Chapter 6
DAMIEN
I t’s been three days since we went to the hot springs, and waking up with Lucy in my arms is a habit I’m rapidly getting used to.
The rightness of it still catches me off guard.
Her hair tickles my chest, her breath warm against my skin.
For a moment, I let myself pretend that she’s mine to wake up next to every day for the rest of my life.
Eight years of empty mornings, and now this. Now her.
She stirs against me, making a soft sound that shoots straight to my cock.
Her hand spreads across my chest, fingers tracing lazy patterns over the scar tissue from an IED blast in Kandahar.
She’s never asked about the scars, but she touches them like she’s not afraid of the story behind them.
She makes me feel like I could truly open up about what happened to me, and she wouldn’t run away.
“Morning,” she murmurs against my collarbone, pressing a kiss there that makes my heart expand with even more love for her.
“Morning, beautiful.” I tighten my arms around her, breathing in the scent of her hair. “Sleep okay?”
“I did.” She lifts her head to meet my eyes, and the smile she gives me could light up the sky. “You?”
“Best I’ve slept in years.” The truth of it surprises me. These last few nights, holding Lucy as we slept, were the first nights since returning from overseas that I didn’t dream of war and the faces of people I couldn’t save. I dreamed of us building a new life together.
She stretches against me like a cat, pressing her breasts against my chest in a way that sends bolts of desire straight to my cock. “Coffee?”
“In a minute,” I say, rolling her beneath me and capturing her mouth in a kiss.
She melts into me immediately, parting her legs to welcome me to paradise. I want to lose myself in the warmth of her body and the soft sounds she makes when I kiss her neck.
But the coffee maker’s automatic timer chooses that moment to start brewing, filling the cabin with the rich aroma that signals the start of another day. Lucy laughs against my mouth, the sound vibrating through my chest.
“Duty calls,” she says, but her hands are tangled in my hair, holding me close.
“The coffee can wait.”
Twenty minutes later, we’re in the kitchen, grinning from recent orgasms. I’m discovering how much I’ve missed this, especially watching Lucy drink coffee while wearing nothing but my thermal shirt from yesterday.
I’m mesmerized by the way the fabric skims her thighs, the way I can see the bottom curve of her delicious ass.
“You’re staring,” she says without looking up from the coffee she’s doctoring with sugar.
“Can you blame me?” I pour myself coffee into a backup mug, standing close enough that our elbows brush. “You look good in my clothes.”
“I look good out of them, too,” she grins, making my pulse spike.
“Christ, Lucy.” I splutter the coffee I was drinking, then set down my mug and laugh. “You can’t say things like that when I’m holding hot coffee.”
“Why not?” She steps closer, going up on her toes to press a kiss to my jaw. “What are you going to do about it?”
Before I can answer, her attention shifts to something behind me.
“What’s this?” she asks, moving toward where my coat is by the front door.
My stomach drops. Lucy is looking at a photograph that should be in the pocket of my coat, not on the ground.
The edges are worn from years of handling, the colors slightly faded.
It’s from college, of Lucy and me at the lake on our first weekend trip as a couple, her arms around my neck, both of us laughing at something I can’t remember.
The photo is slightly blurry because we asked a kid to take it for us.
“You kept this?” Her voice is soft, wondering.
I clear my throat, suddenly feeling exposed in a new way. “I, uh. Yeah.” She knows I’ve missed her because I’ve told her and shown her. What I haven’t told her is how I looked at this picture of us every damn day of the last eight years.
She picks up the photo with careful fingers, studying our younger faces. “All these years?”
“It went everywhere with me.” The admission comes out rougher than I intended. “Every deployment, every mission. I kept it in my vest pocket, right over my heart.”
She looks up at me, eyes wide and glistening. “Damien... I can’t believe you carried me with you all this time.”
“I carried you through everything,” I tell her, framing her face with my hands. “Every firefight, every dark moment when I thought I might not make it home, I’d touch that photo and remember the best person I’d met in my life.”
“Oh, Damien.” She sets the photo aside and wraps her arms around my neck, holding me like she’s afraid I might disappear. “I wish I’d known. I wish—”
“Hey.” I pull back enough to meet her eyes.
“No wishing. We’re here now. That’s what matters.
” She nods, but I can see the emotion threatening to overwhelm her.
