Josie listened to her messages, taking down pertinent information she would need for follow-up calls. Jack had been gone for two months now. Several days after he left, she received a single phone message from him saying he would be back, but he was not specific about when.
Josie found out from the town gossip mills and the network news why he had left. Amos Rawlings, his grandfather, had collapsed on stage in Tulsa while pre-recording a religious sermon for broadcast throughout the south and mid-west on the following Sunday morning. Jack had not returned to Rawlings after the celebrity funeral services. He'd left another message for her, more hurried than the first, but again with no specifics about his return. Another week went by, and the international news covered the story of fifteen hostages taken from an American cruise ship by Somali pirates. Several weeks later, the U.S. Navy SEALs implemented a rescue. She was concerned and worried when they reported that two members of the SEAL team were seriously injured. Still, there was no word from him.
Meanwhile, daily life went on. Josie was gradually turning over the reins of the sheriff's department to Sheriff Charles Malone. She had eventually agreed to stay with the department a little longer to help with the transition.
Alex's first day in court was positive even though Marcy Carter still refused to sign off her parental rights. Mrs. Foster, his child-advocate attorney, filed a termination of parental rights with the court, based on the long history of Marcy's alcohol and drug abuse and criminal charges. Technically, Alex was petitioning for the termination of parental rights. Unfortunately, Marcy's refusal would tie them up in court for a while. A Family Court Judge would make the final decision based on psychological evaluations and reports from social services, but it could be a long and tedious process. If they granted the termination, Josie could file for adoption. Meanwhile, the court was agreeable to her retaining foster-parent custody.
Josie had gone back to peeling wallpaper off her walls, sanding floors and continually learning how to be a Mom to a boy who had recently turned twelve. Her days were full and busy, but her nights were long and empty. She told herself that missing Jack was silly. He had never spent the night with her, at least not in her bed. What they had was sex, fantastic sex, but nothing more. It had been only a physical relationship, and she'd known from the beginning that Jack was a Navy lifer. But when she fell asleep in the early morning hours, she dreamed of her time spent with him, those fleeting hours when she had felt secure and wanted.
After she'd given up on the idea that he would return, one day she picked up her phone to discover him on the other end. Blunt and brief, he merely said, "I'm on my way back to you," and the bastard hung up!
Josie was furious—no… she was so far past furious, she was seething. She vowed revenge, but it was hard to plot revenge when all she wanted was to see him, touch him and make love to him. After she did all that, she was going to kick his ass!
Josie and Charles Malone dripped their way down the sidewalk and back to the Sheriff's Office eliciting laughter and smiles from everyone on the sidewalks. They walked through the door of the office to the surprised faces of the Deputy on duty and the dispatcher, Georgina Snyder.
Georgina let out a loud, raucous bark of laughter. "What happened? You two look like you were attacked by a giant cupcake!"
"We were," laughed Josie. "Linda Riggs and Lily Cummings got into a fight at the Rite-Food bakery. They were still going at it when we tried to break it up. We got hit with their weapons of cake icings and puddings. We got the manager to agree not to file charges if they cleaned up the mess and paid for the ruined goods."
"What started the fight?" Georgina asked, pulling out a roll of paper towels from a desk drawer and handing them over.
"Linda Riggs' almost ex-husband, Wade, asked Lily out on a date. Lily said she was going to accept. Linda got a bit bent out of shape over it and accused Lily of breaking up her marriage," Josie explained.
Georgina shook her head in disgust. "I warned Linda not to kick Wade to the curb yet, but she wouldn't listen. She can't claim she didn't know this was coming because I told her Wade wasn't going to waste any time tom-catting around."
"Wait, didn't she already catch Wade with another woman?" Josie asked, wiping pink icing from her uniform.
"Yeah, but I told her that was her fault too," Georgina complained. "It was her idea to have Wade's plumbing fixed. I told her to get her plumbing fixed because doing that to a man is giving him a free pass to screw around. I know how them ol' boys like Wade think. I've got four stupid, redneck brothers. If they can't get a woman knocked up, they think it doesn't count, and they're not going to get caught. Wade always was about as smart as a dead stump."
