And together it all just felt so good, so right to be with him. So much like where she was supposed to be.
He scooped her up and moved her to sit across his lap, as if he needed her closer still. And she went willingly, because being closer to him was what she wanted, too.
She reached up to lay a hand to the side of his neck, going from there to his shoulder, to his biceps, on a quest to experience more of him than she’d gotten to last night.
And it all felt tremendous—rock solid and steely strong without an ounce of excess anywhere.
He didn’t seem to have any complaint about being touched because his mouth opened even wider over hers and his tongue play turned more sensuous, more alluring.
She liked knowing she could turn him on. But it wasn’t only touching that she discovered she was interested in. The inclination to be touched was making itself known.
And not only where he was already touching her. While those big hands felt great on her back, her nipples tightened within the shelf bra that lined her tank top as her breasts began to beg for some attention.
She could take his hand and put it there...
But the kissing was so, so good she also didn’t want him distracted. And she didn’t want him to know just how badly she was hungering for more.
Then he stopped kissing her mouth and began to kiss her neck, instead. Kissing and sucking lightly and letting just the tip of his tongue do tickly things that created more of those goose bumps.
He kissed a line that led to the hollow of her throat and then along the ridge of her collarbone while she wondered if he was on a path that still might get him where she wanted him to be...
Until he dashed that hope and returned to her mouth.
But there was a new brashness in the way he started kissing her then, something that made it even more sensuous.
And just as she was distracted by trying to figure out how it had changed, one of his hands came to her breast.
It took her off guard and that somehow made it even more exciting, sending her nipple into a tight coil in his palm as his big hand cupped that soft sphere.
It felt so good that a moan escaped her throat even as the thought of skinny-dipping popped into her mind, bringing with it images of skin to skin. Because as nice as it was to have his hand on her breast, there was still too much clothing between them that she wanted gone.
Beau must not have liked the barrier any better than she did because after only a few moments he moved that hand to the hem of her tank top and underneath it for the perfect relocation.
So much better...
His hand was warm, his skin tough and every sensation he brought was blessedly unmuted.
And, oh, the sensations he brought!
No clumsiness, no awkwardness, tonight he was assertive and certain and he reveled in working that mound of flesh, caressing it, kneading it, gently pinching and pulling, tugging and teasing even as his mouth went on plundering hers.
Her injured right hand wasn’t good for more than lying flat against his back to keep her anchored, but her left ran rampant over him, too, doing some reveling of her own over hills and valleys of honed muscle.
But still none of it seemed like enough and as she felt the rise of his own need against her hip, she began to recall Darla’s peanut butter analogy and think that nothing was going to be enough until she had it all.
Except...
When they were teenagers they’d had a plan. A blanket to cover the ground. The seclusion of the lake in the middle of the night for privacy even out in the open.
Now they were basically in the backyard of his family’s home where his brother or sister-in-law could glance through a window and see them. And if they took it inside they’d be in one of the rooms across the hall from the couple.
There was a guesthouse on the opposite side of the pool...
But as Kyla took all things into consideration she realized that she didn’t want now what they’d avoided when they were kids—slinking off to merely grope each other.
And despite Darla’s advice for her to get some—and despite everything in her shouting for her to do that same thing—she wasn’t sure she should.
Here, tonight, revisiting the best of their past, she knew that an essence of her younger self had come out, that so had an essence of the younger Beau.
But that wasn’t who either of them really was anymore, and she was afraid that letting themselves recapture a piece of that past might end up as a disaster in the light of day.
And disaster was also a part of their past...
So it was thoughts of that old disaster that she hung on to, to subdue the desire running rampant in her and demanding that she just follow her roommate’s recommendation. She reluctantly took Beau’s hand from her breast at the same time she ended the kissing.
“What are we doing?” she whispered.
Beau didn’t answer her, he merely rested his head to the side of hers and let his arm fall across her lap.
“I don’t think we better,” she added, sounding and feeling like the girl she once was—even when it came to how much she wanted him to ignore her and go back to what he’d been doing.
“I need to be up early and get to the bank and have my driver’s license replaced before we can leave in the morning,” she went on without any encouragement from him.
Beau finally responded with a nod of his head against hers, accepting the brakes she was putting on things. Unlike the boy he’d once been who would have cajoled and bargained and tried for a little more.
The boy she missed all over again at that moment.
“I can go into town to do that stuff while you give Immy breakfast—if you don’t mind.”
“Sure,” he said, his voice deep and ragged.
“Then we’ll drive back?”
He nodded again. But he still wasn’t letting go of her. He was still holding her on his lap.
“You said it would take about eight hours?” Kyla said as if nothing else was relevant.
Another nod.
“So we better have four or five bottles, just to be safe.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said.
Oh, there were so many other things she wanted him to take care of...
But she fought it, fought every inclination she had to kiss him again, to put his hand back on her breast, to just go where everything in her was telling her to go.
