by Anne Calhoun
“We’re not supposed to have it in Muslim countries, but we did,” he said, dark amusement in his voice as he shifted over her. “‘This Marine’ didn’t think about breasts or nipples, either,” he said as he released the front catch, then brushed the fabric off to the sides. He gently squeezed the firm flesh, pursed his lips and blew a soft stream of air over her nipple. Her sex clenched as sensation wicked through her body. “Or about the way your nipples darken as you get aroused.”
“You didn’t,” she said unsteadily.
“No. Stay in the moment. Cleaning my rifle, packing for a mission, listening to a briefing, standing watch, running, lifting weights. Never let your mind drift.”
“You’re very disciplined.” It would have been easy to mistake his fidelity for a lack of sex drive. In fact, it was the opposite. Adam was an intensely sexual man, and just as intensely disciplined.
A smile she felt as much as saw, then he caught one nipple between his teeth, laved it with his tongue, then pressed it gently between his fingers while he turned his attention to the other nipple. She slid her hand into his hair, her attention divided between the way the lengthening buzz cut flattened under her palm and the hard biceps flexing under her other hand. A particularly firm pinch sent heat streaking along her nerves, and she arched and whimpered.
“‘This Marine’ didn’t think about sounds. Breathing.”
One warm hand skated down her breastbone to her abdomen, and indeed, anticipating the move lower made her breath catch. Everything he didn’t think about became the object of her attention, her taut nipples, her shallowing breath, and his responses. The heat and strength of his body, pressed against hers. The way his voice deepened, the words running together as his erection pulsed against her thigh. He gently stroked her flat abdomen with his fingertips, leaving her sensitized nipples to throb in the dark, warm air.
“Or buttons, or zippers,” he continued as he unfastened her jeans, stroked the swell of her hip above the waistband, then slid his hand inside to work them partway down. “No thinking about curves, either.” He paused, his gaze roaming her disheveled state, then traced a fingertip from her lowest rib along the flare of her hip, to the point where her jeans were stuck, along with the elastic of her panties. He tugged her jeans down her legs and off, leaving her bare to his gaze.
“I didn’t think about having you naked and spread for me,” he said.
He was looking in her eyes as he spread her legs, and for a moment Marissa’s heart stopped. Something dangerous and edgy flashed there, and the half smile that quirked the corner of his mouth shaved only the thinnest layer off the palpable tension.
He’d thought about it. About her. And whoever this Marine was, the only man in the room was Adam.
Still positioned between her legs, he sat back on his heels and pulled his shirt over his head. She sat up, drawn to the finely honed muscles of his shoulders and chest, but he pushed her back to the bed. “I definitely didn’t think about touch,” he said.
He eased down, the breadth of his shoulders widening her thighs. One hand curved under her leg and over her hip to stroke the soft curls at the top of her mound. With the other he urged her legs to open more. “This was off-limits,” he said. He stroked her folds with his index finger, opened them, but avoided her clit. “The soft, delicate skin, the scent. How vulnerable you are right now.”
He’d thought about that, too, about how each step in the dance heightened a woman’s surrender. When he bent and blew gently on the exposed nub, she made another soft noise.
“So slick,” he murmured, but she didn’t know whether that was an observation, or something else he wouldn’t allow himself to remember. His finger traced her inner folds, then slid inside. “So hot, and very, very tight.”
At the words, she spasmed around his finger. He bent his head and put his tongue to her clit. Her eyes dropped closed as all her attention focused on his tongue and what it was doing. A slow circle, another, then he stopped when she shivered and laved several deft strokes on the more sensitive side. “There?”
“There,” she said.
“Hmmmm.” A satisfied purr from the broad male chest.
The hand resting on top of her mound didn’t move, so she brought her hand along his arm and linked her fingers with his as he did it again, and again, the touch of his tongue light, almost teasing, enough to strike sparks under the swelling skin but not enough to satisfy. He dipped lower, circled her soft opening, then slid back up, developing a slow, steady rhythm.