Charles wadded up the dirty paper towels. "From what I heard, Linda caught Wade with the other woman down at the motel. Considering we only have one motel in town, parking your truck in the lot to meet up with some gal that you're not married to—well that's plain stupid. Especially when you've got the only truck painted green camouflage in town."
Josie laughed as the new Sheriff dispensed his share of the latest gossip. "Thanks, Georgina, but these aren't going to do the job. Charles, I'm heading home to clean up, and I suggest you do the same. I seriously doubt anything more exciting is going to happen today. I haven't been in a food fight since the fourth grade, and since I got detention for two weeks and had to clean up the cafeteria, I think Linda and Lily got off lighter than I did."
Josie was in the shower washing the last of the pink and green icing out of her hair when she heard the doorbell's Westminster chimes go off. She quickly wrapped her hair in a towel, grabbed a robe and ran down the stairs. She opened the door and slammed it shut hard.
The door opened, and Jack Rawlings came sauntering in with a grin on his face and a gleam in his eye.
"Get the hell out of my house!" Josie yelled.
"Now, Josie," Jack said, advancing on her.
"Don't you 'now, Josie,' me, you goddamn asshole," Josie shouted furiously. "Two months, Jack! Two goddamn months! All I got in two months were three friggin' messages!"
"I wasn't supposed to make two of those," Jack admitted. "You were undercover, Josie. You had clearances, and you know the rules."
"You couldn't have told me your Grandfather died, Jack? Was that Top Secret? You couldn't have told me your team was activated? Or, was it that you didn't want to tell me?" Josie yelled. "Get the hell out of my house! Go back to your damned SEAL team."
"I can't," Jack said. "I have been officially detached and decommissioned. I've come home this time for good. I'm a civilian."
Josie turned her back on Jack, and as he tried to put his arms around her, she elbowed him in the ribs, caught him behind the foot and gave him a shove to the floor. "Ask me if I care, you big-headed asshole!" She jerked away from him as he tried to get up, but he grabbed the back of her robe to hold her in place. She defiantly shrugged out of the robe and stormed up the stairs naked. "Get the hell out of my house or I'll shoot you as an intruder!"
Jack sat on the floor with a handful of white terrycloth robe and a wide grin on his face. He got to his feet and followed that gorgeous naked body up the stairs. The bathroom door was locked, but he figured she would have to come out eventually, so he settled down to wait.
Josie went back into the shower and stayed there until she was semi-calm. She was not going to let Jack Rawlings walk back into her life again. She would not! The son of a bitch—she would arrest him for trespassing! She'd need backup for that. Where was her phone? Crap, she'd left it in her uniform shirt pocket. She peered around the edge of the door and saw no sign of Jack, but the second she stepped out his arms were around her.
"Let me go!" Josie screamed.
"Not until you calm down," Jack said patiently.
"I'm not going to calm down, you ego-driven jackass!"
"Yes, you are," Jack said, tightening his grip. "You need to listen."
"I need to kick your ass!" Josie snarled, and she bit him on the arm, hard.
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"Ouch! Damn-it! Okay, you want to play it that way, I can play rougher. I'm stronger, better trained and a hell of a lot meaner than you are, Josie Raintree," Jack said testily. He swept her off her feet, carried her to the edge of the bed, tossed her face down on the mattress and sat down beside her. He swung one of his strong legs over her back, effectively pinning her to the mattress. He yanked the towel away and laid down a hard spank to her ass.
Josie screamed in fury. Swearing, she tried to kick and claw her way free. Her training was good, but Jack had over a hundred pounds of pure muscle and weight on her. Her lower half was trapped, and it took him only a few seconds to secure her arms behind her back. He pinned her wrists in one strong hand as he applied a lesson of anger management to her butt with the other.
