by Jamie Pope
“I’m sorry,” he apologized immediately to Cass. “I shouldn’t have raised my voice in your home. I think I need some air.”
He walked out quickly and the three of them stood there for a moment in silence.
“Why do you have to be such a pain in the ass, Nova?” her brother asked her.
“Something has been bothering him all night,” she said looking at the door he’d escaped through. “I wanted to get it out of him. I’m going to go talk to him.”
She left them, grabbing a couple of throw blankets off the couch as she went outside. Somehow she knew he would be on the small private beach that was just a few hundred steps from Wylie and Cassandra’s house.
She took off her heels, even though the sand was freezing in the early spring, and walked over to him. She said nothing, just spread out one of the blankets on the sand beside him and sat down.
“I know you’re always a giant pain in the ass,” he said after a while. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I wanted you to snap at me. I was wondering how long it was going to take. I was afraid I was going to have to start making some low blows.”
He looked down at her. “You want to run that by me again?”
“Something is bothering you. I want to know what it is.”
“What if I don’t want to tell you? What if it’s none of your goddamn business?”
She held out her hand to him. “I brought two blankets. We can wrap the other one around us.”
He shook his head as if his choice went against his better judgment, but he sat down beside her and she went up on her knees to wrap the blanket around him and while she was there she kissed the side of his face. Once. Then twice. Then half a dozen times.
He exhaled heavily. “Don’t kiss me.”
“You need to be kissed and hugged and babied. But if you don’t want me to touch you, I’ll stop.”
“I don’t want you to stop. I’m going to want more than just a kiss from you. Don’t tease me. Just walk away.”
“I’m not teasing you.” She set her lips on his and swept her tongue into his mouth. She could taste his surprise and his arousal. “I want to feel your hands on my skin.”
It was all she had thought about this past week. His big hands, his heavy body, his warm breath. She took his hand and placed it beneath her shirt on her back.
“What are you doing?” Even in the darkness she could see the bewildered look in his eyes.
“There’s something up there I need you to remove for me. You’ve got long arms. You’re the only man I can think of to reach it.”
He trailed his fingers up her back, his eyes never leaving her face, as if he were waiting for her to change her mind.
“Tanner, I don’t ever ask a man to unhook my bra, but I’m asking you. You want to snap to it?”
“Please don’t play with me tonight,” he begged, and she felt a little bad for him.
She went back on her heels and pulled her sweater off over her head and removed her bra.
“Are you insane? You’re going to freeze to death.”
“Then keep me warm.” She wrapped her arms around him.
He tumbled her onto the blanket. She should have been cold. There was gooseflesh all over her exposed skin, but she didn’t feel cold, she felt exhilarated.
“You’re freaking crazy.” He kissed the side of her neck. “I can’t stand you. Sometimes I hate you.”
“I know. Sometimes I hate you, too.” She slid her hands up the back of his shirt. “Touch me. That’s all I can think about some days.”
He pushed his mouth against hers and gave her a fiery kiss. There was so much pent up inside him at the moment, there was a little bit of wildness there. Part of her liked it. Part of her was scared. He slid his hand up her side and then covered her breast. Her nipples had already been hard due to the chilled air, but now there was a new sensation there.
Pleasure.
He stroked her nipple with his thumb, just across it at first and then in circles. She hated to compare him to her husband, but when she met Elijah, he hadn’t been much more than a boy and she was a virgin. She didn’t know what to expect, that he was supposed to care about her pleasure.
But right now she was with a man who seemed to instinctively know what felt good.
“Don’t moan like that,” he said, his breath coming out labored. “You know we can’t finish what we’ve started here.”
“Why not?” She reached for the button of his jeans. “I’ll make sure you finish.”
“Nova.” He grabbed her hand. “Nova, Nova, Nova.”
“What, Tanner?”
“Not here. Not here in the cold sand. Not walking distance from your brother’s house.”
“I just wanted to feel you up a little.”
He chuckled and gave her another scorching kiss. “Not here. Not tonight,” he panted.
“Okay, then tell me what’s wrong.”
He sighed and knew he was contemplating if he was going to tell her.
“Please, Tanner.”
“I spoke to my mother today.”
“Did you let her have it?”
“No. I did ask her why she didn’t tell me she was getting a divorce. Most of my life, I’ve had the feeling that my family is hiding something from me, but none of them will fess up to it.”
In the moonlight she could see pain flash across his face. “Tell me about your family. I don’t know much about them.”
“I’m the black sheep. The only child of only children. I was supposed to go to a good school and then go into finance or be a CEO of a large corporation. My parents didn’t expect me to stay in the military as an enlisted soldier for fifteen years. They sure as hell didn’t expect me to go to war and love being there.”
“Did you really love being at war?”
“I loved the thought that I was fighting for my country, fighting for something bigger than myself. And if I died in battle I would know that my death would be for something. That I would have honor.”
“Like a warrior.”
