Yet she was more beautiful than ever. So beautiful, his chest actually hurt.
She parted her thighs, her stare holding no trace of shyness despite the fact that she couldn’t be in a more vulnerable position, wide-open and completely bare. In that instant, Gamble realized Kennedy was doing what he’d asked her to, showing him exactly what she needed. Hesitating only long enough to take a condom from his bedside table drawer, he knelt between her legs, trying not to hiss out a breath as she took the condom from him and rolled it over his hypersensitive cock.
“I need you,” she said again, the words arrowing way down deep. Reaching between them to wrap her fingers around his cock, she canted her hips up, and oh, holy hell, he was lost. Or maybe he was found, because all at once he was inside of her, and that was all that fucking mattered.
“This. Oh, God, this,” Kennedy murmured. Gamble knew he should take a second to adjust to the sensations ripping through him—the warm, perfect squeeze of her pussy, the ease with which his dick had slid all the way home.
But he didn’t. Instead, he gave her what she needed.
Gamble pulled back, but only so he could press back to fill her to the hilt, then repeat the wickedly sexy process again and again. He didn’t go slow, and he sure as hell wasn’t sweet. He gripped Kennedy’s hips, a dark smile tugging at the corners of his mouth as she grabbed his wrists, turning her nails into his skin to ensure that he didn’t stop. She lifted off the bed to meet him, their bodies slapping together with every thrust. Gamble sank into her over and over, his pulse racing faster and his need burning like a bright, uncontrollable fire. Kennedy opened her legs wider, hooking her thighs over his waist. She didn’t knot her legs all the way around him, but held him just close enough to the cradle of her body to make his balls throb as he fucked her with hard, purposeful thrusts. The muscles deep inside of her clenched in promise, and oh yes. Hell yes. He wanted his name on her lips as she flew apart.
“Ian, please. I need you.”
Gamble buried his cock in her pussy, covering her body until there was no space at all between them from shoulders to thighs. He started to come just as she finished, his release rushing up from the base of his spine and barreling through him with enough intensity to steal his breath. Kennedy didn’t hold back, not even in the haze of her own climax, her arms wrapped around his shoulders, her heartbeat a steady constant on his chest. Gamble let go of everything—the adrenaline that had gone with the fire call, the anger of having been benched, the fear of all the what-ifs that could’ve made tonight so much worse than it was—and focused on the one thing he could control.
But then he realized, as he looked down at the woman in his arms, that he couldn’t control this at all.
Because he needed Kennedy. Craved the way she needed him in return.
And hell if that wasn’t more dangerous than bullets, bombs, and blades combined.
23
Kennedy rolled over in a bed that wasn’t hers, her heart squeezing in her chest. Funny how, all of a sudden, her heart didn’t feel like it was hers, either. Guess that’s what happened when your emotions blindsided you into realizing the truth that had been right there in front of you, as big and bold as a billboard, just waiting for you to have a lightbulb moment. Kennedy wasn’t really sure what would happen now that her heart had—rather forcefully—informed the rest of her that she had all sorts of feelings for the sexy, tortured firefighter she’d fallen asleep next to, and who, despite his rough edges and sharp corners, seemed to have feelings for her in return.
Wait, she thought, rolling over in the tangle of bed sheets that smelled like laundry detergent with just a hint of something masculine that belonged uniquely to Gamble, and blinking her way fully into the reality of the soft, very-early morning light edging past the window blinds.
She might’ve fallen asleep next to him a few hours ago, but he wasn’t here with her now. In fact, the opposite side of the bed was cool to the touch.
As if, even though she had drifted off for a few hours, Gamble hadn’t slept at all.
With her pulse tapping her awareness and her instincts into gear, Kennedy reached for her cell phone, which she’d put on the bedside table just before closing her eyes, in case something went down with Xander. But she had no voicemail messages and no new texts, the last exchange between her and her brother being the quick confirmation from last night that he was, in fact, unharmed and just as what-the-fuck about the fire as she had been. Kennedy knew the intelligence unit had his safety well in-hand, at least for the moment, so she slid the covers back and put her bare feet on the floor.
