SEALed Forever

by Mary Margret Daughtridge

  “But studying and proving how smart you were didn’t work?”

  She laughed painfully. “No. I was only five. When I prattled my child’s understanding of all I was absorbing, they laughed or looked embarrassed or told me not to be silly.”

  “For instance…”

  “Okay—like the time the adults were discussing the talents and personality characteristics required by various specialties. I asked what the specialty was for doctors who could see bones and muscles and things under the skin. I thought that was the kind I would be.”

  He could just see her as a little girl—tiny for her age, with huge spice-colored eyes and that look of intense focus she sometimes had—being laughed at because she saw things her own way and asked questions adults couldn’t understand. An amazingly tender awareness of just how special she was filled his chest. He dropped a kiss on her hair.

  “And of course, they told you there were no doctors like that,” he finished for her.

  “Right. Only machines could see inside people.” She shrugged, dismissing something before she said it.

  He was getting a little tired of those shrugs. He wanted to know what she was leaving out. Unlikely as the answer seemed, he asked the question that came to mind. “Can you? See structures under the skin?”

  “Actually, most doctors are good at visualizing anatomy. Some are very good. It really is like they can see inside the body.”

  He noticed she hadn’t quite answered his question. “How about you?”

  Her smile was self-deprecating. “I think all those anatomy books I studied at such a young age warped me. I just developed the skill earlier, and it was almost like I didn’t have to learn anatomy. And I have to admit I do have a great imagination, so it’s not surprising if sometimes… it’s just a great imagination, that’s all.”

  She fell silent for a minute. If he hadn’t been holding her, he wouldn’t have registered the tiny movement of her shoulders. “So you see, my parents were not completely wrong in their assessment. They assumed I would change my mind, and when I didn’t, they tried to help me change it.”

  Good luck with that. He’d already seen that once she set her mind to something, Bronwyn was immovable. “But to take it as far as refusing to help you through medical school?”

  She shrugged. He thought she was leaving unsaid how much their lack of faith had wounded her. “They’re not bad people. In their own way they were trying to keep me from being hurt. They knew more about what I would face in medical school than I did.”

  He stroked her silken hair. It was cool on top, but he could feel the warmth of her coming through it. “What did you learn in medical school—the hard way?”

  “Medical students aren’t treated like human beings—any more than SEALs are, but medical students aren’t being toughened up so they can be sent to war. The schools use intimidation and relentless competition to turn the students into nervous wrecks who won’t question why they are being taught as they are.”

  “Huh. I’ll bet that didn’t work on you. What did you question?” The thought of his tiny troublemaker standing up to the bigwigs brought a tender smile to his face.

  “I asked why the school’s curriculum still required vivisection in dogs. Most medical schools had phased out dissection of living animals. With computer simulations, the same lessons could be taught in humane ways.”

  He went cold inside as he thought about the extraordinary communication and trust between her and Mildred. This woman couldn’t treat an animal like a thing. “Did you still have to…?”

  “I protested. I even started petitions. Finally, to get me out of their hair, the administration made me exempt from the vivisection labs.” She was silent for a moment. “In medical school, they teach you to be distant and professional. They try to make you this objective, emotionless scientist. My parents knew how unsuited I was. It was only later that I realized why the arguments about teaching anatomy through vivisection sounded so specious to me.”

  “Why was that?”

  “It was because the real lesson was: If they wanted to be doctors, the students had to make their interest in science primary, and shelve their capacity to care about a living creature.”

  “But you rejected that.”

  “I did, and I do. But you can see why my parents thought I wasn’t cut out for medicine and believed, if I went to medical school, I would only fail and quite likely embarrass them in the process.”

  He didn’t know if he did see. Bronwyn’s clinical competence was so obvious to him that her parents’ attitude seemed over the top. If he pressed her further right now, though, she’d likely shut down, and he didn’t want her to. God, he didn’t want her to.

  She sighed and then rubbed her cheek against his shirt. “What’s going to happen to her?”

  “Julia, you mean?” It was his turn to sigh. “One step at a time. First we do have to figure out, if we can, how she came—”

  “I know that. I was just thinking. I’ve been sitting here trying to explain to you how I came here. I might feel lost as all get out, looking for where I belong, but I do have two living parents, a living grandmother, a brother… what will Julia feel if she has to grow up never knowing where she came from?… How about you? Where’s your family?”

  “My mom and dad are in Durango. My married sister, her husband, and two kids live in Golden. My one living grandfather has a small horse ranch in the high meadows of the Rockies, near Steamboat Springs.”

  “You obviously love them a lot. I can hear it in your voice. Do you see them much?”

  “I love them. But it’s hard for a SEAL to stay close.”

  “But you’re not a SEAL anymore.”

  He hadn’t told her his civilian status was a cover. He had lied to her and not corrected the lie. And hell, after MacMurtry’s revelations yesterday, maybe he hadn’t lied. Maybe he wasn’t a SEAL. His reasoning was fallacious, and he knew it. It was another problem they’d have to solve when they came to it. “What I am right this minute is a man—who wants you, very much.”