“Yeah, but it sounds kind of stupid when you put it that way. I was a messed-up teenager. I was wild. I was beyond wild. I was headed toward killing myself.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I drank. I did drugs. I shoplifted and wrecked cars and fought and fought and fought. I didn’t care if I got hurt. I didn’t care about the consequences. I just needed to feel something. Something that was a clear sign that I was alive.”
Nova was alarmed at his confession. He didn’t seem like the type. He was too noble. Too upstanding. Too kind. But she of all people should know that appearances didn’t matter.
The revelation of the substance abuse made her want to shy away from him. Her mother drank herself to death. Her husband abused. She couldn’t be around it. But she had known Tanner for a year now. He wasn’t a drinker, or druggie, or maniac. He was good. He felt good to her. “Why did you need to feel like you were alive?”
“Because to them, my parents, I was invisible. I didn’t exist.”
“How could that be? They made you. They had to have loved you.”
“I think my mother did in her own way. She spoiled the hell of me, protected me from my father’s wrath when I was little. I was like her little accessory. She would dress me up and parade me in front of her friends. My father would try to make decisions about me and she fought him at every turn, most of the time for no reason. But then I wasn’t so little or cute anymore and she got tired of me. She started taking trips. Long trips to Europe, or across country. My father was always away on business so I was left alone.”
“And you wanted them to notice you.”
“I didn’t realize what I was doing at the time, but yeah. I wanted that one thing that was going to make my mother come home and stay home. That one thing that was going to make my father see that I existed, that I was his son. That I mattered.”
“And did it work?�
��
“No.” He gave a humorless laugh. “Well, it got my grandfather to notice. I had gotten in trouble when I was nineteen. My friends and I took a car. We were going to bring it back, but to the police, breaking into someone’s garage and driving off in their car was a serious offense.”
“How did you get out of that?”
“My grandfather has some pull. He could have made the whole thing go away with a snap of his fingers, but he told me that if I didn’t straighten up my act and enlist that he was going to use his pull and make sure I went to prison.”
“He wouldn’t have really done that.”
“I told him that he was full of shit, and then he made me stay in jail for two weeks. By the time he came back to see me I knew better than to call his bluff.”
“So you joined the army.”
“So I joined the army,” he said with a small laugh.
“And I loved it. Every goddamn minute of it until the end. I hated my grandfather for it. For so many years after that.”
“Why?”
“Because he knew what was best for me. And when you’re young and pissed off, you don’t want to hear anyone tell you that they know what’s best for you.”
“He ended up saving you from yourself.” She sighed and snuggled closer to him. “You’re lucky. Not everyone is lucky enough to have someone who wants to save them.”
“No.” He kissed down the side of her neck, and then that very sensitive spot where her shoulder and her neck met. It felt heavenly. To be this close to him, underneath the stars with the waves crashing against the shore and no one around them. It was intimate, more intimate than she had been with anyone else before and that scared her, too. “I can’t believe I have you half naked and beneath me and I can’t even enjoy it.”
“Why can’t you enjoy it?”
“I can’t see you very well. I need to see you. I’ve been dreaming about what you look like naked for the past year and I need to see if my imagination conjured up anything nearly as good as the real thing.”
“I might disappoint you. I could be a hot mess under my clothes.”
“It wouldn’t matter if you were. I would still want you.”
She was glad it was so dark because he would have seen her blush. No one had ever spoken to her the way he did. She didn’t know how to handle it. “Because you had a bad night, I’m going to let you get away with being sweet to me.”
“I’m not being sweet to you, I’m being honest.”
“What else is stopping you from enjoying this?”
“I keep worrying that you’re going to freeze to death.”
“I’m fine. There’s a giant man on top of me.”
“The cold from the sand has to be seeping through this blanket.” He rolled off of her and reached for her discarded clothing. “Put this on.” He helped her redress and then wrapped the blanket around her. It was another one of those unconscious sweet things he did.
“You’re very motherly.”
“I’m not. Trust me.” He hauled her into his lap. “It’s taking everything inside of me not to yank down your jeans and slam myself inside of you.” He put his lips on her ear. They were warm and they sent tingles all throughout her body. “I keep imagining how warm and wet and tight you’ll be, with your legs wrapped around me and your nails digging into my back. I want to make you come, Nova, and after I’m done, I want to start the process all over again.”
Coming from another man, his words might have been crude, offensive, but they weren’t. They were erotic and beautiful, and as much as he wanted to feel her around him, she wanted to feel him buried deep inside her.
“You could have had me tonight. I would have let you.”
“I couldn’t. Not here.”
“Why?”
“Nova!” She heard her name being called in the distance.
“That’s why.” Tanner kissed her cheek. “I would never be able to look your brother in the eye again. A man can’t have sex with his best friend’s sister on the cold sand a few hundred feet from his house.”
“You have a point.” She sighed. “We’re over here, Wylie,” she called back to her brother.
“Are you okay?”
“Tanner hasn’t killed me if that’s what you’re asking.”
“We’re just talking,” Tanner yelled back to him.
“Cass is worried. She thinks you’re going to freeze out here.”
“We’ll be in soon.”
