by Loren, Celia
By Celia Loren
Copyright © 2016 Hearts Collective
All rights reserved. This document may not be reproduced in any way without the expressed written consent of the author. The ideas, characters, and situations presented in this story are strictly fictional, and any unintentional likeness to real people or real situations is completely coincidental.
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SOAK
A Navy SEAL Mormon Taboo Romance
By Celia Loren
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Epilogue
Prologue
Chloe’s heart beat fast, as if it were in sync with the choir above. She’d never noticed it before—the way you could feel the vibrations from the service, rippling through the chapel walls. But then, she noticed lots of things she’d never noticed before, in present company.
Ryder inched up behind her, engulfing her first with his scent, then with his arms. When he pressed his jeans forward into the back of her dress, she could feel the forbidden. He began to rub her shoulders. Then, his fingers scurried up the fine vertebrae of her neck. Ryder leaned in, and his hot breath sent a tingle down her spine. The sensation resolved in the hot, warm place she knew it would, the secret space between her legs. She didn’t mean to, but a low sound escaped her lips.
“Ryder,” she protested—or pretended to. “Not here.” But his mouth had already made the decision. He kissed the spot in the nook of her collarbone (“her power button,” he’d once joked), and the warmth in his lips made the sensation again. She put her palms on the cool walls of the church basement, and spread her fingers wide. Above them, the Tabernacle Choir crescendo’d again—and once more, the music seemed to synchronize precisely with the rhythms of her own body. Her breathing. Her pulse.
Ryder took a rough, strong hand and latched himself onto her waist. She found herself returning the gesture, pressing her palms against the wall so her ass could find purchase against his jeans. There was that forbidden again. Thick and assertive as a piece of pipe. She pressed harder. Now, it was Ryder’s turn to moan.
“Yeah. Here,” her man said. And it wasn’t a suggestion. He flipped her around in one fell move, lithe as a dancer but strong as a bear. Chloe’s head knocked against the wall, but she felt no pain.
She drank him in. The light was low—a few tapered candles and one finicky fixture by the door—but it was still stupidly obvious, how handsome he was. Ryder Strong was a hulking six four. His dark hair was cropped close to his head, in an overgrown buzz cut. His evenly tanned skin had something in common with exquisitely-burned butter on white toast. She put a cool palm on his chest, felt his heart beating through the army green t-shirt. Felt the muscles flexing to her touch. Then came that perfect smirk, made so perfect by those perfect, pink lips. God, he could have been an angel. Well, almost—Ryder would have been clean-shaven, if he wasn’t the type who needed to shave twice a day.
Chloe let herself collapse into the grey pools of his eyes, which seemed to radiate want. All her defenses fell. She nodded, quickly, and within seconds Ryder’s taut hands had crept to his own hips. His shirt was off in one quick jerk, and Chloe was forced to recalibrate at the sight of those bowed muscles, those night-black tattoos coiling about his biceps. She raised her chin—he dove in to kiss her. Before she’d even realized what she was doing, her own fingers had wandered to his jeans.
When Ryder kissed her, he put his hands on the side of her face—which was a gesture Chloe loved, having seen it in so many old movies. He held her like a prized possession. And gently, too, like she could break. Yet when their bodies made contact in other places, all bets were off. That was how she wanted it now. The walls vibrated again; the sounds of the faithful sinking from standing into their seats. As if urged by their motion, Chloe smiled coyly and began to sink to her knees.
“Oh, man,” Ryder said, grinning. For a split second, he looked like a little boy on Christmas. But then the Navy SEAL in him returned. Her fingers were sweating as she fumbled with the zip of his jeans, but Ryder provided a guiding force. He put a hand on the back of her head and pressed her gently.
“Easy,” Chloe laughed, but it was more for her own benefit than his. She actually made herself afraid sometimes, with how badly she wanted this man. The zipper fell open. His throbbing cock sprang forward, eager as she was. She was drunk on his smoothness, his size. This was the first manhood she’d ever gotten to see, and it was still so strange to her how much she enjoyed handling it. Especially given all the horror stories she’d been hearing for years from her girlfriends at BYU, who seemed chiefly concerned with how best to endure sex, as opposed to enjoy it.
Ryder raised his arms and slipped his meaty hands behind his head. Chloe tilted forward on her knees, supplicant, and then took him in her mouth. She wrapped her lips around his shaft, careful not to smudge her light, clear gloss. Then, she started running her tongue up and down, over the throbbing expanse of him. Ryder sighed. Chloe started to suck. She took her little precious virgin hands and dug her fingers into the rippling flesh of Ryder’s bare ass, tugging him deeper. She craved closeness. It didn’t seem like it would be possible to get too close.
