My erection pressed against her backside, and she drew in a sharp breath at the feel of me against her.
“Parker…”
“Gonna fuck you now,” I said, then reached around her and unzipped and unbuttoned her jeans.
She started to protest, but the words stalled in her throat as I started to unbuckle her belt.
They were the kind that had an individual belt that held them up instead of attaching to a belt like some did.
Once I had her jeans unfastened, I pushed them down over her hips, leaving the chaps still in place.
Thank God they were so loose, otherwise this would never have worked.
With the way the chaps were designed, I was only able to get her jeans down to about mid-thigh—but it was enough.
Enough that I could see the slit of her pussy—see her entrance—see the fucking promise land.
It was the single most erotic thing I’d ever seen in my life. Hands down
Seeing her bent over at the top of the stairs, my chaps the only thing keeping her partially concealed, with her jeans around mid-thigh? It’d be my go-to material from now on until I died.
I just knew it.
I knew that I couldn’t wait any longer.
It took about five seconds to pull my cock out of my jeans and another three to line up to her entrance and start sliding inside.
I was immensely grateful when I put my cock to her entrance and found that she was already wet.
Then again, it seemed like all I had to do was touch her in a certain way, and she was ready for me.
Thank God for that.
Because I was so ready for her that I might’ve literally come against her fucking leg if I had to do any touching.
“Parker!” she cried out as I breached her entrance.
I groaned loudly as my cock was fully engulfed by her wet heat. My eyes nearly crossed when she started to pulse around me.
“Sweet baby Jesus,” she breathed, wiggling her hips. “Move, God!”
I moved.
I moved roughly, holding onto her hips as I fucked her on the stairs.
In fact, I became so engrossed in what I was doing that I almost missed the sound of someone on the stairs below me.
Almost.
Hearing the steps—thank God they were coming slow, I pulled out quickly, helped her to her feet, and then bent over for her phone, lip gloss, and purse.
The change I left where it was because we didn’t have time to get out of the way before whomever it was climbing the stairs rounded to the second tier.
But, I couldn’t get us into either of our apartments quickly enough.
So, I settled for second best and pinned her against the wall in the shadows right past the stairwell.
Pressing her back against the wall, I put my hand with her things in it up above her head and pressed it against the wall.
My other hand went to her pussy, which I started to play with, while I waited for whomever it was that was coming to get the hell gone.
When she started to cry out in surprise, I shut her up with my mouth.
In retaliation, she reached for my cock and started to work it, keeping pace with my own movements.
The shuffling of steps stopped on our floor and then moved past us down the hallway.
I broke the kiss and looked at whomever it was over my shoulder.
The UPS guy.
I turned back around and gave Kayla a grin, then curled my fingers into her g-spot and stroked it.
Her head went back as I felt her orgasm take her.
Just the sight of her falling over the edge did me in, and I couldn’t hold back my own orgasm any longer.
We both came.
Her on my fingers. Me on her belly.
I was so going to hell, and I was going to take her right along with me.
***
We arrived at the house forty-five minutes later, after four wrong turns and a stop at a gas station to ask directions—which had been Kayla’s idea, not mine.
But she capitalized on the stop by grabbing a large pack of gummy worms, an Icee, and a burrito that looked like it’d been fried last night.
She inhaled the damn thing, too.
I wasn’t sure she even had a chance to taste the contents before we were back on the road.
“I’m not sure there’s a running bathroom here,” I looked over at her once we got off the bike. “If you have to go…you’ll have to use the woods.”
She flipped me off. “I won’t have to go. I eat those all the time. I’ve never had a problem yet.”
“Yet.” I pointed out the significant word in her statement. “That place was a dive.”
She shrugged. “The dives are sometimes the places that have the best food.”
“If you say so…”
She ripped open the saved bag of gummy worms, and I rolled my eyes and turned back to the front.
The place had been hard to find because it was hidden deep in the woods with trees lining the majority of the property lines. The manicured lawn was essentially hidden from the road. I wasn’t sure if I liked that or not.
On one hand, having privacy was nice. However, if they couldn’t see me, I couldn’t see them.
“It’s nice,” Kayla supplied as she sidled up beside me. “I was expecting worse.”
Honestly, I was, too.
Kayla had found this particular place on a Facebook post of all places, and the photos of the outside didn’t really do it justice.
The yard was covered with junk, and honestly, it didn’t look all that appealing in the photos.
But the thought of a four-bedroom, two-bath house that was twenty-two hundred square feet, with a massive wrap-around porch, on thirty-five acres for only two hundred thousand was massively appealing.
Even if I did have to do some work to it.
But, with all the junk cleaned up, it actually looked quite nice.
Although, we hadn’t seen the inside yet.
“Can we just go in?” she questioned.
I shrugged and started heading to the door.
