by Lexi Blake
She thrust back against him, pulling him in. His cock slid home, pressure making his balls draw up in pleasure. She was squeezing his cock, her asshole pulsing around him. He resisted the driving need to come because this was fucking heaven. He wanted to stay here.
“Are you all right?”
“So full. It’s almost too much,” she said, moaning. Her cheek was against the bed, her whole body spread and submissive.
“Play with the vibe. Don’t forget your pussy.” He held himself still while she pressed the vibe up.
“Oh, my god. Oh. Henry. Henry.”
Somehow it felt right to have her call out that name. He was Henry with her. He would have to go back to being that sad-sack bastard John Bishop soon enough, but being Henry Flanders had been the joy of his life.
He felt her shudder as she came and let himself off the leash. He forced his dick back, the massage of the vibe ensuring that it wouldn’t last as long as he wanted it to. He pounded into her, forcing her to take every hard inch he had to give.
Nell shouted out again. His spine shivered as his balls drew up tight and gave up the fight. Arousal poured from his cock as the orgasm filled his body, his soul. This wasn’t sex. He finally understood the difference. This was making love. This was pure connection.
Nell fell forward, all her energy seemingly depleted. He followed her, covering her flesh with his own. He wrapped her up in his arms, and a peace unlike anything he’d ever known came over him, settling around him more securely than any blanket. Her fingers threaded through his own, winding around and allowing her to cuddle up. He shifted and spooned her.
“Don’t you go to sleep.” He had plans and they didn’t involve a nap.
“Not on your life,” she said back with an intimate smile.
She was his life. He knew that now. She would be the last thing he thought of right before he died. He could also see now that he’d been looking for a way out for a long time—a way out of life. He’d put himself in the most dangerous situations he could and told himself that he was protecting his country or doing good, but all he was really doing was looking for that one bullet that had his name written on it.
Funny how that had worked. Now he was a little afraid of it, and that was exactly what would get him killed in the end.
One more night and then it would be over.
He rolled off the bed and picked her up.
“Henry?” Nell’s eyes opened as he settled her into his arms. “I love it when you carry me.”
He loved to carry her. If he had his way, it would be his only job. He could carry her around and protect her. She was everything that was pure and right and good about the world. He’d started out thinking she was a naïve idiot and ended up here realizing that she was the very thing he’d sought to protect. She wasn’t the status quo. She wasn’t some economic interest. She was hope for the future. She was everything.
“I’m going to take care of you, baby.”
He would, if only for the rest of the night.
* * * *
She hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Her eyes flew open, and the creeping light of day filled her with utter panic. Clutching the covers, she sat straight up in bed and winced as every muscle in her body ached.
What time was it? How long had he been gone?
God, she’d thought she had longer. She shouldn’t have fallen asleep. She should have stayed up all night long, but Henry had utterly exhausted her. He’d put her in the shower and tenderly washed her body and her hair and then dried her off and then he’d gotten her dirty all over again. He’d been on top of her all night until she’d finally drifted off to sleep.
How was she going to survive the next sixty years without him?
“I drew you a bath. It should help with the soreness.”
She turned and he was standing there, dressed as he had been when he’d first come to Bliss. He was buttoned up, and every piece of his wardrobe looked like it had been pressed to perfection. She liked him casual, naked even. This was the Henry Flanders the rest of the world knew, not the private lover that was only for her.
“I love you.” She was glad she got to say those words to him. His suitcase was packed and sitting at the door. He was leaving, but she could say it. “I love you so much.”
His eyes closed behind those intellectual-looking glasses he wore. “I wish I could stay.”
It was right there on the tip of her tongue to beg him, but he had to make that decision himself or he would resent her one day. If he stayed because of guilt or out of pity, then nothing between them could last. She couldn’t stand the thought of that. “I know. It’s okay, Henry.”
He looked down at her, his jaw tightening. “Don’t do this. Fight me. Yell at me.”
Make it easy on him. She wasn’t going to do that. If he was going to leave, then she wanted this moment to be perfect, too. The last few days had been the most beautiful of her life. She wasn’t going to end them with a fight that had nothing to do with how they felt. “I love you.”
She let the blanket drop as she got up. She wasn’t going to hide from him.
“I have to go. My flight is at three. I have to get all the way to Colorado Springs.” But he wasn’t moving. He stood there by the door, but he didn’t go to open it.
“I love you.” She couldn’t say it enough. She wanted to make sure he knew so he would always know, no matter where he went, that she would be here loving him, wishing the very best for him.
A long moment passed before he answered. “I love you, too, but it doesn’t fix all the problems. It actually makes them worse. Baby, if I could stay I would. I want nothing more than to be here with you, to be the man you need me to be.”
“Tell me why. Tell me what these problems are, and we can fix them together.”
He shook his head. “No. That’s one thing I won’t do. I love you. I won’t drag you into my world.” He cupped her face and dropped his forehead to hers. “God, I love you so much.”
Tears started. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t cry. “I can handle it. If you can’t stay here, then I’ll go with you.”
