By Break of Day (The Night Stalkers) (10 page)

“Damn you, Roberts!” But Kara also rolled to press her breast tighter against his mouth as she cursed.

He drew her in and teased her until she quivered and cursed like a bronc gone mad. She finally got one of her arms wrapped around his head.

All she had to do was grab his ear and she could pull him off her. Instead, she locked her arm about his head and dragged him in even harder. She clamped her thighs so tightly on his hand, he’d have been hard pressed to recover it.

He drove her up. He’d never had a woman who so gave herself to him. She moaned and twisted and pleaded for more in rough whispers.

He flew her body like the best helo ever made. She rose for him, rose until she soared, and then stayed there as if she’d never come down.

When at last she fell back to earth, he started to wonder quite what he’d done. He’d never used a woman that way, nor been so fascinated seeing quite what he could make her do.

Slowly her body settled, though aftershocks continued. She kept his one hand still clamped between her thighs as she slowly curled into him. She let her arm slide down across his neck, then his shoulder as she rolled, and he was nuzzling the side of her breast instead of attacking the tip.

He still supported her head as she curled up around him.

Justin began to worry about whether he’d hurt her. He hadn’t meant to, hadn’t ever wanted to do so much to a woman.

But she’d almost gone fetal on him, her face nestled into his side.

He opened his mouth to whisper her name as a question.

Then she nibbled him in the ribs.

Right on his ticklish spot.

* * *

The moment she felt Justin flinch up and back, she rolled away from him; she landed catlike on all fours on the deck.

One disadvantage to a Navy berth, there wasn’t a lot a lot of room.

One advantage to a Navy berth, that meant that they were very close.

She kicked his boot with hers.

As she planned, he looked down in surprise.

It was going to cost him. She grabbed the back hem of his T-shirt and pulled it up, over his head, and forward down his arms until it was snarled around his two wrists.

Then she stopped. She simply didn’t have a choice.

“Justin,” she managed against a dry throat.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“You do me a favor?”

“If I can.”

“Do not
ever!
stop working out.” He was a damned handsome man, but his chest was a work of art. She wanted to relish it, admire it, so…

She attacked it.

Kara shoved him onto his back, straddled over him, pinning his T-shirt-bound hands beneath her, and admired those beautiful pecs. It was clear from his rippling arms that he could throw her off if he wanted to, which he’d think of in a moment. So she had to distract him.

She peeled off her own T-shirt and sports bra, then tossed them in his face so that he stopped staring wide-eyed at her chest much the way she’d been staring at his. Then she leaned forward and rubbed skin to skin, chest to chest. The power of it slapped against her and she dove further in.

He started to explore with his hands. They might be marginally trapped in cotton, but she was sitting right on them.

“Naughty, naughty,” she warned him, hoping he wouldn’t stop. When he persisted, she used it as an excuse to tease his chest some more. He didn’t hiss or buck, he growled—a low feral sound she could feel rippling over his pecs and through her lips.

He finally remembered his strength and pulled his hands free from beneath her, though they were still inside the shirt.

Kara was pushing back with one hand on the center of his chest to give one last good old Army try at controlling the situation, when he wrapped his fingers around her bare waist—both palms to her belly since his wrists were still snarled up.

With that simple gesture, all her desire for a good tussle just slipped away.

She straddled his hips, one hand on the center of his chest, the other slowly slipping along his beautiful arms. He’d shaken her T-shirt and bra aside from his face, though the latter still lay across his throat. She plucked the garment free and tossed it aside, his T-shirt as well, never losing the connection of her hand on his chest. She tossed both onto the growing pile of their clothes.

He slid his hands up her rib cage and back to her waist. As his hands traveled up her body, their rough texture and soft touch made her eyes want to slip closed. But she couldn’t look away from his blue eyes.

This time she wanted to protest that those eyes should be focused on her chest, not looking right back at her.

It was too much, too close.