  Bronwyn leaned back against his supporting arm in order to see his face. “You’ve got to promise me you won’t push me to get serious.”

  “Why? You know this is right. You know this is good between us.”

  “It isn’t good. I have too much to do to get myself established here. I don’t need the distraction.”

  “I’m a distraction?” That sounded good to him.

  “Yes.” There it was again. That don’t-mess-with-me look.

  “Look, I know I sprang the marriage thing on you, but this is how the men in my family are. My dad has told the story a million times—how he saw my mother in a Laundromat on the edge of the UC campus and knew, right then, he was going to marry her.”

  “Did she fall in love with him at first sight?”

  “Huh. I never thought to ask her that.”

  She gave him a dry look. “I’ll bet your sister did.”

  He thought of his mother and sister. Sometimes what they laughed and talked about was incomprehensible to him—like the words were English but had been arranged into a different language. He chuckled. “Yeah, she probably did.”

  He had to grin at the told-you-so expression Bronwyn aimed at him through her sparkling eyes. “You are so beautiful,” he said.

  He liked everything about her: her large, wide eyes that he literally thought he could drink from, her ardor for medicine, her willingness to risk everything for the benefit of a child. He made up his mind right then that no matter what it took, he would not let her offering shelter to Julia cause her to lose anything. He liked her short little nose and her smooth legs, and he loved those darling, dainty, cupcake breasts. Even her bare toes (she went barefoot most of the time) were adorable.

  He captured her hand. Against his own deep tan, its whiteness made his heart shake at the thought o
f its fragility. Despite the slender bones, he felt the tempered strength living deep within, the focused intelligence and precision. That thing about her that lightened him suddenly intensified and fed some deep hunger within him.

  Holding her gaze with his, he lifted her hand to his cheek and held it there, then moved it across his lips, relishing out the slick hardness of the nails, the softness of the finger pads. He folded her fingers and ran his lips over the knuckles. She didn’t want to hear how he felt, and he wasn’t sure he had the words anyway—but he would show her, as much and as often as she would let him.

  He turned her palm over to give it the same loving attention. “Let me stay.”

  Bronwyn felt detached, almost voyeuristic, observing her hand being made love to as if that were an end in itself. He held her palm to his nose and frankly inhaled, drawing deep the pleasure of her scent, and then bathed the palm in the warm moisture of his breath, heated by the vital fire within him.

  He licked his tongue in tantalizing passes over the webbing between her ring finger and pinkie and between her ring finger and middle finger.

  The sensation was exquisite.

  She was surrounded by his heat, by the wonderful, hard resilience of the muscles of his arms cradling her, by the smell of cloves and hot flesh.

  Suddenly, she discovered that the arousal she thought had gone away hadn’t. It had simply hit a plateau. It burst into life again, hot, pulsing, needing—stealing her breath.

  “They used to say that there was a special vein that ran from the ring finger straight to the heart,” he told her. “Can I find the way to your heart by doing this?”

  “You can find your way into my bed, that’s for sure.” She lifted her arms to his neck, turning her face up to his.

  “That’s a start.”

  They kissed a long time, stoking the fire of their mutual desires. She moved onto her knees, straddling him to bring their mouths into better alignment. For a few minutes he let her have control of the kiss. He relaxed against the chair’s headrest while she covered his cheeks and forehead with kisses. She kissed his eyelids and ran her tongue across the silken bristle of his lashes. She went back to his mouth and reveled in his hot, dark taste while she dug her fingers into the thick ropy muscles that shaped his neck.

  His big hands slipped under her white cotton top. He pushed it up until he could pull it over her head. Lifting her easily to hold her in place, he slid down the chair until his mouth was level with her breasts. “Been wanting to do this again, ever since I stopped out on the dock.”

  He tongued one nipple in lazy swirls and then lifted her away to admire the puckered and hardened tip, gleaming rosy and wet. He ministered to the other breast and again assessed his handiwork with a hot, blue, possessive gaze. As he looked, her nipples puckered more. He smiled.

  He opened his mouth over the first breast and added the stronger strokes she craved. He suckled in deep pulls that plucked at the hidden seat of pleasure at the junction of her thighs. Heat and pressure built there with every hot tug of his mouth.

  “Brace your arms on the chair back. Need my hands for other things.”

  His hard hands kneaded the globes of her bottom and then pushed her skirt up to her waist. The high cut of her bikini panties admitted his fingers easily. He stroked the silky curls he found there. He pushed the panty further out of his way. With a fingertip he traced the seams of the soft folds. With her legs spread as they were, the panty crotch kept trying to snap back into place, and there wasn’t room for his whole hand.

  After a few minutes he growled in frustration. “The panties have got to go, Bron.”

  Eager to divest herself of any barrier to his touch, Bronwyn sat back on her heels—at least she meant to, but both she and Garth had worked closer to the chair’s edge than she realized. She began to tip over backwards and to fall between his legs. She grabbed his forearms at the same moment he steadied her with his hands at her waist and brought his knees together. In the nick of time, her bottom rested on his rocklike thighs.

