Finally, he swung her shoulder blades to the tile, absorbing the force of the spray across his back. Pressing one palm to the wall behind her, he dropped his mouth to her neck while sliding his free hand over one tightly drawn nipple. He circled and stroked, and oh God, nothing could ever feel as hot on her body as this man’s fingers.
But then he replaced them with his mouth, and Kat nearly came out of her skin.
“Gorgeous,” Jesse murmured, closing his lips around her nipple with a groan. She splayed one hand over his shoulder, arching into the perfect friction of his tongue. Tension built, low and demanding between her hips, and she pressed her thighs together in a failing effort to offset the pressure.
Jesse froze, pinning her with a dark stare through his long, wet lashes. “Do you want to come, Kat?”
He cast his eyes downward, letting his hand follow. He skimmed the indent of her waist, the flare of her hip, until his fingers came to rest just above the apex of her tightly clenched thighs.
Kat nodded, rivulets of water spilling down from her hair. Still, Jesse didn’t move.
“Tell me.”
She didn’t think, just lowered her gaze as she opened for him. “I want you to make me come. Please.”
He didn’t hesitate.
Jesse slid a finger into her heat, burying deep. The sensation of having everything yet not enough slammed through her body, and she turned her fingernails into his shoulder, crying out for more. Jesse delivered, nestling his thumb at the top of her core as he retreated, then pushed back inside. Although the bubbles had long since washed away, he slipped in with ease, stirring the want between her legs into a screaming demand. Her climax twisted and swelled as Jesse coaxed her closer with sure, perfect strokes, and with one last thrust of his fingers in the spot where she needed them most, Kat came undone.
“Gorgeous,” he whispered, moving his hands gently from her center to hold her close. His cock pulsed, hard against her belly, and she returned to her senses, second by second. Kat moved forward, angling her body even closer as she reached around him to turn off the water.
“What are you doing?” Jesse asked, his voice thick and dark, like molasses mixed with honey.
Kat pushed back the shower curtain, a smile filling her mouth as she reached for a towel. “I’m taking you to bed.”
Drying herself with an economy of movement, she turned to give Jesse the same treatment. His tight shoulders thrummed at her touch, flexing under her hands, and suddenly, even the towel was too much of a barrier. Kat let it fall to the edge of the tub, stepping out to lead the way down the dimly lit hall. Three strides had them in her bedroom, three more at the foot of her bed. With one firm pull, they were tangled together in her bed sheets. Desire rebuilt, hot and fast in Kat’s core, and she didn’t wait to name it.
“I want you, Jesse. Right now.” She slipped from beneath him just long enough to take a condom from her nightstand drawer. Jesse swung her back under the frame of his body, bracketing her shoulders with both palms. Running her hands over the smooth skin of his chest, Kat touched the leanly cut muscles of his abs, reaching lower until her fingers found the crisp dusting of hair leading down between his hips. She worked the condom quickly over his cock, her knees falling wide as he pressed into the cradle of her body. Slowly, he pushed forward, gripping the sheets by her ears in his fists as he erased every last inch of space between them.
“Oh . . . God.” Kat’s hips lifted off the bed, canting up toward him even though they were fully joined. Levering forward, Jesse covered her body, tilting her head to one side to kiss her neck while he thrust. The pressure built in her core, coiling and releasing and coiling tighter still. He threaded his fingers in her hair, the pleasure-pain sting of his grip daring her closer to the edge. The harder he moved, the faster she met him, until the pressure in her core unraveled into her climax.
Kat arched up, unable to do anything other than let her orgasm crash around her as Jesse gripped her hips and worked her through every last cry. His body tightened as hers went loose, and she wrapped her arms around his waist, letting him fill her completely as he groaned out her name on one last thrust.
Their breathing returned to normal in gradual increments, their chests rising and falling in rhythm. Jesse kissed her forehead, stealing from the room to clean up while Kat nestled in the bed sheets. Crickets sang a nighttime symphony outside her window, lulling her further into bliss, and Jesse slid back under the covers, making the journey complete. Tucking her back to his chest, he wrapped an arm around her waist, holding her close but not saying a word. Kat gathered it in, waiting for him to break the silence between them, for the moment to disappear.
