Falling for the Enemy

by Samanthe Beck

  “Do you…have everything you need?” The hesitant, husky voice encompassed him as completely as the warm steam from the shower. Her palm formed a dark shadow on the glass door.

  No. I need you to strip down, get in here, and… Some scrap of pride wouldn’t let him say the words though. Virginia wasn’t a hesitant girl, but she had plenty of hesitations about him. Being her impulsive mistake, yet again, didn’t sit well with him. “I’m good. Thanks.” If she wanted more, she was going to have to say so, without hesitation or the escape hatch of “one last time.”

  “Great. Good.” The shadow of her hand disappeared. “I’ll go start dinner.”

  The thunk of the bathroom door told him she’d left. He turned off the water, listened to her footsteps continue down the hall, and tried not to be disappointed. He shouldn’t be, he told himself as he dried off and pulled on his briefs and jeans. She had her goals, and spending time with him put one of the main ones at risk. Meanwhile, his life needed a few fundamentals—little stuff like some goddamned direction and a new career—before he started layering in distractions. And even if he was settled enough to consider a relationship, his father’s adversary would be an inadvisable choice—for all of them.

  Valid points, but they didn’t do much for the disappointment. He made his way down the hall toward the kitchen, barefoot and shirtless, serenaded by the sound of Ginny half-singing, half-humming. He stepped into the kitchen and saw her.

  Part of her, anyway. She was bent over, with her head in the oven, presenting him with a stunning view of her backside covered by those innocent white shorts.

  “Ginny.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him, smiling. “I think that’s the first time you’ve called me—” But as she took in the sight of him standing there her words trailed off and the smile disappeared.

  “I hope this isn’t one of those no shoes, no shirt, no services places.”

  The smile snuck back to her lips. She straightened and closed the oven. “No. We’re pretty casual here at Casa Boca. Can I get you a beer or something?”

  Alcohol had turned into a hazard as soon as his sleep problems had started, but it was one he’d been smart enough to recognize and avoid. “I’m fine. I’m no Anthony Bourdain, but I can stir a pot or—”

  She waved his offer off. “Everything’s under control. I put the game on in the sitting room. Go on in, relax, and take a load off. I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”

  He wasn’t sure if she was trying to indulge him or get him out of her hair, but either way, the idea of kicking back for a few minutes suddenly sounded pretty damn good. A few steps down the hall brought him to her sitting room. The lighting was low, and mainly from the television. Springs in the dark blue sofa squeaked as he sat. He moved a fancy, fringed decorative pillow off to the side, and fingered the fluffy, matching throw draped over the back of the sofa. Girl stuff—as fascinating as it was confounding.

  He slung an arm along the sofa back and stared at the screen. Seventh inning shut-out. The remote sat on the dark, mission-style coffee table in front of him. He picked it up, intending to channel surf, but ended up just turning the volume down and leaving the game on.

  Virginia’s soft, smoky rendition of “Umbrella” drifted to him from across the hall. The images on the screen started to blur. He blinked them back into focus, once…twice…and then gave in to the compulsion to rest his eyes for five lousy minutes.

  …

  “Wake up, sleeping beauty.”

  Shaun jerked upright and looked around as if totally disoriented.

  “Hey.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “Ginny’s house, camera install, thank you dinner, remember?”

  “Yeah.” He rubbed the heels of his hands over his eyes, and she suspected he wouldn’t appreciate knowing how much he looked like a tired little boy, but the gesture transported her back in time, to an early memory. She couldn’t have been more than four or five, sitting between her parents in a pew at Bluelick Baptist, watching young Shaun Buchanan several pews over, yawning and rubbing his eyes.

  “You snuck in a nap.” Hoping to tease the haunted expression from his face, she took a seat beside him on the sofa and added, “That’s twice you’ve fallen asleep on me. I think I’m boring you.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “It’s not you. It’s me. I…haven’t been sleeping well.” The words came out reluctantly, like the last drops of water from a dry well.

