by Anne Calhoun
He was her boyfriend, which could mean a great deal, or not much at all. He took her out to eat. She packed picnic lunches for days at the beach. They went to street fairs and outdoor concerts and the movies. He slept at her house when he could. She kept him apprised of her ever-changing work schedule. They were exclusive and had been for six months, but when did exclusivity go from I won’t see anyone else to I accept your right to make demands of me?
She went rigid at the thought of such dangerous intimacies. “Do you want to hear my side of the story?”
Smart, smart Drew knew all too well how to handle her. Only when he’d gently pulled her back against him and licked a delicate path along the rim of her ear, then down to her soft earlobe, did he whisper, “I’m listening.”
“The air conditioner broke last week.”
She owned her aging house, a tiny, slightly off-kilter two-story painted a fading, funky shade of lavender unremarkable for the eclectic neighborhood near her studio space in the warehouse district. “Eclectic” meant affordable prices for interesting-if-dilapidated architecture, and diverse, opinionated neighbors who were passionate about the neighborhood, its causes and people. It also meant she walked home from her studio past addicts, dealers and drunks, hookers and pimps, homeless families and groups of aimless young men. Break-ins were frequent. After one weekend with her, Drew was already on friendly terms with her neighbor, Mrs. Delgado, given his polite manners and Southern drawl. But with his well-honed sense for trouble, he’d recognized the neighborhood’s good and bad elements and formed a decidedly negative opinion about her ancient air conditioner and the windows.
“I figured as much,” he said, his voice dry.
“And you still scared the daylights out of me?”
He ignored her question, or at least she thought he did. “Why didn’t you get it fixed?”
She threw a glare over her shoulder. “I need to pick up extra shifts at The Blue Dog to come up with the money.”
“How much?”
“More than I have until I work the extra shifts.”
“You said they were overstaffed and tips were down. How much, Tess?”
This relentless Drew was new to her, as if a stranger had come home in her boyfriend’s body. “Six hundred dollars,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t like the answer.
His teeth ground, then he shifted his weight behind her. “I left money for you.”
This was true. He’d tried to give her a thousand dollars in twenties, and the names of two navy buddies she could call day or night, for any reason, when he was gone. She’d refused both. A short, tense “discussion” ensued, one she’d thought she’d won when he stuffed the neatly rolled money into the pocket of his cargo shorts. She’d turned her back on him for less than a minute to retrieve his wallet from her nightstand. On his way back to the base he’d called to inform her that in the sixty seconds she’d left him alone in her kitchen, he’d put the cash in an empty Folgers Instant can at the back of her narrow pantry and the phone numbers in her cell phone. The next day he’d left on his most recent mission.
She had no intention of using the phone numbers, let alone the money.
“This is my life, Drew, not an emergency. I won’t take your money. If I used it I’d need months to earn enough to pay you back, and besides…”
Her voice trailed off when his head dropped forward to rest on her shoulder.
“You don’t have to pay me back.”
“I do.” This was important, although for reasons that grew hazier with each passing day.
There was a pause while his even breaths merged with the sweat trickling down her back. “Tess,” he said, his voice totally without heat, “what do I have to do to earn your trust? Because I can’t keep going like this.”
The words, their empty tone, sent a shiver down her spine. She pulled her hands free of his and spun to face him. “You can trust someone and not take money from them, Drew!”
“You think I’m going to count up favors and make you work them off on your back?”
Her eyes widened at his crass question. “Of course not!”
He kept his arms on either side of her head while his blue eyes, somehow both sad and curious, searched hers. “Because it’s not just the money. For all practical purposes I live here, and yeah, I buy groceries or fix things around the house, but it’s a dirt-in-the-eyes, bare-knuckles street fight to get you to take anything I offer. You work harder than just about anyone I know, but half the time I come over here and you’ve got four cans of corn in the cupboard and nothing in the fridge. Christ, you won’t use six hundred dollars to be safe, not to mention comfortable. It’s hot as hell in here!” He took a deep breath. “I know how you grew up, Tess. I respect your independence. I’m just trying to do the right thing here. If I can’t, I can’t stick around.”