She followed closely behind. Once we climbed up the steps to the porch, I knocked and waited for someone to answer.
They didn’t, so I shrugged and went on inside without an invitation.
Kayla hissed at me that we weren’t allowed to just walk inside, but I disagreed. “He knows I’m coming.”
Kayla murmured something under her breath. “Probably going to die because he doesn’t expect us to just walk in.”
My lips turned up into a smirk, and I looked down at her and offered her a wink.
We made it all the way through the house, and I was pleasantly surprised again.
“This place could work,” I said. “It needs some fresh paint. New flooring. Updated appliances, and an overhaul of the kitchen and bathrooms, but those are all easy fixes. The integrity of the house is exceptional.”
Just as I said that the door to the kitchen opened, and a man who looked to be around his eighties entered.
“Hello,” I said, offering him my hand.
He took it and nodded back to me. “Glad you could make it. What did you think of the house?”
“Tell him you’ll take it,” Kayla whispered.
I rolled my eyes. “If you’re still up for selling, I think I’ll take it.”
Kayla’s nails dug into my back as she practically bounced with excitement.
Seems I wasn’t the only one enthusiastic about this new chapter of my life.
Chapter 21
I’ve given up on getting a bikini body. The Lord put ice cream and Olive Garden breadsticks on this Earth for a reason.
-Kayla to Parker
Kayla
The next weekend, once again, I found myself in a car with Parker.
This time, though, we were driving to Virginia where Parker would be attending the Wreaths Across America wreath hanging ceremony at Arli
ngton National Cemetery.
“Why do you come here, of all places?”
Parker grinned as he pointed out a tattoo on his arm.
It was a list of dates. All precisely placed to be in a perfect rectangle on the fleshy part of his forearm.
“I have a buddy here,” he said. “He was with me through the SEALS. On our last mission, he took a sniper bullet straight to the heart…a bullet that was meant for me.”
My mouth fell open.
“Really?”
He nodded. “Really. I’d been standing in the same place just moments before, but we got in a shoving match because he’d eaten one of my Jolly Ranchers that I’d been saving…and then he was gone.”
The idea that Parker had come so close to losing his life had never occurred to me…though it should have.
I’d seen the scars all over his body and had firsthand knowledge of what every one of those scars felt like against my lips. A man didn’t get scars like that without having at least a somewhat dangerous life.
I should have known. I mean, it was more than obvious.
But to know that a bullet had once been aimed at him, with the sole purpose of killing him, was enough to take my breath away.
I couldn’t imagine my life without Parker in it.
I couldn’t even imagine what I would do, let alone how I would react.
Just the idea of him no longer being there to talk to me when I was having a bad day was debilitating.
That point was hammered home hours later when we arrived for the Wreath Ceremony, and I saw just how many lives had been lost of people who had served our country just as Parker had.
Seeing the thousands and thousands of graves in that cemetery showed me that life wasn’t promised.
It also showed me that I was taking my life for granted. I expected to wake up every day. I also expected to go to sleep every night.
However, that wasn’t guaranteed for me, and neither was it for him.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
I swallowed and nodded, still keeping my thoughts to myself.
I didn’t want him to know that I was all of a sudden scared shitless at the thought of losing him.
It seemed like a stupid reason for me to be near tears.
But, I was.
I was scared.
Because there were some scary people in this world—like the serial killer that was sweeping the South by storm—and what if one day something completely out of the blue happened to him and took him away from me?
What would I do?
Honestly, I just didn’t know.
After the ceremony, we headed back to Parker’s truck, and he drove to the hotel where he had booked our room.
The hotel overlooked the Potomac River, and it had a stunning view—even if everything was covered in snow and ice.
I’d never once left the south, so seeing all this white stuff was like a different world for me.
Which was why I asked him if we could go take a walk in the park moments after arriving in our room.
“Can we go outside to that park? I really would love to see it up close.”
He grinned at me, and without a word, he re-donned the coat he’d just taken off, picked up his key card, and gestured to the door. “Let’s go.”
The park was within walking distance of the hotel, and I marveled at the beauty.
I was so flabbergasted with the snow—and it was everywhere!—that I didn’t even feel the cold.
We walked, and Parker stayed at my side despite his being adamant that I was getting too cold.
“Have you ever had to live anywhere like this?”
He shook his head. “No. Florida. Louisiana. Texas. And California. Plus where I was stationed overseas.”
“At least you have that. I’ve ever only lived in Texas. I feel like I’m in a different country,” I admitted.
He grunted, but he didn’t reply.
I looked over at him to see his eyes trained on something in front of us, and I turned to see what he was staring at.
A kid and a dog, as well as a clearly-not-paying-attention-to-her-kid mother who was playing with her phone on a park bench.
