Rank & File (Anchor Point Book 4)

by L. A. Witt

  Couldn’t think of a better guy, though. I shivered as I got out of bed.

  There was one epic downside to having really hot sex—not just the morning after, but the Monday after. Waking up and going back to my real life . . . Fuck.

  I’d felt amazing when I’d been in bed with him.

  And now I felt like shit.

  It wasn’t that I regretted my hookups. Aside from accidentally diving into bed with a married woman, I didn’t have any regrets where sex was concerned. The problem was that the better the sex and the hotter the night, the more it seemed to emphasize how much the rest of my life sucked.

  I’d tried to stay positive and optimistic. I really had. I was paying my dues before I got to the good parts—commander, captain, and upward—and if I could get through these slow, boring years, the rest would get better.

  But it was getting harder and harder to convince myself of that. In fact, I was getting dangerously close to a breaking point. Something had to give. I was miserable. I’d been depressed for months. Probably the last year or two if I really gave it much thought. Three times, I’d made it to Fleet and Family Services to see about an appointment with a therapist, but I’d never actually followed through. What could they do besides tell me the same shit my dad and grandfather always did?

  “It’s going to get better.”

  “Everyone’s career sucks at first.”

  “Once you make lieutenant commander, you’ll be golden.”

  Right. Because I’d never seen a miserable lieutenant commander. And “at first”? Counting Annapolis, I was nine years into this shit. I was damn near halfway to retirement eligibility.

  I shook myself and headed out to the car. I was just bored. After spending my formative years being groomed for my future as a captain or—God and Congress willing—admiral, I was understandably restless as a paper-pushing lieutenant. I’d get there. I’d be fine.

  Clinging to my coffee cup, I headed to the base.

  Every time the gate came into view, something sank in my stomach. Today was no exception, but damn if it wasn’t more noticeable than usual.

  Will was probably already at work, and had been for a while. The masters-at-arms kept eye-watering hours that made my nine-to-five shifts look pretty damn nice by comparison. At least I couldn’t complain about that part. Just . . . the rest of it.

  Like I did five days a week, I parked outside the admin building. Every parking lot on base had several spots reserved up front. They were marked with painted-on letters, and I let my gaze drift from one space to the next, same as I did every morning. Command master chief. Executive officer. Commanding officer. Some departments had additional spaces for people like the security officer or whatever. The admin office had one for our Officer-in-Charge, and that spot was currently occupied by Commander Wilson’s car.

  I scanned over the ranks on the reserved spaces, and like I did every day, I reminded myself that I’d get one eventually too. I wasn’t there yet, but I would be.

  For now, my job title might as well have been Admin Bitch. I did the work my commander didn’t have time to do. Had it been any other boss, I’d have said I did all the things he thought he was too good to do, but in this case, that wouldn’t have been fair. Commander Wilson really did pull his weight, and he did plenty of paperwork that he could’ve pawned off on me. Busy as he was, he needed a secretary. And that was basically what I was—a secretary.

  At least I had my own office.

  Well, sort of.

  I sat down at my desk—an old metal thing with a stack of sticky notes shoved under one foot to keep it from wobbling—and looked around my office. Office was being pretty generous. It was more like a glorified storage closet where someone had shoved a desk, and then decided to shove a lieutenant behind said desk. I’d personalized the place as much as I could—a few pictures, some framed certificates, the GI Joe my brother had given me as a gag gift when I’d graduated high school—but it was still a closet.

  My degree from the Academy looked ridiculous wedged into the tiny sliver of badly painted wall between the crooked supply cabinet with the broken door and the drab gray shelves that were bowing under the weight of overstuffed procedural binders. Graduating from Annapolis was supposed to be a huge thing. A foot in a lot of doors that led to a lot of prestigious positions. And it was. I just hadn’t realized there’d be this long interim as a peon before those doors actually opened.

