Soak (A Navy SEAL Mormon Taboo Romance)

by Loren, Celia

  “Why weren’t you looking?!” The pain bloomed then, in her right wrist. She struggled to a sitting position. Chloe had taken plenty of spills with grace, but had managed never to break or twist anything while skating. Perhaps her luck had run out.

  “Let me see that, baby,” her mother tutted. From the other sides of the rink, the Christiansens began to flock to the scene of the accident. Ryder, Chloe saw, was also rising slowly. He flexed his left leg to and fro, gingerly.

  “You had surgery on that knee?” Chloe asked. Ry nodded, and grimaced.

  “Let’s get you kids back to the lobby,” her father said, assuming command of the moment.

  Great. Now, she’d be quarantined with the very person she needed to avoid most. So much for outracing shame.

  “My bad,” Ryder murmured, as the whole family moved in concert to help the injured skaters towards the exit. Chloe could see his breath in the air. Celeste faltered under one of her sister’s arms, and for a second, Chloe and Ry’s bodies sagged against one another, forming an ungainly V shape. Though they wore several layers apiece to shield themselves from the cold, for a moment she thought she imagined she could feel Ryder’s blood racing in his veins. Perhaps he felt shame, too.

  “It could have happened to anyone,” she heard herself say, generously. They were guided onto a plastic bench and told to “take it easy.” Sweet little Martin offered to fetch them hot chocolates, and after a moment’s “debate” between her parents (“should we take them to the hospital?” “Surely it’s not that serious”), they were abandoned, with half-hearted, piteous smiles. It was too important a trip for the family to give up on. Even John was on the ice, using a special-made walker with blades where wheels might be. He moved slow on his new prosthetic leg, but he looked jubilant enough in the blinding white of the rink.

  Once the hubbub had died down and their respective pains had become manageable, Chloe tried to avoid looking at Ryder. If only she hadn’t left her book in the car, then they wouldn’t have to speak. The danger could be kept at bay. But alas:

  “Listen,” Ryder blurted. I’m sorry again.”

  “It’s totally fine.”

  “I shouldn’t have been so gung-ho.”

  “Seriously, no worries.”

  “You’re the king of street hockey in New York, you figure: I can ice skate. Same principles.”

  “Not exactly.”

  To her pleasure, this remark made Ryder belly-laugh for some reason. He sank an inch or two toward her on the narrow bench, so she could sense the faintest edge of his body heat. Chloe felt a ripple move through her own frame, from her shins to the backs of her ears. She felt violently hot, and then violently cool.

  “You ever play hockey, ballerina? Or you more of a...ballerina?”

  “Why do you call me that?” She could no longer help it; some part of her disobedient body rotated her knees, so she faced her nightmare on the bench. His sea-grey eyes were merry. Light.

  “I don’t know. I guess you look like a ballerina to me. My idea of a ballerina.”

  “And what does that include?”

  “I don’t know.” Now it was Ryder’s turn to ripple. It was cold in the rink, sure, but it had to be more than coincidence that his cheeks went tomato-red at the same moment hers did. He glanced at the floor.

  She glanced at the floor. Silence reigned for another few moments, and Chloe’s heart began to pound. She was aware of how much she wanted to be talking to him. More, she conceded, than she wanted to be locked away in some tower where no tempting boy could test her faith.

  “You’re very graceful,” he said, in a quiet voice she’d never heard him use before. “You move a little like a swan. But at the same time, I get the idea that you used to have an awkward phase.”

  “Gee, thanks!”

  “No, I mean like—” Ryder blew air through his lips, shrugged his masculine shoulders. “It seems like you don’t realize certain things. About the way you look.”

  Was this a heart attack? It sort of felt like how elders in her community had described heart attacks. Chloe began blinking rapidly. Her breath was arriving in rapid, shallow bursts. She tried to conceal this fact from Ryder, who was suddenly a few inches closer to her on the bench. She smelled his smell.

  “And how do I look, exactly?” Chloe managed to respond. The words seemed to come from some unknown place within. Gwen had spent years trying to teach her best friend the mechanics of “flirting,” and Chloe had spent as much time insisting she was an un-teachable pupil. And yet—this voice she spoke in now, it knew something the rest of her didn’t. It was deep and coy and prepared for the answer she both dreaded and craved.