She did close her eyes, and leaned back to guide his hands up and over her breasts. Every callus elicited a nerve sensation that blasted into her brain; every brush of a thumb earned a gasp of breath that pounded out of her.

If this is what it felt like to be touched by Justin, how would it feel to have him inside her?

She wasn’t sure if she was ready for that much power.

He hesitated as if sensing her mood.

She opened one eye and peered down at him. He was watching her face intently, both of her breasts cradled in his palms.

“I’m not one of your goddamn horses.”

He teased her breasts just right to send a shiver through her. “Must say, I noticed that.”

“Stop being so…so…” She didn’t have the word that was supposed to land on the other side of that sentence. Aware? Considerate? He was supposed to be a glorious, spectacular, Texas-sized fuck. And then done.
Just a test drive, remember?

When he’d attacked her, he’d read her mood perfectly. Now that she felt inexplicably quiet, she rather wished he didn’t.

But on their own, her eyes slipped closed once more. Of their own volition, her hands slid up over the backs of his. Not to guide—damn, but this man didn’t need any guidance—but simply to enjoy feeling his motions as he explored her body.

She floated as he stripped off both of their pants and underwear, never once losing contact with her.

Then he lay back on the bunk, protection on, and she was sliding down over him. Never once did she open her eyes. Never once did she break the feeling of floating, not as he entered her, not as he filled her, not as he sent them both flying ever so high in the impossible sky.

* * *

That’s a new one on you, Justin.

He really should leave Kara’s bed. The potential for embarrassing her or, worse, causing her difficulties, should get him moving along.

But when they finished making love—for there was no doubt this hadn’t been mere sex; he knew what that felt like as well as the next guy—she had slowly tipped forward until she lay on his chest. Her now very-well-mussed hair tucked up under his chin.

Somewhere along the way, their fingers had interlocked. And even as consciousness slipped away from Kara and eased her grasp, he could only marvel at their interlaced fingers: her fine Italian dark ones, his big, soap-white clumsy ones. They were fine on a horse or the controls of a Chinook, but they weren’t meant for a woman like Kara Moretti. Though she hadn’t complained.

There was so very little to complain about at the moment. Her hair smelled of her. Not shampoo, nothing else but her. Her sweet weight was fully upon him. He wished he could reach for a blanket to pull over her, but that was trapped beneath them.

She was warm and soft against him, was perhaps the most beautiful woman he’d ever lain with, and the sex had been truly off the charts. He wished he could fly half as well as Kara Moretti made love.

He sighed, feeling her resting weight against his diaphragm.

Definition of heaven, found.

* * *

Kara woke hours later, curled against Justin who had remained flat on his back. She now lay head on his shoulder and one leg hooked over his hips.

She considered doing some happy girly thing, tracing the fine contours of his chest or maybe trying to tease his body to life so that he could wake once more inside her.

Some evil part of her brain took over. She wrapped her hand around him, marveling once more that all that had fit inside her…and felt so incredibly good. Then she put her lips close to his ear so that it would sound far louder than it was—the compartment walls were made of steel, but they were far from soundproof.

“Alert! Alert! Alert! Fire in the hole!”

Kara wasn’t quite ready for the scale of Justin’s reaction.

He jerked awake and grabbed for controls that weren’t there, planting an elbow hard in her stomach in the process, which caused her to unintentionally clench her fist around him.

Justin offered a sharp squeak in response before she managed to ease her handhold. He looked around wild-eyed and leaped on top of her.

At first she thought that had to be a record recovery time from dead asleep to wake-up sex.

But when he didn’t move for a long moment, she realized that he was covering her to protect her from an explosion.

“Easy, babe.” She brushed her free hand down his back. Unlike his chest, the skin on his back was rough, scarred. Her other hand was still trapped between them and holding on to him. “Easy. Bad joke. Kara made a bad joke.”

He propped himself up and looked around for a moment before looking back down at her. His eyes slowly came back into focus.

Justin blinked a few times as comprehension finally sank in.

Instead of showing the fury she deserved, he cleared his throat a few times, then managed to speak.

