by Anne Calhoun
“No. The I.T. department assured me it would work.”
That earned her a snort. “You rebooted it?”
“Yes,” she said. “Twice. Once at the airport, and once at dinner.”
“I’m out of ideas,” he said. “If you have an international plan, it should work. If it’s unlocked, you just swap out the SIM cards and buy minutes. Is this the first time you’ve taken it overseas?”
“This is the first time I’ve taken myself overseas, much less my phone.”
“Email your I.T. department tonight and maybe they’ll get it fixed while we’re on the road tomorrow.”
“You do not know our I.T. department,” she said. “It’s a ten-business-day request turnaround. I’ll be home before they get to it.”
“Ten days is for soft civilians. Try a couple of months.”
Elbows on the table, she blew out her breath and rested her head on her fingertips. “I am so fucked,” she said to the polished surface.
His glass, visible in her peripheral vision, disappeared for a moment. She heard him swallow, then he set the empty glass down. “You were planning to work on this trip?”
“Yes.” She saw his phone resting face down on the table beside the glass. “Can I use yours?”
“No. I’m sorry,” he added, softening the blunt refusal. “It’s locked down pretty tight. Security.”
Head still in her hands, she looked up at him. “I thought you didn’t reenlist.”
“I didn’t. I’m working for Grey Wolfe Security.”
The same company Jack had planned to work for when he was discharged. It means doing similarly dangerous work under a similar shroud of secrecy with similar levels of security clearance, for about five times the pay. Jack had planned to go into contractor work with Keenan, until he’d come home with the shakes. She wanted to make that right for Jack, the way she’d made right their parents’ divorce, their father’s abrupt departures, their mother’s drinking. But this was something a sister couldn’t fix. Whatever he’d survived in the Navy was so far beyond her ken, all she could do was just sit with him while he trembled.
And he still didn’t talk about it. She barely knew anything about Keenan, but he looked even less likely than Jack to talk about his feelings.
He mistook her silence for petulance. “If there’s an emergency, of course you can use it,” he said reluctantly. “A real emergency. Like someone dies, or something burns to the ground.”
“It really wouldn’t do me much good,” she admitted. “I need access to the network to do much of anything, and the I.T. department would skin me alive if I tried to VPN in over your phone. They’re beyond anal about data getting stolen.”
“Can we just buy you a phone tomorrow?”
“Same problem with the VPN,” she said. “I need my data, my security access, and the trip’s booked almost to the minute. I’m not going to ask Grannie to cool her heels while I try to deal with this when I know they’ll have my ass if I use an unsecured phone to work. I am so fucked.”
“Didn’t you tell your boss you were going to be out of the country for two weeks?”
She heaved an inhale, then immediately regretted it. The air smelled faintly of furniture polish and heavily of the scent of the skin of Keenan’s forearm, bared by his sleeves pushed to his elbows. The hair dusting the skin was golden brown, lightened by the sun as it tanned the skin, and did nothing to obscure the shift of muscles and veins as he stroked the condensation on his glass of beer. She’d always had a thing for hands. Workingman hands, elegant cellist hands, short, stubby fingers or long, deft, callused ones, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the way the delicate framework of bones and muscles worked together to convey competence. Even better was the sense that they could delicately twine wires together or clench into a fist hard enough to shatter a jaw.
Keenan’s hands looked like his mouth. Delicate and brutal, all at once. The thought set off a slow burn low in her belly.
I did not know that about myself.
They say travel opens you up to new places, faces, cultures, ideas. She’d been in Turkey less than twelve hours and her entire nervous system was being rewired.
“I told him,” she said. “But I also told them I’d be available.”
He just huffed out a soft laugh that told her he knew all about making promises and breaking them. “You want a drink?”
That wasn’t a good idea. “Are you having another?” she equivocated.
The laugh softened into a smile, patiently waiting for her to make up her own mind.
“Red wine,” she said.
He got up and went to the bar, returning with a bottle of beer for himself and a small bottle of red wine for her. “Jack told me you’d be like this,” he said as he twisted the top off the bottle.