She realized belatedly that her feet matched the rest of her. Her clothes were still where they’d been hastily discarded on the bathroom floor last night, and she padded in to retrieve them. A wash of heat bloomed over her cheeks at the sight of her hoodie and jeans and panties folded neatly on the edge of the counter and her boots in a precise line at the foot of the vanity. Her tank top, which was still far more wet than not, had been draped carefully over the side of the bathtub, a clean, dry RFD T-shirt resting directly beside it, and her heartbeat conspired against her composure.
She cared about Gamble, which was crazy enough. But in his own quiet way, Gamble cared about her, too.
And Kennedy wanted nothing more than to let him.
Tugging the gray cotton over her head and her panties back into place for some semblance of propriety, she pilfered a swig of mouthwash from the medicine cabinet and pulled her hair into a knot on top of her head. She decided to forego her jeans for now—Gamble’s T-shirt was big enough to hit her knees, and unlike the last time she’d crashed here, she wasn’t in a hurry to motor out the door just yet—and tiptoed down the hallway leading into the main living space of his apartment.
“Hey,” Kennedy whispered, even though the shift of Gamble’s shoulders and the slight tilt of his bearded chin told her he’d seen her from the spot where he was sitting on the couch.
“Hey.”
The room was half-shadowed, half-illuminated by the rising sun casting golden-pink light through the pair of oversized windows dominating the far wall. The TV opposite the couch was dark and quiet, and although his phone sat within reach on the coffee table, it too was untouched.
Kennedy walked over the floorboards to sit down beside Gamble, who was dressed in a pair of low-slung sweats and a hard, impenetrable stare aimed at the windows. “Any word from Bridges?” she asked softly.
“No.” He shook his head, but didn’t look at her. He didn’t clam up or push her away, either, so right now, she’d take the win. “Have you heard from Xander?”
“No,” she said, realizing she’d been too scared, then too angry, then too distracted to update Gamble on her brother last night. “I voice-texted him when I was on my way to the hospital, and he’s okay. Isabella checked in with him, too, and of course, Capelli still has tabs on him, but…” She let the rest drift, and Gamble nodded as if he’d more than filled in the blanks. She and Xander might still have fences to mend, but she wasn’t ever going to not worry about him. “Anyway. He was just as surprised about the fire as we were.”
“Glad he’s okay.”
It was Kennedy’s turn to nod. “Me, too.”
They lapsed into silence, which, she supposed, was Gamble’s default. But again, he didn’t push her away, didn’t get up to make coffee or go to take a shower, and screw it. She’d seen the emotions in his eyes when he’d ordered those shots of tequila at The Crooked Angel, then again last night when he’d told her he had a head full of razor wire.
And she didn’t want him to face those ghosts alone anymore.
“You don’t sleep much. Do you,” Kennedy said quietly. Although her tone didn’t label the words as a question, he answered her anyway.
“No. I don’t.”
Some feeling she had no name for twisted inside of her, but miraculously, her voice stayed level as she asked, “Do you want to talk about this yet? What keeps you up at night?”
“It’s…complicated,” Gamble said, more like a warning than a brush-off.
A warning she heard but didn’t heed. “I’m okay with that if you are.”
For a beat that became two, then twenty, he said nothing, and no less than a thousand questions swarmed Kennedy’s brain, begging to be asked. But chances were, he’d been holding on to whatever this was for a long time, stuffing it down instead of letting it out. So she did the only thing she could think of to help him.
She turned off her brain, went with her heart, and gave him the space to find his voice.
“I joined the Marines on my eighteenth birthday,” Gamble said finally. “My parents barely spoke to me after I got back from the recruiting center, or in the ten days before I left for Parris Island. I haven’t spoken to them since.”