  “You poor man. How long has this been going on?” She didn’t know about anyone else, but her life went to hell in a hand-basket pretty damn quick if she dragged around more than a few days without a good night’s sleep.

  He stared at her for a long moment. “On and off for seven months.”

  “Seven months?” Men. “That’s a ridiculous amount of time to suffer. Have you talked to a doctor?”

  He opened his mouth to say something, but then expelled a breath and ran a restless hand through his hair, leaving it sticking up in the kind of haphazard disarray some guys spent lots of time and product trying to achieve. “I’ve talked the whole mess to death—with my commanding officer, my doctor—”

  “Well, fine. Now talk to me.” She scooted closer when he edged away. He was feeling penned in? Too bad. People talked to her. That was her gift. “Talk to me,” she repeated, never taking her eyes off his face.

  His hand attacked his hair again, and then he dropped his arm, tilted his head back and closed his eyes. Surrender.

  “My sleep problems started shortly after my last mission with the SEALs.”

  Her heart sank under a creeping wave of dread. Whatever came next was going to be bad. Not Justin-painted-a-foul-word-on-my-wall bad, or anything else that passed for bad in Bluelick, but the kind of fucked-up that messed with the head of one of the strongest of the strong. She took a fortifying breath, and pressed on. “Coincidence?”

  His laugh contained absolutely no humor. “Not so much. My last mission went sideways, to put it mildly.”

  “Tell me.”

  He laughed again, and shook his head. “Trust me Virginia, you do not want to hear the details.”

  “Why? They’re just words, Shaun. They can’t hurt me…unless…” She lowered her voice to a dramatic whisper. “If you tell me, are you going to have to kill me?”

  This time his laugh came closer to real amusement, and his eyes found hers. “If I said yes, would you drop the subject?”

  “No. I’d take my chances. Where was your last mission?”

  His eyes drifted away. “The Sudan. Counterterrorism mission involving a high-value target within Al-Qaeda. Go in. Extract him from the compound where he was living in plain sight under a false identity. Bring him to justice.”

  Jesus. She styled hair for a living. It suddenly seemed so ridiculous. “Sounds cut-and-dried,” she deadpanned.

  “It should have been. We got our intel from a reliable local informant. Satellite pictures confirmed everything he told us. Our target lived like a king in a fancy enclave on the outskirts of Khartoum, in a spacious home with a panoramic view of the Nile. Approximately seventy-five members of his family, staff, and aides lived there, too.”

  “Sounds like a lot of…variables.”

  “The SEALs are trained for variables. Part of the deal is to get the job done with precision. A good team can nab a feral rat from a Tokyo subway at rush hour without a single witness—if nothing goes wrong.”

  “But, in your case, something went wrong.” Her stomach clenched at the thought, but she told herself to toughen up. This had been his reality. All she had to do was listen.

  “The thing about informants in a place like the Sudan is they’re poor. Poor at a level people in the U.S. can’t fathom. They have poor parents, siblings, spouses and children, and they’re all trying to survive any way they can. A family member learned what was going on and took the information to our target.”

  “Oh, no.” The clench in her stomach evolved to a cramp.

  “The ni
ght of the mission, we came in slightly off our timetable. High winds delayed our chopper about ten minutes. We’d barely breached the outer walls when the whole compound blew sky high. Our target was a firm believer in the scorched earth policy.”

  “God. Shaun.” She couldn’t stop herself from reaching for him, or stop the immediate sense of relief when his hand closed over hers and his warmth seeped into her skin. “Were you hurt?”

  “Not a scratch. Not on me, or anybody else on the team. But there were casualties. Lots of them. Inside…” He trailed off and rubbed a hand over his forehead, as if to erase images lingering in his mind.

  “I don’t understand. If the guy blew up his own home, who would have been inside?”

  “All of his wives, all of the daughters, and most of the domestic staff. The final body count came to forty-three.”

  “Good lord.” A sick taste polluted the back of her throat. She rested her free hand on his shoulder and held on. “Why?”