She didn’t even pretend to not know what he meant. She’d taken on their alcoholic mother’s job to ensure Jack had a reasonable facsimile of a normal childhood. If he found it amusing, not a source of guilt because he got to be the carefree younger sibling, then she’d done well. But the truth of the matter was, Jack was different now, and she had no idea how to help him. In fact, she’d planned on using this trip to spend time with Grannie, and with her radically altered younger brother. “Jack told me all kinds of things about you,” she said, watching him over the rim of her glass.
“What did he say?”
That Keenan was the best badass on a team of badasses. Rose smiled. “He said you’d take good care of us.”
Keenan’s smile tightened imperceptibly. “I will,” he said. “So what’s with the obsession about work?”
No one ever asked a man that. No one. But she had to spend the next ten days in a Land Rover with this man. She was already attracted to him, already thinking about how long it had been since she’d had sex, let alone the kind of sex her chemistry with Keenan promised. The only way to make it worse was to get into an increasingly heated verbal sparring match. “I’m thirty,” she said mildly, “on a leadership team comprised of men who are all at least ten years older than I am. I’m a woman in a male-dominated industry. I can’t fail. I can’t even make a mistake. If something goes wrong while I’m gone, all I’ll hear for the rest of eternity is ‘remember that time Rose took her granny to Turkey and the pricing system went down?’”
He laughed again, a low, soft chuckle that wove with the wine heating her veins. “Anything’s funny when it involves the word “Turkey.” We’ll figure something out, Jetlag,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
She automatically woke up her phone to check the itinerary. “We’ve got the dawn hot air balloon ride, then Goreme and Derinkuyu.”
“We will figure something out,” he said again.
“It will be fine. It will be just fine. We’re eight hours ahead of them. I’ll check in before we leave for the day and see what happened at the end of their day, then again when we get to the next hotel, which will be early morning for them. Or something like that,” she said, because she was confusing herself. She swallowed the last of her wine and reached for the bottle. “It’s going to be fine.”
Keenan’s hand closed around hers. “You probably know this, but drinking that much red wine after twenty-four hours of travel isn’t the best idea.”
Goose bumps shivered up her arm to her nape. “Making sure my phone worked before I left North America was the best idea,” she said. She tilted her wrist, still in his grip. The wine sloshed into the neck as she held it just below level, over her glass. “This is second best,” she said, and started to pour.
His fingers tightened around her wrist, heat and pressure, strength and threat. She flicked her gaze from the glass to his eyes, hot and dark with promise. “I can’t make your phone work, but I can do better than second best.”
Chapter Two
Keenan was going to kill Jack.
Or Jack was going to kill him. Either was possible, at this very moment, Rose staring at him, the bottle suspended over her wine glass, empty enough that only a
thin sliver of liquid sloshed up the neck toward the opening. Still clasping her wrist, he stared right back, using the ticking seconds to memorize her face, partly out of habit, partly because he was captivated. Her hair and her eyes were the same shade of rich chestnut brown, a color he’d never seen in anyone’s eyes before. Her pale skin testified to a life lived indoors, slender fingers poised over a keyboard, razor-sharp mind slicing problems into neat ribbons. If she’d started the day in Lancaster with any makeup on her face it was long gone by now, leaving her with a pale rose mouth. The color in her cheeks he attributed to the wine, or maybe to the fact that he’d just baldly propositioned Jack Powell’s sister.
Jack, the lying bastard.
With his peculiar mixture of half-truths, half-lies, Jack had managed to keep the fact that his sister was a knockout from a team of Navy SEALs. He rarely talked about Rose, and when he did, he made her sound like a ballbreaker. He bragged up her fast-track promotion to the leadership team, highlighting the way she kicked ass and took names, totally focused on her career. He probably sorted through pictures for the ones that showed Rose in the least flattering way possible. Eyes closed. Hair in a ponytail. Suit jacket obscuring her curves. Mouth full of food. Jack, the most outrageous storyteller in a group known for tall tales, had fooled them all into thinking his sister was a cross between a drill sergeant and a maiden aunt.
