An hour of sitting around the hole later, they had nothing. The patience required for this sport rivaled the amount needed for stalking a gaggle of bad dudes in the mountains. Today he was interested in a quicker reward. “Done yet?”
She rolled her eyes. “Haven’t you ever ice fished?”
“Hell no.” He shrugged out of his unzipped jacket and pulled off his stocking cap. Either the portable heater was effective, or his temperature was rising.
“This is an endurance sport.” Without breaking eye contact, she shed her parka too. “It requires contemplation.”
“Beer.” With his preferred beverage, he’d happily contemplate how her bib overall straps framed her breasts and pushed them together.
“That too. Luckily, the gas station happened...” she rummaged in the sled, “...to have some.” Her hand emerged, holding two bottles of Hopping Dakota Brown Ale.
“Best woman. Ever.” He made a gesture of prying off a cap. “Open?”
Horror as absurd as a rubber mask crossed her face. “Oh, nooo. I forgot.”
“New plan.” Screwing didn’t require beer, and his body fit the sled perfectly, like a bunk. His coat and the tent carry bag would insulate him from the ice. She could ride on top.
“I can predict where you’re going, and it won’t catch our dinner.” Despite the prim tone, she eased the portable heater closer.
“Catch me.” He ran both thumbs from the outer edge of his waistband to meet in the middle and watched her eyes track his motion. “Buy dinner.”
“That’s an...idea.” The rapid rise and fall of her chest intrigued him.
The snaps and fasteners at his fly didn’t make enough noise to be heard over the whoosh of the heater, but her pupils expanded when he spread his pants. She could probably tell what was happening under his sport shorts and long johns. “Come here.”
She clunked on to the sled, boots and all, and he guided her legs to either side of his hips. With their coats to pad her knees, he slipped the straps off her shoulders to hunt for the hem of her thermal shirt. He wanted to see her bare breasts in the filtered light of the tent and watch her skin flush pink.
Her shirt lifted out of the high waist of her snow gear, but the bib straps tangled on her arms. He pulled and lifted more layers, finally revealing the black stretch of...a sports bra. He couldn’t insert a finger under the band. The contraption was tighter than a jammed double feed in an AR-15. Probably twice as hard to remove. Why did chicks wear this stuff?
“Armor?”
“Support, you know, for hauling gear and landing a record trout.” At least she took the hint and wiggled out of her bindings, which involved rotating her hips smack on top of him, so maybe that was another acceptable reason.
He pulled her down until he could kiss her while he rubbed circles on his prizes. Her mouth was holy; he was a sinner who needed to worship. Her lips, her tongue, the kitten sounds from her throat invited him to enter and entwine until he couldn’t be sure where he stopped and where her thrusts took over. Every twist was a move he wanted to repeat with their bodies, but until he had more of her clothes off, he could only kiss and touch.
Her hands burrowed under his shirt to push the slippery fabric high enough to expose his skin, match it to hers, chest to chest while they kissed. He dug his hand deeper into her hair, and the other pulled her hip tighter. Skin to skin, she dragged her nipples across his chest and moaned, or maybe he dragged her and moaned, because they were so close to being one. If only they didn’t have clothes in the way.
“Harder,” she groaned, because the friction wasn’t enough for either of them. He lifted her, brought those breasts from his chest to his mouth and suckled like a man denied, not like a man who’d fucked himself sore the night before.
She made a sound somewhere between panting and screaming, and it was good. “More, more, Rey.” She was reduced to single words too.
He obliged by pressing his tongue under her nipple, sucking it to the roof of his mouth until she keened with appreciation. His cock pushed toward its destination, but she wore those damn padded pants.
Then her fingers dipped into his shorts and closed around his shaft. She could glove it tight and squeeze like that, or run her fingers from tip to balls, or flick her thumb, or both—oh, that was both—whatever she wanted, all good.
