by Anne Calhoun
“Not on this WiFi.”
A text message pinged on Grannie’s computer. Florence, down the hall, with a text message that read I was right! It’s a relative of the forget-me-not!
“You three are as bad as teenage girls,” Rose said fondly.
“It’s so much fun,” Grannie said.
“I’m going down to the bar to work for a while. Don’t wait up for me. And take it easy on that screen time. Research shows the light prevents your body from transitioning to sleep.”
As soon as the words left Rose’s mouth, she wished she could take them back. Grannie looked up at her, a familiar fond exasperation in her cornflower blue eyes. “Rose. Honey. Go to the bar. I’ll sleep, or I won’t sleep tonight and I’ll sleep in the car tomorrow.”
“Sorry, Grannie,” she said, and let herself out.
Habits forged in a cauldron of childhood uncertainty die hard, she reflected as she waited in the hallway for the elevator to take her to the lobby. The little girl labeled bossy and a know-it-all grew up to be a woman responsible for the operations of a global energy company … who lived with her cat in her hometown. Alone. Except for Rufus, the cat. Until she met the right man, who also wanted a white picket fence and a couple of kids, and a stable home and family life.
Someone unlike Keenan.
Satisfied with that little bit of organizational efficiency, she strode into the hotel lobby already scanning the bar for signs of the bartender and a wall with an outlet she could plug her laptop into. But when she saw Keenan standing at the front desk, she stopped short. It wasn’t the relaxed, aware way he conversed with the desk clerk, in fluent Turkish, no less. It wasn’t the way his shoulders stretched his shirt, or the sight of his forearms, dusted with golden hair, so tempting in the Land Rover.
It was the book he held in his left hand, his fingers curled around the edge, hiding the title. She recognized the cover design, black with an orange stripe, used for modern editions of classic books, but her brain filed that little detail away in favor of remembering how those fingers tightened in her hair, held her wrists, clamped over her mouth while she shuddered out her climax.
Her body awakened, the tiny dents along her jaw and bands around her wrists throbbing back into her awareness. He hadn’t seemed to notice her, so she let herself look, and feel, let it spread through her body to the tips of her fingers and toes, to her nipples and clit.
Without breaking the conversation or looking her way, Keenan lifted the hand holding the book and held up his index finger, indicating she should wait for him. He finished the conversation with a smile and a nod and an inshallah, then crossed the lobby, all loose joints and pantherlike.
Get a grip, Rose. She lifted her chin. “I didn’t think you saw me,” she said when he was right in front of her.
“Mirrors,” he said succinctly.
Rose looked over his shoulder, saw herself reflected in the mirror on the wall behind the desk. “Damn,” she said.
“Work?”
“Yes. The Bucket List Babes are settled in for the night. They’re texting each other from their rooms.”
He chuckled, soft and genuinely amused, and held out his hand to indicate she should precede him into the bar. “They’re a fun group.”
“Apparently Marian’s skill with toilets comes from working in a garage before she got married,” she said. “I had no idea. Grannie just told me.”
He chuckled again as they sat down across from each other. The room was dark, intimate seating arranged around small tables. The bartender came over to their table.
“An Efes,” Keenan said, then looked at Rose. “Red wine again?”
“No,” she said fervently, focused on opening the laptop and watching it search for a WiFi connection. “I’ll have the same. And a glass of water. Thank you.”
The bartender disappeared, reappearing with bottles of beer and her water around the time Rose connected to the WiFi. She logged in through the secure website, and signed in to her email.
“Oh, great,” she groaned.
“What?”
“Five hundred and thirty-six emails, all downloading from the secure server through the firewall, then onto this completely inadequate WiFi. It will take all night just to get the email.” She blew out her breath with frustration. “So, what exactly did Jack say to warn you away from me?”
“Nothing specific. He showed us unflattering pictures of you, and made you sound like a career woman too smart to date a bunch of losers like us.”
“Who? His teammates?” She smiled. “You’re not losers, but he didn’t need to go to that kind of work. I don’t tend to go gaga for a uniform. I’m in the market for an ordinary guy.”
The second the words were out of her mouth, she wished she could take them back. She was often blunt, but rarely rude. But saying something trite like present company excluded was a lie. They both knew what this was.
He smiled again, lazy and confident. “Don’t look so worried, Jetlag. You’re not going to hurt my feelings. SEALs are anything but ordinary. We make shit boyfriends, much less husbands. We’re gone all the time, and even when we’re home, our minds are somewhere else.”
She appreciated his honesty. “Is there … someone?”
“Not for a long time,” he said.
“Girlfriends?”
“Depends on how far you’re willing to stretch the word,” he said.
“No money changed hands?”
Another laugh. “That’s about right.”
She could learn to like this. She glanced at the progress bar for her email. Six percent done.
“Lancaster sounds nice,” Keenan said finally.
“Really?” she said, disbelieving. “Jack always hated it. He couldn’t wait to enlist. But it’s a nice small city, with good parts and bad parts. Grannie lives in a really nice neighborhood, old brick houses and big yards with gardens. The East Side is a mess. The high school we went to pulled from both neighborhoods.”