  I’d busted my ass to get into the Academy. Then I’d busted my ass at the Academy. I hadn’t graduated at the top of my class, but I’d been up there. High enough to bode well for future promotions. In fact, I’d be up for lieutenant commander in the not-too-distant future, and Commander Wilson was confident I’d be a shoo-in.

  At this stage of my career, I was exactly where I needed to be. Everything I’d been doing since high school—before that, if I counted all those years in Sea Cadets—had been leading up to this.

  Or, rather, it was all leading up to when I became a senior officer. That was the endgame. I was still at the dues-paying stage now, and there was no way around it. With each promotion, there’d be more opportunities to advance my career and move me toward my own ship. Maybe even my own region.

  All of that assuming, of course, that I played by the rules. Made the right friends. Did the right favors. Kissed the right asses.

  And didn’t sleep with the wrong people. I’d heard plenty of stories about officers who’d given up their careers in the name of love. Hell, Commander Wilson was good friends with the former CO of the base, and he’d told me once that the guy had made it all the way to captain, then retired so he could be with his now-husband. Like me, he’d gone to the Academy. He’d had his eye on admiral. But then he’d retired. I didn’t know the full story, only that for whatever reason he couldn’t have both his career and his man, so he’d hung up his uniform and called it a day.

  Not me. No way. It was tempting sometimes because this job sucked right now, but I wasn’t throwing away my job for a man or a woman. I would get through this phase of my career, and I would get to the top where I belonged. Just like my dad and my grandfather before him. I would get there.

  Eventually.

  Groaning, I let my face fall into my hands. I just hoped the next several years weren’t as long as the last several. I wasn’t sure how many years I could spend at a job where I had to give myself a pep talk just so I could get through the day.

  On the bright side, at least I wasn’t on a boat right now. I couldn’t stay ashore forever—and I’d need to spend a fuck-load of time at sea if I wanted to be taken seriously—but a couple of years at Anchor Point wasn’t the end of the world. Ships got claustrophobic after a while. I needed some time on shore to catch my breath and have my own space. My tiny one-bedroom apartment was cavernous compared to that damn stateroom I’d slept in for months.

  Especially that queen-size bed.

  Without anyone else in it.

  Fuck.

  My mind kept wandering back to the other night. Even if I’d been more depressed than ever the morning after and still felt like shit now, I was glad I’d done it. I’d needed it. I had never been with a man who’d thrown me around like a sack of laundry, told me just how hard he was going to fuck me, and followed through with gusto.

  Good thing we’d gone three rounds too. Might as well get as much as we could out of the one and only night we dared to spend together. After all, he was the last man I should be sleeping with, and in the daylight, he’d probably come to his senses too. While I was kicking myself for not convincing him to stay until morning, he was probably kicking himself for being in my bed in the first place.

  We hadn’t exchanged numbers because there’d been no point. We hadn’t made any promises to do this again because they would’ve been empty. We’d fucked, we’d walked away, and that was the end of it.

  But, damn, I wanted more.

  Concentration was not happening.

  There was a mountain of paperwork on
my desk, and it was probably still going to be there tomorrow. In fact, it would be higher because, from the radio chatter, my patrols were staying busy today. By tomorrow morning, there’d be a whole new batch of reports for me to look over. With any luck, my brain would be back on the rails by then.

  Not likely. Not unless something came along and erased that hot, insatiable lieutenant from my memory.

  It had been almost a week since we’d hooked up, and I was still glued to last Friday night.

  On the bright side, nineteen years of pushing past insane amounts of fatigue had taught me to do most of my job on autopilot. Just this morning I’d been able to focus enough to deal with a couple of young MAs who’d been sheepishly herded in front of me by their LPO. By the grace of God and coffee, I’d put on my Senior Chief face, read them both the riot act, and made sure they knew that if I heard their names and insubordination again, they’d be taking it up with the CO. By the time they’d scurried out of my office, red-faced and rattled, I was satisfied they knew I wasn’t kidding.