Only he fell asleep next to her instead.
Chapter Eight
Jesse woke up all at once. It wasn’t unusual—after all, whatever get-up-and-go defenses he hadn’t learned from his mother’s escapades had been smacked home by three tours overseas. But something about this particular morning was strange in the sense that he knew without looking that he wasn’t in his own bed.
And he damn sure wasn’t alone.
Jesse scooped in a slow, controlled breath, exhaling in a rush as last night filtered back through his memory. Kat, with her tanned, sexy legs and her sweet, candid smile. Kat, listening without pity as he spilled the truth about his shitty past.
Kat, bare and beautiful in the spray of the shower, begging him to make her come.
Holy fuck. Gabe was going to kill him.
“Mmmm.” Kat snuggled deeper into her spot next to him, her movements languid right up until her eyes fluttered open. “Oh. Oh. You, um, stayed.”
Her unexpected response knocked the awkward right out of Jesse’s chest, and he sat up to look at her. “Is that okay?”
“Of course,” she said, and leave it to Kat to go the no-bullshit route. “I just didn’t think you would.”
“Hey.” Jesse’s pulse kicked the word from his mouth in a snap. He might not be an angel, or okay, even passably worthy. Still—
“Oh God, Jesse, I’m sorry.” Kat scrunched up her face, and aw hell, she looked adorable with all that chagrin and bedhead going on. “I shouldn’t speak before coffee. I didn’t mean that I thought you’d take off like a jerk.”
“Oh.” Relief speared through his gut, but it was short-lived. “What did you mean, then?”
She grabbed a tank top from the chair at her bedside, guiding it over her shoulders before she slipped from beneath the covers to add a pair of shorts. “Well, you and Gabe are tight. It’s not exactly a secret that you’re a little, ah, sensitive about that when it comes to me.”
Jesse’s brow popped, and he pulled his jeans over his boxer briefs with an involuntary half laugh. “I’m not sensitive.”
“Relax. I’m not going to ask you to a poetry reading or anything. And for the record, you’re totally sensitive.”
Kat capped off the words with a matter-of-fact grin, twisting her hair into a knot as she padded down the hallway toward the kitchen. As spot-on as she was about his conflict of interest—not to mention that, fine, he was maybe a little touchy about it—she had no idea why Jesse’s loyalty ran so deep.
The honesty on her sun-freckled face had the story locked and loaded on his tongue before she could even get the coffee filters out of the cupboard.
“Do you remember when I told you your brother suggested I work in a field outside of medicine?”
“Sure,” Kat said, her forehead creasing slowly. “And then you started working your way up the ranks at the Double Shot.”
“The Double Shot wasn’t the first place I worked when I got back to Pine Mountain.”
Her hands paused over the coffee grounds. “It wasn’t?”
“No.” Jesse’s muscles pulsed with the need to move, to have a task in the kitchen, however mindless, and he gestured to the fridge in a silent request for permission. At her nod, he opened the refrigerator, perusing the contents before moving on to the pantry. “I spent six years as a medic. I ne
ver planned to stay in the Army forever, but I did plan to use that training to take care of people after I was released from active duty.”
“So you wanted to go into medicine, like Gabe?”
His soft laugh was tipped in irony, and he reached for a box of oatmeal. “I wanted to be a paramedic. Guys like me aren’t exactly med school material.”
“Guys like you,” she repeated, crossing her arms over her chest.
He returned to the fridge to grab the container of strawberries he’d seen lurking there, ordering the simple steps in his mind, and his rapid-fire pulse fell back into line. “Yeah. So I planned to snag a job at the firehouse, maybe go to Lackland Air Force Base to help train medics whenever they needed hands. That sort of thing.”
