Six
JAMIE
Is it possible that one decision could change your entire world? Two hours ago, I would have laughed at that. And yet, from the minute I said yes to the job with Reynolds Protection Services, everything changed.
What is this odd twisting and twining in my gut? I’ve enjoyed plenty of one-night stands, so it’s not anticipation. It doesn’t hurt… exactly, but it is uncomfortable.
Is it guilt? If there were an award for being the biggest asshole in the universe, I figured I was the frontrunner for it because I would take her up on what she was offering, even though I knew she was lying through her teeth.
It was a compulsion. Jess was a white-picket-fence girl.
I knew it, sure as I knew my military DoD ID number.
She wanted this, but if I followed through, I’d leave behind a woman who was… different.
Everything that had happened since meeting her … was it a sign of something bigger happening tonight? When she said her name aloud, I swore I felt everything vibrate. Like I shook a snow globe and let the flakes inside it fall naturally where they should.
Or was it divine intervention? Her name, so close to my twin’s.
When she said it aloud, it was like a sigh across the room.
A cooling breeze in the heat of the club.
When I lost Jesse, I lost the last piece of what kept me tethered to the world.
Since then, I’ve drifted, going from one job to the next, looking for a place to land, and never quite finding it.
I wanted her. I wouldn’t deny it. There’s something about her that made me feel light inside.
A feeling I hadn’t felt since I was a child.
Before cutting off my family. Before deciding to go into the military against my parents’ wishes.
Before trekking across the globe caused me to see more death, more evil, than any one person should.
I’ve never, ever considered being a one-woman man.
While they never divorced, I watched my parents' marriage disintegrate because my father couldn’t keep from wandering.
When my brother died, I held my grieving sister-in-law as her world fell apart, and she was left vulnerable to my parents’ cruelty.
As I moved up in the ranks of the Marines, my job became far too dangerous to subject a woman to the worry of one day coming home in a box.
By the time all of it faded into the background, and I left the military, I was too set in my ways to change.
And yet… there was something about my little goddess that made me feel like I was running away from something when I should have been running towards it. That if I left tomorrow, I would miss out on the chance of a lifetime.
Could I possibly change? Could I possibly survive an actual relationship? I’ve never been in one, so I didn’t have the first clue what to do.
“Jamie?”
Her voice called me back from my musings. I realized she’d reached out a hand to my face, cupped my cheek in her palm, her thumb tenderly brushing back and forth.
Who was I kidding? I could do a weekend. Maybe, probably, a week. But longer? No, it wasn’t within me to pull that trigger. Oh, the irony in that statement!
Recovering from my bout of temporary insanity, I raised my hand to cover hers and turned my head slightly to nuzzle into her skin. Not a kiss, but enough of a touch with my lips to flirt with the concept. “Yes, little goddess?”
“I need nothing more than tonight.”
Her body trembled, barely perceptible to the naked eye, but I’m trained to notice these things.
Her voice quivered, letting me know she was nervous.
The words were foreign to her. This wasn’t something she had asked for before in her life.
She wanted this… whatever was crackling between us. She couldn’t deny it.
Neither could I.
However, I gave her one last chance to see how wrong this would be for her, to push her away, even as a voice cried from the murkiest corners of my brain that I was ten kinds of stupid for doing it.
“You go home on Sunday,” I pointed out to her.
“I know.”
“I leave for Europe tomorrow.”
“I know.”
“I won’t call. Or text. Or email. San Antonio isn’t likely to be a place I’ll ever pass through.”
“I know. I don’t care. I want this anyway.”
This time, I kissed her palm. Slowly. Lingeringly. My eyes never so much as twitched away from hers.
“Okay.”
My little goddess felt turned on by the earlier display, so if she wanted me… if she wanted this tonight… I would make sure she had a night to remember. A night no other man could give her.
Laying her hand in her lap, I rose from the couch and crossed to the curtain opening.
Earlier tonight, Hubble said this would keep people, both staff and patrons, from intruding.
I had closed them so we could hear each other over the noise of the club.
Now I was about to unleash all of her inhibitions.
I opened the blackout curtains, but I left the second layer, a translucent sheath patterned like lace, open.
Between the extremely dim lighting in the club, the low lighting in the booths, and the peekaboo curtain, it allowed others to see the moving shadows inside, and allowed those inside the shroud to see people passing by, possibly even trying to get a closer look at what was going on. A voyeur’s paradise.
Returning to her side, I held out my hand, palm up, allowing her to choose whether to take this any further.