Nova rested her head on Tanner’s shoulder, kind of upset that whatever it was they had just been engaged in was now over. “Do you really think your family is keeping a secret from you?”
“I know they are.”
“What do you think it is?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, there’s only one thing you can do in this situation.”
“What’s that?”
“Keep digging until you find out what it is.”
Chapter 6
Tanner and Wylie’s work building the community was slowing down. Nearly all the homes were done; there were just little things here and there, but they could wait. It had been a rainy morning and as Cass got further along in her pregnancy, Wylie took off more days to be at home with her. And when Wylie took off, he let everyone take off. But Tanner had enjoyed working. Most of the time he went to the community site anyway and completed small jobs. Sometimes he did paperwork. It was that and Wylie’s incredible leadership skills that made them so far ahead of schedule. Tanner was planning to go in today anyway, but he realized that if he completed all of his work early he would have a long stretch of time off later and the thought of that much inactivity was making him twitch. So instead of heading to the work site at seven, he got in his car and headed to town, to Nova’s apartment.
It wasn’t a plan, or conscious thought. But he wanted to see her. She was waiting outside when he pulled up. Teo was at her side, dressed for school, prepared for the rain in his matching green raincoat and rain boots. Nova wore rain boots, too. Hot pink plaid ones. She had on jeans, an oversized Marine Corps sweatshirt, and over her head she carried a huge umbrella with butterflies printed all over it. Her face was clean of makeup. Her hair was up in a tight bun. She was still absolutely gorgeous.
He stepped out of his SUV and walked over to them. Teo’s face lit up with he saw him. There was surprise in Nova’s eyes, but she smiled, too. Her smile could make any man feel warm, even on a cold, wet spring day.
“Sasquatch!” she greeted him.
“How are you, Mouth? Good morning, Teo.”
“Good morning, Mr. Tanner. I’m waiting for the bus.”
“I can see that. You’re dressed perfectly for it.”
“Mommy bought me these boots,” he said, looking down at his feet. “They got frogs on them. She says they’re adorable. I didn’t used to like to wear them, but three ladies stopped to tell me I was so cute the last time I wore them so now I like them.”
“It’s a good thing that you realize the importance of pleasing women.”
“Yeah. Mommy said when I become a teenager she is going to buy a big stick to beat the girls off me. I told her that she shouldn’t hit them, because hitting people isn’t nice.”
“You’re right. But sometimes mamas need to protect their babies and your mother doesn’t want any other girls kissing you but her.”
Teo looked up at her.
“He’s right, kid. I’m the jealous type. I don’t even like it when Aunt Cass kisses you. But I deal with it because she is such a nice lady.”
“I think your bus is pulling up,” Tanner said looking down the street.
“Time for kisses,” Teo announced. He lifted his arms and Nova picked him up.
“Have a good day in school and a good time at your friend’s house tonight.” She kissed his cheeks. “Call me if you need anything, or if you want to come home early.”
“I won’t want to come home, Mommy. It’s restaurant night for the school and before then we have a Sco
uts meeting and I’m going to be busy.”
“You’re always busy.” She sighed. “I’m going to have to buy you a day planner to keep all your appointments straight,” she said with a grin.
“I would like that. We could keep it in my office.”
“Go to school, you little old man,” she said, squeezing him one last time.
“Good-bye Mr. Tanner.” Teo turned to him. “You could hug me too, if you want.”
“I want to.” He took him from Nova and hugged him before setting him on the ground. “Thank you for offering.”
The bus pulled up and Teo got on it, looking back once to wave to them before the doors closed. “He’s the cutest freaking kid on the planet,” Nova said when the bus pulled away. “I know I must be biased, but who else do you know who has a kid that gorgeous?”
“No one, but then again, not many people look like you.”
“His father was incredibly beautiful.” She sighed. “It was the only thing he had going for him. Teo has a lot of his features and none of his personality. Thank the Lord.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Ugh. Don’t make me. The only good thing about him just went away on the bus.”
“Wylie said he’s also Native.”
“Yes. I think that’s why I fell so hard for him. He had the most gorgeous hair when we met. Thick and inky black. It was longer than mine. People used to stare at us whenever we went out. He was both insanely jealous and incredibly proud. Toxic combination.” She stared off into space with some sadness in her eyes. Wylie had told him that her husband was a deadbeat who Nova divorced shortly before his death. Tanner wanted to ask her a dozen more questions about the man who let her get away, but he refrained. Nova would shut down if he pushed.
“You busy today?”
“Today is my day off. I think you know that.” She looked at him, into his eyes, and there was something there. Awareness maybe. They had shared something incredibly intimate the other night. And it wasn’t just the fact that she invited him to touch her in a way few other men could. He had talked to her about his life, his childhood. He had barely scratched the surface, but she had gotten more out of him than anyone else had.
He could hold a conversation with anyone. Make small talk about the most inane things. He could talk to Wylie, his best friend, about his time in the service, about his time at war. He could discuss his PTSD. But that was it. He never could go deeper than that. He could never talk about his other life.