  The minute they were gone, though, my mind went right back to the other night. Again.

  I’d known, of course, that sleeping with Brent wouldn’t do a damned thing to get him out of my head. Though I supposed on some level I’d thought that I could fuck him, realize he didn’t measure up to my fantasies, and move on.

  Except it was my fantasies that hadn’t measured up to him.

  Leaning back in my chair, letting my police belt press into a few still-tender muscles, I indulged in a happy sigh. Sex with Brent had been a terrible idea, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t needed it. What a way to welcome me back into the realms of the sexually active.

  I kept telling myself that was the explanation right there—I was hooked on the first piece of ass who’d come along in a while—but it wasn’t that. I knew I could get on an app or go to a bar and find someone to swap orgasms with.

  Someone like Brent, though?

  I whistled into the silence of my office, and shook my head. They didn’t make guys like him very often. I’d never be able to look at him without being acutely aware that I had a solid decade on him, but it hadn’t been like being with a kid. Ten years and too many ranks apart, and I’d still felt like we were on level ground. Like I’d met my perfect sexual match.

  A shiver ran through me. He’d been rattled the night we’d met, so he’d been understandably subdued. At the High-&-Tight, though? And in the bedroom? He was something else. He had an air of certainty around him that made my skin tingle. There was none of that second-guessing that came with inexperience. Wherever he put his hands, his mouth, or his cock, he meant to do it, and he knew what he was doing. I’d been with younger guys before who’d had a certain innocence about them. Like everything was new, and what we’d been doing had been an exploration. That could be fun in its own way, but nothing in the world turned me on like a man who knew what he wanted, knew how to ask for it, and wasn’t afraid to demand it.

  That was Brent to a T. Holy fuck.

  Now I regretted not switching with him at least once. He’d been such an enthusiastic bottom, and if I ever had to choose, topping was absolutely my preference. But how often did I get my hands on a man who pinged as aggressive enough to top me the way I liked it?

  Well, if he existed, Brent couldn’t be the only one. So what if it had taken me until damn near forty to find him? There had to be more guys who could do what he did to me without also putting both our careers at risk.

  I’d walked away in the wee hours of Saturday morning without looking back because I valued my career, so I needed to get back to valuing it. And doing it. That stack of paperwork on my desk wouldn’t shrink itself, and the Navy frowned on burning things like that.

  So, bound and determined to be a goddamned adult and do my job, I took the first folder off the stack, opened it, and got to work.

  I made it through three reports. One was a minor car accident with no injuries or damage. The second, a DUI involving one of the Sailors from the supply ship moored at Pier Two. That one would be turned over to his chain of command, but we kept it on file here too in case witnesses were needed.

  The third file was another domestic dispute in housing. No charges had been filed, but reading between the lines, I suspected we’d better keep an eye on that particular couple. There’d been broken glass on the kitchen floor and a dent in the living room wall. Both parties had insisted the glass had been knocked over while one of them had been gesturing carelessly, and the dent in the wall was from when the movers had misjudged the size of a bed frame they’d been maneuvering into the hallway. MA3 Harvey had noted that the husband had what looked like recently bruised knuckles, but he and his wife had both insisted it was from his job as an aircraft maintainer.

  It was plainly obvious there was a problem in that house, but at this point, there was nothing we could do.

  “Nothing we can do sometimes,” an old chief had said back when I’d been an MA3, “except wait until it’s too late.”

  He hadn’t meant it as a joke. He’d been as frustrated as we all were that our hands were tied. To this day I sometimes wondered if he was still as haunted as I was by the incident he’d been commenting on. The older I got, the more I decided he had to be—no amount of time or training ever completely prepared a cop to walk into a scene like that. Especially when it was the fifth call to the same house, and you knew it really would be the last. As far as I knew, the husband was still at Leavenworth and would be until he was dead.

