Chapter 12
“So I believe we had a deal.” Across the table, Ivy leaned back in her chair, a glass of wine in her hand. “A question for every ten thousand words. I’ve earned a question and three quarters.”
Damn. Harrison had hoped she’d forget. Not that he wasn’t willing to share with her, but he was a little afraid of what she’d ask. “You can’t ask a partial question.”
She wrinkled her nose in a little snit that bordered on adorable. “Fine. I’ll bank those seven thousand words for next time. I still get one.”
You made the deal.Bracing himself, he picked up his beer. “So you do. Ask away.”
“This has been circling around in my head since you dropped me off.” She ran a finger around the lip of her glass, angling her head to study him. “What is it you do for a living that you can stick around here waiting on me?”
Of all the things she could’ve asked, that wasn’t what he’d expected. Relief and mild embarrassment had him settling back in his own chair, rubbing a palm on his thigh. “Oh, that. Well, as it happens I’m also a writer.”
Ivy blinked. “What?”
The stupefied expression on her face made him wish he’d said something sooner.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
Self-conscious, he shrugged. “I’m not in your league. You’re all multi-New York Times best seller, and I’m self-published. I mean, I do well enough. I make a living. But I figured you get all kinds of requests and shit from other aspiring or newly published writers who want an introduction or an in to the big leagues. I didn’t want you to think I was one of them.”
She waved a hand. “Oh, that whole snobby traditional vs. self-published debate is so five years ago. The indies have more than proven themselves savvy businesspeople. To my mind, you have it harder. You have to be author and publisher. I can’t imagine doing more than I’m already doing.”
“I’m not, really. I hire out my editor and cover artist. And I wager I do a lot less social media and fan stuff than you just because I don’t have that kind of fan base. I don’t have the acclaim, and I’m totally fine with that because it also means I don’t have the pressure. There’s no agent breathing down my neck, and my editor works on my schedule, not somebody else’s. It’s not a bad gig.”
“No, I don’t guess so.” She dropped her head back and sighed. “No wonder you were so insightful about the problems I’ve been having. You get it.”
“Well enough.”
When she straightened, her eyes held a gleam of interest. “So what do you write?”
Harrison hesitated.
“Oh, come on. You can’t just tell me you’re a writer and not expect me to want to talk shop. This all still falls under the category of the first question I asked. Do you write thrillers, too? You’re awfully damned good at helping plot them.”
He shook his head. “I write science fiction.”
“What kind of sci fi? Like…Dune or Aliens or space opera or what?”
“It’s kinda Firefly meets Game of Thrones meets Star Wars.”
Her eyes brightened. “That sounds epic. Why scifi?”
It was a logical turn of the conversation. She’d told him why she wrote thrillers. But the whys of his fiction skated a little too close for comfort to the ghosts he’d been struggling to escape.
Ivy’s expression softened as she reached out to lay a hand over his on the table. “It’s fine. I’ve used up my question.”
What kind of coward was he, making her earn the right to know him? He wanted more with her than the physical, and that meant sharing more of himself, even the less than sterling parts. It meant choosing connection instead of avoidance and deflection. He wouldn’t tell her all of it. Couldn’t. But he could give her the gist.
Turning his hand over to curve around hers, he swallowed. “You weren’t wrong in your profile. I left the Army three years ago. It was…a rough transition.” Captain of Understatement. But he couldn’t bring himself to revisit those first six months out. “I’d enlisted when I was eighteen, worked my way through the ranks. It’s all I’d really known in my adult life. Those men and women were my family. And I’d lost three of them because of a call I made.”
Her fingers tightened around his but she said nothing, offered no false platitudes. And somehow that made it a little easier.
Harrison sipped at his beer to wet his parched throat. “I didn’t handle it well. I kept replaying it over and over, trying to see what I’d missed, what I could have changed that would’ve altered the outcome.” He’d relived it too, for about eighteen months. But those attacks had come fewer and farther between. The one he’d had at the cabin had been his first in more than a year. But even that hadn’t been a full-blown flashback. Thank God.