She’d dated her share of losers—artists, bartenders, even a couple of suits—and none of them, not a single one, looked in her cupboards, let alone gave a rat’s ass about honor. Doing the right thing. But the problem wasn’t that taking the money felt wrong. It was how right it felt, how easily she could add to his burden by letting him shoulder some of hers. Serving his country was the ultimate honor, but no one got rich doing it.
“You don’t have all that much more money than I do,” she protested, cravenly sidestepping the far more important issue he’d laid at her feet.
For a moment his normal laid-back sense of humor surfaced. “Damn, you’re hard on a guy’s ego,” he said, but just as quickly the smile disappeared into the firm line of his full lips. He shrugged. “I have enough to fix the air conditioner. You don’t. I’d give it to you with no strings attached because I love you, but you won’t take it.”
Shock once again flooded her veins. He pushed away from the wall and a fear more potent than the icy torrent that had immobilized her when he’d stalked out of the shadows settled in the pit of her stomach. “Drew, wait!” she said, and grabbed his arm.
Her grip was strong from lifting kegs and welding heavy, awkward pieces of metal, but he stopped because he wanted to stop. He stopped because she asked.
“You love me?” God, could she sound any more doubtful? Prickly?
“Yeah, Tess. I love you.” Soft, even words. She marveled at the strength it took to casually put himself in harm’s way, both on duty and off. Right now the soft underbelly of his soul was totally exposed to her, easy to lay open with a few brittle, indifferent words. Until Drew, she’d defined strength by the thickness of walls she built around her heart, the barbed wire fences draping her personality. Compared to his willingness to walk into physical and emotional danger, she was weak. A coward, even.
“You…” She stopped, slid her hand down to clasp his, thinking through how best to handle the hidden sharp edges of another person’s feelings. “You’ve never said that before. Why say it now?”
After a moment, a very long moment, he returned her grip with a gentle squeeze. “I’m a play-the-odds kind of guy, Tess. Odds weren’t good I’d hear the words back. Tonight I needed to say it. You don’t have to love me back, not right now, but if you can’t let me in even a little bit, I can’t stay.”
The words could have sounded like an ultimatum, an effort to control her through an all-or-nothing choice, but he sounded taut, tightly wound, pushed to the point of no return. She wondered where he’d been, and what he’d seen or done that made him lay it all on the line. Not ready to walk away, but prepared to do so if she kept her defenses up.
Her choice. She swallowed against the ache in her throat, looked at their linked hands, then down farther to their feet, his braced wide, hers snugged together, the right foot curled over the left.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she said to the chipped, bright blue nail polish on her toes. Hard to admit, but true.
“You don’t have to do anything, Tess. I just want to take care of you. Fix your air conditioner. Make sure you stay safe when I’m gone. It won’t suck, I promise.” He said t
he words with a crooked smile, tipping her chin up so she met his eyes as he spoke.
“Why?” It was unfathomable to her. In foster care from the time she was eleven, on her own from the day she turned eighteen and the state no longer provided money to cover her food or clothes, she’d long since accepted that if she wanted something—a house no one could make her leave, a degree in industrial art, a client base—she had to scrap for it by herself. “Nobody’s wanted to take care of me my whole life. Why would you?”
“Because you’re you.”
Unable to help herself, she laughed, the sound mocking, derisive. “Yeah, right.”
He shrugged, the pain back in his eyes. “This is where the trust part comes in. What’s it going to be, Tess?”
Dammit, she’d rather handle rusty scrap metal without gloves than do this, but for the very first time in her life, someone wanted her company on a permanent basis, and not because the state paid for her upkeep. All he wanted her to do was put herself into his hands, into his care.
Terrifying.
Even more terrifying was the thought of holding back, and losing him.