  I shuddered and took a deep swallow of coffee to quell the nausea. The coffee was getting cold, but it kept my stomach in place. When I was reasonably sure I wouldn’t get sick, I sent an email to the training department to see if we could get a refresher course on working with potential domestic violence scenes. If my people were better trained in asking the right questions and looking for the right signs, maybe we could be more effective at intervening.

  After I’d sent the email, I signed off on the report and put it on top of the other two I’d finished. Something always felt kind of weird about putting a file like that into the business-as-usual stack, but such was the job.

  I moved on to a much more benign report about price tag switching at the Navy Exchange.

  For fuck’s sake. This again?

  I rolled my eyes, perused the report, signed it off, and dropped it on top of the domestic. Then there was a fistfight at the E club after a couple of Seabees had had too much to drink. Because that never happened.

  As I was reaching into the pile to see what other excitement NAS Adams had to offer, a familiar voice came from a little ways down the hall and made my heart stop:

  “Is Senior Chief Curtis around?”

  You have got to be shitting me.

  “I think he’s in his office,” MA2 Hill said. “You want me to check?”

  “Sure. I’ve got some forms for him from admin.”

  I gulped, staring at my open door. Since when did admin send a lieutenant to do their bitch work?

  Footsteps came down the hall. Then MA2 Hill leaned into the doorway. “Senior, there’s a Lieutenant Jameson here with some paperwork from admin. Do you want me to send him in?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question. If I was genuinely busy or just plain didn’t want to deal with whoever was asking for me, I had no compunction about asking her to get their information so I could put it off until later.

  If ever there was a time to let my MA2 run interference, it was now.

  But I cleared my throat and reached for my cold coffee. “Yeah. Send him in. Thanks, MA2.”

  “Will do.” She left my office. I listened to her footsteps. Then the exchange of words. Then another set of footsteps that were sharper and much more determined.

  I held my breath.

  And there he was.

  “Hey.” He stood in the doorway, a drab green folder under his arm. “You have a minute?”

  I hesitated, but then put my coffee cup down and folded my hands on my desk. “Su
re. Yeah. What do you need?”

  Brent shut the door behind him so gently, I barely heard it click. In his hand, he had that file folder, but in his eyes there was something decidedly less professional.

  I gulped. “You have something for me to sign?”

  He chuckled. “Nope.” He held up the folder and winked. “Call it a forged hall pass.”

  I didn’t laugh. “Brent . . .”

  Sobering, Brent swallowed as he set the folder down on my desk. “Listen, I’m not gonna lie. I can’t stop thinking about . . .”

  My stomach somersaulted. “You know we can’t, though.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do.” He ran a hand through his hair, and my fingers twitched at the memory of combing through it, grabbing it, pulling it . . .

  I cleared my throat. My alternately bored-horrified-annoyed mood evaporated along with any concentration I might’ve mustered up for my job. “So what are you doing here?”

  “Because this is killing me.”

  I blinked.

  A set of boots and voices went by outside. My neck prickled—if I could hear them, they could hear us. So, in an effort to be a little more discreet, I got up and came around the desk. At least now we could speak more quietly.

  Except . . . it also meant we were closer.

  A lot closer.

  And then Brent took a step, and . . .

  Fuck. We were eye to eye now. When he shifted, the toe of his boot nudged mine. He didn’t pull away. Neither did I.

  “You know we can’t do this,” I said.

  “I know no one can know about it.” The stubbornness in his eyes did weird things to my pulse. He knew as well as I did what a risk this was, and he was determined to do it anyway? That should’ve reminded me that we were being fucking idiots, but instead, it was flattering. And hot. What the hell did I do for him that made this a risk worth taking?

  “You do understand what’s at stake here, right?”

  “Yes,” he said, barely whispering. “But what we did was the first thing that’s felt that good in . . .” His eyes lost focus. Then he shook his head. “I don’t remember how long.”