“Is there a reason that your hand is where it is during an attack drill?”

“Not really. It wasn’t a real attack drill.”

“And yet your hand…” He didn’t ease back. She was pinned to the bed.

“…is where it is,” she admitted.

He eased off her, sat up, and scrubbed at his face.

She removed her hand, wanting to curl up and die for how wrong her joke had gone. A sophomoric tease; a stupid one for a trained soldier.

Justin trapped her hand in his and held on to it before she could curl it against her own chest.

“Need a moment, sweetheart. Just give me a moment.”

She was always doing shit like that. Something would be good, so good, and then she’d find a way to fuck it up. She managed to free an edge of the blanket and pull it over her against the sudden chill.

Justin just sat there, feet on the floor, back to her, but unaccountably holding on to her hand despite what she’d done.

His back, barely visible in the shadows of the small light that had been on all night, wasn’t smooth and impossibly perfect like his chest. It was rippled with scar tissue.

Justin had struck her as a wholesome, healthy cowboy who she liked against her better judgment. But now, here was another side to him.

Her one hand was clamped in his, as if he was anchoring himself. There was a sad joke, anchoring to her as if she was so well planted on the ground.

But at his continued silence, she released the corner of the blanket from her other hand and reached out to trace the scars.

* * *

A cool fingertip brushed down between Justin’s shoulder blades. Traced a line that he knew all too well, one that had burned with heat and pain.

Kara Moretti’s bed.

He was sitting on the edge of Kara Moretti’s bed.

Not strapped into the seat of a burning Chinook as it shredded from the inside out.

“Humanitarian relief mission,” he managed to get out. Closing his eyes didn’t help; it only made him see the moment more clearly.

“Shhh. It’s okay. You don’t need to…” Kara’s voice was gentle, soothing, and unsure.

“No, it’s something I’ve had to face. To learn to live with.” Though he couldn’t turn to face her just yet. Instead he held on to her hand to keep himself firmly anchored in the present.

“The team was keeping the people back as well as they could, but they were so desperate for the food and clean water that they were pushing aboard.” He opened his eyes, but it was little better. There on the wall above her small desk were a dozen photos. Family. They looked like family. Kara right in the middle of them with that radiant smile of hers.

He turned to look at her, as much to see her as to stop her hand from tracing over his scars.

“Some crazy jihadist, guaranteed of his place in heaven, food for his family, or who knows, got by security. All we really know is he wore a suicide vest and wanted to blow up an American helicopter. In the confined space, it didn’t take much explosive and he wore plenty. My crew and a dozen of the desperate people who had forced their way into the main cabin never even had time to scream. My copilot wasn’t as lucky as I was.”

He took a deep breath and forced himself to focus on Kara’s eyes, on the sympathy there. Sympathy but no real understanding. She might be a soldier, but she didn’t fly into battle. He caught himself before he described Rom’s last moments. That would be cruel for no point.

“I managed to roll out the door with whole chunks of my seat embedded in my back. Only my armored vest kept the chunks from continuing right out my front. Combat search-and-rescue reached me before I bled out. Spent over a month in the hospital and six months on light duty.”

“You came back.”

He nodded. He’d owed them. His crew had risked and lost their lives; he couldn’t abandon them, even if they were gone. He couldn’t turn his back on…their service. He’d done a lot of thinking from that hospital bed, had been on the verge of calling it his last tour. Instead he decided to do everything he could against the people who had sent the crazed bomber. He knew who did that the very best, and he started aiming for SOAR from the hospital bed.

No one had understood, not even his sister flying Air Force, but it hadn’t been a choice. Not even a duty to his past. It was need that drove him into the future—a desperate need to protect—because some crazy could just as casually walk into a horse show where his family rode. That wasn’t going to happen if there was any way he could stop it.

He stood, releasing Kara’s hand with a brief squeeze.

“Don’t leave. Not like this.”

Justin didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled on his clothes and boots, and picked up his hat before looking back down at her.