He broke off, staring at the blue ceramic bowl in front of him on the counter. Maybe blabbing like this was a bad idea after all. Even though it would make him a dick of epic magnitude, maybe he should just shut up, shut Kat out, and go back to his SOP of being calm, cool, and completely freaking quiet.
But then she appeared at his side, sliding a mug of fresh coffee over the Formica with that wide-open look on her face, and the rest of the story poured right out of him.
“I was about thirty days from the end of my last tour when my squad was hit on a trip back from a remote firebase. An IED took out the truck in front of mine, with five guys inside. I was the only medic on the op.”
“Oh my God,” Kat whispered, stepping in close. “Were you hurt?”
“No.” The catch-22 of his answer clattered through his veins. He might not have been injured when those explosives had ripped through the 1151 a mere twelve feet in front of him, but what had come afterward had been so much worse than pain. “All five of the guys in front of us were injured, three of them critically.”
Jesse screwed his eyes shut, pressing back the jagged images flashing through his brain. He needed to stop talking, to focus on being in the kitchen so he could fill his lungs with something other than the sharp, metallic aftertaste of loss. But then Kat’s fingers slid over his forearm, and the simple comfort of her touch guided half a breath past the traffic jam in his chest.
“I tried, you know? But everything moved so fast. There was a lot of heat, a lot of noise. A lot of screaming. I had to triage everybody in less than two minutes, and we were taking fire. I had to decide which of them to help first. Which I thought I could save.”
He swallowed hard, the words like rocks in his throat. Choosing between an open chest wound and an above-the-knee amputation was hellish in the best of conditions. Trying to do it when both of the wounded were your squad mates and your hands were shaking so hard you couldn’t even start an IV? Yeah. That couldn’t touch hellish with an RPG.
“I lost one guy in the field, one more in transport,” he continued. “The docs at the hospital on base said I did everything by the book, but I had kind of a hard time readjusting after that. I kept thinking maybe I could’ve done something different. The attack was brutal, but . . .” Not as brutal as hindsight. “Anyway, I was so close to my release from active duty that I stayed on base for my last few weeks; then I came back to Pine Mountain. That was the last op I ever did.”
“Jesse, I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine how hard that must have been.” Although Kat’s words twisted with emotion, her fingers didn’t budge from his arm.
He dropped his chin in a broken nod, grateful as hell that she was right. “After I got settled in, I thought things would be different, being here instead of in Afghanistan. I tried working as a paramedic in Riverside, but I couldn’t focus. Even small-time calls like fender benders messed with my head, and every shift just got more and more intense, to the point that I couldn’t even look at the rig without getting the shakes. I probably would’ve lost it if I hadn’t run into your brother at Riverside Hospital during a drop-off. All it took was one look for him to know I wasn’t straight.”
“Yeah. Gabe is freakishly good at that,” she agreed, taking a step back to rinse the strawberries at the sink as if she’d sensed his need to move, to cook, to breathe.
He took it, if only for a foot or two. “He dragged my ass to a twenty-four-hour diner that same night, then every night after for a week. Sometimes we talked about what happened in Afghanistan, and sometimes we talked about nothing at all. But Gabe got what it was like to have been there. And even though he’s got memories just as shitty as mine, he still listened.”
Kat’s head sprang up, a wisp of hair falling free from the tousled knot at her nape. “Is that why your loyalty to him is so fierce?”
“My loyalty to him is fierce because his loyalty to me is the same. Even if I didn’t earn it.” Jesse’s humorless laugh cut through the early-morning quiet of the kitchen. “I tried for every last one of those seven days to fight your brother, just like I tried to gut out my shifts as a paramedic. But every night, he still came to take me to that diner, and every night, he told me the same thing. In the end, Gabe was right. If I’d stayed, if I hadn’t found a job that would help get me straight, working with traumas would’ve broken me. I was just too fucked up to see it.”
“You’re still awfully hard on yourself, you know. A situation like that would’ve made it tough for anyone to cope, no matter how good they were at their job.” The affirmation was as free of judgment as Kat’s expression, but it tangled in Jesse’s gut all the same.