Their fingers still linked, she reached down and spread her folds for him. This time when his tongue stroked along her clit, she bucked toward his mouth. The hand under hers flattened on her mound, holding her down, and then it was game on. He went down on her like he had all the time in the world and no end in mind other than her complete and total devastation. He worked two fingers inside her, stroking in a lazy, gentle reminder of what it would feel like when he fucked her, and drew tight, desperate gasps from her as molten pleasure built and built. When he turned his fingers and stroked the bundle of nerves in the swollen inner wall, ecstasy went supernova. She lifted into his mouth and sobbed out her pleasure as she came.
He backed off a little when she subsided, kissing her trembling inner thighs, the hand still clutching his at her mound, a veneer of lazy amusement over the intensity in his eyes. He straightened, looming over her as he shoved off pants, socks, and boots. Then she got her first good look at the body of a fighting-strength United States Marine.
Amazing. Hard, not an ounce of fat with the muscles so sharply delineated. Darker brown hair dusted his pecs and tapered to a line down his abdomen before thickening around his erect shaft. Completely unselfconscious, he removed a condom from his wallet and smoothed it on. The dim light from the kitchen starkly illuminated his broad shoulders as he knelt between her legs. He planted one hand beside either shoulder. She let out a moan when the broad head of his shaft stretched skin made vibrantly sensitive by foreplay and an orgasm.
He slid inside, slow and relentless, stretching her unbearably. She drew tight around him, the movement as involuntary as the helpless little gasp she made. He lowered his body to hers, taking some of his weight on his elbows, but she felt the strength and power of his torso covering her, the clench of his abdominal muscles as he withdrew and pushed back in.
“That’s my secret, Ris. I focus on whatever I’m doing. I block out everything else. Now I’m focused on how tight you are, how you’re slick and hot, and I’m paying attention.” He stroked in once, twice, and pleasure began to simmer. “That’s good,” he said. Then he adjusted the cant of his hips and his next stroke glided over the sensitive bundle of nerves inside her.
The contrast was electrifying, the difference between trundling along in her truck and screaming down dirt roads on the back of Adam’s Hayabusa at a hundred and thirty miles an hour. Her toes curled, her fingernails dug into his biceps and nape, and a new, higher-pitched, demanding noise clawed its way from her throat.
“That’s better,” he said, and did it again.
“God, yes,” she said.
The only facets of her world were his voice, low, rough, utterly self-assured, utterly masculine, and the slow, slick glide of his cock into her sensitized channel. She was beyond thinking, adrift in a sea of hot, dark pleasure. His heart pounded against his sternum, the pulse reverberating into her body. Without knowing why, she cupped the back of his head and turned his mouth to hers. The taste of her juices lingered on his mouth, but then the kisses were deep and hard, as much an exchange of gasps and huffs of air as a battle of tongues and teeth. He fisted his hand in her hair and turned her head so his mouth brushed her ear. “I won’t forget, Ris. Next time I’ll remember this, and I’ll use it against you.”
She came, and this time her orgasm made her vision close to a pinprick. He thrust through the contractions, holding his breath, then let it out with a stuttering groan as he ground against her and came.
He lifted s
ome of his weight onto his elbows, and the shift only heightened the sensations where they were connected. His hair-roughened legs against her inner thighs, the supersensitive flesh where they were joined. The muscular strength of his biceps alongside her upper arms. His fingers, entwining with hers as the tension ebbed from their bodies, but she was glad he couldn’t see her face.
“Very interesting demonstration,” she said. “How long did it take most people to go from ‘me’ or ‘I’ to ‘this recruit’?”
He nuzzled into her hair, then stretched out on his side, his head braced on his palm. “A few weeks.”
She turned toward him. “And you?”
He tucked her hair behind her ear and looked at her with those unreadable hazel eyes while his hand cupped the back of her skull. “Two days.”