What she wanted was to bring his man into the light and look, and that was mighty fine too. She licked her lips, and that armed more than his imagination. Medical literature claimed men didn’t pass out from natural erections, but it seemed unlikely that much blood could go one place and not make a guy dizzy. His crazy brain filled with images, her mouth front and center.
As if she knew his mind, she lowered her head. When her lips encircled his cock, he thought he’d died again, this time with no pain. Her mouth was wet and hot, not tight and balls-deep like fucking her pussy, but so wet, and the pop of her lips on the tip of his cock was heaven. The little wet slurp as she bobbed on him was a sound he heard in dreams.
She went up and down and simultaneously gyrated her tits on his pants. He got the hint—touch them too. His hands reached for her nipples and rolled them the way he already knew she liked. His moves sent her faster, lower, and the harder he tugged, the deeper she opened her throat until he swore he was never returning from the pleasure zone.
“Now.” He warned her it was coming. She could pull off, but she didn’t, so he thrust while her mouth slid down his rod until his ears buzzed with pressure. Then the explosion, brighter, redder, hotter than the rest of his body, all of the pain and pleasure poured out as he let go and called her name.
Maybe he said more, but she was flat on his chest and silent, so maybe he hadn’t said he loved her. They could stay like this—
A single shot jack-knifed him upright, and he flipped out of the sled, fumbling with his fly and hunting for his boots. “Stay down. Now.” His rifle and tactical vest should be—
“Was that a shot?”
Her question pulled him from Afghanistan to crash into the world of the no-legged man.
She peeked through the flap. “It’s a flare.”
A flare meant distress, a rescue plea, not a threat. Alongside him, she donned her gear with the speed of a woman who wore arctic survival suits. It took both of them, but it wasn’t impossible to crawl-hop to the door and with Grace’s help clamber into the chair.
The emergency was obvious as soon as they exited. Where blown snow had drifted at one edge of the fishing area, it must have concealed thinner ice. The farthest tent was tilting, half-submerged.
“Damn.” Today his post-coitus speech didn’t linger.
Snow clogged his wheels closer to the slushy pile-up, and Grace added her strength to move the chair. A big guy, maybe two-fifty, was trying to throw a rope to someone hanging on an orange cooler in the water beyond the tent. Ice creaked, and two other men had boards they pushed from positions on their knees, but they looked unstable. A light rescuer had a better chance of making it to the water’s edge. He pointed to the man with the rope. “Take me. There.”
She understood and pushed him closer until he said stop.
“Stay here.”
“But I can—” She must have understood his expression. “Right.”
The way he waddled off-kilter on his short stub and his bent knee, trailing the legs of his pants, probably resembled a freaky penguin crossing the ice to the man with the rope. The stranger was trembling, and Rey realized the person in the water was a kid, maybe a teenager. Ah, shit, a kid wasn’t going to have the strength to pull himself out, even if the rope miraculously lassoed the cooler.
“Tie me. I...light.” He made crawling motions, and the man understood.
The rope harness crisscrossed from armpit to opposite shoulder in a figure eight, and after his first attempts he had a rhythm that d
istributed his weight between his two hands, knee and stump as he scrambled. Dragging a hundred feet of rope wasn’t as heavy as a fire hose and wasn’t nearly as heavy as the gear he used to wear. Last year he could have added this rope to his load and still run two miles under fire.
This wasn’t last year.
He should have covered the distance by now, squishy shifting ice slowing him or not. He should be with that kid, who was failing faster than Rey could move. Talk, that was what rescuers did when someone needed help to stay conscious and motivation to save themselves. “Hey. Kid.”
The dam in his mind blocked other reassurances. He had to find something to help this kid hang on while he inched forward.
“Ooo-ooo-ooo,” he sang. “Staying alive. Ooo-ooo-ooo.” Water had sloshed through enough ice cracks that his path was a puddle. Maybe only snow glued these chunks together, but he was getting close. “Kid!”