Rose Powell was a knockout. She wore black leggings and gray knee high boots, a gray long-sleeved T-shirt that hugged her chest and hips, and a swingy loose black sweater that drew his eye every time she moved. She’d obviously ignored any advice Jack gave her about walking around tumbled ruins and streets unevenly paved with marble blocks carved thousands of years ago, and she was obviously strung as tight as parachute cords after a High Altitude Low Opening jump.
He needed to forget about Jack. Jack was half a world away, unable to pound Keenan into the earth for what he’d just said, but it was entirely possible Rose would do her best to end him, right now. She could do it too. Every time she looked at him he sat up a little straighter, but that was probably because when they made eye contact it was like taking a punch to the solar plexus.
She’d been a little unfocused there at the end, but now her eyes sharpened. For a long moment they were frozen, Rose with the bottle in her hand, Keenan meeting her gaze. The only thing that moved was the wine, gently flowing back and forth along the neck.
If she poured the glass, she was out. No way would she get drunk to sleep with a man. Wait. If she poured the glass she was in, because wine was sexy, lowered inhibitions, that kind of thing. Christ. He wasn’t the one with jet lag. He should be thinking more clearly than this. He’d landed in Istanbul months earlier, and somehow never caught a flight stateside, somehow never went home. He was an expert at navigating from point A to point B using only the sun, but he didn’t have the map that showed him how to get home.
“You can do better,” she said, repeating his words. “You must like living dangerously.”
Not as much as he liked the light in her eyes. “I’m good with it, yeah,” he said.
“I think I want to be sober for this,” she said, and tugged her wrist free from his to set the bottle on the table. But she didn’t say anything else. She didn’t bring Jack into the conversation, or her grandmother, or set any other parameters, much less boundaries. Instead, she looked him right in the eye and let the silence flow between them like the wine in the bottle, something on a physical level getting asked and answered.
“Shall we?”
He pushed back his chair and went to stand behind hers, then put his hand at the small of her back to escort her from the bar, through the lobby staffed by a sleepy night clerk, just let his hand hover at her waist while they waited for the elevator, close enough to feel heat radiating through the thin cardigan and T-shirt. But heat wasn’t the only thing radiating from her. Tension, tight muscles, and nerves made her twitchy.
“I should take a shower,” she said conversationally as the elevator doors opened.
“Don’t,” he said. He braced his feet and folded his arms across his chest. The scent of her body, strong and musky, rose from her, twice as dizzying in the close confines of the tiny elevator. “I like it.”
Leaning against the wall across from him, she had one hand on the brass railing, the other loosely cupping her phone. When the doors opened on their floor, she looked down the hallway, then back at him. “I really should … just … check on Grannie,” she said, apologetically.
And that was the end of that.
“Sure,” he said, trying not to feel disappointed that he wasn’t getting something he shouldn’t have asked for in the first place, something that wasn’t his to have.
He let himself into his room. Out of habit he scanned the corners, floor and ceiling, then flicked on the light in the closet-sized bathroom. Empty. His toiletry kit sat on the counter, his duffle bag on the chest of drawers. He could be gone from this room in seconds. Not like his apartment in Istanbul. That would take minutes to evacuate. Two minutes. Maybe.
The room didn’t even smell like him. Had he become the kind of person who didn’t even leave behind enough molecules to register in the air?
He reached between his shoulder blades and pulled his shirt over his head, then tossed it at the foot of the bed for easy access the next morning. He had his hands on his belt buckle when a soft knock came at his door.
Maybe that wasn’t the end of that.
He peered through the peephole. Rose stood on the other side, her head tilted to the side, the soft fall of her hair tucked behind her ear. He opened the door, and watched her gaze flick over him, shoulders, abs, the waistband of his shorts visible just above the waistband of his cargo pants. “I thought checking on Grannie was code for changing your mind,” he said.
One eyebrow shot up. “I’ll tell you if I change my mind. Anyway, why would I? We’re both consenting adults. Do you have condoms?”
Jack had clearly told her zip about life in the SEALs. As if he went anywhere without condoms. “I have condoms,” he said seriously.