For a long moment they lay together, then he shifted down to the end of the bed, and off. Cold without his body generating heat next to her, Marissa pulled the layers of bedclothes over her body. The scent of him, skin, sweat, and sex, remained in the sheets. She was trying to decide if she should ask him to stay, when he came out of the bathroom and tugged on his khakis and buttoned up his shirt. Decision made, she snuggled into the bed and watched as solid muscle and bone disappeared behind twill and cotton and his leather belt.
“What time are we leaving to get the paneling?” he asked as he sat down at the end of the bed to put on socks and boots. She peered at him, but his face, cast in shadows by the light from the kitchen, was difficult to read. “I owe you, Ris,” he said. “I’m the one who destroyed it.”
Clarity sometimes came in darkness. Adam defined himself by control, not by notches on his bedpost, and this Marine was having a hard time adapting to civilian life. “I’ve got a siding job coming up,” she said evasively. “I was going to wait for a clear stretch, but this late in the season I’ll settle for a relatively dry stretch. I could use the help.”
“Great. Just let me know when.” He stood at the foot of her bed, then reached behind him for the light switch that controlled the lamp on her nightstand. “Wait!” she exclaimed, and sat up, but she ended up covering her eyes against the light. In her mind’s eye she could see Adam standing at the foot of her bed, hands on his hips. When she lowered her hand, he rapped a knuckle on the wall running the length of her bed.
Five pictures hung there, neatly spaced. Each black frame held a yellowing photograph of Josiah Brooks’s yacht Dreaming Seas, the boat he’d left behind in Rhode Island when he went west, to the High Plains. In two shots the sixty-foot yacht was moored along a dock, in three others moored off an island. The rocky beach and pine trees curved away in the distance; the camera must have been set up on the beach. The photographs were in the trunks her father left her when he died, yellowing, fading, the cardboard frames stained from both handling and neglect. Her heart had skipped several beats when she’d found them. She’d studied them until the cardboard fell apart, then spent money she didn’t have to get them archivally framed.
“I have excellent night vision,” Adam said with a glance at the wall. “What’s this all about?”
How could she describe this? A hobby? She lived in South Dakota, smack in the middle of the North American continent, a region of the country that hadn’t seen salt water for several geologic eras. All she knew was that the oldest photographs of Josiah Brooks at the bottom of the trunk were taken on sailboats. Big ones, with sleek lines and teak decking, canvas sails furled or unfurled. He stood among men in white suits with vests, and women in white dresses with sashes and parasols, and he looked young and happy. When she saw the boats, something inside her vibrated slow and deep and long, like she was standing inside a giant bass speaker at a concert, but the music playing was the distant, primal rush and pull of the tides.
“Josiah Brooks owned a sailboat in Connecticut,” she said. “A yacht, really. I saw pictures in the trunk in the attic. I was curious about sailing.”
“And you call it a tangent.” He picked up the sextant, propped on a shelf above one of the pictures, then carefully examined the chronometer resting next to it. “Nice instruments,” he said.
Should she mention the boxes of composition notebooks, full of notes she’d taken to familiarize herself with lines and rigging and sails? Should she mention the lists of things she would need for an around-the-world voyage, or the much-revised itinerary?
The first item on the list was Buy a boat, something that wouldn’t happen as long as she owed the lumberyard six years of her average annual income.
She gave a dismissive little laugh. “I said TV was boring.”
“Most people read novels,” he said.
“Why would I read about made-up people when I could read about things real people have done?” Laughter huffed in his chest, and the corners of his mouth quirked up just a little. “They’re part of the Brooks family history,” she said stiffly, clutching the sheet and blankets under her chin. “The prelude to Brookhaven. I’ve framed other pictures and hung them in my apartment.”
“Not over your bed. Not where you read,” he said with a nod at the books stacked by her nightstand. “Not where you dream.”
“It’s nothing,” she said because that was all it could be. “Don’t make something out of nothing.”
“Making something out of nothing is a Marine’s specialty,” he said. “It’s what you’re doing with Brookhaven. You could make it a habit.”
She reached for the lamp on her nightstand and turned it off manually, plunging the room back into darkness. Adam’s broad shoulders remained backlit in the doorway. A long moment passed before he spoke. “I’ve been sailing. It’s amazing. A purer rush than the bike.”