  His cheeks had extra color underneath his tan; his nostrils were flared; his features had the taut look of arousal. He looked up at her, his blue eyes lifting at the corners. In a dark voice flat with understated humor, he said, “I’m afraid the chair is not rated for this activity. We’ve pushed it beyond its design limits.”

  Her chest was heaving; her whole body thrummed; her brain was cloudy with arousal. He was just as turned on, judging from the bulge under his fly.

  And he could make a joke.

  It surprised her. It shocked her. It forced a readjustment of all her expectations about him. He was so controlled, so intensely focused on his objectives and so unyielding in the standards he set that she hadn’t guessed he could laugh at his or her clumsiness. The fact that he could laugh let light into a place that had been dark and airless for a long time. It was like a door had opened to another dimension, like the walls had disappeared and suddenly she was in a far larger place.

  With a knowing far deeper than any rational thought, which she was incapable of right that minute anyway, she knew he was a man she might love. In fact, with the first tenuous threads of feeling, she already did.

  Still steadying her, he sat up with the ease of a man who could do a hundred crunches without breaking a sweat. “Put your arms around my neck,” he told her. When she complied, he kissed her long and slow. Then, with one arm cradling her bottom, one arm around her back, he lifted her and stood. Slowly he let her down until she could stand on tiptoes.

  “What is it?” he asked, sensing something had changed.

  “You are in love with me. I mean, you didn’t get all testy and short a minute ago, the way men do when a seduction scene goes south. You really do have something in mind other than a roll in the hay.”

  “Right. If I’d had any sense at all, I wouldn’t have started things in a chair when there’s a perfectly good bed upstairs.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I’m not looking for a quickie—not that I would turn one down. I’m not looking for a one-night stand. I’m looking for real—and forever and forever.”

  Chapter 27

  “Well, if we’re going upstairs to bed, do you want to take Julia up to her crib and let me go out with Mildred for her last potty stop, or do you—”

  He stopped her question with a kiss. “You go on up with the baby. I’ll supervise Mildred. I want to make sure that the new locks are set and working properly. I’ll be up in a minute. What?” he asked at her sudden chuckle.

  “It feels so, I don’t know, so domestic.”

  He winked at her. “That’s the plan. Come on, Mildred. Let’s check the perimeter.”

  “I like this.” Garth said a few minutes later as he took his wallet from his hip pocket and laid it on the dresser. “It feels like a wedding night.” He unbuttoned his shirt while he kicked off his shoes. The open shirt revealed a swath of smooth, brown skin. He shrugged off the shirt and opened his pants all in one coordinated movement, and there he stood.

  Bronwyn’s breath failed her. Her heart shook in deep thuds.

  And she smiled too. He was not unaware of his masculine beauty and not averse to showing it off to impress her. She could name every muscle and every bone in his body, but she had no word for the sleek, all-encompassing male perfection he embodied. His penis jutted full and proud, dark with arousal.

  With the masculine grace that characterized him, he walked over to the bed and rested one knee on the sheet. He looked down at her, a smile playing around his lips.

  “Do we need to have the protection talk?” he asked. “I’ve been thoroughly checked out, and I’m good. And as of this moment, I’m in a committed, monogamous relationship. But I have protection with me.”

  “I went off the pill after…”

  “Fine.” He picked up his pants and drew several packets f
rom the pocket and set them on the bedside table. “Light on or off?”

  “On, please.”

  He got between the sheets and folded her carefully into his arms, surrounding her in his warmth and smooth skin and the scents of citrus and clove and aroused male.

  “I want to go slow, Bronny. I want to make it last and last. And I want to please you. But, God, I want you so much.” He stroked her hair with fingers that trembled slightly. “See, I’m shaking like a kid. Like this is my first time.”

  Her heart went soft at his admission of vulnerability. Funny, how she could actually feel a warm, melty feeling just under her sternum. She reached up to touch his hair, relishing the thick pelt and the velvety prickle at his nape. “Go slow next time.”

  He raised up over her and stroked her whole body with his while she spread her hand on the skin of his back. Stretching, she cupped his buttocks, trying to pull him into closer contact.

  He began dropping kisses with every pass. Her nose, her forehead, her cheeks, her chest. Marauding playfully, never letting her guess where he would strike next until she was giggling and breathless. And opening her legs, he lifted her hips, trying to bring her body into contact with his penis.

  Abruptly he was serious. He took her face in his hands as he let himself settle into the cradle of her thighs. “Oh, Bronny, Bronny. I’ve waited forever for this,” he whispered. “You feel so absolutely right.”

  He kissed her deeply, melding their mouths for long minutes, with intermittent forays to her ears, her throat, her breasts until she was twisting and surprising little moans came from her throat.

  His fingers found the place between her thighs. “You’re wet,” he said. “So hot, and silky. I’m going to make you mine now. Mine. Do you understand?”

  She shivered. She didn’t know if she nodded in agreement or in dissent. She was past anything but wanting his hardness filling her now. He positioned himself at the entrance to her body and pushed slowly within.