Instead she slid off his lap and retrieved the shoe box from the ground along with a couple of things that had spilled out, putting the lid back on it.
And telling herself, as she did so, to put a lid on everything else, too.
Chapter Eight
“Morning.”
Beau looked up from feeding Immy her first bottle of the day on Tuesday to answer his brother’s greeting. “Hey.”
“There isn’t usually anybody up before me,” Seth said.
Beau nodded but didn’t tell Seth that he’d already been up for over an hour, as was normal for him these days.
Seth poured himself a cup of the coffee Beau had made and joined him at the big country kitchen table, nodding at what Beau was doing.
“Looks like you’re pretty good at that,” Seth observed.
“Not much to it. There’s a lot of chance for practice in a day—round the clock—so you get good fast. At this and diapers, too.”
“Yeah, not thrilled with the thought of those,” Seth grumbled.
“You get used to it,” Beau assured him, thinking that he’d seen worse but not saying it.
His older brother stared openly at him while drinking his coffee, then said, “From talking to the family I expected something different from you when you got here.”
“Like what?”
Seth shrugged. “I keep hearing that you didn’t come back the same. From what I’ve seen, though, you’re a little quieter than you used to be, but otherwise... I haven’t noticed you standing around like you’re on guard duty or looking like you’d break if you ben
t over. You did knock on the door when you got here—man, does GiGi hate when you do that at home! But you helped yourself to my beer without any problem—” He poked his chin in Beau’s direction. “And that right there—you’re smiling. How come the family says you never do that? That you’re like being around a stone statue of yourself? That’s what I was expecting.”
Immy had finished her bottle, so Beau sat her on his thigh, braced her chin and chest with one hand and began to pat her back with the other to burp her. “Yeah, being home has been a little rocky,” he said as if that answered what his brother had asked.
“Is it better?”
“Getting there.”
“This...uh...whole thing with Kyla and Immy. Does that have anything to do with the improvement?”
“Yeah, I think it probably does,” Beau admitted. “Seems like babies can break down walls, and Kyla...” He laughed just thinking about her. “Kyla doesn’t pull any punches. She’s given me some grief about the same things that bother the family. She kind of doesn’t let me get away with it.”
“And that works because you’re pretty hot for her.”
Talk about not pulling any punches.
Beau merely gave his older brother a frown that would have made anyone under his command shrink back.
It only made Seth laugh. “Don’t try to deny it. Geez, you reek of it! You can’t keep your eyes off of her, you get as close to her as you can any time you can, and I saw you out there on the swing with her last night—looking at whatever it was she had in that box, happy as a clam to be doing something that was probably all girly...”
Beau laughed, flashing back to old days of brotherly harassment and just glad that Seth hadn’t seen any more than he had of what had happened on the swing last night.
“Hey, you don’t have any room to talk—wearing that apron your wife made you wear to barbecue last night. What did it say? Real Men Wear Aprons? I don’t think so. What’s girlier than an apron?”
Seth grinned but didn’t respond to Beau’s counterattack. Instead he reached toward Immy and said, “Show me how to hold her so I can practice.”
Beau did. Then, with Immy in his brother’s care, he went to pour himself a fresh cup of coffee.
When he returned to the kitchen table there was a more serious expression on Seth’s face.
“What the old man did wasn’t right,” he said then. “We all understand what he wrote about not wanting your life ruined, but paying off Kyla’s father to make the problem go away? Not letting you know she was pregnant? I heard that she miscarried, but if she hadn’t...” Seth shook his head slowly, direly.
“I go to every doctor’s appointment with Lacey,” he continued. “I have all the ultrasound pictures around the mirror I use when I shave. I can’t imagine not even knowing about a kid of mine...not finding out until years later because somebody else decided that’s what would be best for me.”
There was more head shaking. “You could have had a kid out there in the world and not even known it,” he marveled. “How would that have been?”
“Not good,” Beau confirmed.
Seth shook his head again, as if he just couldn’t comprehend it, and for a moment neither of them said anything.
Then the oldest of the Camden grandchildren said with more caution than he’d started with, “And Kyla... Did you have it as bad for her then as you do now?”
“I was crazy about her,” Beau admitted, but only in the past tense.
But his brother persisted. “And now it’s just kicked in again?”
Obviously dancing around it was futile, so Beau stopped trying. “I don’t know. I don’t know whether it’s old or new or a combination of the two.”
“Does it matter?”
Beau shrugged.
“Are you going to do something about it?” his brother asked.
Beau filled his cheeks with air and blew it out. “Shouldn’t.”
“Why shouldn’t you?”
“For starters it’s all pretty confusing between us. It’s not like we’re coming at it with a clean slate.”
“True,” his brother conceded.
“And the family’s not wrong,” Beau went on. “Yeah, I’m in a better mood than I was before I met Kyla again. I guess I’ve loosened up a little, and it’s helped to have more to do, taking care of her and Immy. But...” He shook his head. “I’m not a marine anymore and I’m sure as hell not much of a civilian—feels like I’m in no-man’s land. Would you drag somebody else into that?”