Her breath caught, because she knew how much the bike meant to him, but she couldn’t get words through the thickness in her throat. Eventually, he turned and let himself out.
9
ADAM PARKED THE Charger in front of the Walkers’ house, situated on the fourteenth green of the Chatham County golf course. From the front the house didn’t look like much, a single story with a brick entryway, brightly lit windows in the dining room to the right of the front door and in Mr. Walker’s home office to the left. The ground sloped away from the garage on the left. A bottle of wine in hand, he jogged up the driveway and rang the doorbell.
Delaney answered. “You don’t have to ring the doorbell,” she chided. “You’re practically family.”
Practically family wasn’t a son-in-law, and he knew it. He just nodded and stepped into the foyer. Inside, the house’s size and luxury became more evident. A fire popped and cracked in the fireplace in the living room, and the dining room opened into a large, eat-in kitchen with stainless steel appliances and a large island with wrought-iron stools tucked underneath. Big windows looked out over the deck that ran the back of the house, and the golf course, still lushly green and empty thanks to the rain. The furniture was upholstered in heavy, dark greens and blues, with maroon accents, as were the curtains.
“Your mother made the curtains,” Delaney reminded him, the bottle of wine tucked in her crossed arms.
“They look good,” he said shortly.
“Come in,” she said, and set off for the kitchen. She wore her work clothes, a simple pair of black slacks, a blue blouse with a ruffle along the neck, and a darker blue cardigan. “Dad’s still helping Mom get dressed, but let’s go ahead and open this.”
Yeah, they were all going to need alcohol to get through this. Delaney handed him the corkscrew and the bottle. He had the cork out in the time it took her to pull a tray of sliced vegetables from the fridge and set it on the island’s raised counter, next to the cheese ball and crackers.
He watched her, the woman he’d planned to marry. Once loved. Her hands were smooth, pale, the same words he’d use to describe her lipstick. Marissa was the bottom of the ocean—deep, fathomless, seemingly endless—Delaney was like a meadow in spring sunshine. People settled down around her, relaxed. He had.
He poured for them both.
Delaney lifted her glass and sipped. “That’s good,” she said. “How are you, Adam?”
She meant it, those words spoken in clear bell tones. She always meant it when she asked, had from the night she sat down next to him at a party hosted by Keith at his parents’ lake house. They’d been twenty. She was home from college, he was home on leave, and she asked him how he was. He didn’t tell her the truth, but she’d meant it, and that was enough. He’d awkwardly offered to pick her up for the movies the next afternoon, then spent the rest of his leave with her and her friends. When she’d asked him to e-mail her at college, he had, and snail-mailed postcards, then letters, then packages filled with candy, books, mix CDs, the perfume she wore. At the time he’d had only the vaguest clue why he went after her so relentlessly. In hindsight, with her he felt everything he didn’t feel with Marissa. He felt nothing at all, and that felt safe.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Glad to be home.”
She picked up a baby carrot, dipped it in ranch dressing, then asked, “How’s your mom?”
“Good. Keeping busy. Lots of orders.” She’d laughingly refused to tell him what Marissa asked for in exchange for renovating the bathroom. He’d come at it from another angle, another time. “How’s your mom?”
“The drug regimen seems to be working,” she said. “The progression of her symptoms has slowed again.” Delaney’s parents appeared from the master bedroom, off the sunken living room. “It takes her a while to button her blouse, and she can’t get her earrings in on her own,” Delaney confided in a low voice.
His gaze sharpened. “That’s recent.” The last time he’d seen Mrs. Walker, before his last deployment, she’d had tremors in her left hand and a slight balance problem.
“It got worse shortly after this last deployment,” Delaney agreed. They both watched Mr. Walker escort his wife across the slick floor. Delaney’s room was on the lower level, next to the family room with sliding doors that led to the pool, and the guest room that was ostensibly his when he was home on leave. It made for an idyllic lovers retreat, one her parents turned a blind eye to when he produced a ring box.
