Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
ZARA
Itell him about the scar.
Not the sanitized version I give when someone at a bar notices the thin line running along my collarbone and asks if I got hurt.
The real version. The eighteen year old kid named Private Jansen who took shrapnel to his femoral artery in a convoy outside Kandahar and how I held pressure on his leg for forty seven minutes in the back of a Humvee while the medic worked and the vehicle bounced over roads that felt like the earth was trying to shake us loose.
How a piece of metal from the same blast clipped me across the collarbone and I didn't feel it until Jansen was in surgery and someone pointed out that my uniform was soaked with blood that wasn't all his.
He listens the way he's listened all night. Without interruption. Without that look people get when they want you to stop talking about something that makes them uncomfortable. He listens like my words are a briefing he needs to absorb completely before he can act.
When I finish he's quiet for a long time. The fire has burned down to embers and the cabin is warm and close and the snow outside has turned the windows into walls of white.
"You saved his life," he says.
"He lost his leg."
"And you think you failed him."
I open my mouth to argue. Close it. Because nobody has ever named that particular wound so precisely, so quickly, and the accuracy of it steals the air from my lungs.
"The scars we carry from protecting other people are the ones that heal the slowest," he says, and his voice is so low it's almost lost under the crackle of dying embers. "Because we never think we did enough."
He's not talking about me anymore. Or not only about me. There's something in his face, in the tightened line of his jaw and the way his eyes have gone distant, that tells me he's standing in his own battlefield right now. A place I can't see but can feel radiating off him like heat from a burn.
"Come here," I say.
He looks up. Surprised. Like he's not used to being the one someone reaches for.
"You've been sitting in that chair for two hours keeping a safe distance like I'm a grenade with the pin pulled." I set my coffee mug on the table. "I'm not going to explode. Come sit with me."
He doesn't move for three full seconds. I count them the way I count heartbeats in triage.
Steady. Measured. Then he stands, and crossing the four feet between his chair and my couch takes him longer than it should because he stops halfway and looks at me with an expression that is so naked, so unguarded, that I feel it in my teeth.
He sits. Not close enough to touch, but close enough that I can feel the warmth of his body through the flannel I'm wearing and smell that pine and woodsmoke scent that I'm already starting to associate with safety.
"I want to kiss you," I say, because I've never been good at waiting for things I want and I see no reason to start now.
"Zara." There's a warning in the way he says my name. Not don't. Something more complicated. Something that sounds like you don't know what you're starting.
"I'm not asking for permission." I shift on the couch until my knees are angled toward him. "I'm giving you information. What you do with it is your choice."
The look he gives me is pure heat filtered through rigid control.
I can see the war on his face. Duty against desire.
Whatever principles he set for tonight against the reality of what's happening in this cabin, in this storm, on this couch where we've both said more true things in four hours than most people say in four months.
"If I kiss you," he says, and his voice has dropped into that register that makes my spine liquid, "I'm not going to be gentle about it."
"Good." I hold his gaze. "I've had enough gentle to last a lifetime."
He moves fast. One hand comes up to cup the side of my face and the other wraps around the back of my neck and his mouth finds mine with a precision that makes every kiss I've ever had before feel like a rough draft.
He kisses like he does everything else. Deliberate.
Thorough. His lips are warm and firm and when his tongue slides against mine I make a sound that I would be embarrassed about if his grip on my neck didn't tighten in response.
He swallows the sound like he's been waiting for it.
Like he wanted to know exactly what I taste like when I stop controlling the narrative.
My hands find his chest and the muscles underneath his henley are ridiculous.
Hard and warm and they flex under my palms when I drag my fingers down his ribs.
He pulls back just enough to look at me and his eyes are darker now, the blue green swallowed by pupil, and the expression on his face is something I've never seen directed at me before.
Hunger. But not reckless hunger. Controlled hunger. The kind that comes from a man who knows exactly what he wants and has been disciplining himself against wanting it.
"Tell me your safe word," he says.
My brain stalls. "I don't have one."