Josie was in shock that he was actually spanking her, and mad as a hornet at her stupidity in thinking he had given up after she came upstairs. She clamped her jaws shut. She would not give him the satisfaction of knowing he was hurting her! He was hurting her! Each smack to her bare bottom was leaving a burning trail of throbbing pain, and where he might have held back when she was a youngster, he was not holding back now.
She fisted her hands and gritted her teeth, but the pain intensified with each hard smack. She didn't know when she started squirming, and she didn't know when the tears started or when the sobs broke through her fury. All she knew was that her butt was on fire, and she was beyond caring about being tough. At some point, she started pleading him to stop. "Stop, Jack, please stop!"
Jack, however, never started anything that he didn't intend to finish. He reddened her bottom considerably, but still concentrated several more hard stinging smacks to her beautifully shaped buttocks, each one eliciting another cry and a sob.
When he released her, he grabbed several of those large pillows she called 'decorative,' bunched them up behind his back, and pulled her up onto his chest letting her cry out her frustration. When her sobs settled down to an occasional sniff and hiccup, he drew her up and kissed her.
"Are you ready to let me talk to you now?"
"No!" Josie exclaimed trying to roll away, but he held her firmly to his side.
"Damn it, Hellion, you nearly took a chunk out of me. Look at those teeth marks!" Jack complained.
"Good, you deserved it!" Josie snapped, but she blinked and swallowed when she saw blood seeping through his skin.
"Quit fighting me, Josie," Jack said firmly. "Now, you either calm down and listen or I'm going to figure you haven't learned a lesson yet and start spanking the fire out of you again!
"I'm sorry I couldn't tell you, couldn't warn you," Jack said bluntly. "This last mission was complicated and dangerous. I don't mind dealing with military missions, at the very least we can calculate and approximate what can or could go wrong. But when you're dealing with idiots who think an assault rifle is power and have no concept of human dignity or the value of life, it's a whole different kind of mission.
"When I came back to Rawlings, I was on medical leave, and I was trying to decide if I was going to re-up or be discharged. I made my decision after we reconnected. I put the paperwork into the Navy to leave the service. Officially it had been stamped approved but it hadn't gone through all the sign-off channels yet.
"When my unit was activated, I was ordered to report for duty. They needed me, but I was neither cleared medically for duty or technically still in the Navy as my request had been approved but not processed yet. I was in a sort of limbo status. But the Navy needed my expertise and my command skills." Jack laughed and shook his head. "It got messy, and trust me, the Navy does not like things to be messy. The result is that I am now officially discharged from the Navy with a full twenty-year retirement. It's been signed, sealed and delivered. They got what they wanted, and I got what I'd already earned several times over."
"I didn't doubt the need for your mission, Jack," Josie complained. "But I've got a major problem with your communication skills. You tore out of here without even saying goodbye. Your Grandfather dying wasn't classified information!"
Jack nodded. "You're right. When I got the phone call about Amos, I was—hell, I don't know what I felt. I couldn't believe it was true. Amos sold his soul to the devil a long time ago, and I guess I thought he was too evil to die. I didn't even see him put in the ground before I was called back to duty."
"Amos was a famous television evangelist," Josie protested. "People loved him."
"Only the idiots that bought into his lies and filled his greedy pockets with donations," Jack admitted. "Anyone that knew the real man had little choice but to despise him. He may have been my grandfather, but there was no love lost between us. He tortured my father, but my father wasn't strong enough to stand up to him. My father was gay, Josie."
"What?" Josie started to sit up, but hissed as her tender backside rubbed against the sheets, and she quickly changed her mind. She yanked the bedspread over to cover her nakedness. "Big Cal was not gay. He was married; he had you. After your mother died, he dated a lot of women—big, sexy women. He liked women, everybody knew he did."
"He pretended to like sexy women. I wasn't blind. I saw the kind of women he ran around with, big tits, brassy hair, and fawning all over him. Hell, he might have liked them, for all I know, but most of it was a sham," Jack said, shaking his head. "My father, Calvin Rawlings, was gay. His marriage and later his charade of loving women was all a hoax—invented and orchestrated by Amos Rawlings to protect his reputation and moneymaking schemes. Amos couldn't stand on a pulpit denouncing homosexuality and let it be known that his son was gay. My poor mother was trapped between Amos and Calvin's manipulations to hide my father's homosexuality. I don't believe she knew the truth until after she'd been married several years."