Parker and I watched as the kid chased after the dog.
Parker tensed, and I frowned. “Why isn’t that dog on a leash?”
But I wasn’t seeing the importance of where the dog and the boy were standing until a loud crack, followed by the boy disappearing through the layer of ice that he’d once been standing on.
I gasped, frozen in at first confusion and then fear.
Parker didn’t.
One second he was at my side, and the next he was sprinting so fast across the snow that he was kicking powder up in the air in his wake.
My heart started to pound as I hurried in their direction.
I couldn’t see the kid, and I couldn’t see the dog.
What I could see were people looking around, trying to figure out why Parker was flat out running like he was toward the pond.
He ran into the water like he was at the beach and not a frozen lake in the middle of winter.
The first step he took, his foot fell through the ice.
Then the second.
And the third.
When he was up to mid-chest, he started to crack the ice with his elbows.
Meanwhile, on shore, everyone started to panic.
“Why is he in there?”
“Oh my God. There’s a dog over there on the ice!”
“There’s someone in there. Look at that red hat floating on top of the water. Do you think somebody fell through?”
I somehow had my phone out of my pocket and in my hand, with my fingers dialing 9-1-1 as I watched Parker go further and further in disbelief.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“A little boy just fell through the ice next to my hotel. We’re in a park right next to it. Ummm, Luxury Suites,” I said, mostly because I had no freakin’ clue where we were, and I couldn’t tell her something I didn’t know.
“Yes, ma’am. Can you see the little boy?”
“No,” I answered. “But my boyfriend went in after him. He’s in the pond, too.”
“Tell him to get out.”
I laughed then. “Yeah, right.”
Then I put the phone into my pocket without hanging up and ran up to the side of the pond.
Watching, waiting, and feeling so freakin’ helpless that I was crying tears of frustration.
Then, Parker dove.
He disappeared, and then my heart really did stick in my throat.
Three more times he did that, and three more times he came up empty-handed.
On the fourth, he came back up with his hand buried in the little boy’s hair.
***
“We’d like to take you in to get checked out, sir.” The paramedic eyed Parker worriedly.
Parker waved him away, then glanced down at the paramedic’s arm. “SEAL?”
The paramedic grinned. “Yeah.”
Parker lifted his wet shirt and showed him his side where his own tattoo was, very similar to the paramedics.
Something passed between them, and the medic nodded. “All right, I’ll leave you to it then.”
Moments later, the medic walked off and took the passenger seat of the ambulance.
I looked over at Parker, who even soaking wet in the freezing cold, still wasn’t shaking.
“Are you human?”
He looks down at me. “Let’s go back to the hotel so you don’t catch a cold.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re worried about me getting a cold while I’m worried about you getting frostbite and hypothermia.”
He shrugged. “BUD/S training, paired with quite a few missions where it was much colder than this, and I was in it for longer, has really let me experience cold. Though it is cold right now, I have about another, I’d say, twenty to thirty minutes before
it starts to become a nuisance.”
Before it starts to become a nuisance. I would’ve laughed had I not seen that he was a hundred percent serious.
“Well, okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I was giddy. I was excited. I was fucking floored that he’d charged out into that icy pond and saved that kid.
But, then again, I was also mad.
And I didn’t know why.
I mean, I’d have done the same thing, or at least I would have tried to. So why was I so upset that he had done it?
I shouldn’t be.
I really shouldn’t.
But I was.
He kept glancing over at me as if he was waiting for something, but I never gave whatever he was waiting for to him.
We rode up the elevator in silence. Then he put the keycard into the slot and pushed opened the door, holding it for me.
I walked under his arm, but before I could so much as pass him, he curled his arm around my belly and twisted.
I found myself pinned up against the hotel room door, staring angrily at him.
“Spit it out already.”
“Spit what out?” I asked.
His eye twitched.
“Tell me why you’re so mad.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it.
I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say.
I was glad that he found the kid, yes. But I was pissed that he took that risk.
It made me sound like a real asshole, but I couldn’t help it.
Seriously, it was a really shitty situation.
“Kayla…”
“I’m just pissed, okay?”
His wet clothes were starting to seep into my own clothes at this point, so I pushed him away.
Or tried to.
He didn’t so much as budge.
“I’m not going to sit on the sidelines while there’s a problem I can fix,” he said evenly.
His nonchalance at what he’d done was seriously pissing me off. Did he not see that he could’ve freakin’ died?
“Whatever.”
His eyes narrowed. “You can’t change me. I’m set in my ways and have been for a really long time. If you can’t handle who I am…maybe we shouldn’t do this anymore.”
I opened my mouth and let him have it.
“It’s not okay for me to worry about you?” I screeched, banging him on the chest with my closed fist.
He grunted but didn’t move to set me down on my feet or pull away from me.
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