“Probably wouldn’t be fair,” Seth agreed.
“She’s helped me figure out what I want to do in Camden Inc—”
“Yeah, Cade told me about that—I think it’s a great idea.”
“And that’s a step.”
“A big one,” his brother pointed out. “I know you weren’t finding anything you wanted to do with us before that.”
“But it’s still just one step—I haven’t actually gone to work, started keeping business hours, put any of it into action. That’ll all take a lot. And a lot for me to get into the day-to-day of it.”
“Sure, but—”
“And then there’s the family and getting to where I fit in again and to where they don’t feel like they have to fix me. And that’s just the beginning. There’s the whole rest of my life—I don’t have any vision of that at all at this point. I need to have a distinct direction, a strategy, a course plotted, a firm battle plan—”
“Whoa! Now I’m seeing it!” Seth said to stop him. “You can get intense fast!”
Beau didn’t refute that.
“You know, some of life—some of every day—just happens,” his brother said then. “You can’t have a strategy or a course plotted or a firm battle plan for every minute from now until you’re ninety. Nobody can. Lacey and I didn’t plan to have this baby—she was a hardcore career woman, juggling working for her father and her own line of clothes and then she added me to the mix, and boom! Birth control failure and we’re going to have a kid by the time we hit our first anniversary. Not in the battle plan, let me tell you. But so what? That’s life. A little surprise can be nice.”
“A little surprise in a life that’s already pretty stable, Seth,” Beau argued. “You’ve lived in Northbridge and been running this portion of the business since you got out of college. This time three months ago I was in Afghanistan. I knew what I was doing, what was expected of me. Now everything is different and I haven’t figured out much of any of it—”
“You bought a house. You’re carving out a place in the business—”
“All small steps toward the much bigger picture that’s still a blur. And do you think that a relationship would just be another small step in that direction? With someone with her own hands full inheriting a kid and having a business dumped on her? With someone who’s spent the last fourteen years hating me?”
“No, but—”
“No is right—that would be throwing a whole can of paint over the top of the blur and making it even worse. And do you think that I’m a prize package when I can’t even figure out how to sleep on a civilian’s timetable yet? When, out of uniform, I don’t know what to wear to a memorial service? When not even GiGi’s house feels like home and my own place certainly doesn’t? When, yeah, I do stand like a stone statue of myself around people—even family—because I don’t know what the hell to talk about?”
Seth’s expression was serious again and Beau knew he’d just crushed his brother’s hope that the rest of the family was concerned about him for no reason.
Then Seth said, “Okay, so you’re not back in the groove. And yeah, there’s old stuff with Kyla that carries some weight. But no matter what else is going on with you, Beau, you’re good when you’re with her. I think that must count for something.”
“So you think it’s just okay if I use her as a distraction from all this other stuff?”
Seth shook his head. “No. But it doesn’t look to me as if that’s what you’re doing.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Beau said somberly. “And I need to.”
Seth’s eyebrows arched and he reared back a little. “What I think,” he responded, “is that we all need to find comfort and support somewhere. Solace. And if you happen across someone who offers that, along the way to figuring everything out, there’s no crime in grabbing on to it. Man, I know marines strive for perfection, but you don’t have to be the perfect civilian before you can let yourself have some happiness.”
“I think I do,” Beau said.
“Wow! That was all marine,” Seth observed, sounding astonished by it. “Are you really that stubborn and bullheaded now?”
“Something else any woman would be thrilled to deal with,” Beau said sarcastically.
“Well, cut it out!” Seth shouted the command.
But as good as Beau had become at taking orders, that wasn’t one he thought he could execute.
So he merely stared at his older brother.
Knowing that Seth just didn’t understand.
* * *
“Times like today with Immy give me a new appreciation for quiet,” Kyla said when she accepted the glass of wine Beau handed her at ten on Tuesday night.
“Oh yeah,” Beau concurred, pouring himself a glass and toasting the air with it for emphasis.
The intended eight-hour drive from Northbridge had taken twelve, and it had been a disaster. Immy had wailed the whole way, never napped, eaten only sporadically, then spewed that onto herself, the car seat and Kyla’s car. And if that wasn’t enough, there had also been two blow-out diapers that had left Beau cleaning up Immy on the hood of the car while Kyla used baby wipes to one-handedly clean the car seat.
By then Kyla had been in a panic thinking the baby might be seriously ill. Beau had not been able to offer any other perspective and so had gone into emergency mode. Responding calmly and efficiently, he’d used his smartphone to locate the nearest doctor, then driven Kyla’s small sedan as if it were an ambulance carrying a critically injured accident victim. They’d rushed into the doctor’s office as if the infant were bleeding to death.
Her Baby and Her Beau Page 15