“Jack always made it sound idyllic. White picket fences and the Garden Club.”
She snorted. “Sounds like exactly the kind of place an active duty Navy SEAL would avoid.” Keenan’s eyes widened a little, then he snorted while she tapped her nose. “I know my brother. He was in high school when I was in college, and I knew if I went away he’d run completely wild. For a while he had Grannie bamboozled into thinking he was the president of the youth group at church and seriously considering the ministry, which was, as nearly as I could tell, a cover for seducing the pastor’s daughter.”
Keenan’s totally involuntary laugh lingered as a smile on his fine, fine mouth. “I never heard that story.”
“He always did have a thing for the sweet, serious type. Anyway I stayed, got an internship at Field Energy, and went into their management training program after I graduated.”
“Pretty impressive,” he said.
She shrugged, then took a risk of her own. “What about you? You and Jack left the teams around the same time.”
He shrugged. “The plan was for both of us to go to work for Grey Wolfe. He changed his mind. I didn’t.”
“Where’s home?”
“An apartment in Galata,” he said, then clarified, “a neighborhood in Istanbul.”
“I meant, where’s home home?”
This time he didn’t even shrug. “That is home, Jetlag. Dad was an Army Ranger. I grew up on bases, joined up as soon as I could.”
“But … the Navy?”
“The SEAL program is tougher to complete than the Ranger program. I’m not knocking them. I’m just stating fact.”
Her eyes widened ever so slightly. “And you were going to do better than your dad?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What’s he doing now?’
“Six feet under in a cemetery near Fort Hood. He was KIA just after I graduated from BUD/S. He was getting a little old for active duty missions, but he thought he had one more in him. His dream in life was to die with his buddies.” He
shrugged. “Guess he did that.”
“I’m sorry,” Rose said. “What about your mom? Are you close to her?”
“She took off when I was seven.” He looked at her. “It sounds worse than it was. Made my life easy. Gave me focus.”
“Why did you leave the Navy?”
He didn’t answer for the longest time, made a big show out of checking the GPS. She didn’t change the subject, though. Experience with Jack had taught her to wait him out. “You know the last mission we were both on?”
“The one that shook Jack so badly?”
“That’s the one. I saw our friend bleed out in front of our eyes. We both did. It shook Jack pretty badly. Me … all I could think about was that I didn’t want to die like my dad.”
He clearly didn’t want to talk about it. The windows were thrown open to the late spring night, the cool breeze caressing Rose’s cheek a constant reminder of how flushed her skin was. She should be chilled, but her blood seemed to beat at the surface of her skin, wild and demanding. Keenan’s gaze sharpened, then softened into the heated, intent gaze of a jungle cat.
Rose cleared her throat. “What are you reading?”
He handed the book to her, fingers brushing hers, his knee pressing against hers and not moving when he sat back. The simple contact, heated through two layers of clothing, subtly reminded her that he knew something about her, something she hadn’t known she wanted or liked. She could, she realized, trust him because he hadn’t explicitly gone all alpha-male badass on her. If he’d come on to her, said You know you liked it, baby I got what you need right here, she wouldn’t have given him a second thought.
Which made him so much more dangerous.
The right thing to do was to hand him back his book and go back upstairs to actually work. That was the practical, pragmatic, sensible thing to do. Instead, she turned the book over to see the title.
“The Iliad,” she said. “Preparation for this trip?” They were visiting Troy after Ephesus, but even as she flipped to the back cover copy, then paged through the book, she knew he’d carried this around for far longer than the last couple of weeks. The corners of the cover and pages were blunted, dusty, stained with what looked like coffee. It smelled like Jack’s belongings when he came home, a distinct combination of sweat, dirt, and superhuman effort.
He shook his head. “Do you know the story?”
“I have a business degree,” she said. “I took art history to satisfy my humanities requirements, then promptly replaced everything I learned with organizational theory. I saw Troy, though. And 300.”
“That’s Greece,” he said. “Sparta, to be accurate. The Iliad is the ultimate story of war. When I first joined the teams, I read it for the glory.”
“And now?” she asked, watching him closely.
There was a short silence during which he framed his answer. “Now I read it differently.”
His answer piqued her curiosity about the book, and him. “I brought my e-reader,” she said.
“Too bad you can’t work from that,” he quipped.
“If I thought I could jerry-rig it, I would,” she said. “But I’ll download the book and read it.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he said.
“I want to,” she said, surprising both of them. “We’re visiting the site. I read Rumi’s poems in preparation.”
“All of them?”
“I read some of them,” she said. “A few. That Grannie sent me. But I’d like to read The Iliad.”
She offered him his copy, but he held up his hand. “Keep it.”
“Thank you,” she said, smoothing her hand over the cover. “I’ll take good care of it.”
“Don’t worry about it, Jetlag. It’s been through more missions than I can count.”
Carefully she laid it beside her laptop, away from the sweating beer bottles, then checked the email download process. Thirty-two percent complete. “This is a complete waste of time, isn’t it?”
She half expected him to repeat his line from the previous night, that he could take her mind off it. He didn’t. Instead he watched her for a long moment, until she looked away.
“You’re afraid,” he said.