Kennedy’s tongue burned with the most malicious swear words she could think of, but she locked her molars together in an effort to keep them to herself. Not that she didn’t want to launch every last syllable, because she so did. But this conversation wasn’t about what she wanted. It was about what Gamble needed, so she nodded and waited for him to continue.
“At the time, I wanted the fastest route out of their house, and they were all too happy to have me take it. But it didn’t take me too long to realize that not only was I pretty good at being a Marine, but I…liked it.”
She tried to hold back her shock, but failed. “You liked basic training?”
One corner of Gamble’s mouth lifted in irony rather than humor. “Don’t get me wrong. There were parts of it that were pure hell, and that was on the good days. But I liked the order of it. The way the objectives were clear, the tactics precise. I’ve always been a physical guy, so the hard work didn’t bother me as much as it does most people. And, yeah, I liked being part of a group whose job it was to watch my back, and that my job was to watch theirs.”
God, of course. “You wanted the camaraderie.”
“I guess. Yeah, I did,” Gamble said. He paused for a minute, as if he was trying to get his bearing with the rest of his words. “I knew I wanted a career in the military pretty early on. I didn’t want to just serve and be done, or use it as a stepping stone to something else. I wanted it to be my something else.”
“I get that,” Kennedy said, and she did. Even with that very first job in that shitty diner in North Point, she’d loved working in the restaurant industry. Callings came in all shapes and sizes.
Gamble nodded. “I wasn’t really interested in becoming an officer—I didn’t have a four-year degree, and I wanted my boots on the ground—so I set my sights on special operations. Specifically, Force Recon.”
“Whoa.” Kennedy’s shoulders hit the back of the couch with a soft thump as her eyes went wide. His badassery had never been in question, but… “Force Recon is a really big deal in the Marines, isn’t it?”
“It took a lot of time and training,” he said by way of agreement, and it was just like him not to brag, or even make a fuss over a skill set that was probably so advanced and, well, downright fucking scary, that ninety-nine percent of people could never even dream of it, let alone survive whatever was necessary to qualify. “But the closer you get to making your way up those ranks, the more you find the people who want it just as bad as you do. There’s not a whole lot of room for freelancing in Force Recon. You’re either part of the unit or you’re not.”
Her chest squeezed in realization. He’d been looking for fellowship. Why not aim high? “So you completed the training and became a Force Recon Marine.”
Kennedy let the and then? hang in her tone, and Gamble shook his head.
“I can’t talk about a lot of it. Not because I don’t want to,” he added, “although most things, you probably wouldn’t want to know even if I could. But nearly all of my missions were classified. Suffice it to say, I spent a lot of time deployed overseas.”
“How much time?” Kennedy asked, her curiosity getting the better of her mouth. Gamble, however, didn’t seem to mind the question.
“Four years—on and off, of course. I spent most of my leave traveling, though. Or with the guys in my unit.”
At the mention of his unit, Gamble’s expression changed, growing more shuttered and sharp. His shoulders crept higher around his spine, tension pulling his muscles tight like bowstrings.
Kennedy took a risk and slid her hand over one rock-solid forearm, her own heart beating in time with the pulse she could feel hammering away beneath his skin. “You must have been really close.”
“We were,” came the answer, low and quiet.
“So, what happened?”
Gamble said nothing, just stared out the windows with that closed-off look on his face, his dark eyes unreadable, and for a minute, Kennedy thought she might’ve pushed too hard. But then something inside of him seemed to break, emotion tearing over his face and taking over his stare as he turned to pin her with it, and oh, God, her heart broke at the sight.
But then it completely shattered when he said, “They were all killed right in front of me, and I couldn’t do a damned thing to stop it.”
Gamble knew all the signs of physical duress. He’d had extensive first aid training and seen enough traumas to fill a dump truck with them. So he knew that his racing pulse, the lockdown in his chest, the clammy sweat between his shoulder blades, and the extreme dread crowding his brain right now were all classic signs of a panic attack. He just couldn’t do a single thing to keep it from happening.
Second verse, same as the first.