"It was a different time," she said quietly. "A lot of men were in the closet and denied their sexuality until recently."
"I'm not ashamed that my father was gay, Josie," Jack said. "I was ashamed that he put up this huge facade of a life because he wouldn't stand up against Amos. My father died, never being the man he was meant to be. He allowed Amos to make him ashamed of what and who he was as a human being. He also made my mother's life miserable because he wouldn't give her a divorce even after she knew the truth. He used me as a bargaining chip to make her stay. That was some heavy crap for a kid to try to understand. After my mother died, I despised both Calvin and Amos. I never settled those accounts with my father. Ironically, it appears I did settle accounts with Amos."
"What do you mean?"
Jack barked out a laugh that was without humor. "Amos left everything to me. The old SOB had rewritten his will to spite my father when I was about ten. I guess the old devil thought he was going to live forever, and he never got around to changing it. I signed all of it over to organizations Amos would have hated, organizations supporting gay rights and hospices for victims of AIDs. His empire will be dismantled and whatever is left over beyond the legal fees will be turned over to more charities."
Josie laid her head on Jack's shoulder. "Why do families have to be so complicated? That's not my idea of what a family is supposed to be like. I liked your father, I liked your grandfather."
"I liked my father, too," Jack admitted. "I couldn't stand that he was living a life of lies and he wouldn't stand up to Amos. Amos is another story altogether."
"Were you hurt in that rescue mission against the Somali pirates?"
Jack tilted his head. "No, I wasn't hurt. You copped to that?"
"I'm not stupid," Josie complained, smacking him hard on the chest. "It still doesn't excuse you for not contacting me!"
"The mission was classified," Jack said, shaking his head. "It was my job, Josie. I was needed and I did my job. At least I proved to myself I could handle a mission again. I had my doubts after the last one. We went in, did what we needed to do and got the hostages out alive."
"I thought you were gone again," Josie complained.
"I was always coming back. But it took a wh
ile to clear the decks, to get back here. I'm a civilian now, as weird as that seems to me," Jack admitted. "I'm back. I'm yours, and I'm here to stay. Are you going to stay mad at me?"
"Two months, Jack," she mumbled with a catch in her voice. "Two, long, long, months. You deserve to suffer. I cooked up some really hideous plans for revenge if you ever showed your ugly mug around here again."
Jack grinned. "Are you going to try to execute them? If I remember correctly, your revenge plans were never very successful."
"I've gotten better at overall planning and execution," Josie promised with a stubborn glint in her eye.
"Have you?" Jack laughed. "I have a better plan."
"What would that be?"
Jack lowered his head and kissed her. "Make-up sex instead of revenge, anything your heart desires," he offered.
"Yeah," Josie whispered. "I don't think you're man enough to make up for two whole months."
"Want to bet?" He lowered his head to her breasts as he brushed his tongue over her nipples making her shiver. "When I have a job to do, I become very single-minded and do whatever it takes to complete my mission."
"Yeah?" was her sultry shaky moan.
"Yeah. I have a target in mind I'm working on right now," Jack said, trailing kisses down her belly and parting her legs to reach his goal.
"Two months' worth, Jack," Josie reminded him breathlessly. "Two, long, long, months!"
"Come on," Josie complained, as she gave the sheet a tug. "You're no good to me now, anyway."
"I'm half dead, woman," Jack said cheerfully. "You've worn me out."
"Like I said, all talk and no action," Josie taunted.
Jack caught her and dragged her back onto the bed. "I'm human, and I'm only temporarily out of commission. I need a little time to recoup. Make-up sex isn't over yet."
Josie laughed. "It is for now. I have a junior league baseball game to go to, and later we have pizza with twenty-five little boys."
Full Circle Page 8