She wasn’t sure how it would work, but she was willing to try. She would leave Bliss for him. He was the important thing. Home was where Henry was.
He took a big step back as though that was the most horrifying thing he’d ever heard. “Never. I would never take you with me. God, I should have left before you woke up. This is too hard. I stayed because I wanted to say good-bye and wanted to explain the plans I’ve made for you.”
“Plans? When did you make plans?”
“I started calling to make some arrangements a few days ago. I knew I would have to leave, but I had to do a few things first. Your cabin is being fixed up as we speak. It’s my gift to you, and I won’t take no for an answer.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but he stopped her, his hands on her shoulders.
“I can’t stay. This is all I can give you. I’m begging you to take it. I’m already going to be miserable. Please don’t make it harder.” The words came out tortured.
“I wish I understood.” What was so terrible that he couldn’t take her with him?
“I can’t talk about it. I know it’s wrong, and that’s why you should hate me. You should tell me to go to hell. You deserve better than me.”
He was trying so hard. It was obvious that he was trying to keep it together. He needed that calm, that coolness. He needed it to feel in control. She didn’t want to take that from him, but she also wasn’t going to lie. “I can’t hate you.”
“I took your virginity.”
“I wasn’t doing anything interesting with it anyway.”
His eyes hardened as he stared down at her. “Damn it. This isn’t a joke.”
Her heart twisted in her chest. “I know. Trust me, I know. There is nothing funny about this, but you can’t feel guilty. I’m not some starry-eyed teen. I knew you would leave, and I still said yes. I would do it all over again. I didn’t sleep w
ith you to make you stay. I slept with you because I love you, and that won’t change because you do what you said you would do all along. You never lied to me.”
He turned and picked up his bag. “I’ve taken care of the cleanup at your cabin, and I’ve taken care of your mother’s medical bills.”
Her jaw dropped open. Her mother’s bills were so expensive. “Henry, you can’t do that.”
“I can and I did. I need to know you’re safe. I need to know I did something to make your life better.”
She knew what the medical bills were like. She often worried she would be paying them forever. “But, that’s so much money.”
A sad grin tugged his mouth up. “Yeah, it’s about everything I had. I wish I had more. I wish I could make your life easy. I know the writing thing takes time to pay off.”
She shook her head. “The writing thing is a bust. No one wants to read about sharecroppers and protests and how man is killing the earth.”
“People like to read love stories. They like happily ever afters because so often they don’t get one. Seth sent over a top-of-the-line computer. It’s got everything you can need on it. You shouldn’t have to find work for a while. You could give the romance thing a try. Happy endings. I think you should give us one.” He turned and there was no hiding the tears in his eyes.
“I won’t leave Bliss,” Nell vowed. “I know I said I would, but I won’t ever leave here. I won’t leave because this is the last place I saw you. If you ever want to come home, I’ll be right here. There will be a place at the table for you and a place in my bed. I’ll be here waiting.”
“I can’t come back.” The words sounded strangled out of his throat.
“Then I’ll wait until the next lifetime.” She would wait forever if she had to.
He kissed her forehead. “I love you. You have a good life.”
He walked away. The door closed with a shudder of finality.
He was gone. She was alone again.
Nell sat down on the bed, pulling the covers around her. She’d been warm before, but now she felt the chill. The shades were closed, but she knew if she looked outside the world would be a snowy, frozen white.
Tears started to fall. Winter wouldn’t last forever. Spring would come, and she would likely still be alone and Henry would be somewhere else. She would look for pictures of him, and one day she might find he’d moved on and had a family. And she would be here, alone, because she couldn’t love anyone else.
She cried, ignoring the knocks on her door. Callie came first and then her mother. They stood outside and finally the knocking stopped. She cried for the longest time, letting everything out.
The morning turned to afternoon, and when long shadows fell across the room, Nell got up. She washed her face and dried her eyes and sat down at the new computer.
Nell Finn believed. She believed in so many things, but most of all she believed in the power of love and kindness and positivity. She believed that if she put good and beautiful things into the universe, perhaps whoever was at the center, whoever looked down from that Nirvana or Heaven or whatever a person called it, perhaps that being would send it all back.
She was still a child, clapping her hands so that Tinker Bell could live.
She couldn’t have Henry, but she could hope. She could believe. She started to type. She had a whole world around her that needed something good. Max and Rye. Callie. Stef.
Maybe she should start there. She couldn’t write about Henry. Not yet. But she could give her friends a happily ever after even if it was only on paper.
Nell began to write, her hopes and dreams for all of them flowing like a comforting wave.
Chapter Fourteen
Six months later
Bolivia, South America
Bishop took a long breath and wondered why he was fucking bothering. He followed the sergeant into what had to be the shittiest bar he’d ever seen and wondered why he hadn’t stayed in the jungle. Taggart and Tennessee had been relocated. They were working together in the Middle East and his other charge, a young former Chinese operative, had a new handler. Whoever Levi Green was, Bishop wished him well with the young woman because Jiang Kun wasn’t her twin. There was something dark about the woman. Of course, he’d sent her twin back to Chinese intelligence in her place and without letting the woman know her sister was alive, so he had that sin on his soul.