“It’s kind of hard to dispute the facts.” He tugged at the box of oatmeal hard enough to tear the cardboard, forcing his hands into steadiness as he slid a pair of packets to the countertop.
“And there’s a difference between facts and circumstance.”
“Are you saying what happened in Afghanistan was circumstance?”
Kat met his shock with quiet resolve. “I’m saying what happened in Afghanistan was awful. But the fact that you had difficulty dealing with it makes you human, not unworthy.”
Jesse bit back the argument brewing in his throat. He might not be on board with her glass-is-half-full mind-set or her misplaced belief in his decency, but she was only trying to help.
And despite the fact that he knew it shouldn’t, letting her help felt frighteningly okay.
“I guess,” he said, shrugging off the tightness that had crept into his shoulders. “But it still doesn’t change the fact that your brother would kill me if he knew we spent the night together.”
“Oh please.” Kat rolled her pretty blue eyes, crossing the linoleum to reclaim the space she’d put between them. “Look, I get the loyalty you two have toward each other, and what’s more, I respect it. But you and I are adults, Jesse. What we decide to do together is none of Gabe’s business. Even if he is my brother.”
Jesse paused. “So what are we doing together?”
“Right now, we’re having breakfast.” She paused to give him a wry smile. “After that, why don’t we take things one step at a time?”
“You deserve more than that.” Damn it, he’d been able to see Kat’s bone-deep desire for something permanent the minute he’d clapped eyes on her in the parking lot of their flooded apartment. And no matter how unnervingly, unbelievably good he felt in both her presence and her bed, she was the daughter of a colonel. His buddy’s little sister. Smart. Honest. Beautiful.
And he was the bastard son of a drug addict who hadn’t been able to save his squad mates’ lives when they’d needed him most.
“Jesse, listen.” Kat brushed a hand over his biceps, and God, how did she manage to relax him so thoroughly with just a simple touch? “I like you. I know you said I shouldn’t, but that’s too bad, because I do. We’ve got three more weeks here. We can spend them trying to fight this, or we can take each day as it comes. I don’t need you to make me any promises.” She pressed a kiss to his lips, feather-light. “But I also don’t want you to go.”
“I don’t want to go.” Although the words shocked the hell out of him, Jesse couldn’t deny their truth. Abandoning the food at the counter in favor of wrapping his arms a
round Kat’s shoulders, he pulled her in close to return her kiss. “I might not be able to make you any promises, but I can tell you this. If we’re going to take each day as it comes, I want to make every second count.”
“And how are we going to do that?” Her sexy, catlike smile hit him right in the kill zone, but Jesse turned the tables, scooping her off her feet with a lingering kiss.
“By skipping breakfast, for starters. After all, I owe you a proper good morning. And I fully intend to deliver.”
Kat stood at the edge of the deck, tipping her face up to the Sunday-morning sunshine with a grin she felt all the way to her work boots. The breeze carried the crisp scent of fall as it rustled through the already-changing poplar trees down by the dock, and she inhaled a deep breath of it as she surveyed the lush space in front of her.
Over the last two weeks, she and Jesse had spent their daylight hours on various projects in both the lake house and the yard, sprucing up everything from the paint on the porch to the shelves in the shed. Every job had made the place feel a step closer to home, with small touches and huge laughter filling the house with the kind of energy and comfort Kat had always craved.
All those nighttime hours she and Jesse had spent hot and heavy and tangled in her bed sheets? Yeah, they didn’t hurt a girl’s outlook, either.
“Taking a break?” Jesse asked, pulling her out of her thoughts as he mounted the comfortably creaky wooden steps to join her from the yard. He crossed the boards with a glint in his eyes that he backed up with an equally hot kiss, and just like that, Kat’s fantastic mood tripled.
“I was enjoying the weather. And the view.” She loved her apartment, with its cheery curtains and overstuffed bookshelves and space that belonged just to her. But slowly, surely, she’d been able to shed the memories of leaving this place over and over, of her strained relationship with the colonel and the sadness she’d once associated with the duplex.
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