by Angel Payne
Because the mind-blowing sex didn’t confuse things enough, their physical chemistry wasn’t the only perk of having the man around all the time. Crazy, what happened when a girl owned a house with fifteen rooms and had the Energizer bunny hanging around, ready to screw her in all of them. With every new space they visited in his sexy version of a property tour, Kellan was also swift to notice everything that needed repairing there. Within the next hour, she’d hear him hammering, power drilling, tinkering, or even cursing his way through the fix. If she came in to see what was happening, he’d simply flash that stomach-flipping grin and give her a cocky wink before throwing his focus back into the work
She’d left him doing exactly that to a ceiling fan in one of the upstairs guest rooms, tripling her guilt about lying to him when she left. It hadn’t been a total fib; she really did run to the bank and the grocery store. Could she help it if Franz’s place was on the way home, and she had an extra bag of groceries thanks to some good sales? Could she also help it if Kellan hadn’t been here since his ride over a day ago, nudging her a tad over the “reasonably worried” line about Tait? The guy had been riding with Leo a few times, but they had to skip the outing today due to Leo’s fencing match. That left a lot of hours open for Tait to drink himself into another stupor—a potentially dangerous one, judging from Kell’s assessment of how frequently the guy had been hitting the juice lately.
She rang the doorbell and knocked.
Three times each.
Damn. Either Tait wasn’t here or really was shitfaced again. Both theories compelled her to fish out her own key to the place. Since she and Leo came over often to check on things for Franz, she could let herself in with one easy turn.
As she crossed the living room, she peered around in wonder. Though Tait had been the only guy actually living here, she expected the place to resemble the wake of a hurricane. Every day, Leo demonstrated the housekeeping nightmare even one male could create.
A deeper frown took over. While the minimal mess was a pleasant change, her perusal didn’t include a Sergeant Bommer sighting, either. The three bedrooms and den, all reflecting the Franzen family’s taste in comfortable island décor, were also empty.
She moved into the kitchen to put away the groceries. Still no sign of the man.
Checking her phone confirmed the time, four o’clock, which meant she’d been gone nearly an hour. She estimated she had another fifteen to twenty minutes before Kellan started his protective freak-out, so that was how long she’d wait, too.
Or…maybe not. What were her intentions if Tait showed up? She couldn’t shoot the breeze about the weather, which had been eighty and unchanged since the storm three nights ago. If she started to meddle, would the men appreciate it or resent it? Was she plowing her nose somewhere it didn’t belong?
Just when she’d decided on a yes in answer to that question, car tires crunched on gravel outside. As the engine cut, Lani pulled in a breath with the intent of calming herself, but her choppy exhalation accomplished the opposite.
She stood in the middle of the living room, attention on the front door. And waited for what felt like an eternity.
“Hokulani?”
“Ahhh!”
Her yelp filled the room. Though his inquiry was quiet, its issuance from three feet behind her was as startling as a scorpion.
“Are you okay?”
“I will be after my heart climbs out of my throat.” She stepped back before she could help herself. The shock of his ninja-style entrance from the lanai was only half the cause. His utter resplendence formed the other half. Even in board shorts that fit him way too well and a blue V-neck tee that hugged his body even better, the man seemed like a half-god sent from another realm. His gaze matched the late afternoon sun for depth. His hair, a little better combed today, still made her fingers tingle to touch it. And his mouth, luscious and smiling…ohhhh no; too dangerous; don’t go there. No use studying the strong column of his neck, either. Or how the masses of his biceps pushed from the short sleeves of his shirt. Or how those shorts defined things so perfectly from his waist down…
Thank God he wasn’t at a sudden loss for words.
“Sorry.” He gave up an awkward laugh, betraying how much he meant it. “When I saw the unfamiliar car outside, I had no idea who was here.”
“So you decided to get the bad-ass warrior jump on them.” Teasing him brought back a welcome wave of control.
He grinned. “Something like that.”
A longer-than-comfortable silence descended. She glanced up, only to see that his stare was just as fixed on her as before. So much for regaining composure. “So.” She twisted her lips. “Are you okay?”
“You’re stealing my lines, dreamgirl.”
Oh God. He hadn’t forgotten his drunken nickname for her. And just her luck, it sounded much better when he was sober. Dangerously better. Low and silken and…intimate.
How the hell could the man be amazed that his partner had gotten horizontal with her inside a couple of hours? Kellan probably learned the technique from him. It was all she could do not to fantasize about letting him croon that word again, down the length of her neck. In her ear. Against her lips…her breasts…her abdomen…and lower…
You are going to Hell, Hokulani. And your panties are going to be soaked when you get there, thanks to your wicked yearnings for two men at the same time.
She needed to refocus. Fast. Needed to think of boring things like…paying the bills. Cleaning out the storm gutters. Picking snails off the rose bushes. Going to the bank and fending off Dexter Greene’s skeevy invitations for dinner. Grocery shopping.
“Groceries!” she blurted.
“Excuse me?” Tait exposed his crooked canine in a curious half-smile.
