by Gayle Wilson
“Make love to me,” she whispered, her lips moving against his temple as his mouth caressed the delicate skin of her throat. “Make love to me, Griff.”
It was permission that he hadn’t needed. Not after the other, but hearing her whisper those words drove the hot blood through his body in a demanding wave of need and desire.
He had always desired Claire. And always loved her. But after what they had been through, it was more important than ever to show her. To prove to her again how he felt.
And through the course of the night, he had done that in every way he could conceive. With his hands, drifting against the well-known and beloved places he had slowly discovered, one by one, during their previous lovemaking. With his lips, brushing with tantalizing tenderness over the most erogenous areas of her sensitized body. With his teeth, teasing nerve endings that had never before seemed so responsive to his touch.
He had once known Claire’s body better than he knew his own. Yet in the course of this night, he learned things he had never imagined about her ability to respond. And found places newly awakened to his touch and to his tongue’s caress.
He had left nothing unexplored, delighting in inventing ways to make her gasp his name, in hearing it float away into the darkness, or in feeling the breath of its single syllable sighing against his own skin, as his lips trailed wet heat over hers.
There had been nothing one-sided about their lovemaking. One by one, Claire had examined each of the scars he had acquired since they had been together. And she had traced with her tongue and her fingertips the uneven ridges left by the surgeries.
He had been surprised to feel the hot fall of tears, but somehow they had served to burn away his guilt. Guilt that she hadn’t been allowed to be with him. Guilt that they hadn’t even told her he’d been hurt, as desperately as she would have wanted to know. As desperately as he would have wanted her beside him.
Maybe if he had been able to express that desire, they would have sent for her. Then the long, dark coldness that had come between them wouldn’t have existed. But he hadn’t, and by the time he had been capable of making his own decisions again, that tragic one had already been made for him.
He could have defied the agency, of course, but in his new bitterness over the changes the terrorist’s bullets had made in his life and his body, he had included the old bitterness over Claire’s rejection, as well. She had told him she never wanted to see him again, and for months he had savagely, angrily, complied with that demand, fighting other battles, physical ones, while he struggled to conquer his never-ending need for her.
He had been such a fool, he thought, his mouth lingering over the hardening nipple of her breast. So much time wasted. So many things missed. So many things. He raised his head, looking down on the smooth, milk-white skin around the dark areola of her breast, marked with a thin tracery of blue veins and faint, silvered lines.
“You breast-fed her?” he said, his eyes lifting to hers.
There was a moment’s hesitation before she answered, and he wondered if that had sounded like a criticism. And then she smiled, the corners of her mouth, relaxed as they had not been throughout the ordeal of these long days, tilting in amusement.
At least she could still read him well enough to know that his question was simply the result of his fascination with a subject he knew nothing about. A process he had missed having any share in. Another regret. Another loss.
“I thought about that the night on the boat,” she said. “About your mouth—and Gardner’s. Both of them on my breasts.”
The image produced by those words, which had been so soft he had to strain to hear them, was surprisingly erotic. His hard erection suddenly strengthened. And Claire was certainly aware of that, given the intimacy of their positions.
“Very different sensations, I would think,” he said, lowering his lips to fasten around the nipple again, the idle suggestion made just before his teeth nibbled at its peak.
“No,” she whispered.
He raised his head so he could see her face.
“Not so different. Not the feel,” she said. “Not the way it made me feel. Not at the beginning.”
He nodded, watching the memories move in her eyes.
“A little like the first time with you,” she said. “Making love the first time. Nervous. Unsure, I guess, but...anticipating so much what it would be like.”
“You don’t do that anymore?” he asked.
“Anticipate making love to you?” she teased.
“Feed her.”
“You like talking about this,” she said, a hint of surprise about that discovery in her voice.
And he realized that he did. He wished he had seen them, Gardner’s small dark head against Claire’s breast, a contrast to the almost alabaster skin of her body.
“You think that’s strange?” he asked. “That I like to think about you feeding her? About seeing you like that?”
“I used to look down at her while she nursed. At her hair. The shape of her head. And I’d remember your head there. So, no... I don’t think it’s strange that you would like to think about that,” she said. “She’s a part of us. Both of us. A part we created. Just...like this.”
“Is that a warning?” he asked, smiling at her.
“Maybe,” she said softly. “If you want to be warned.”
He thought about the possibility of another baby. He didn’t even know the one they had. He had already missed so much. So much of watching her learn and grow and develop. Of being around to take an active role in that.
“I don’t think I do,” he said, lowering his mouth to reclaim her nipple. “Want to be warned, I mean,” he whispered, just before his lips closed around it, beginning to mimic the image that had been in his head.
“Yes,” she whispered. And then again, after a long time, as his hands moved against her body, “Oh, yes.”
That was what he had asked her to say on the cruiser, he remembered. A word he had thought he needed to hear. And now, tonight, it hadn’t seemed important anymore. Because between them it was just as it had always been. And would always be.
“I THINK SHE’S HUNGRY,” Griff said.