Tension thickened and heated the air around them. Little dots danced at the edges of her vision and she realized she was holding her breath. After a shaky exhalation she took a deep breath, and the scent of him—clean sweat and musk over the harsh tang of no-frills soap—swept through her nostrils, triggering the memory of his unique taste, the silky smooth skin under his wrists, stretched over his hip bones, the underside of his cock. The tension in her muscles eased from her body again. She didn’t know how to do this, but Drew had good hands and limitless patience. He’d catch her if she fell.
“Okay,” she said, with a nod and a small, tremulous smile.
Fierce exultation gleamed in his eyes. He bent his head and brushed his lips over hers, a sultry kiss that started as the merest pressure, just the tantalizing possibility of something more. Then his tongue lazily traced her lower lip and she opened to him, her breath coming faster, mingling with his. She shifted restlessly as the promise in his mouth trickled down her jaw, hardened her nipples and settled between her thighs.
Then he pulled back. Tess waited a few racing heartbeats, then opened her eyes to find hot, possessive emotion surging in his. In his smooth, easy way he slid his hand into the hair at the nape of her neck. “Okay, what?”
“Okay, I’ll take the money to get the air conditioner fixed,” she said.
He began a gentle massage, right at the spot where her neck met her skull, the spot where she held all her stress after hours bent over a sketchpad or a project. A thrill shot down her spine even as her shoulders slackened with pleasure.
“And?”
“Hmmm?” That was all she could get out, given his magic touch on her nape.
Her eyes widened at his pointed glance over his shoulder to the open window. At the same time his other hand slid down her arm to encircle her wrist, where he rubbed his thumb over the quickening thump of her pulse. She felt the throb of blood now leaping against his gentle, unyielding pressure. The dark, hot, implacable look in his eyes dropped her gaze to her wrist captured in the cuff of his fingers.
“I’m sorry I slept with the windows open.” She was proud of her steady voice, even as her heart thudded hard against her breastbone and fresh sweat broke out under her arms and at the small of her back. Please let him have forgotten, please, please let him have forgotten…
“What did I say I’d do if I caught you doing exactly that?”
He hadn’t forgotten.
Suddenly his hands on her body felt less like sensual preparation and more like a devious softening up for an interrogation. She didn’t need to look into his eyes to note the preternatural energy humming under his skin.
“Drew. No.”
“What did I say, Tess? Do you remember the conversation?” The words were liquid, so soft, which was a little scary. Despite the drawl, the sense of humor and the unflinching Southern honor, Drew was anything but soft.
She stayed stubbornly silent through ten pounding heartbeats, twenty, because if she kept quiet, his promise didn’t exist. Thirty more beats passed with her gaze focused resolutely on the place where her pulse pounded against the circle of his fingers. Finally, she surrendered.
“We’d been in bed all day and we’d soaked the sheets even though the AC was on. You said it was on its last legs. I said I didn’t care because I’d just sleep with the windows open. I’d done it before, and I’d do it again.” Unwilling to show fear, she dragged her gaze up to meet his. “And then you said…if I did…you’d spank me until I couldn’t sit for a week.”
With his back to the windows, stark shadows lay across the planes and angles of his face, concealing most of his expression. His eyes, however, were such a pale blue she could see emotion flickering through them, too fast for her to decipher. His bent head and wide shoulders offered her no protection from the moonlight, but she didn’t look away as her heart hammered in her chest and her stomach alternated between circus flip-flops and plummeting to the bottom of her abdomen. And yet at the same time her nipples swelled against the soft material of her tank top and a traitorous heat throbbed in her womb.
In a voice as thick and dark as the still air coalescing into moisture on her skin, he said, “Good thing you don’t have a desk job.”
Not funny.
She stepped back, twisting her head and arm to pull free, but came up short with her back to the wall. “Drew, you can’t possibly mean it. It’s…archaic! It’s crazy!”
He moved closer, boxing her in. “I meant it, Tess. You knew I meant it when I said it.”