“That’s—errrm—why I—” While nodding toward the kitchen, she nervously twisted the ends of her summer scarf. “I just had some extra groceries and stopped by to share.”
“You had ‘extra groceries’? With a kid like Leo in the house?”
She winced. “All right, you got me. Maybe I was checking in on you. Just a little.”
Only when he chuckled again did she realize she was tensing for a different reaction. Based on what she knew of Franz, these Special Forces men were stubborn, prideful, and secretive. The traits weren’t character flaws; they were job essentials. By coming here, she’d pushed at the first two and shattered the third with Tait. But the man actually smiled wider before replying to her.
“Guess I can’t blame you, after the sloppy first impression I gave.”
“Or the fight you had with your best friend the morning after?” she countered. “Because of me?”
His smile dissolved. “You think you caused this?” He shook his head. “Stop it. Right now. This is a bigger mess than what you see, Hokulani. It started before we got here. Way before.”
She let a meaningful pause go by. “It started with Luna?”
His jaw went granite hard. “He told you about her?”
“Only because I asked.” She caught him by the forearm as he wheeled toward the lanai. “You called me by her name,” she blurted, “when you were still blotto on my couch. But you sounded so tormented, so I had to know.”
“Now you do.” He grabbed her fingers with his free hand and pushed them away. “Happy?”
She let him escape to the porch. After he’d stood out there a long minute, his posture so proud but his profile tautening by the second, she walked out to join him. “What is it about me,” she finally asked with soft care, “that brings her back for you?”
He snapped his head at her. Grief, desperation, and confusion flashed out from his gaze. “Nice follow-up, lady. Was Slash not so inclined to answer it, or did you want to save it for this special occasion?”
She let his words fall into another long silence. At last she asserted, “You’re off the clock here, Sergeant. There’s no answer required. I never asked Kellan to answer that, nor are you required to.”
He
pulled in an unsteady breath. “So…how’d you even know to ask it? Is there some cool mind-reading algorithm out there these days? Maybe a magical quiz in Cosmo, ‘Just How Fucked-Up is the Guy-Next-Door’?”
She attempted an empathic smile while moving out to the railing. It faded as she neared him. His bitterness was a thin front for the loneliness that palpably rolled off of him, jerking hard at the center of her chest. Too bad he wouldn’t be on the island long enough to know that “magic” wasn’t a word one tossed around so casually on Kauaˋi—in the good and bad ways. She’d experienced enough of both to know.
“When my parents were still alive and the B and B was running, we’d sometimes have movie stars who came to stay.” She relayed it while gazing over the Franzens’ little garden, with the gate to the beach path decorated with hand-painted pictures from the kids through the years. The flagstone trail led between two dunes to the ocean, full of azure tranquility today. “You look at me like Leo used to gawk at the celebrities. Like I’m not real. It gets worse when I stand a certain way. It gets really bad when I yell at you.”
He stunned her by setting a laugh free. “Yeah. That makes sense.” The next moment, he grimaced again. The look hardened before he stalked away a couple of steps. “My beauty always loved yelling at me.”
Lani chose respectful silence once more, though the restraint was agonizing. The sight of his spine, so stiff in his inner struggle, made her long to run and press herself there, wrapping as much of her comfort around him as she could. She yearned to pull his grief out of him if only for a little while…
When she teetered on giving into the impulse, he turned around. He’d pulled out his phone, and swiped the screen as he walked back over. Without a word, he set it down on the table, exposing the home picture.
Lani gasped.
With the exception of the dyed streaks in her hair and the enviable figure with the lithe legs, the woman could be her sister. The photo’s smiling subject even had luminous, near-silver eyes.
“Sorry,” he murmured. “Guess I haven’t been subtle with the oh-god-a-ghost gawks, though maybe you understand now.”
“Just a little.” She didn’t pull back on the sarcasm. “This is…a little weird.”
“You think?” His matching irony brought a surprising dose of comfort. “I hope this also explains why I went all John McClane on Kell the other morning.”
She slanted him a wry smirk. “While Kellan is as hot as Alan Rickman, it’s understandable.”
He blinked at her. “You know I have to officially fall down and worship you now. You actually got the Die Hard reference.”
“Duh. I live with a sixteen year-old male. Besides,” —she lifted her brows expectantly— “at the risk of being dork fan girl at large, that movie has Alan Rickman.”
He grimaced again, this time in a way that made her giggle. “Really? He’s always the bad guy.”
“Watch it! Snape was not the bad guy.”
Their moment of humored relief was just that, a moment. His mien descended back into grim territory before he muttered, “And…you’re a Hogwarts fan, too. Figures.”
Change of subject, take two.
She hitched herself up onto the lanai rail then straddled it and leaned against the support post. She’d worn a full ankle-length skirt for her errands, so the fabric made it possible to reclaim her regular spot from the days she used to hang out here to watch the sunset with the Franzen kids. “All right, you’ve got the four-one-one on where I just was. Where were you today, Sergeant Bommer?”
He kept up the scowl, though his eyes began to smile again. “We’ve traded McClane and Potter references, Hokulani. I’m just Tait from now on, okay?”