“Oh, God. Gamble, I’m so sorry.” Kennedy’s voice pierced through the panic, and he focused on it, on the cadence of the sound, the rise and fall of the syllables.
He inhaled. Or at least, he tried to. “It was…bad.”
Gamble waited for her to say he didn’t have to talk about it, to backpedal or recoil or shove him away. But she didn’t. Christ, she didn’t even come close. Instead, Kennedy pressed her hand against his forearm, her fingers warm and strong and so there that he opened his mouth and the words just started falling right out.
“There were five of us. Me, Flannery, Perez, Cho, and our captain, Weaver.”
He saw each man in his mind’s eye, as clearly as if they were right there in the room, Flannery with his bright red hair, Perez with that fucking perma-smile that always bordered on a smirk but somehow never managed to get the guy into trouble as often as it won people over.
“We’d just finished a long mission that had been kind of tedious, shitty conditions, not a lot of sleep, and we were on our way home. But then we got orders to divert.”
Gamble knew he had to be careful here. Any mission where four Force Recon Marines had been killed in a cluster fuck of epic proportions on what was supposed to have been a goddamned cakewalk of a personal security detail was classified to the nines. He shouldn’t even be acknowledging that there had been a mission, let alone that he’d been there and was the only survivor.
And yet, for the first time ever, the past was ripping a path out of him, whether he wanted it to or not.
“So, your unit was needed somewhere else for a different job?” Kennedy asked, seeming to understand his need to redact the details and stick to what had been in the statement made by the government after the fact, and Gamble nodded.
“Yeah. Usually, the military tries not to do that with a team that’s been deployed for a while, but we were close, and the new detail was supposed to be quick.” In and out, just the way I like it, Cho had said with a laugh, and even Weaver, who had been the most stoic of the bunch, had laughed, too.
Gamble shook his head, more words spinning and churning from the spot where he’d shoved them, all the way down in his chest. “The conditions weren’t ideal, but we’d seen way worse. Plus, we were there for personal security detail. It was supposed to be easy. Less than a day, then we’d all be throwing back beers on the beach, stateside.”
“But that’s not what happened,” Kennedy whispered. She looked so pretty, sitting t
here in the growing sunlight of his apartment that was seven thousand miles away from the village in the desert where his entire life had changed, and he let out a shaky exhale.
“No. It’s not.”
Gamble couldn’t give her the facts, not unless he wanted a big, fat court-martial sandwich. He couldn’t say that they’d been ambushed, or that Weaver and the guy they’d gone to do PSD for had been killed instantly by an IED blast. That both of Cho’s legs had been blown off in less time than it took most people to blink. That, despite his grave injuries and massive suffering, the guy still hadn’t died for a full ten minutes afterward, and that every time Gamble closed his eyes long enough to dream, all he saw were those ten minutes, on a grisly, continuous loop in his head.
The ones where he’d tightened tourniquets, drawing unholy screams from the people he’d loved like brothers. Taken heavy fire, certain he would die at any second. Watched Flannery, with whom he’d been the closest, get shot in the head by a sniper as they’d ducked for cover less than six inches apart. Dragged Perez, whose femoral artery had been nicked hard by a chunk of shrapnel from the blast, to the most secure spot he could find so he could cover the guy with his own body while he radioed frantically for help.
Tell…my wife…tell her I love her, Perez had said, the coppery smell of blood clogging the air as Gamble had slid a tourniquet from his med pack around the guy’s thigh and prayed for the first and only time in his entire fucking life.
You can tell her yourself when we get home, Gamble had replied.
He’d been a goddamned liar. Perez had bled to death just a few hours later on a field hospital operating table.
Five had gone out. One had come back.
But in a way, everyone had died.
“Ian.”
The stability in Kennedy’s voice brought Gamble back to the reality of his apartment, of the fact that he was sitting here when the other four members of his unit had been brought home in body bags. His lungs flattened, the shadows that haunted him in those rare, quiet moments he allowed himself closing in.
Down Deep Page 24
