Chapter 6
She didn't know how long he held her like that.
Long enough for her breath to find his rhythm.
Long enough for the trembling in her arms to ease into something quieter, a low tremor she carried in her hands like aftershock.
He didn't push for more. He didn't try to take the kiss further.
He stood with her against him and let her come back to herself one slow inhale at a time, his mouth resting at her temple, his hand spread open and warm across the base of her spine.
She pressed her face into the hollow under his jaw. She breathed in aroused man, and cinnamon and the gorgeous scent of his natural body, reveling in the tactile warmth of his skin and the slow, even thud of his pulse against her cheek. Her hand fisted slowly in his shirt and unfisted again.
"Don't let me go."
The words came out so quiet she wasn't sure she'd said them, but he heard.
He bent. With one arm braced under her knees, the other across her back, he lifted her off the floor as if she weighed nothing, and she let herself be lifted, which was its own kind of confession.
He carried her the short distance to the couch and sat with her cradled against his chest, the amber light pooling around them, and he settled her across his lap and tucked her in against him until the line of her body fit along the line of his like he'd been holding her this way for a long time and had only now been given permission to remember.
She rested her cheek against the place where his shoulder met his throat.
She could feel his heart. She could feel the eagle still riding the air above him, the faint pressure of wings she wasn't meant to see, and her own ribcage with its chakana ink and its centuries of forgetting, and the way her body had stopped trying to put distance between them and had instead curled toward him like a hand closing around something it had been searching for.
His thumb stroked along her hip. Once. Slow.
He was deliciously hard beneath her hips, against his groin, thick and hot.
So many nights she’d thought about him inside her, burned with the need for not only that damn sexy mouth, those expressive gray eyes and everything that went with it, including this hard-muscled body courtesy of Uncle Sam, but the part of him that was pure male.
She moved, unable to stay still, and he gasped, groaned, and said, "Fuck, if the stakes weren’t so damn high right now, I would fucking take you right here on the goddamned floor, and fuck you until you screamed my damn name. ”
She turned to look at him, his pupils blown, his face contorted. “Not unless I fucked you first,” she whispered. Her mouth found his again, her lips claiming him, groaning when she turned her body and straddled him. He clutched her hips and thrust against her, his breathing ragged.
She heard voices. Dammit. His team.
He heard them too, and was swift and decisive, lifting her and setting her beside him.
Her breath rushed out. She closed her eyes.
“Is it safe to enter?” Twister asked, standing just outside the open front door.
“Yes,” she said, then turned to Flash. Her voice scraped along the edges. “Damn SEALs can’t follow directions.”
“We can, but we’re used to moving all our muscles and were worried for our boy. Looks like you made up.”
She looked up at him, and the control she'd held through all of it loosened a notch, just in her shoulders, just for him. "I owe you the courtesy of hearing you out. Your story is insane, but you believed in me when you had no proof. How can I do anything less?"
He looked down at her, the sparking gray of his eyes gone almost soft, and she watched something settle in his face that she didn't have a name for.
"That’s the first thing I’ve heard in a really long time that gives me a measure of hope," he said, low.
"Before you tell me everything, Jae." She breathed it against his throat.
"How about you all get settled." She pointed upstairs.
“There are two spare bedrooms with bunks and storage units. My armory is on this floor, behind the bookcase.” She rose and pressed a hidden button, and it opened to collective male gasps.
She spared no expense when it came to weapons, explosives, and gadgets.
Twister grinned. “Damn, woman. That’s a tactical wet dream.”
She laughed softly. “Right.” She looked at the two young men she didn’t know. “You are?”
“Lieutenant Flynn Gallagher, and this is Lieutenant Nathaniel Locklear. You can just call us Fly and North.”
She nodded. “I’m sure you’re parts of the puzzle. Just…make yourselves at home. There’s a shower to each bunk room.”
“Hot damn. Dibs,” Easy said, heading for the stairs with that feline grace she couldn’t seem to unsee. The others followed.
Flash rose and she simply watched him. How did she stay away from him for so long? A flash of the hilt of a knife in her hand made her pulse stumble. She shook it off. He cupped her face with both hands. “Is that a subtle hint that I need a shower, babe?”