Claire struggled to open her eyes, squinting against the sun that was pouring into the room through the windows whose draperies she had forgotten to pull. Griff was standing beside the bed, wearing nothing but his slacks, wrinkled because he had dropped them on the floor early on last night.
His belt was through the loops, but he hadn’t taken time to buckle it. The waistband gaped a little at the closure, revealing the trail of fine, dark hair that ran down the center of his flat stomach and crossed his navel to disappear into the opening.
“Feed her,” Claire suggested, closing her eyes against the temptation that sight offered. She pulled the pillow over her head, trying to block out the painful sunlight and the endless allure of Griffs body.
She must have had at least a couple of hours sleep last night, but she couldn’t be sure. After all, she and Griff had had a lot of lost time to make up for. A lot of cold, empty nights to forget. And forgive.
Despite the pillow, she could still hear the baby. Gardner was always talkative in the mornings. An incomprehensible string of syllables, gradually growing in volume, always accompanied the sound of her rattle being drawn back and forth against the bars of her crib, exactly like a prisoner’s protest to the warden.
Claire must have missed the rattle signal this morning. If Griff had left Gardner in her crib long enough for that second stage of waking to begin. But the baby was certainly well into the talking phase.
Claire lay there, head under the pillow, listening to those familiar sounds and knowing that for the first time in a long while things really were right in her world. Gardner was safe, and Griff... Griff was back.
Unable to resist, she furtively inched the edge of the pillowcase aside with her fingers until she could see them. Griff’s size dwarfed Gardner’s. It was obvious that he was holding her very
carefully—and a little awkwardly—ready for any unexpected move. Amused, Claire wondered if Griff Cabot had ever before held a baby in his entire life. If not, it seemed to her that the experience was long overdue.
A lot of things had been overdue, she acknowledged, but she refused to let regrets spoil today. Or spoil the sight of Gardner’s small fingers now gingerly touching the dark mat of hair that covered Griff’s broad bare chest. That would certainly be a new texture for her to explore, Claire thought in amusement.
Griff was looking down on those tiny fingers, so that she could see only the top of his head. There was more gray intermingled with the raven’s wing blackness of his hair than she had realized before. The morning light highlighted the contrast, but it also emphasized how very much alike were those two dark heads, together for the first time.
“You want to give me some instructions here, Claire?” Griff said impatiently, raising his head and focusing his attention on the pillow under which she was hiding.
At the sound of his deep voice, Gardner leaned back in surprise, and then, quickly overcoming that reaction, she poked her fingers toward his mouth. Griff automatically avoided them by raising his head, ending up with a couple of chubby fingers grazing his chin. Gardner reached out to touch him again, apparently deciding that she liked the feel of whiskers almost as much as the texture of chest hair.
“Cereal,” Claire said, her voice muffled. “There’s some in pantry. It says cereal on the jar. She isn’t picky.”
“Just spoon it in?”
“Straight from the jar,” Claire agreed.
That breakfast menu would be the easiest for him to handle. And based on the fact that he’d bravely rescued the crib prisoner without waking Claire, Griff certainly deserved a chance to succeed with his first foray into baby feeding.
Especially deserving after last night, she decided, her reminiscent smile hidden by the pillow.
“THAT COLOR’S GOOD ON YOU,” she said, watching them from the doorway. Left alone upstairs, she’d finally decided she’d better check on them.
Griff hadn’t opted for the state-of-the-art high chair against the wall. He was doing it the old-fashioned way—baby held securely in his lap, left arm around her middle, spoon in his right hand and a goodly portion of cereal on them both. Gardner had reached the stage where her hunger had been satisfied enough to allow her to be creative.
“It’s called rice and bananas,” Griff said, looking up.
Gardner’s mouth made a couple of futile attempts to capture the elusive bite on the spoon he was holding. Griff’s attention was rather flatteringly directed on the length of leg exposed under the short silk robe Claire was wearing, however, instead of on what he was doing. After another openmouthed lunge toward the spoon, Gardner finally gave up and batted at it with her hand, sending more cereal to join the splatters on the table and on her father.
“Did you taste it?” Claire asked, watching him guiltily stuff what remained on the spoon into Gardner’s mouth.
“Was I supposed to?” he asked, looking up again.
“I can’t ever resist. It’s all pretty yucky, if you ask me.”
“I’ve always preferred my bananas flambéd in brandy,” he said. And then he smiled at her.
Griff Cabot’s smile had always made her knees weak. Right now, coming at her from over their daughter’s head, with an endearing splotch of rice cereal on his dark, bewhiskered cheek, she thought it was the most sexually devastating thing she had ever seen.
“Will you marry us?” she said softly.
The silence that followed her question was too long, broken only by Gardner’s monosyllabic chant and the slap of her palms against the oak table.
“Nothing’s changed about who I am, Claire,” Griff said, the smile gone, replaced by the same sternness of expression with which he had dealt with all the setbacks of the last two weeks. “Or about what I’ve done. And, as much as I wish I could, I can’t guarantee it won’t ever touch your lives again.”