I press a kiss to her nose. “Besides, if you’d known I was carrying around a photo like some lovesick teenager, you might have thought it was creepy. ”
That gets me the laugh I was hoping for. “Maybe,” she concedes.
“We should eat,” I say, wanting to steer us back to now and not the past.
Lucy insists on making breakfast, claiming it’s her turn, so I sit back and watch. The morning light streaming through the windows lights up her hair, and every time she reaches for something, my shirt rides up to give me a glimpse of the black lace panties she’s wearing underneath.
“You’re not very good at multitasking,” she observes, not turning around from the stove where she’s scrambling some eggs.
“What makes you say that?”
“Because you’re sitting there staring at my ass?” she laughs, shimmying enough to make my cock take notice. This woman is wearing me out.
I don’t even try to deny it. “It is an ass worth a lot of attention.”
“Damien Terrance,” she says in mock horror, “are you objectifying me?”
“Absolutely.” I move to stand behind her, letting my fingertips lightly graze her body through my shirt from her neck to her waist before settling on her hips. “Problem?”
“No problem,” she breathes as I press a kiss to the side of her neck and lower my hands to cup and squeeze her ass. “But these eggs are going to burn if you keep distracting me.”
“Then stop shaking your lacy ass at me.”
Lucy laughs, grabs some bread, and thrusts it at me. “Get to work, Damien. We need toast.”
“I have other ideas about how what I’d like to work on.” I nip at her earlobe, and she makes an erotic sigh that I could listen to for the rest of my life.
“Food first,” she says, but her voice is already breathless. “I’m not burning breakfast because we’re as horny as teenagers.”
“Fine.” I step back, admiring the way she shivers at the loss of contact. “But I’m collecting on this later.”
“I’m counting on it,” I say, popping the bread into a toaster and pulling butter out of the fridge.
“This feels familiar,” she says when we sit down to eat.
“Which part?”
“All of it. The cooking together, the easy conversation, the way you’re looking at me like you can’t quite believe I’m real.” She piles some scrambled eggs on her toast and takes a bite. I try not to get distracted when she licks her lips. “It’s like no time passed at all.”
“Sometimes it feels that way,” I agree. “Other times, I look at you and think about how much we’ve both changed.”
“Good change or bad change?”
I consider the question, studying her face in the candlelight. “Good change. You’re stronger now. More confident. You know who you are and what you want.”
“And you?” she asks. “What kind of change am I seeing in you?”
“Probably not all good,” I admit. “I’m harder than I used to be. Less trusting. More careful with people.”
“But not with me.”
“No.” I exhale. “Not with you. With you, I feel like myself again. Like the man I was before I lost myself.”
She reaches across the table, her fingers finding mine. “I like the man you are now. Both versions—the soldier who kept me safe and the man who has carried our picture in his pocket for years.”
“Even the broken parts?”
“Especially the broken parts.” Her thumb traces my knuckles. “We’re all broken, Damien. The secret is finding someone whose broken pieces fit with yours. We were always two puzzle pieces that fit together perfectly. That hasn’t changed.”
After breakfast, Lucy settles on the couch, and I build a fire before joining her. She curls against my side, her feet tucked under her, my arm around her shoulders. It’s perfect and everything I never let myself imagine I could have again.
“I could get used to this,” she says quietly, echoing my thoughts.
“Yeah?” I press a kiss to the top of her head.
She tilts her head back to look at me. “I feel safe with you. Completely safe.”
The words hit me harder than they should. “Lucy...”
“I mean it.” She shifts to face me more fully, her hand settling over my heart. “For the first time in eight years, I don’t want this to end. I don’t want to go back to my life. I want to stay here with you and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist.”
“We can’t pretend forever,” I say, even though the idea is more tempting than she knows. “We can’t stay locked away in this cabin. We have lives.”
“I know.” Her fingers play with the hem of my shirt. “I know I have…” her eyes darken, “stuff to deal with. But after.”
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
She kisses me, soft and sweet and full of promise. I lose myself in the taste of her, in the way she melts against me like she was made to fit in my arms.
The harsh electronic beep of the sat phone makes me freeze. I glance at my watch, confirming that I haven’t missed a check-in. Which means…
FUCK.
“Damien?” Lucy’s voice wobbles, but I’m already reaching for the phone, preparing for the worst.
The perimeter alarm starts blaring.