  Ryder threw his head back as if he were about to belly laugh. For one sick second, Chloe feared that the bubble would burst. “I’m totally joking,” he was about to say. Or make some stupid jab at Mormonism, again. Heart attack, heart attack, heart attack...

  But the laugh didn’t come. Instead, Ryder leaned a little further into her personal space—and to the delight of the new voice, Chloe did not move away. He half-whispered his next words into her ear.

  “Look. I’m tired of this game,” he said, in his gravelly way. “Chloe Christiansen, if you don’t know, now you know: once you realize how hot you are, you will be a force to be reckoned with.”

  A decent and pious part of her wanted to rear back, wanted to slap this offending, low-speaking devil. But it was a small part. The mass of Chloe had been consumed by the confident voice. For no sooner had Ryder’s words slid into her ear than the ripple returned in full force. Only this time, it began in her ear, and darted straight to her most secret space, where it radiated warmth. Chloe was suddenly afraid to shift on the bench, knowing that if she did she’d be forced to admit to herself that her panties were soaking wet.

  “Kids!” Ryder and Chloe sprang apart. Mrs. Christiansen was thankfully too giddy from skating to make any comment on the proximity of her young charges. Still, Chloe felt the shame rain back down.

  “How are our bruised bodies feeling?” her mother squealed. They both answered “Fine!” in suspicious unison. Ryder, seeing John’s approach, teetered to his feet and made his way back to the ice.

  A door had closed, but not in time. Chloe had already seen what was inside the room.

  Chapter Nine

  Dinner was a blur of small talk, not-so-subtle Mormon missionary cajoling, and carbs. Ry had a hard time keeping track of the conversation. Even Elder Johannes, usually so above-it-all, made a comment on how the skating day seemed to have “sapped most of us of our energy.” Oh good sir, if you only knew...

  Ry was convinced that so much as looking at Chloe would give something away—and given his dick’s recent imagination, this wasn’t literally impossible. But he still felt the charge in the air. Getting into the car, he’d accidentally-on-purpose brushed the back of her thighs as she climbed into the back seat of the van. It was easy enough for people who weren’t going to fuck to brush by a brush-by, but he’d caught the look on her beet-red face. This flirtation, it no longer belonged to the province of his dreams. He just had to wait.

  Well, he had to wait, be patient, and follow the signs. There were a hundred trillion reasons why he should drop the pursuit of the pale, pretty Mormon girl, but after she’d tolerated his touch in the parking lot, some part of Ry had committed to the chase. He was a man who finished what he started. Instincts were the highest law of his land.

  She didn’t look at him, either. Though their smallest interactions felt charged. At one point, Chloe passed him the salt with her eyes pinned to the table-cloth, and the shaker went tumbling. Celeste shrieked when the salt hit the table, throwing some over her shoulder—which necessitated a whole conversational detour about how silly superstition was. The irony wasn’t lost on Ry, as he refused to look at the woman he planned to have tonight. Wanted to have. Hoped to have.

  “Bro, you okay?” John muttered into his ear at the end of a Sara Lee dessert. “I know that conversion
stuff can be a little hard to hear, but you’re acting a little spacey.”

  His buddy’s eyes were wide open, and perhaps glossed with a little suspicion. John had been pretty vocal about his disapproval of weed and other narcotics while the pair of them had been recovering in rehab together; Ry’s fellow SEAL thought such “crutches” were “weak.” If he suspected his buddy was using under the family roof, Ryder knew there’d be hell to pay. He summoned all his energy and tried to look normal. Or at least like a guy who wasn’t spending every cell’s energy on not lunging across the table at the coy ballerina, tearing aside her gossamer petticoats, and having her.

  “Don’t worry, man. I’m totally cool.”

  “That spill on the ice looked pretty bad today.”

  “I’ve been using my relaxation techniques,” he half-joked. John slapped him on the back. His eager smile returned, and his attention spun off in the direction of one of the twins.