“Let’s do this,” she said, and stepped past him.
By the time he closed and locked the door, she’d kicked off her shoes and tossed her sweater on the dresser. “Whoa, whoa,” he said, reaching for the hands at her T-shirt hem.
“You really don’t have to, you know, romance me,” she said.
He smiled. “I’m not going to romance you,” he said. “Let’s just slow things down a little.”
The hotel was eerily quiet around them, the only thing audible in the room his breathing, deep and regular, and hers, a little shallower, lighter, getting shallower and lighter when he stepped right into her space and used chest and hips to back her into the wall. She projected big—he didn’t realize how small she was until he got close enough to feel her stomach graze his with each breath. He looked down into her face, then watched her straighten and peer right back up at him.
Her hands lifted, then came to rest on his hip crests, visible above his waistband. Her fingers tightened, trying to pull him closer. He stopped her by the simple expedient of not letting her move him. Although he was damn near desperate to feel her skin against his, he wanted to stretch this out, make it last.
Twin lines appeared between her fine, arched eyebrows. Up close he could see how tight the muscles in her face were. This was as good a way as any to start this. He leaned forward and pressed his lips to the furrowed spot and stayed there a moment, until the muscles relaxed. She gave a soft, hitching little sigh, and her fingers tightened on his hip again, but he still didn’t close the distance between them. Slowly, he tilted his head and kissed the soft skin by her left eye, remaining there until the delicate muscles quivered and gave way. Next was the hinge of her jaw, the muscle there as tight as if she were clenching her teeth, fighting him. Knees bent, a susurrus of sound as skin rasped against cargo pants. Then he opened his mouth and closed his teeth ever so gently around muscle and bone.<
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A softer, deeper sound, and the muscle went lax, her breath leaving her in the first deep exhale he’d heard her make. Encouraging further surrender he brushed his lips along her jaw to the corner of her lips. The temptation to kiss her was strong, growing stronger when her mouth opened and she turned to bring their mouths together.
One hand on her hip, the other forearm braced against the wall, he took advantage of her slight weight and momentum to turn her to face the wall. The sound she made when he did, a soft, helpless hitching breath, went straight to his cock. He swept her hair to the side and bent to put his mouth to the knotted muscle joining neck and shoulder. Ruthlessly he used teeth and tongue and lips until the knots gave and her head dropped to the side.
Rose gave way like a bridge over a gorge. What was it going to be like when he had her under him, clinging with all her might as he drove inside her, watching the flush spread in her cheeks and throat until she let go?
One hand crept up to cup the nape of his neck while the other slid alongside his forearm. Then she turned her face to his, seeking his mouth. He gave it to her, the contact maddeningly incomplete with her face twisted over her shoulder. She turned another hundred and eighty degrees, back to where she started, except this time her hands cupped his face to keep him close.
This time he went, pressing them together from thighs to chest as if full body contact flowed from the kiss. Her lips opened under his, her tongue flickering against the roof of his mouth, his tongue. She tasted of red wine and desire, and for a moment he was immobilized by the electric contact of her hands on his jaw, her lips against his. His heart jumped and stuttered as she smoothed her palms down his shoulders and chest, to the button of his pants.
Smiling during sex was new to him, but smile he did, the configuration of lips and teeth against her open, ravenous mouth breaking the tension a little. “Wait,” he murmured. “Wait for it.”
She gave a little growl. “Why?”
Heat radiated from her skin through the soft cotton of her T-shirt, but he kept the barrier between them, cupping her breast through shirt and bra, brushing his thumb back and forth until her nipple peaked, then kept on until she arched against him. He leaned, unsubtly rubbing his erection against her soft belly until she raised one leg and hooked it around the back of his knee. When they had a fucking fabulous shimmy going, when he could feel the heat of her sex against his thigh, when her body was undulating against his as he pinched her nipple through T-shirt and bra, when she fucking whimpered, he put his mouth to her ear, slid his hand under her shirt to ruck up her bra and gather the soft, hot flesh of her breast in her palm. Then he pinched her nipple again, rough fingertips to tender flesh.