“My therapist suggested I write about it. She meant journaling, but that was too…close. Too personal. I couldn’t look directly at it without ending right back up in the same place. So I ended up creating this character and shifting the whole damned thing to another world. Pretty soon, I’d come up with at least a dozen different variations for what could’ve happened differently. And most of them involved tech that doesn’t actually exist, intel I didn’t have. One impossibility after another. Because the reality was that there wasn’t anything I could’ve done differently. Because I’m not God.”
Those silver-green eyes shone with empathy.
“Yeah, you were right about that, too.” He grimaced. “Knowing it doesn’t make it any easier to live with. It doesn’t changed what happened. But writing about it like that…it let me be God in some small way. And I found myself taking the strongest scenario of the lot and following what happened to those men, if they’d lived.”
Her thumb stroked the back of his hand, a soft, soothing rhythm. “Did it help?”
“Some. I was always into adventures and scifi as a kid, and it turned out I had an aptitude for writing it. Since it meant I could set my own hours and avoid people, it seemed like the ideal job.” He sighed. “Or it did. You aren’t the only one struggling with writer’s block.”
“That’s why you came up here? Same as me?”
“Something like that.” He thought of Ty and wondered how his buddy was holding up. But he wasn’t ready to talk about the funeral or the ghosts it had stirred up.
“Well, you were a hell of a plot doctor for my book. Maybe I can return the favor. Where are you stuck?”
“I have to decide if I can keep going.”
“With the current book?”
“With any of it. I’m three books deep and the war they’re fighting isn’t over. I’m not sure it’ll ever be over.” Because he didn’t know if his own ever would be. “The fourth book is dragging because I don’t know how it ends. I don’t know if my hero can keep fighting it. I don’t know if I can keep fighting it. So I’ve been considering that maybe he goes out in a blaze of glory and I wrap the series.”
Catching the look of distress on her face he squeezed her hand. “That’s not some kind of metaphor. I’m not considering suicide. I just think maybe the writing thing has run its course. It started out a way to figure out how my men could’ve lived, and ended up being a way to sort of let them live on. That part was good. But it hasn’t exorcised those demons, and I’m not sure putting all my thoughts and memories of that shit on paper—even with lasers and spaceships—is a good thing. Keeps them…too close for comfort.”
Ivy was quiet for a long moment. “Maybe the answer lies in not trying to rewrite the past but in writing a different future. I don’t know your story or the context for your hero, but maybe in order for you to leave the war behind, your hero does, too.”
Harrison frowned. “Just have him walk away? What the hell would that even look like?”
“I don’t know. But it’s the third option that doesn’t involve staying in the fight or making the ultimate sacrifice. It gives you room to write more stories. If that’s what you want to do.”
The idea of it circled around the back of his brain as they finished their meal. Did he want to write more stories? If he wasn’t writing about the horrors of war, he didn’t know what stories he would tell. But as he helped Ivy on with her coat and offered his arm to escort her back out to the Jeep, he knew the only story he was positive he wanted to continue was theirs.
* * *
Harrison stayedquiet on the drive back to the inn.
Ivy worried he was too much in his head. Maybe her questions had pushed those things he’d been trying to forget to the forefront. Her heart twisted at his unexpected decision to open up to her, at the knowledge of what it had to have cost him. She understood his reticence. Who would want to talk about going through hell? And yet, clearly the experience was still with him. He’d been living with it, by turns circling around it and attacking it head-on. And none of that had quite helped him accept it. Maybe nothing would but time, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to help.
Her gut said he shouldn’t be alone tonight. She was the one who’d circled into that territory and brought it up. He’d said himself she was a good distraction. She could do that much for him, at least. Keep him in the now, with her. So when they got to the inn, she reached out to take his hand. “Come up.”
For a moment, she thought he’d demur. Then his fingers closed around hers.
