Chapter 18 #3
She said nothing, and he thought he’d have appreciated her relative quiet this evening, but it unnerved him.
He needed her to be her chippy self so he could keep up his defenses.
He didn’t want to like her or feel anything but animosity toward her—not even protectiveness.
He hated that he felt protective. Most of all he hated that he felt the lust. That’s what it was.
He needed for that to be all there was. Nothing else.
He could afford nothing else between them.
“Maybe we should have it out,” he said, contrary to everything. He pushed the door open and stepped aside for her to walk in, but she stumbled and he caught her arm. The sting of her hot skin sent a shot of desire pinging through him so that he let her go and fisted his hands again.
They walked inside the house and he let the sultry warmth surround him and seep in.
“I thought we decided clearing the air was a bad idea?”
“Any other ideas?”
“How about self-restraint?”
“You got any left, girlie?” He almost smiled but kept his mocking tone for safety.
She laughed.
“What happened to that chip you had a couple hours ago?”
“Maybe it melted under all the heat.” She gave him a look. “You still haven’t shared anything meaningful about who the real Dane the Demon is—and what’s with the Demon tag anyway?”
“That’s the general and his idea of team bonding. Everyone gets a name.”
“Kind of like you naming me girlie?”
“That’s not a name. Your name would be something else if the gen—Governor Douglas, I should say since he’s your boss—”
“Isn’t he your boss too?”
“More like my client. But he’s still the general to me.”
“So what yellow brick road did you take to lead you to be a semi-retired hired gun living in a beach shack on Martha’s Vineyard?”
“When you put it that way it sounds like it should be an interesting story.”
“So tell it and I’ll be the judge.”
He scoffed and still resisted, but there was an urge to talk curdling up in him.
The resistance had grown paper thin under the weight of his weariness.
He’d needed a rest and this was what happened when the soul-crushing weight of too much darkness, too much blood and too many evil men crossed his path.
He needed the peace and quiet and tranquility to assimilate it all.
To not feel like the world was a second hell.
He took his stare from the ocean and saw she was watching him with her newly adopted patience.
She must sense he was cracking, that her warmth had crumbled his defenses.
Even his professional pride wasn’t a match for the need in his soul to connect with her.
“I started out as a surfer in California. When I was sixteen—halfway through high school and making a name for myself in the waves—we moved. My mother and I. It was always my mother and I. My father died in the service when I was fourteen. I supposedly take after him. A lot.” He didn’t mention that his father had been something of a womanizer and had married his mother because she was pregnant.
Then he realized he might be more his father’s son than he’d like to admit.
He could smell Shana’s sweaty heat and it gave him a rise, God help him.
“Then we have that in common.”
“Your father a war casualty?”
“Of a sort. He died. Line of duty police officer when I was fifteen. I was the oldest—and the biggest. I grew up fast to help my mum take care of my three younger brothers until the ingrates towered over me.”
“So you’ve been proving yourself all your life.”
She nodded.
“I never had to prove myself. Things came easy. Until the move back east. But once I graduated West Point and joined the Army Rangers and special services, I was recruited by Peter John Douglas—not a general, but that was our tag for him—things started getting easy again. I had a lot of pluck as an ignorant young man.”
“And now?
“Don’t have to tell you about now. You’re looking at me.”
“I see a tired man. Still lots of pluck if that’s your less offensive word for arrogance.”
He laughed and she went on.
“I see a very accomplished and scarred man and one who’s driven, but I’m not sure by what.”
“Does there have to be some deep dark secret driving a man? Can’t it be a quest for justice? A quest to lay his own swath of rightness over the scorched hell of the world?”
“A closet poet?”
“A solitary man who does some periodic soul searching about his badass crazy unconventional life.” Right now, the scar of a lost love and no children stung most of all. But he didn’t dare tell her that.
She nodded and her eyes softened, lost their lust and gained a melted heartfelt quality. He felt his heart speed up in recognition of that look and the way it touched him. The way he felt drawn to it like a man seeing a desert mirage.
“I understand,” she said as she took a step toward him into the circle of his arms, before he even realized he’d held them out to her.
“And you lost a love?” She held herself back with her hands against the beating of his heart. No sense trying to hide from her now.
“I had one love.” The words cost him. The clench in his gut tightened as he held her against him. “Her name was Elena and she… died.” He’d never told anyone how. People knew. The people they’d worked with. The people he hadn’t seen in fifteen years.
“How?” Shana whispered the question and pleaded with her intense green eyes, her nostrils flaring as if with the effort of restraint.
“I’ve never told the story.”
“In for a penny,” she whispered.
When he pulled back, she held on. He sighed.
“After Special Ops I did a stint with Chicago SWAT and we worked together—Elena and I. And…we had a relationship. Serious.” He paused to watch her react. She looked interested, but since she knew the end to this particular story, he figured that stopped her from feeling more. He went on.
“She was undercover in an operation I was overseeing involving gun smugglers. It was time to take them down. She ignored my command to shut it down and return, ignored orders from the chief. Instead she tried to back out with the man—the perp heading up the gun-runners. We went in guns blazing. She—they both—got caught in the cross-fire. She didn’t make it.
” He watched Shana’s eyes dilate as he said the words and felt her intake of breath and the simmering outrage on his behalf.
The tension eased from his shoulders and he pulled her closer, but she still stared straight into his eyes, so he finished the story, answered her unasked question.
“I quit Chicago and worked for an international security firm until I went solo a few years back. Outside the country most of the time.”
“Serving justice and the American way,” she said. They both smiled like they meant it.
“Wish it were as simple as it sounds.”
“Let it be simple,” she whispered and moved the barrier of her hands, melting against him, hot and simmering.
“You talking about the job… or us?” He touched his lips to her earlobe and nibbled, breathing in her scent, the salt air, and allowing tendrils of her hair to whisper against his beard-roughened chin. He shuddered.
“I… don’t know. But I can promise you I’m not an Elena.” She turned her head and brushed her lips along his jaw and found his mouth as if to seal her promise.
His stomach tumbled at the way she spit the name Elena as if it were a curse.
He felt light-headed as he tasted the warmth and salt of her mouth on his lips and the rough hot sponginess of her tongue tangling against his.
The solace filled him like he hadn’t felt in years.
The way she filled his arms, pulsing and alive and warm, she soothed him with her solid frame and scorched him with her desire.
Their kiss felt right. Made him feel right.
He let her warm him and let himself go, let himself peel away her clothing and his. And peel away his defenses, let her sink into him and let himself sink into her. All the way.