Her jaw dropped. A minute ago he was a rational twenty-first century male whose mother had earned her law degree studying nights and weekends, and whose sisters juggled work and kids. That man had disappeared, leaving behind a Drew she recognized only at some level so primitive she hadn’t been aware it existed.
“You need this—”
She gasped, somewhere between astonished and outraged. “I do not!”
His gentle smile almost hid the intractable look in his eye. “Yes, you do, Tess.”
CHAPTER TWO
For the third time in thirty minutes shock ran, electric and searing, through her veins. Suddenly she was as motionless as he was, with no heartbeat, no breathing as she searched his eyes, pale blue and unreadable in the dim light. The hand that had rested lightly on her nape now cupped her cheek, while his thumb brushed her full lips. Then his roughened fingertips trailed along her neck, into the hollow where her collarbones met, then slid down her breastbone before detouring along the lower edge of her ribs and finally dropping to the swell of her hip. He wound his thumb in the string stretched taut there, pulled the thin strip away from her body and slid his fingers into the back of her panties to curve around her bottom.
“You’re trembling.”
“You’re scaring me. Again.” She might have sounded believable if her voice had quavered rather than snapped.
“I’m not scaring you. I’m making you mad,” he said, calling her bluff without a hint of remorse. “You know nothing bad’s gonna happen here. I, on the other hand, came up the street and saw the windows open and half the neighborhood’s Latin Kings drinking and hanging around in Mrs. Delgado’s driveway.”
An impromptu party she hadn’t heard over the music. She turned her head to the side, away from the look in his eyes. “I said I was sorry.”
“Apology accepted, Tess, but you still get the spanking.” His hand tightened on her hip, the pressure constant until she opened her eyes again. He looked back at her, his gaze part wry amusement, part serious intent. “Sometimes pain can feel really, really good.”
A dozen smart-mouthed comebacks trembled on the tip of her tongue, but in the end the agitation roiling inside her kept her from voicing a single one. She shoved at his shoulder and ducked under his arm, hurrying down the stairs and across the peeling linoleum to the kitchen sink. She opened the faucet
as far as it would go. Cold water streamed into the scratched aluminum bowl. She scooped handfuls of water to her mouth, then splashed her face.
He’d lost his mind. That was the only explanation. He was completely insane if he thought she’d let him spank her. Yes, she’d left the windows open, but that was no reason for him to make good on a lazy promise made at the tail end of four hours of sex. Truth be told, they were nowhere near vanilla in bed, but let a Navy SEAL spank her, for God’s sake? He was certifiable!
Except he sounded sane, assured and totally in control.
Expecting him hard on her heels, she shut off the water and turned, but the stairs were empty, the creaky floorboards above her silent. Would he forget about it? He looked haggard with exhaustion, dark smudges under his eyes visible even in the dim light of her room. Maybe if she gave him enough time he’d fall asleep and they could laugh this off in the morning. Or maybe he’d storm down the stairs, drag her to the sofa and blister her butt. Moments passed, then stretched into a minute without sound or movement.
Fine. He could sit up there until he roasted.
Her mind replayed his words…put yourself in my place…not as badly as you scared me…half the neighborhood’s Latin Kings drinking and hanging around in Mrs. Delgado’s driveway…not as badly as you scared me…
Well, that was an accomplishment to put on her résumé. She’d managed to scare a SEAL, an individual trained to handle any circumstance at any time with whatever meager tools and resources he had at hand. She’d scared him.
But she’d known when she wedged opened the windows with a small shim that she wasn’t just dealing with her poverty line life. She was defying the only rule he’d felt strongly enough to voice. Despite his current incarnation as a dominant alpha male, Drew was laid-back, relaxed, beyond tolerant of her unusual hours, jobs, hair color and friends. Besides the windows, he simply let her be. Of course, a highly trained professional special operative in the United States Navy should have more on his mind than fussing over her rainbow hair and shabby wardrobe.