He followed her quietly up the stairs. They didn’t run into Pru’s family or any of the other guests. Ivy unlocked her room, letting them inside. A single lamp cast a gentle glow over the room. The flowers she’d arranged in the vase before they left for dinner made the air smell sweet. Laying her purse beside them on the desk, she locked the door and turned to Harrison.
His focus was very definitely on her now. She liked how he watched her, as if she were the center of everything. His true north. It was fanciful and romantic, but it made her feel beautiful and sexy and simply more than she was.
Moving into him, she laid hands on his chest, rising to her toes to brush a kiss over his lips. Just the barest whisper of a touch instead of the greedy gulps they’d shared before. She didn’t want to rush. Her hands slid inside his coat, stroking up and over his shoulders to push it off. He tugged her closer by the front of her coat, his fingers making short work of the buttons and repeating her gesture, sliding his hands down her spine and pulling her against the length of him.
All that warmth and strength was intoxicating. So was the taste of him as he took the kiss deeper, dipping his tongue into her mouth. Ivy lost herself for seconds, minutes, as her tongue stroked against his. Then he was peeling down her dress and following it with his lips, trailing them over each newly exposed inch of skin.
She could never get tired of this.
Because she knew he was apt to take over and she wanted her fill of him before he did, she fought her way through the haze of lust to unbutton his shirt, stripping it off and sliding up his undershirt so she could press a kiss to the smooth, warm skin of his chest, over the heart that beat thick and fast to match hers. His chest rumbled with a groan of pleasure and his hand slid into her hair, holding her there for a long moment.
Ivy lifted her gaze to his and felt her own pulse trip. There was the intensity she’d come to crave and lust as well. But beneath all that she saw an unexpected vulnerability. As if he were willingly dropping those shields, letting her in.
She reached up to frame his face, murmuring his name as she kissed him again, trying to say without words what she hardly dared admit to herself.
I love you.
It was so, so easy to lose herself in him. She could only hope he felt the same.
He stripped off her bra, following the strap with his mouth as he drew it away, then bending to take one nipple into his mouth. Her knees buckled, but he was there, lifting her up until her legs could wrap around his waist, fitting the bulge of his erection against her center. Needing more pressure, more friction, she shimmied against him. His hands dug into her ass with something close to a growl. Then they tumbled onto the bed and the weight of him was gone as he tore his mouth away to strip off her underwear.
She started to make a complaint, a demand, but then he pressed that mouth to her core and she couldn’t do anything but gasp his name, burying her fingers in his hair as he drove her slowly, ruthlessly up. He battered her with waves of delicious sensation, bringing her closer and closer, until she was wrecked and aching and breathing his name like a prayer for deliverance. Only then did he push her over. She barely bit back a cry as the orgasm pulled her under like a riptide.
The bed dipped and creaked as he crawled into it, fully naked. But he didn’t cover her, didn’t settle himself between her thighs. Instead, he stretched out beside her, stroking a soft hand through her hair, down her arm, over the flare of her hip as she trembled with aftershocks.
“You’re so beautiful.”
When he looked at her like that, she felt it.
Rousing herself she rolled toward him, reaching out to touch and taste. He fell back, letting her explore the body she’d come to know so well in so short a time. She’d noted the scars before, the physical reminders of the life he’d led. She’d skipped over them, not wanting to draw undue attention. He hadn’t told her about any of them. But she’d done enough research that she understood the kind of wounds that had caused each one. They’d all long healed, some better than others. But they represented deeper wounds, wounds she wanted to combat with tenderness. So this time she paused to press a slow, lingering kiss over each of them, tracing her fingers, then her lips over the puckered flesh high on one shoulder where a bullet had ripped through.
Harrison stiffened, and Ivy hesitated, eyes flying to his face. He let out a long, controlled breath, his dark eyes watching her, saying nothing as she slowly lowered her head to press a lingering kiss to the old wound. He relaxed degree by slow degree as she continued. The slash where a knife had glanced off his ribs. The knot in his thigh where he’d been caught by some kind of shrapnel. With endless patience and tenderness, she made love to his warrior’s body, until he exhaled her name, reaching out for her. “Need you now.”
