Then he asked, “What was that for?”
“Because I wanted to.”
“Okay.” He picked up his box, about the size of a ream of paper, and used his other hand to tug her over to the couch.
“Want some coffee?” she blurted, wanting to put this conversation off a little longer.
“No, I’m good, thanks.”
She sat on the sofa with the plain white box.
Sometimes, she could tell when something bad was coming. Where had that feeling been when she’d first started talking to Aaron? Why had the talent abandoned her when she’d needed it most? And why was it back?
She’d known something was terribly wrong from the moment she got back from Greece and woke up to her roommate with an odd look on her face, before she’d heard a word about the shooting on the train.
That last day with Aaron, when he’d been so insistent about getting married right away, before she went back home and he went back to his base … Maybe he knew, too, that something really bad was coming.
No, that made no sense unless he’d truly wanted to marry her.
She didn’t understand her own dread now, either. Her hands were trembling. Her chest felt heavy. Breathing took way more effort than it should. Shit.
Mace reached for the box and started to open it, but must have seen that she was freaking out. “Dani, there’s nothing bad in here.”
She nodded, hearing him but not agreeing. “Just say it. Whatever it is. Tell me. Now.”
“Aaron wasn’t lying to you about anything except that the marriage was legal.”
She shook her head, confused. “What does that mean? That’s the everything! He didn’t really marry me.”
“But he wanted to. More than anything, he wanted to. He intended to. I bet as soon as he got back to the States, he would have explained everything to you, then found a justice of the peace and made the whole thing legal. He just never got the chance.”
“You can’t know that. No one can know that. And why would he lie about us being married in the first place? Who does that?”
“Someone who loved you and wanted to make you happy. I’d say someone who believed the important part of being married is the way you feel about each other, the promises you make to each other, the vows you take, more than a piece of paper that makes it legal in the eyes of the rest of the world.”
“No,” she whispered. “It was a lie!”
“A little white lie, not a malicious one.” He tugged the lid off the scary box and pulled out what looked like a photo album.
Who printed photos anymore?
Not that it really mattered, not compared to what he was trying to tell her, trying to get her to believe.
Mace flipped open the cover, and she gave a pathetic whimper.
There was Aaron, her and Aaron, hands clasped, gazing at each other with what she’d been sure was love, the setting sun sending a shimmering trail of fire across the Mediterranean Sea at their back, at their non-wedding.
They’d given their landlady Aaron’s phone, and she’d taken photos. Dani had been sure they’d been lost to her forever.
“How did you get this?”
“The Germans gathered his phone and iPad as evidence after the train shooting. It was automatic to check whether the shooter had run into Aaron at any point, whether him getting shot was truly random. So, I asked Germany’s version of our Homeland Security for a favor. They gave me everything from his electronic devices and cloud storage.”
“Oh, my God,” she whispered. She touched the photo, Aaron’s image.
“Look at his face,” Mace said. “He’s not an actor. He’s not a liar. He’s a soldier. And a happy man.”
Mace flipped through the photos. More of their so-called wedding. More of their trip. The two of them with ridiculously huge smiles, looking at each other with the kind of happiness Dani had always had trouble believing could possibly be real, even before she found out Aaron lied to her.
Image after image went by. They all hurt, like a thousand tiny, cruel cuts.
She’d always thought if she ever saw those images again, she’d be able to spot some little tell in his expression that she’d missed before, the one that would tell her he was lying, the one she should have seen and known.
Pain unfurled inside her, like the agony she remembered from those first, horrible moments after it had finally been confirmed — that Lt. Aaron Carson had died on that train.
There he was, in gorgeous, full-blown color, his mega-watt smile, messy hair flying in the wind. He had been the most fully alive person she’d ever known, like he’d wanted to make the most of every second. He’d noticed how everything smelled, the brightness of all the colors, the way the sun and the water felt on his skin. And he’d treated her like he thought she was beautiful and perfect, like she was a damned miracle.
Her. Plain, sensible Dani.
She put her hand over her mouth. She bit a finger hard to keep a sob from escaping from deep inside her.
Even now, he looked sincere. But that didn’t prove anything.
“It’s just a photo. A bunch of photos. If the look on a man’s face could be trusted … ”
“I don’t think the photos lie,” Mace said. “I think the guy was crazy in love with you. But you don’t have to take my word for it.”
He pulled a small tablet from the box, swiped across the screen a few times, then put the tablet on the coffee table in front of her. On the screen was an older, dark-haired man with heavily tanned, wrinkled skin.
“That’s the guy who married us.” Then she remembered again. “Pretended to marry us.”
“Yes.”
On the tablet, on the video, Mace asked the man questions. A young girl, maybe a teenager, stood beside him, translating when the man needed her help.
He smiled broadly as he told his tale of Aaron coming in that morning, wanting the man to perform their marriage ceremony. Aaron was so disappointed when he was told what citizens of other countries needed to marry in Greece, the notarized documents, the affidavits, the church bans posted ahead of time.
Aaron kept insisting there had to be a way, surely, there was a way.
No, the man explained.
Aaron pleaded that Greece was magical to him and Dani. They’d met in person for the first time there, fallen even more irrevocably in love there, had a perfect time there. They couldn’t possibly get married anywhere else. This was the place, the ceremony they’d remember for the rest of their lives. He needed to give Dani the perfect wedding, with just the two of them and someone to perform the ceremony.
The man smiled as he told the story. The girl translating looked dreamy-eyed, like she hoped someone would give her a dream wedding some day on a seaside cliff as the sun sank down into the water.
Don’t think that way, Dani wanted to tell her. Don’t believe it.
But it was too late. Like every little girl who’d grown up with the ridiculous, supposedly romantic tales of Disney princesses rescued by their handsome princes, the girl was clearly hooked.
The man said he explained again to Aaron that the marriage he wanted wouldn’t be legal. Aaron said, okay, if that was the way it had to be, they’d make it legal later.
It made Aaron so happy, and the m
an, too. He’d loved performing that ceremony and telling Dani and Aaron that they had to come back on one of their anniversaries to show him how happy they were together and display photos of their babies.
He’d been so sure she and Aaron would have beautiful babies.
Dani jumped to her feet, nearly tripped over the coffee table trying to get away. Air. She needed air. She ran for the sliding glass door and the balcony. Mace followed and tried to help her, to make sure she didn’t fall, but she jerked away from his touch.
Being stabbed slowly and repeatedly must feel like this. The old feelings, hopes and dreams were gouging out big chunks of her heart and discarding them at her feet.
In the background, the man who’d married them and the girl went on and on.
“Make it stop,” Dani told Mace. “I don’t want to hear any more. I can’t.”
He walked back into the living room and the sound stopped. That was better. A bit.
Dizzy and hot, she sank down to the stone floor of the balcony with her back against the side wall. She drew her legs into her chest and held on, like that might be enough to hold herself together.
Mace’s feet reappeared on the balcony in front of her, and he sank down to sit across from her, a baffled look on his face.
“He loved me?”
Mace nodded.
And he’d really wanted to marry her?
Until she’d shown up at his mother’s house, Dani had believed it.
She had never looked for the fantasy, waited for some man to come along and rescue her and make everything easy and happy.
She’d lost people she’d loved. She’d worked hard. She’d been cautious and a realist, she’d always believed.
But maybe she hadn’t been foolish to trust Aaron.
She could imagine him insisting there had to be a way for them to get married that last day in Greece. He was used to getting what he wanted, to making things happen, and he’d kept telling Dani he wanted to give her the world. It made sense that their simple, joyous marriage ceremony on that Greek island would be part of the perfect reality he’d want to create for her.