"Pick one. Right now. Something you'll remember."
I search his face. He's serious. Completely, absolutely serious. He has one hand on my neck and the other cradling my jaw and his mouth tastes like whiskey and he's asking me to establish an emergency exit before we go any further.
"Kandahar," I say, because it's the word that lives in the back of my throat at all times and it will come out when nothing else will.
For a moment, I swear I see a look of recognition on his face, but it’s gone in an instance. He nods once.
"If you say that word, everything stops. No questions. No hesitation. Everything stops and I take care of you. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Yes what?"
I know what he's asking. I’ve done enough research on the lifestyle to know what he needs, but I also know what the answer means. And the fact that my body responds before my brain can catch up tells me everything I need to know about what I want from this man.
"Yes, Sir."
His exhale is controlled but I feel it shake through him. He presses his forehead to mine and stays there for one breath. Two. Like he's steadying himself against the force of what I just gave him.
Then he pulls back and the man looking at me is not the same man who offered me risotto three hours ago.
This man has purpose. This man has command.
And when he speaks, his voice carries the quiet absolute authority of someone who has been in charge of keeping people alive and takes that responsibility more seriously than breathing.
"Stand up."
I stand. My legs are trembling and I don't try to hide it because something tells me he wants to see it. He wants to see what he does to me.
He stays on the couch. Looking up at me with the firelight painting shadows across those sharp features.
His gaze travels from my face to the collar of his flannel shirt hanging loose on my shoulders to the hem where it grazes my bare thighs.
I changed out of the wrap dress in the bathroom an hour ago and I'm wearing his shirt over nothing but my underwear and the way he's looking at me makes me feel more naked than skin.
"Take the shirt off."
My fingers find the top button. I undo them slowly.
Not because I'm performing, but because my hands are shaking and I want to feel every second of this.
The flannel falls open and the fire is warm against my bare stomach and my breasts and the thin lace of the bra I wore because some stupid optimistic part of me thought tonight might end exactly like this.
I let the shirt slide off my shoulders and it pools at my feet.
He doesn't move. Doesn't reach for me. He just looks, and being looked at by this man is its own form of possession.
His eyes trace the scar on my collarbone.
The curve of my waist. The stretch marks on my hips that I stopped hating three years ago when I decided that a body that survived two deployments gets to look however it wants.
"You're extraordinary," he says, and the word is rough. Not a compliment. A fact. An observation delivered with the same certainty he uses for everything.
"I'm standing in my underwear in a stranger's cabin during a snowstorm," I say because humor is the last fortification I have left and it's crumbling fast. "Extraordinary is generous."
"You're standing in my cabin," he corrects, and the possessive weight on the word my makes my knees buckle, "because you're brave enough to want something that terrifies you and honest enough to chase it. That's not generous. That's the truth."
He reaches for me then. One hand. Just his fingertips, trailing from the scar on my collarbone down between my breasts and stopping at my navel. The touch is so light it barely qualifies as contact and I feel it in every nerve ending I own.
"We're going to go slow," he says. "And you're going to tell me what you feel. Every sensation. Every response. I want to hear you."
"I thought the whole point of submission was shutting up and taking it."
"Whoever told you that doesn't deserve to be in the same room with a submissive.
" His hand flattens against my stomach and the warmth of his palm spreads through me like a current.
"Your voice is part of this. Your voice is what makes this work.
Without it, I'm just a man in a room. With it, I can give you everything. "
I don't know what everything looks like with this man. But standing in his warm cabin while snow buries the world outside and his hand rests steady against my skin and his eyes hold mine with a focus that makes me feel like the only person who has ever existed, I know I want to find out.
"I feel your hand," I whisper. "And it's warm. And I'm terrified. And I don't want you to stop."
His thumb traces a circle below my navel and the sound I make is involuntary and raw and he closes his eyes when he hears it. Just for a second. Like he needs to absorb it somewhere no one else can reach.
"Good girl," he murmurs. "Keep talking."
And God help me, I do.