  It seemed to take longer than usual for the Christiansens to dodder off to sleep that night. Mrs. Christiansen wanted to play Scrabble for a full hour after dinner, and Elder Johannes had some odd piece of scripture to read aloud for the family’s “consideration.” As the hours ticked by, it became harder to ignore Chloe, breathing beside him, occupying the same close spaces. Ry got close to praying that she wouldn’t interpret the familial stalling as some kind of sign, some reason to avoid what he now considered inevitable.

  It wasn’t that he was so cocky. It had been ages since he’d had sex with a woman, but it wasn’t pure lust that governed his instincts. It never exactly had been. When every other man in his unit—hell, even John, who was tearful about it later—had solicited prostitutes on a lay-over in Amsterdam, Ryder had spent one glorious night in a weed cafe, attempting to obliterate painful combat memories. This had been just before his first tour with the SEALs, near the conclusion of some on-the-ground training. Ryder mused that it was a little shocking, how he could look back on his early days in the military with an amount of nostalgia—especially given how the whole adventure had ended.

  The point being: he’d never fancied himself the kind of man who was governed by his cock. The girls he’d preferred in Queens and Brooklyn were the same as he; other crazies, Roman candles he could bump into for brief spells and then leave without fear of heartbreak. He liked competent, confident women who knew who they were and liked to feel good. From what he could tell, Ballerina was the opposite of this type. But in a twisted kind of logic, it was this fact that was making him so certain that they needed one another, needed something from one another. They were...unlike.

  Across the room, Ryder watched Chloe jam little wooden tiles back into the black Scrabble bag. She’d thumped everyone in the room, and an adorable little winner’s smile played at the corners of her lips. He forgot the evening’s pledge for a moment, and managed to catch her gaze in his. They both blushed and looked down. Ryder saw a flash from his dream life—Chloe’s naked body, hanging over his.

  Then again, maybe the lust thing was much simpler than he was making it in his head. Maybe it was just that Chloe was a new kind of incandescent light and he was a helpless, dumb moth.

  “Goodnight, Christiansen clan!” Elder Johannes hollered from the foot of the stairs. Jesus-Christ-God, finally! Ryder had to resist the urge to jump in the air, as one by one the family filed up the stairs to put on their freaky Mormon pajamas. He made a brief mental note to stop thinking such evil things about the religion of his woman-to-be.

  “Chloe, don’t forget to turn off the lights!” Marie cooed, the last to ascend the stairs. Ryder didn’t move a muscle until he heard the twins’ bedroom door slide shut, with a click. Then, he listened to the house breathing.

  They were alone.

  He wasn’t going to be the one to speak first. He definitely, definitely wasn’t going to be the one to speak first.

  “Listen, Chloe...”

  (Fuck.)

  “About today,” he continued, sounding lame even to himself. She played the Sphinx, methodically cleaning up the rest of the game. When she finished with this, she fluffed pillows.

  “Is your knee feeling better?” she asked, a little coolly.

  “It’s fine. Your wrist?”

  She nodded, sitting beside him on the living room couch. Now is the moment, spoke some horny little boy in his head. But just as he was about to close the distance between their bodies, there was the sound of some heavy object being dropped upstairs, and rolling across the floor.

  Chloe sprang up, as if pinched. They both listened like deer caught in headlights, ears alert, bodies frozen. Finally, they heard John’s audible, “Crap,” and the slow movements of a man on new legs mopping up a spill.

  Chloe turned her big eyes on him. Ryder stayed caught.

  “We can’t do this,” she said. “I mean, whatever this is.” Her voice trembled, but her chin was set. Ryder thought she’d never looked more beautiful, quivering there before him.

  “Chloe,” he began—but for once in his damn life, words were not forthcoming. He couldn’t give her a reason to be with him that trumped family, faith, and a lifetime’s worth of carefully grown convictions. Not to mention common sense.

  “What?” she prompted, when he stayed quiet. He dared to believe there was an edge of pleading in her voice.

  “You’re the most annoying woman I’ve ever met,” he blurted, punctuating this with a weary laugh. “You drive me absolutely crazy.”

  “That is so not the way to get into my pants, Ryder.”

  He couldn’t help himself.