“Fair enough.” She let a little smile sneak across her lips, too. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”
He dipped his head in a semi-knightly bow. “I was at the esteemed Kekaha Boys Academy.”
The smile dissolved. She nearly fell off the railing. “Leo’s school? Why?”
“There was a fencing match today.”
“I know. The match he ordered me not to attend, to the point of threatening to fake malaria if I did.”
He shrugged. “Don’t take it personally. He was having heebs about the match. The only reason I got an invite was because of the strategy we discussed during yesterday’s ride. He went up against some Dursley who’s been antagonizing him.”
“Parker Smythe,” she supplied. “Though ‘Dursley’ would be a great surname for the kid.” She wished his tribute to the boy wizard’s world, even the scheming bully from it, made her feel better about referencing Leo’s nemesis.
“Yeah, him.” A full smile finally took over the man’s face. At the same time, the sun broke into the lanai, highlighting every mesmerizing curve of his mouth. “The strategy worked, by the way. Leo won. You know, he’s really good.”
“So his coach tells me.” She tossed a perturbed glance. “But as mentioned, the brat threatens to disown me if I show up at any of his matches.”
He slipped a roguish quirk over his grin. As if he needed any help making those lips more enticing. “That’s because Kalea is usually there, too.”
“Kalea? His little friend from the rec center social nights? Ohhhh, how nice. She’s so sweet and—what?” She fired the question in response to the way he scratched his temple and pursed his lips, holding in a laugh. “What?”
“Errrmm…she’s not such a ‘sweet little friend’ anymore.”
She jolted to an upright position—though wasn’t sure she was ready to fire her next words. “What do you mean?”
He folded his arms with unnerving calm. “I mean that after we got off the horses yesterday, the kid wanted to talk about condom choices.”
She fell back against the pole. “Oh my God.”
“Chill out; it’s okay. It was handled.”
She widened her eyes again. “Handled? The condoms?”
“No. The talk.”
“So you just talked to him about condoms?”
“Well, yeah…among other things. I gave him a bunch of pretty heavy shit to think about. Manhood. Accountability. The responsibility of being a girl’s first lover.”
“Ohhhh, God.” She planted her head in her hand. He did not help her tension by laughing again.
“Lani. It’s okay. He’s a bright kid. He got the message. I’m fairly sure you won’t be encountering a stampede of Trojans in his drawer for a few more years to come.”
She swung her gaze out toward the water. Though the sunset wouldn’t be in full bloom for several hours, the rays on the water, brilliant orange and amber upon the cobalt waves, were a welcome soother for her whirling thoughts. “Mahalo,” she finally murmured. “Thank you…for being there for him.” She threw over another sarcastic smile. “Can’t say I appreciate the image of finding condoms in my little brother’s room, but I’m still really grateful.”
He lowered his arms and braced his hands on the back of a patio chair. “I’m probably the one who should be thanking you, missie.”
“Huh?”
He hitched a fast shrug. “I wasn’t the most lined-up guy when we first got here. But Leo’s been good medicine.” His features grew reflective as the wind kicked up, tugging at the edges of his hair. “Actually, with the exception of the night I barely remember and that crap-fest of a hangover, the last five days have been great therapy.”
Warmth surged through her chest, even gathering a little behind her eyes. She climbed off the rail, rushed over and pulled Tait into a hug before she could talk herself out of it. “I’m glad,” she rasped into his shoulder, which smelled so clean and masculine, like cedar-infused soap.
“Me, too.” She felt the words, equally sincere, vibrate through him. To her ongoing surprise, he returned her embrace, swathing her in strength that was so like Kellan’s but heat that was different, too. Kellan was a volcano explosion, searing and intense; Tait was like magma, forceful and fierce…and demanding permanency. And maki
ng it so tempting to accept.
She was in trouble. Her heart fast-forwarded by at least ten beats. Her muscles softened against him. And other places in her body, those intimate and secret places, puddled with hot, enlivened need.
Stupid move, Hokulani. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
So why did it continue to feel like one of the best things she’d done in her life?
He finally pulled away, though kept his head dipped so she met his gaze through the fringe of his sinfully long lashes. Could this ordeal get any harder?
“For the record, what’s going down between you and Kell is solely between you two. It’s none of my business; never should have been. You can thank Leo for that, too. He’s got a damn good head on his shoulders. If even half that sense comes from you, then I’m going to trust that you’re okay with your Slash-olate chip cookie.”
She gave him her first gut reaction, an incredulous giggle. “My what?”
The ends of his lips curled up. “Come on. You know what a Slash-olate chip cookie is. A tasty nibble for a while, but no way in hell will he stick around to be the whole meal.”
Her mirth faded. The crack should have pissed her off. Yeah, she wanted to be angry, not struggling against the sadness that filled her heart, instead. “Who says I have room for a ‘meal,’ Sergeant?”
His eyes darkened to dark bronze as she called him by rank again. The rest of his face went taut, too. He’d gotten her firm message, which should’ve made her feel better, but dipped her deeper into frustration. Nothing she could do now; the damage was delivered. She steeled herself for the “T-Bomb” he’d pull out of his personality missile silo in retaliation.