“No, I’m not,” she said quickly. Admitting fear was tantamount to being the slowest gazelle in the herd. “I’m … on completely new ground. No map. No project plan,” she said quietly. “That kind of … loss of control … I don’t like it.”
He relaxed, signs she could read only because she was watching for them. She was studying Keenan’s body with the focus she normally reserved for the really important things. Management committee meetings. Negotiations with vendors. That sort of thing.
“So it’s not about the threat of violence. It’s about the loss of control.”
“Always,” she said. “Always.”
He thought about this for a moment. “If it helps, it’s not a loss so much as a surrender.”
She laughed. “What’s the difference?”
“When you lose control, it’s taken from you. When you surrender it, you’re giving it away. It’s still yours, in a way.” When she shook her head, he continued. “BUD/S feels like a loss of control. The instructors have total control over your body and mind, and they beat the hell out of you in every possible way. But it’s actually a surrender. I gave them everything, knowing that at the end of the course, I’d get it back, sharper, stronger, honed like a blade.”
Her eyebrows were in the vicinity of her hairline. She got them under control, but there was nothing she could do about her heart, alternately skipping in her chest and thumping a slow drumbeat of desire. “I didn’t know I could want like this,” she said.
“You can know it better,” he said.
His knee still rested against hers, his hand resting on the arms of the chair, fingers relaxed. But there was no denying the tightly leashed male demand simmering under the surface of his skin.
She looked at the laptop. Forty-two percent. That was a fact, the place she felt safe. During one conversation she’d downloaded forty-two percent of her email, and those emails would contain situations she could manage, emotions she could handle.
There was nothing factual or manageable about the way she felt with Keenan. The whole situation, the bar, the night air, the unfamiliar language and terrain, wasn’t fantasy, either. It was more real than either fact or fantasy, simmering deep in her core, heightening her senses. Lighting her up.
Her hand was steady when it reached out and closed her laptop, severing the connection to her life, half a world away. She neatly stacked The Iliad on top of the laptop. Keenan held her gaze as he held out his hand. Puzzled, she handed over the laptop and book, the gesture oddly out of place, a gentleman offering to carry her books, but she went along with it. In the elevator he reached out with his free hand and stroked down her arm to her hand, weaving his fingers through hers. Again, gentle, the move matched by a slow pace down the hall. He let go of her hand to slide the key card into the door and open it for her.
It was all completely out of character, until the door closed with a thud at the same time Keenan’s fingers closed around her wrist, muscle and bone that was for all practical purposes as strong as steel when it halted her progress into the bedroom.
Then he yanked, pulling her stumbling back toward him. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew he was using a fraction of his strength, but all her animal body knew was the bolt of crazy hot lust that shot through her when she came up against his hard body.
The impact didn’t even rock him back on his heels. She looked up into his face, saw the thin line of his lips in his beard, the veneer of calm over his eyes totally at odds with his hard cock, currently pressed against her hip.
Using his body he maneuvered her to the bed. The incomplete friction of his body against her struck sparks as he moved, until her breathing was erratic, shallow. Then he pulled her wrist between their torsos and around, spinning her so she faced the bed. She had time to draw one startled
breath before he guided her down to the mattress, their entwined arms clamped at her waist partially breaking her fall, then used some combination of hand and hips and legs until she was lying facedown, his legs between hers, the weight of his torso pressing her into the bed.
She turned her face to the side, watched his hand leisurely reach up and set the laptop and book on the nightstand, blocking the clock’s red display. He’d done all that while holding her laptop and The Iliad. Oh dear God, yes.
With his free hand he gathered her hair and swept it to one side, then tipped her head forward, baring her nape to him. For long minutes he used his mouth on the sensitive nerves there, starting with breath and lips, then adding tongue and teeth when she softened and heated under him. Frissons of pleasure trickled along her nerves, the heat and pressure of his cock against her ass a constant presence compared to the alternating textures of soft lips, bristly beard, and the occasional nip of teeth.
By the time he’d finished she was pliant under him, her body hot and loose around a tight coil of need low in her belly. “Let’s see if you like the game as much as I did,” he whispered.
One-handed he unfastened her belt and button, then curled his fingers into her waistband and panties, then tugged her jeans, panties, and shoes right off and tossed them to the floor. He pushed up her shirt up to expose most of her belly. It should have felt awkward, bared from the waist down, spread to him. It should have looked awkward, when Keenan, still fully dressed and in total control of her body, leaned forward to press a kiss into her belly, just below her navel.
Her first thought was that he was shockingly flexible. The bumps of his spine stretched against his shirt as he slowly kissed his way down to the soft mat of hair covering her sex. Then he paused, his hot breath so close to the sensitized flesh she knew was slick and ready for him. He waited, the hot caress of his breath maddeningly close to her clit, until her body, taut with longing, lifted toward him in a pleading movement.
He shifted down, using his shoulders to keep her open for him. She couldn’t look, couldn’t bear the intimacy of his mouth between her legs. The darkness heightened her other senses. Sweat, and the scent of her musk. The hotel’s silence. She even thought she could taste the heat simmering just below a boil as she ached for the touch of his tongue to her clit.