“Y-y-y-yes.” The voice was thin, and Rey saw less of the body on the cooler, as if the weight of his wet snow suit was slowing sinking him, or his arms were conceding.
“Help you.”
He couldn’t reach the teen from here, and there was no fucking way after this long in the water that the boy was going to be able to kick himself closer.
“Sing. Ooo-ooo-ooo.” He had one shot. On his stomach, Rey coaxed him to make noise to build energy and body warmth while he yanked an extra twenty feet of rope across the ice. Whatever happened, Grace and the others could pull him home. The afterlife didn’t seem interested in him yet, but could he grab the kid?
“Ooo—” the plunge into frigid water locked other words in his chest. This was where training mattered. His arms pulled through the water, his legs nonexistent and his pants dead wet weight. How many times had his captain made him shed gear in the cold pool to a stopwatch, or thrown him from a boat while zip-tied, just to tweak the SEAL Team Six commander?
He reached the floating cooler, looped one arm under the boy’s armpits to hold him firmly on the floating plastic and grabbed a handle. “Pull in!” he yelled.
The men on shore heard, and he felt tension on the line and they moved. Too slow. Kid was blue.
“Sing!” He put his deepest command in his voice. “Ooo-ooo.”
“Don’t know...” the boy’s voice was a thread, thinner than spider silk, “...that one.”
What the heck did teenagers know? “Op-op-op.”
“Eh...sexy...”
The ice was closer, almost at them, and then the front of the cooler bumped. Now for the hard part. The tug of the rope harness pulled him sideways, bringing his shoulder and the boy’s next to a solid piece.
“Let go.”
“I c-c-can’t,” he whimpered.
“Trust.”
“S-s-s-scared.”
“On three. One. Two. Three.” He heaved the kid’s waist, and the equal and opposite reaction dunked him below the cooler. The liquid roof closed over his head, but he’d float in a second, now that his arms were free to pull.
For an instant the ice was on top of him—that was near-panic, to be entombed in blue without an impossible spy gun to shoot an air hole—but then he surfaced at the cracked edge. Air seared his lungs, good and lifesaving and cold and killing at the same time. With his hands as far along the rope as he could reach, he yelled for a pull and porpoised like one of Grace’s marine mammals, and there he was, flopped and panting on the ice.
The boy had made it five feet, nowhere near dry blankets and heaters.
No way could he drag even this skinny teen. Plan B. With his arms crossing the kid’s torso, he ordered him to roll and threw his weight over at the same time, landing on his back and cradling his charge. “Pull!”
First the line jerked, then they started to slide. His head dug into the snow and bounced on the ice, and he bit his tongue. He was so giving Grace shit about not buying helmets for ice-fishing. Right after he took a hot bath. With her.
To keep his spine rounded enough to glide, he had to maintain a crunch with his shoulders high. The Marquis would love this workout. Rub his hands together and send vets to be dragged behind sled dogs, but damn, he’d text the man thanks tomorrow.
Then they reached the crowd. Other people took the boy. Grace hugged him, kissed his face, which would be nicer if he could feel it but he was too iced. Someone wrapped him in a blanket while Grace kept kissing the wrong parts, like his forehead, which wasn’t half as cold as his lips and nose.
“Don’t you even think...what you did...”
“You saved my son.” The big man was shaky and crying too. “Thank you, thank you.”
They recovered in a warm truck cab, clutching heat packs. He couldn’t help Grace strip his wet clothing because his fingers weren’t working yet, but she managed fine. When she started to work on his innermost thermal shirt, she was close enough that he could hear what she muttered.
“And it’s ‘ahh-ahh-ahh, staying alive,’ dammit. Not ooo-ooo. No wonder. If you ever.”
“Shhh.” He reached a finger to her lips. “Roped. Don’t worry.”
“Worry? I’m furious! I’m so mad, I could... Do you have any clue what I thought when you jumped in?” Her face was splotchy red and her nose dripped. “Do you?”