  “I didn’t realize good Mormon girls talked like that.”

  “I didn’t realize good Navy SEALs looked like you.”

  “Oh yes, you did.” He stood to meet her gaze, and suddenly they were nose to nose in the living room. Their words came in rapid streams. “Don’t kid yourself, Chloe. You wished we did. You’ve spent your whole life wishing for a man who can protect you and keep up with you. I know you’re not getting boo from these reedy little Mormon boys, with their goddamned name-tags.”

  “You know what, Ryder? You are arrogant. And intolerant. And...”

  “You know what, Chloe? You are stuck-up. You’re almost as stuck up as you are petrified.”

  “What do I have to be petrified of?” Her lips were moving an inch from his face. He felt like his face was in a cloud of her shampoo.

  “Me,” Ryder said. “Us. This.” Then, he kissed her.

  He kissed her in a way he hadn’t kissed other girls, in maybe ever. The violence of his lust nearly scared him. He reached into the blond mass of her wavy hair and peeled her head backward, feeling like a lusty film star from the 30s. When their lips touched, he felt himself sucking, pillaging the warm, wet hollow of her mouth like a spelunker in a cave. He wanted to know every cranny.

  Every part of her was soft to his touch. As his fingers played with the creamy, smooth expanse of her neck—grabbing, kneading—he felt her body mold to him. She sank into him willingly, and without a moment’s hesitation. There it was again: that feeling that this had been inevitable. He also felt the certainty in his jeans.

  It was moments and moments of raw, angry kissing before Chloe first peeled away. The look she gave him, when their sweaty foreheads were bent together, was not one he’d seen on her face before. It was something to do with the skin around her eyes. She looked relaxed, to be held fast in his arms. Relieved.

  He hoped she wouldn’t say something cliche, like the dreaded “we can’t do this” again. For once, she met his expectations by diving back into his mouth. Now it was Chloe’s turn to demonstrate fearlessness. He felt her eager, virginal hands explore his bulky surface, testing their strength against first his biceps, then his taut middle. He flexed for her, but she settled her dainty fingertips on his cheeks, framing his face. When she came up for short, lusty inhales, he could search the blue expanse of her eyes.

  “Oh my God,” she murmured, finally. Their first words in the new world. Then, as if
the possibility had just occurred to them, they took a moment to listen for any movement on the stairs, or in the rooms above. Ryder realized he’d given no regard to how loud their arguing might have been.

  Thankfully, no other Christiansen made a peep. Chloe—or this new sexy alien who’d replaced her, leaving bedroom eyes in the place where perpetual grimace had been—gripped his fingers again, and led him over to the family couch. The sofa was an uncomfortable leather monstrosity, but it didn’t seem as likely that he could offer her his bed when his room shared a wall with her brother’s. The rest of the evening was fully in his lady’s hands. He was happy to keep it so.

  She shyly guided him down to the sofa’s surface, so they sat side by side kissing, like kids in a soda shop. This was nice for a moment. But as their mouths were turning raw and sore with the greedy gnawing, prodding, sucking, Ryder felt his cravings compound. He wanted more of her. He lowered himself to the shag carpet before her, rising to his knees so his face was level with her breasts.

  A shadow crossed his lover’s face. Ryder mistook this for virgin jitters. He leaned forward and murmured into the hollow of her collarbone: “Don’t worry, baby. I’ve done this before.”

  “But,” Chloe started to say, just as Ryder began to leave a trail of light kisses across the exposed triangle of skin, at her throat. When his lips found fabric, they brushed it aside. He brought his hands up to her shoulders. She moaned softly, and her lovely swan neck sank back against the couch.

  “I’ll go slow,” he reassured her, even though his cock was so rigid in his jeans that he feared early arrival. But more than his own satisfaction, he wanted Chloe to feel good. He wanted to banish the grimace, the fear, the shame.

  Gingerly, he began to fumble with the mother-of-pearl buttons on her paisley cardigan. She tolerated this. When he moved to strip away the shirt she wore below, Chloe pushed his hands away. They continued kissing, and he Ryder made another vain grab for a breast. His left knee began to throb against the ground.