  He raised and lowered his shoulders in a matter-of-fact gesture. “You can disappear with a handful of sons and a few aides, but you can’t empty an entire household without somebody noticing all the activity. So he cut his losses, left the rest of them there as unsuspecting bait, and hoped to take out a SEAL team at the same time. Even feral rats know a few tricks.”

  Her next question came from a hard, vengeful place inside her she never knew existed, and she couldn’t ask it in a voice above a whisper. “Did you get the rat?”

  He squeezed her hand. “Affirmative. We waded into that blown-out, burning shell of a building, over bodies of women and children in unimaginable condition, until we found a woman—one woman—crying her kids’ names. She was in terrible shape…she was just…” He stopped, drew in a breath, and let it out slowly. “She wasn’t going to make it. But she was alive, and conscious enough to understand her children weren’t. And she gave our rat up. Told us exactly where to find him. We went. We found him. We completed our mission.”

  “And after?”

  “After? I decided my rat hunting days were over. Continuing meant learning to accept the risk, if not responsibility, for extreme collateral damage. I worried getting comfortable with the risk might eventually make it difficult to separate the rats from, say, my own reflection.”

  “Shaun, you own no part of the responsibility for what some crazy extremist decided to do to evade justice.”

  “We set events in motion. The hindsight view provides an interesting landscape of what-ifs.”

  “What if your team never acted on the informant’s tip? What if the next building the rat blew up was an office tower where thousands of innocent people worked, or a school, or—?”

  “All good questions. I don’t have the answers. I only have the what-ifs.”

  Hoping he’d keep talking, she stayed silent, but started massaging the bunched-up muscles in his shoulders.

  He let out a low sigh, and leaned back into her touch. “For a long time afterwards, every time I closed my eyes I went straight back to that night. Sometimes half the team is inside when the building blows. Sometimes just me. Sometimes I’m rushing to get there because I know it’s going to blow. I’m running balls out, using all my energy, but I’m not moving fast—I can’t make any progress. Ever had a dream like that?”

  “Yes.” She offered the soft reassurance and kept soothing his shoulders. “It’s common.”

  “The dream analysts say it means you can’t outrun your problems.”

  “No, but you can share them. Want to know why you shared them with me tonight?”

  The corners of his mouth tipped up into a tight grin. “Because you wouldn’t shut up until I talked?”

  “No.” But she couldn’t restrain a smile of her own. She could be persistent. “You told me because you need something I can give you.”

  The hint of a smile still lingered around his mouth. “What can you give me, sweet Virginia?”

  Comfort, she thought. I can give you comfort. But strong, silent Shaun Buchanan wasn’t the kind of man to accept sympathy if he saw it coming, so she leaned into him and placed a kiss on his lips. Then she slid her palms over his chest, down the dips and ridges of his torso, and into the waistband of his jeans.

  “This.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Let me.”

  Those two little words reached his ears at the same time her fingers reached the first button on the fly of his jeans. Then she kissed him—long, deep, and persuasive as hell. He brought his hand up to hold her head and invaded her sweet mouth. She sealed her lips around the base of his tongue and slowly sucked her way to the tip, wringing a shudder from him.

  He broke away and buried his face in the curve of her neck. “Christ, Virginia.”

  “Sit back. Relax. Let me make you feel good.”

  He groaned, then closed his eyes, covered her hand with his, and moved it down the front of his jeans, loving the way she handled him. “You’ve made me feel good many times. A few of those occurred before we ever met.”

  Her hand stilled for a beat, before those slim fingers undid another button. “Did you think of me…touch yourself”—her voice brushed the skin along his throat like velvet—“and pretend it was me touching you?” She grasped him through the denim and squeezed his whole package harder than was strictly polite, but he loved the unapologetically straightforward demand. He couldn’t feel anything except what she was doing to him.

  Eyes closed, chin to chest, he breathed in her scent. “Fuck yes.”