He’d been reassigned. Again. Oddly his new assignment felt a whole lot like all the rest.
So why the sergeant was walking into a tiny village watering hole. “Uhm, is there a problem? We need to get back to La Paz.”
The Delta Force operative simply walked up to the bar and ordered a beer in perfect Spanish. Sergeant Mark Dawson wasn’t someone he’d worked with before, though he remembered the dude’s brother from another mission. He’d worked with Dare Dawson in Chechnya the year before.
“You’re an odd duck, Bishop.” Dawson wiped off the top of the bottle of beer and took a long drink. For the last two days he’d been almost perfectly silent, simply playing the part of escort as Bishop did his recon on a suspected arms dealer who might have ties to a certain terrorist everyone was looking for. Bishop and Dawson had spent days in the jungle setting up surveillance on the group’s compound. Jihadist groups were popping up all over South America and Mexico. Everyone was worried about the Middle East, but terrorist cells were closer than most people in the States could imagine.
Nell probably understood. She kept up with the news.
“How am I odd?” Bishop asked, not honestly caring about the answer. He leaned against the bar. Talking to Dawson would take his mind off Nell. He thought about calling her a thousand times a day. There wasn’t a minute that went by that something didn’t remind him of her. And at night, he always dreamed of her.
He was becoming utterly useless.
Dawson studied him with careful eyes. He was dressed casually, no uniforms for them this time around, but Bishop knew the guy was armed to the teeth. “I’m talking about the way you work. I’ve been working with guys like you for three years now, and if there’s one thing I’ve figured out, it’s that my life doesn’t mean shit to someone like you. Or it shouldn’t. You Agency guys are all about the op. The rest of us are pawns in your game, and you don’t mind losing a couple of chess pieces, if you know what I mean.”
Unfortunately, he did know what the sergeant was talking about. “The operation is everything. If you know these things are more important than one soldier’s life, then you know it’s sure as fuck more important than mine. The Agency isn’t going to come in on a white horse to save me if everything goes wrong. They will leave me high and dry and expect me to take care of the situation.”
But he was questioning the status quo more and more these days. How did this op serve the long-term good? How long was he supposed to simply follow orders? Who was he really saving?
The sergeant kept talking, his voice low. “Then why did you save that operative’s life last year? You know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about Chechnya. Don’t freak out. Dare didn’t tell me shit. I’m sure you were going by another name then, but I think it was you. I have another brother who’s pretty good with a computer. I read the reports on the mission. Yeah, yeah, I could get shoved into Leavenworth, but I had to know what happened. It would have been easier for you to leave him behind. It’s not the Agency’s job to save our asses. It’s pretty much your job to dump our asses at the first sign of trouble.”
Bishop sighed. He hadn’t been able to leave the young soldier behind. He’d ended up losing the man he was following because he couldn’t leave Dare Dawson to bleed out and he was still paying for his humanity. Yes, he’d gotten his ass chewed out for that. It was the exact op that had gotten him shipped to South America. Saving Dare Dawson had gotten him demoted. Of course at the time he hadn’t realized Dare had a brother and liked to talk too much. “It was nothing, and we shouldn’t talk about it.”
It was supposed to be class
ified.
“That’s not how I heard it. You see, that was my brother and the way I see it he’s alive and walking the earth and being a pain in my ass today because of you. So when I got word that I might be able to pay you back, that was a mission I was interested in.”
Bishop felt his eyebrows crease. “What the hell are you talking about?”
What was going on?
“We guys in the service talk. Bill Hartman is good friends with my CO.”
Suspicion crept up his spine. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
Dawson nodded shortly, an arrogant smile on his face. “Sure you don’t. Look, I know how this works. You left the Army when the Agency recruited you and now you have to pretend like that time didn’t exist. The Agency can cook the books any way they like, but a soldier never forgets. A soldier never forgets who his family is even when they walk away. Bill Hartman sent you a message, and I am here to see that you listen.”
Bill was playing fast and loose with his identity. “What’s the message?”
“He says choose again. He says you’ll know what that means.”
Bishop hated the way his eyes misted over. He shook his head, trying to banish the emotions that welled up. Choose again. If only he could. The Agency wouldn’t give him a do-over. “I can’t do that.”
Sergeant Dawson nodded and took another long swig of his beer. “Well, I guess that’s all I can do. Let’s head back to the meet point.”
Even though it was perverse, he found himself arguing. “Really? That’s all I get?”
Dawson shrugged. “I delivered the message. What you do with the message is all on you, man. The way I see it, you must really like your life. I mean, what could be better than living completely alone and never being able to talk about anything you do? Man, there’s a whole lot of freedom in that. Talking about shit is overrated. And you don’t have to worry about women. One starts to give you trouble and the Agency moves you and gives you a whole new identity. I don’t see why you would have to choose again when you chose so well the first time.”