But it was all of her body she was slave to, not just her mouth. Though Ryder was beginning to buck overhead, though his face was taking on that fixed, frustrated quality she’d seen a few times before when he’d reached the ceiling of pleasure...she needed to feel more. His paw-like hands on her breasts, which didn’t feel small in his caress. The weight of him, on her body. She loved best when he hovered over her for a few moments, slack. He was always worried he would crush her (he’d called her “Bird Bones,” more than on
ce), but Chloe loved the feeling right before his weight became too much to bear. Being pressed into the earth by lust. Talk about romantic.
“I need you,” she said, flicking her tongue fast over the tip of his cock. He strained under her fingers, like a flower toward light.
“But Chloe, the whole congregation is upstairs right now. Your parents.”
“I don’t even care.”
“Of course you care,” he said sharply. For a second, it seemed like the mood was spoiled. But he was still rock-hard in her grip.
“You could just soak for a second,” she heard herself say. Chloe’s heart started racing even faster at the prospect. Feeling Ryder inside, for precious, illicit seconds, was like the enhanced version of his lying on top of her. As much as she hungered for friction, for passion, to be fucked...it was almost enough, just to be held. Just to be under his spell.
Ryder grinned, so she could see the whole top row of his wildly white, perfect teeth.
“Okay,” he grunted. “But just for a second.”
Then the organ made sound above them again. It felt like a tacit encouragement.
Chapter One
“Girls! Girls!” cried Mrs. Christiansen, her voice the height of shrillness. “Is everyone decent? They’ll be here any second!”
It was perhaps the fourth time that morning that she’d made this declaration, so Chloe—eldest “girl” in the Christiansen mix, at twenty-five—rolled her eyes. “Mother, we’re fine!” she called, from the bedroom she shared with her younger twin sisters, Celeste and Marie. The twins continued tittering, braiding and re-braiding sections of their long, straw-blonde hair. Chloe returned her own gaze to the library book in her lap. Madame Bovary.
This was until they heard their mother’s anxious trot ascending the steps. Chloe had been warned before about reading “morally dubious,” literature, and her father, a church Elder, would be prone to make a fuss if he got wind of her latest literary secret. So Chloe jammed Flaubert into her top dresser drawer and smoothed her blonde bangs down, she tugged at the hem of her paisley skirt. By the time her mother’s plump frame had filled the bedroom doorway, all three of the Christiansen sisters looked starry-eyed and affable. Just like good Mormon girls.
“I don’t mean to be so nervous,” their mother confessed. “It’s just been so hard, not knowing.”
“There’s no reason to be antsy, Mama. He’s still your firstborn son.”
“Yes, yes, I know.” Mrs. Christiansen frowned. “But he’s never brought home a friend before.”
Celeste paused in her primping to shoot her mother an accusing eye. “That’s not true, Mama! Remember when he got back from Mission, in Guatemala? He brought Elder Timothy and Elder Joseph to dinner! Those guys he bowls with”
Mrs. Christiansen frowned, a shadow falling across her typically jolly face. “You know what I mean, girls. He’s never brought someone home who’s not of the church.”
Marie, who preferred to think her family was more secular-savvy than Chloe had ever found them to be, made a big show of snorting and rolling her eyes. “It’s not 1900 anymore, Mama,” she sighed, securing her long french braid with a piece of red ribbon. “We’re still allowed to be friends with non-Mormons, last I checked.”
Mrs. Christiansen opened her mouth to retort, but it was then that the doorbell chimed, briefly saving everyone from another tiff. This was what happened when you got four adult women to share a house, Chloe mused to herself. Endless bickering.
Not that the living arrangements were Chloe’s choice, per se. After graduating summa cum laude from BYU two springs past, she’d been idling her time around Provo, having boomeranged back into the house she grew up in. At school, she’d been a Geography major with a minor in French and Italian; it had certainly always been the plan to leave Utah and see the world. But as soon as she’d received her diploma, Chloe’s world had begun to feel small again. Promise-less. Her close friends had scattered; many of them had left to serve missions for the Church in distant countries, and others had immediately started families. She sought out great books to replace them. And as often as Chloe dreamt of jumping off a plane and into an adventure, the idea of a Mormon mission had never appealed to her exactly. She loved the church she was raised in, but had never quite taken to the idea of instructing other people to believe what she believed—unlike her brother John. That anointed firstborn son.