  She popped the rest of the buttons in a series of quick, urgent tugs, and, at last, curled her fingers around his shaft. A starburst of lights twinkled behind his closed eyelids.

  “How did you touch yourself? Gently?” Her diabolical fingertip took a slow, feather-light tour of the vein running along the underside of his cock.

  He was literally incapable of answering, but it hardly mattered, because she didn’t wait for a response.

  “Or did you like it rough?” She tightened her grip on his shaft and worked him harder.

  “Fast,” he choked out in what was almost a laugh. “Since I didn’t have company, I wasn’t worried about lasting.”

  The confession pulled a slow, sexy grin out of her. She pressed her lips to his throat, the underside of his jaw, while she continued to stroke him. True, he wasn’t in the same hard-up condition he’d been in a few weeks ago, but if she kept this up, the result wasn’t going to be a hell of a lot different.

  “Virginia—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “I’m doing all the work this time. You’re going to sit back and endure it.”

  Not likely. He’d never been a sit-back kind of guy, but he stilled anyway. She tugged him free of his jeans and briefs. He looked down and enjoyed an unobstructed view of her slim, pale hand curled around the thickest part of him. His head jutted from the top of her fist.

  “I’m going to take such good care of you, you’re not going to be sure where your fantasies end and reality begins.” So saying, she lowered herself to her knees in front of him and let her breath waft across the tip of his cock.

  He groaned and gripped the base of his erection, just under her hand.

  “You’re going to drive me insane…oh, Jesus.”

  She cupped his balls at the same time she stroked him, stopping just shy of the flare of his head. “So, you’re touching yourself, and thinking of me, and…”

  His head dropped back of its own accord, and his breath quickened. “I’d dream of you kneeling between my legs, opening your mouth, and letting me fuck you like that until I was the only thing you’d taste for the rest of your life.”

  While they both watched, liquid beaded at the head of his cock and trembled there. He shivered when she used the pad of her thumb to swipe it, pressing down hard enough to explore the small opening. Then she brought her thumb to her mouth and licked it clean.

  Eyes locked on him, she gripped his thighs, spreading them slightly, and brought her mouth so close her b
reath ruffled the hair around the base of his cock. “Could I trouble you to do the honors?”

  Hell yes. He gripped his shaft and guided it to her lips. She opened her mouth, fully prepared to take him in, but he delayed their gratification by tracing his tip along her upper lip. “You have the softest lips, Virginia. Even before I ever kissed you, I knew they’d feel amazing.” He dragged his tip along her lower lip and couldn’t hold back a groan.

  She chased him with her tongue, wetting her lips in the process. “Having them sealed around you is going to feel even better.”

  He placed his hand on the top of her head, spearing his fingers through her hair. “Don’t rush me. This is my dream, remember?”

  “I remember everything. Tell me what comes next.”

  Why he wanted to torture himself he couldn’t say, but he wanted to savor this. “Kiss it…just the tip. With those plush lips of yours. No tongue, yet.”

  She wet her lips again, puckered them, and rubbed them over the tip he held out for her. Somehow he managed to keep his eyes open, even though they wanted to roll back in his head. Then she parted her lips to take him deeper.

  “Not yet,” he ground out, still hoping against hope to make this last more than three seconds.

  “I can’t wait. I want to cradle the weight of you in my mouth. I want to hear you beg as I take you in.” She tightened her hold on his thighs and aimed a plaintive look at him.

  “Sweet Virginia, you’ve got me so worked up I can’t trust myself. If you let me in your mouth, I’m going to own it. I’ve been fantasizing about this too long to sit by like a gentleman while you have your fun.”

  “Do you think you’re scaring me off?” She parted her lips as if in a dare, and ran her tongue along the same vein her fingertip had traced earlier.

  Control. Snapped. He tightened his fingers in her hair, pulled her head back a fraction of an inch, and pushed his cock into her mouth. She sealed her lips tight around him, either to slow his entry, or to fully appreciate the size and shape of him.