She thought about the truth of what he said. About Gardner. But somehow, seeing them together, seeing Griff hold the baby she knew he would give his life to protect, she knew how right this was. And therefore, she also knew how wrong she had been before.
“I know,” she whispered. “But...I’ve changed, Griff. At least in thinking the world is black-and-white. Thinking that I’m right about it all, and that you’re wrong. Nothing is ever that simple. And there are no guarantees for anyone that evil won’t touch their lives.”
She hesitated, thinking how to phrase the hard lessons she had learned this last year. And then she decided that what was in her heart was best said exactly as she felt it.
“I just know that if it ever threatens her again, I want you here. Protecting us.”
Standing guard over those we love, Griff thought.
That had been the standard under which his team had operated. Something that the world would perhaps never understand about what they did. Something Claire had never believed. But never before had the meaning of those simple words been so real to him. Or so personal. And so damn right.
“If you’re sure, Claire, that this is what you want,” he said. “If you’re sure, then yes.”
She smiled, the strain that had grown around her lips as she waited easing. Her eyes touched briefly on Gardner’s face and then came back up to his.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been as sure about anything in my entire life,” she said softly. “Except maybe a political position or two,” she added, her tone teasing, her smile widening as he reciprocated it. “But we can discuss those later.”
“Or agree to disagree about them,” he said, his tone lightened to match hers.
Her eyes were again on their daughter. “Especially since we’ve got all the important stuff sorted out.”
Griff nodded, feeling his throat tighten unexpectedly. Just as he had seen Claire do last night, he cupped his big hand around Gardner’s head and pulled it near enough to kiss the top, pressing his lips for the first time against the shining softness of his daughter’s hair.
Standing guard. Today and for the rest of my life, he promised silently. Always, standing guard.
Epilogue
“I need the practice,” Tyler Stewart Hawkins said. She reached to take a squirming Gardner from Kathleen Cross’s capable arms and settled the baby on her hip, one chubby leg resting atop the small bulge of her pregnancy.
“Well, I certainly don’t,” Kathleen said, laughing. She smoothed her hand over the baby’s head, and then looked up to smile at Hawk’s wife, whom she had met for the first time today.
The party that celebrated Griff Cabot and Claire Heywood’s wedding had been small and intimate, but there had been no doubting the joy the guests had taken in this union. The living room of the Maryland house had been transformed by hundreds of roses, the scent of which filled the room.
Claire had been radiant when she had entered on her father’s arm. Her eyes hadn’t left Griff’s face as he waited by the windows that looked out on the sleeping garden, except once, to touch briefly, smilingly, on Monty Gardner, who was serving as Griff’s best man. Perhaps either of the other two men in attendance might have had a better claim to that role, but neither had objected to Griff’s choice of the old man.
The bonds of their friendship, forged in danger and commitment—to each other and to the missions they had undertaken—were too strong to need any such outward confirmation. Despite the fact that the team they’d once belonged to no longer existed, the ties that bound them surely did.
“I wonder what they’re talking about,” Tyler asked, her famous violet eyes focused on the three men, who were visible through the open door of Griff’s study.
“The good old days, I hope,” Kathleen suggested lightly as her gaze followed Tyler’s.
Then, almost unconsciously, it was redirected to her children, who were being entertained by the story Rose Connor was telling. Her broad face was beaming, her hands gesturing enth
usiastically, and Meg and Jamie were listening with the rapt attention they usually reserved for when Jordan read to them.
Safe, Kathleen thought. The need to know that they were, no matter the situation, would always be in the back of her mind. She couldn’t imagine how Claire Heywood had endured having her baby stolen.
With that thought, her eyes sought and found the bride, elegant in a winter-white wool suit. Claire seemed so beautifully serene as she saw to the needs of her guests, as much at home in this huge house as Griff himself. And just a little intimidating, Kathleen thought in amusement. She had felt that same sense of awe when Jordan introduced her to Griff.
Of course, considering the respect Jordan had for his former boss, Cabot had already achieved near-legendary status in her mind, long before she’d met him. Her gaze returned to the room where the three men were talking. At least Hawk and Jordan, standing before a huge desk, were talking. Griff, seated behind it, seemed to be merely listening. He was, however, giving whatever they were saying the same serious attention he had devoted to Jamie’s meandering narrative about his new puppy.
Finding that Griff was warm and down to earth enough to listen to an excited two-year-old’s disjointed story had been a pleasant surprise. But then this entire day had been surprising, Kathleen thought. She had expected the ghost of Jake Holt’s betrayal to overshadow the joy of this wedding, but it hadn’t. Probably because everyone was determined it wouldn’t.
“It looks as if they might be up to no good.”
Surprised, Kathleen turned to find Claire Cross standing at her elbow, her eyes, like Kathleen’s and Tyler’s, focused on the meeting in Griff’s study.
“What do you think it means?” Tyler asked, shifting Gardner into a more comfortable position on her slender hip.
“Why don’t we ask them?” Claire suggested, including Gardner in the smile she directed at Tyler. “After all, I think the three of us have a vested interest. Don’t you?”