John was only a year older than Chloe, but the distance felt astronomic. They’d been thick as thieves as children (to use her mother’s idiom), but at some point in their teenage years, John had changed. His sweet temper had burnt into a rage—something Chloe attributed to the few summers he’d spent on extended camping trips with his Boy Scouts troop. Her family and her church had always been proponents of the organization, but whenever John went off with his little gang he’d come home mocking certain church customs, as if he’d been teased by his peers for believing. It was also in the secular boys’ company that he got his first taste of masculinity, learning to fend for himself in the wild. However the erosion happened, by the time they’d reached sixteen and seventeen, Chloe and her brother had become strangers to each other. It surprised no one in the community when John left Utah to accept a scholarship to the U.S. Naval Academy.
That was seven or eight years ago, though it felt a lifetime. John had graduated from school, served a Church mission in Guatemala, and then managed to shock the entire Utah community by applying for a leadership position with the Navy SEALS, in active combat duty. Chloe still remembered the day he’d told the family he was leaving for Little Creek, where he planned to complete advanced training.
“We thought you’d gotten this out of your system, son!” her father had shouted. (And her father never shouted. He was known in the community as the “especially level-headed” Elder Johannes.) “Don’t you see it’s time to put all the valor chasing aside? Settle down. Start a family. Observe the scripture. That’s your task.”
“I’m loyal to my country,” John had replied. Their mother had started sobbing, to the distress of all the younger Christiansen kids—from eight-year-old Martin to the twins. For despite his on-again/off-again relationship to the Church, John had always been her babied favorite.
No amount of tears had been able to sway him from the plan, and within six months the beloved son and brother had left training for a special assignment in Aleppo, near the Turkey/Syrian border. (Chloe could imagine the place precisely, from her Geography classes.) John Christiansen was to lead a special team on a secret mission, something to do with oil fields, ISIL, and Syrian freedom-fighters. They were made to sever contact. No one uttered her brother’s name outside the context of a prayer list for weeks and weeks. That is, until a G.I. showed up on the family’s front steps with the dreaded, yet somehow inevitable-feeling news: John Christiansen had been wounded in the line of service. He would be returned to Provo as soon as it was possible to move him, along with another SEAL from his corps, who had also been discharged. The two men were the only survivors from their mission.
Thus preceded a blur of hospital visits. Mrs. Christiansen’s famous blonde hair had turned white in the span of those weeks. John would lose his left leg below the knee, and had suffered permanent hearing loss on the same side. The military bestowed him with honors and medals commending his bravery, but Chloe found each gesture immeasurably hollow. She became angry, and withdrawn. Angry at the world, angry at her family, angry at herself. How was it that this cruelty hadn’t been prevented? And no matter how distant she’d felt her brother to be in the months leading up to his last departure, what sort of God could reject his tremendous sacrifice, his commitment? A youth cut down in his prime, and for what? In no small way, news of John’s misfortune had stalled Chloe’s ability to plan for her own future. For if the world could be so reckless with bravery, who was she to say that a quiet life in Provo wasn’t, in fact, the right path?
She heard them entering through the foyer, and forced herself back into the prese
nt. Her sisters had already ambled down the stairs, after pinching their cheeks and wetting their lips like eighteenth-century debutantes. (Mrs. Christiansen technically forbade make-up.) Rumor had it that the mysterious SEAL accompanying her brother was a stone cold fox. Chloe hadn’t met him yet, having opted out of many of the more recent hospital visits, when both men were apparently “up and able to move around.” She wanted to see John in the familiar setting of their family home, not in that cold, sterile hospital room.
She took a deep breath, smoothed her hair flat once more, and began to tramp down the stairs. She could hear John’s voice, even below the high-pitched hum of her sisters and her mother as they fussed over his clothes. She supposed her father was parking the car.
“Is that my Chloe?” John called. She felt her heart buoy, like a sail. Chloe smiled, then raced the rest of the way down the stairs.
“Johnny!” she choked, collapsing into the familiar hug. Though the military had basically tripled his muscle mass, she thought she could still feel the gawky remnants of a former Boy Scout under all that manliness. John grinned. He was hobbling some on the temporary prothesis, and a big bandage encircled the left side of his head, but still, he was home. She kissed his cheek.
“Family, now I want you to meet someone,” John said. He took an unsure step backwards on the carpet, so his crutch clattered against the radiator. Chloe bit her lip. Now that they were finally free of the dreadful hospital surroundings, she’d been looking forward to a nice, long, personal chat with her brother. She wanted to hear from him just how and why he thought his misfortune had manifested. Her mother had clearly planned on having the son to herself, too; they both frowned a little in the direction of the mysterious visitor.
“Celeste, Marie, Mama, Chloe, Martin” John said, in a lofty voice. “This is Ryder Strong,” he beckoned to the shadowy figure beyond the stoop, who lumbered into the door frame with all the grace of a snowman. Chloe prepared to judge the stranger. Ryder Strong, she thought. What the hell kind of a name is that?