Her heart squeezed. To be needed by this man, who was so capable, so in control.
He dragged her up his body, his hands curling around her hips in blatant possession as he urged her to straddle him. She kept her gaze on his as she rolled on a condom and lined up their bodies, then she reached out to cradle his face as she took him in. His eyes went to slits, but they stayed locked on hers as he thrust up to meet her. Her moan of satisfaction was long and low, a counterpoint to his reverent curse. Bracing herself against his chest, she rode him, keeping a slow, torturous pace, wanting to draw out the pleasure as long as possible. And when they both began to crest, she took his mouth, swallowing his groan of release with her own before collapsing in a boneless heap.
Harrison recovered first, carefully pulling out and going to take care of necessities before coming back to bed and dragging her against his chest in a spoon. She snuggled in, enjoying the feel of his hand stroking lazy patterns on her belly and the solid presence of him at her back.
She wanted this. This comfort, this warmth, this connection. For longer than the next week. Longer than the next month. It was easy to spin a fantasy where this was their new normal. Where she wrote and he wrote, and they lived a perfect and lovely creative life. And that was probably nuts. How could this—just this—feel so much like a foundation so fast?
But there it was. Being with him just felt…right.
She couldn’t say any of that yet. It was too much, too fast. And they’d already been moving at warp speed. But she could ask for tonight.
“Will you stay?” she murmured.
He inhaled a slow breath and pressed a kiss to her shoulder. “No.”
That had her eyes popping open, ripping her afterglow to tatters. “No?”
“You have work to do. If I stay, you’ll be up half the night and in no shape to write tomorrow.”
She rolled to face him. “But?—”
“You know I’m right.” The curve of his lips was smug and cocky, but there was something else there she couldn’t read.
Maybe that was her imagination. The orgasms had fried her brain. He wasn’t wrong. “Sometimes I hate it when you’re practical.”
“You’ll thank me later.”
She probably would, but that didn’t change the fact that she’d miss him. Again. “When can I see you again?”
“If you got seventeen thousand words by not seeing me for two days, how much can you knock out if it’s longer?”
Ivy scowled. “That is not the kind of carrot on a stick I was hoping for, Harrison.”
He chuckled. “Maybe not. But I need to get some work done, too. I want to think about what you said, make some decisions about this book and my series. And I can’t do that if I’ve got the temptation of seeing you sooner than the end of the week.”
She was pouting. A full on lip-poking snit like she hadn’t had since she was a kid. She knew it, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “The end of the week?”
Harrison kissed her again and rolled away to begin dressing. She couldn’t help but feel like it was a rejection. In the absence of his warmth, she pulled the covers over her breasts.
He tugged on his t-shirt. “Friday. Let’s plan for Friday. And get as much as we both can done, with the expectation of taking more than an evening’s break. We’ll spend the weekend together.”
The prospect of more time together was pretty appealing. And if she really dove deep, maybe, maybe she could be nearly finished. Or close enough she could send stuff to Marianne and buy a reprieve to focus on him again.
“Well, if that’s the best deal I’m gonna get, I suppose I’ll have to take it. But early Friday. Like, mid-afternoon.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
She started to reach for her own clothes. “I’ll walk you down.”
Harrison put a hand on her shoulder, pressing her back to the bed. “No, I can see myself out. And I’d rather have the image of you naked and sated in my head to keep me warm on the way home.”
She arched a brow. “Is that the look on my face right now?”
The easy rumble of his laugh put her back at ease. “I’d say you’re somewhere between sated and pissed.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Hang on to that for Friday. You can have your wicked way with me as many times as you want.”
Scooping a hand through her tangled hair, she fixed him with a Look. “I’m holding you to that.”
He grinned. “I’m counting on it.” With another fast, hot kiss, he was gone.
Ivy fell back on the bed, one arm across her eyes. This wasn’t how she’d wanted the night to end, damn it. But he was probably right about the productivity. So she’d better just make the most of it and finish the damned book.