“Honestly, no. You smell…” She breathed him in. “Amazing.”
His stomach rumbled, and she smiled. He was human after all. “I can get to cooking, but if you want to take advantage of my hot water, be my guest.”
Twister had been carrying two packs, so she was sure the second one was his. “Better make a lot. Five men aren’t bashful about chow.”
She nodded, and as he passed her, she slapped him on the ass. He hesitated, then chuckled. “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”
“Go, before I lock us in the armory and take your fine ass on something lethal.”
He grabbed her around the neck and dragged her against him, his chest heaving. His mouth was fierce and quick, the kiss hot and way too brief. “Babe, everything on you is lethal.”
* * *
Flash stood under the hot water with his hands braced against the tile and let it pound the back of his neck. He hadn’t been kidding.
Lechuza was lethal in every sense of the word.
He'd been moving for too long. His shoulders were a sheet of knots.
The shower was hers, which meant the water pressure was tactical, the temperature ran hot enough to scald, and the soap on the shelf smelled like the woman he'd just been holding.
He kept his eyes closed against it. He kept his forehead against the wet tile.
He let himself stand inside the fact that she'd touched him, that her mouth had found his, that she'd said his name the way he'd been carrying it in his head for a year, and he let his ribs unclench one notch at a time.
She'd let him in.
She'd let him in, and she'd bitten his lip. That had been the beginning of the restraint he needed to keep his damn head on straight, not the one between his legs, although that one did need a stern talking to. His dick tightened with throbbing protest.
She'd looked at him like she was finally going to let herself break, and he'd held her steady because the alternative was getting sidetracked while the world burned down with four brothers waiting in a hangar. He'd never been so proud of his own goddamn discipline in his life.
He got soap on the mesh loofah and scrubbed it over his body, but when he reached the scar from where Herrera’s goon had sunk in his blade, her hands trying to stem the blood…
the world spun, and then, it was her hands holding the knife, plunging it in, her body covered with her own blood, her face devastated, ruined, tear-streaked.
Everything righted, and he caught himself against the tile. What the fuck?
The bathroom door banged open against its stop.
"You drowning in there, brother?"
Easy. Of course, it was Easy.
"Working on it." He caught his breath, recalibrated. A vision that felt like a memory. He was more fatigued than he thought. He was making up shit in his head. Then he thought about when he’d told her no downstairs, how she had reacted with such rage. What had he called her? Quri Killa? What did Quri mean? It had to be Quechua. He didn’t speak it, except for that moment in the jungle when he’d uttered, you are my heart.
He shifted his shoulders. He was sure back then as he was sure now. The jungle had whispered it to him.
A shiver went over him from a wind that couldn’t possibly be there. The jungle…had the Veil given him the knowledge he needed to speak to her in her ancestral tongue? Had it recognized him even then?
Had his uneasiness in the Ecuadorian jungle when he’d been contacted by the Guardian tied to this…this strange name he shouldn’t know?
"Take your time. I'm just here to ask why Twister cooked dinner. He's a fucking medic, Flash. He doesn't even season."
"Lechuza had a pot going," Twister called from somewhere down the hall. "I added garlic. Don't listen to him."
Flash huffed out something that was almost a laugh, unable to dismiss those Veil connections.
When exactly had Flash become a Shadowguard?
He scrubbed his hands down his face and dragged in a long breath that came out shaky at the end and reminded him he hadn't slept well in months and was going to sleep tonight if it killed him.
Maybe his tired mind was playing tricks on him.
He cut the water and stood there dripping.
"You think she bought the whole Veil thing? She’s going to agree?
I for one want a life with my wife." Easy's voice had dropped.
He was leaning against the doorframe on the other side of the shower curtain, the joke gone, and Flash was getting used to seeing him as a cross between a man and a cougar.
Easy battling in full Veil form? That was going to be something to see.
Flash pushed the curtain back a few inches and reached for the towel.
"She's alive." Flash’s voice came out rougher than he wanted. "She's pissed. She let us stay. I’d say that was a start."
"Yeah, and I saw some evidence of kissy face."
"You didn't see shit."
"I saw your face when we got inside, brother."