“But why...mad?” Even superhero penguins obviously didn’t understand women.
“Because I love you!” She threw herself at his chest, mashed him into the seat, and this time he could feel her lips, but he couldn’t hear past the roar those words had started in his heart.
“I love you too.” Easiest sentence he’d ever say.
Chapter Nine
They stayed in Rapid City and pushed to make up time Saturday by driving as far as Bozeman. An easy six hours in the car Sunday found them at Spokane, and they agreed without discussion to stop. This would be their last night together on the road.
His last chance to hold her through the night, smell her hair and feel it in his fingers as he fell asleep. Tomorrow she’d be in her parents’ home, and he’d be at his mother’s trailer until he made decisions about his future. He hoped Grace would be happy with his choices.
* * *
Through the front curtain, Grace saw Rey’s sister drop him in front of her family’s house at exactly six twenty-eight, on time for the six-thirty dinner invitation her parents had issued. He used one cane and carried a poinsettia wrapped in glossy foil.
She broke protocol and beat her mother to the door. This was America, not the old country, and she could stand beside Rey in front of her parents.
A bobbing silver-glitter reindeer on a stick poked out of the plant. Her eyes flicked from his, dark brown and amused, to the glowing display of illuminated carolers and reindeer in the yard. “You know they like decorations.”
“Expert recon,” he whispered for her ears only.
“How are you at interrogation?”
“Trained. To resist.”
Maybe if she slipped the poinsettia on the end table she could find a reason to step to the porch for a minute and give him a quick kiss for luck.
“Sergeant Cruz.” Her mother appeared behind her, leaving her no choice but to hold the door wider.
“Ma’am.” He bowed enough to be culturally correct, and Grace remembered he’d been to Korea with the Army more times than she’d visited. “For you.”
When her mother turned, Grace didn’t have to mouth suck up. Rey puckered at her first.
Her father was deep in Korean abeoji-dad mode, almost to the extent of self-parody. “Sergeant Reynaldo Cruz.” He sat on the couch, hands planted on each thigh like a samurai, even though that was Japanese, elbows out to control the space. “Welcome to our home.”
Rey bowed his head and shoulders. “Thank you for inviting me, Mr. Kim.” The words flowed slowly, but evenly, as if he’d practice
d.
Jenni rolled her eyes from the doorway behind Dad.
“Please sit and we have tea together.”
“Thank you.” He lowered himself to the opposite chair, like a witness on television.
Perched on the next seat, she wanted to hold his hand, but no touching boyfriends was the first, second and third rule of making a good impression with Korean parents.
“What do you do now you are not in the army?”
She’d been raised not to interrupt, but—”Dad!”
Rey nodded agreeably. “School first. You—Dub.” He said the abbreviation for University of Washington, her alma mater in Seattle. The two short words fluttered in her stomach. “Finish my degree.” A folded paper slid across the coffee table toward her father.
He opened it. Studied it.
Grace squirmed to know what that page contained.
Her father nodded, let a smile break his face and called out to her mother in Korean, probably because he knew neither daughter understood much of what he said.
Gasping, her mother hustled in, wiping her hands on her apron, and grabbed the letter.
Grace nudged Rey’s shoulder to get his attention, but he merely shrugged.
Jenni had nothing to lose by bad behavior, so her sister snatched the paper and read out loud. “University of Washington, admission to Medical Anthropology and Global Health major.” She looked at Rey. “That’s like pre-med, isn’t it?”
“Dental, I hope. Less talk.”
Since her sister’s back was to their parents, Grace had to watch as Jenni eyed her boyfriend with the frank assessment of a single woman living in a small town. “Doctor, lawyer, dentist. You bagged one of the big three, and he pumps iron, too. Congrats.”
“He can also hear,” Grace pointed out to her sister. “You could talk to him instead of about him.”
Rey didn’t appear to mind Jenni’s admiration, given how his arms and chest seemed to expand under his collared shirt.
His Road Home Page 12
