Somebody's Angel (#5 in a Military Romance / BDSM Romance series) (Rescue Me) (44 page)

“That’ll work for me. And I’ll be happy to prepare bar food for club members to earn my keep, too.”

“You don’t need to earn anything except maybe the trust of a man who doesn’t trust easily. But I won’t discourage you from cooking anytime you want. Maybe you could give Karla some more lessons. We’ve had steak Florentine more times than I can count since you taught her how to make it. Good grub, but I need something besides that and her tuna and broccoli casseroles.”

“That would be perfect, Adam! Thank you!”

He grew serious again. “I’d also appreciate it if you could just provide some diversions for Karla in the coming months. She needs someone to keep her…busy.” Adam made a sour face and, from what she’d overhead from Karla earlier about Adam’s oh-so-doomed plan to abstain from having rough sex, Angelina could imagine what was bugging him.

Soon reality hit. She couldn’t move in to the club. She just signed a six-month lease and had no steady income except for catering jobs.

A knock at the bar’s front door jarred her thoughts before she could explain the situation to Adam. Someone passing by probably thought he could get in before the bar’s regular hours. She brought her focus back to the conversation quickly. She needed to practice on maintaining her focus if she was going to have a chance winning Marc back.

Adam turned toward the bar and nodded at someone. Now who had the focusing problem? Karla must be there.

Adam turned back toward Angelina. “Back to Marc.”

The strains of Dean Martin’s rendition of
Return to Me
poured from the jukebox. Angelina’s mind returned to the night she’d danced to another of Papa’s tunes on the jukebox in this bar, held in Marc’s embrace. Tears filled her eyes. She once again wished she hadn’t given Rico Papa’s record collection. Only now they reminded her of the loss of Marc, too, not just of Papa.

What was Marc doing now? He never seemed to be around their mutual friends when she was, so she assumed someone was making sure they didn’t bump into each other. Awkward. At least she could still be friends with Karla, Luke, and the others she’d met through Marc. She looked up at Adam. “Does he ever ask about me?”

“That’s between Marc and me, but I don’t plan to share this conversation with him, either.”

“Fair enough.” Adam wouldn’t break a confidence. Of course, Marc knew she’d always been a little intimidated by Adam. She had a feeling he intimidated Marc somewhat as well. She doubted Marc would ask Karla, but maybe he’d ask Luke, especially after he learned she’d spent weeks at his place.

Dio
, she missed Marc. What if they never could patch things up? Would he ever fully trust her? Could he trust anyone? She looked at Adam.

“How did he come to trust you?”

Adam brought his gaze back to her and zeroed in on her. Her heart thumped under his scrutiny. “In combat, you either trust the people you’re with or you get killed. Many weeks of training during boot camp broke him of any notion he could fend for himself over there. The Corps breaks down that streak of independence most recruits start out with. Later, during his training as a roper at Pendleton—”

“Roper?”

“That’s what we call the recon Marines in training because—well, never mind.” He waved the thought away. “Anyway, he learned he had to rely on the members of his team, and they would need to have each other’s backs when our boots hit the ground.”

“How can I ever make him see that I have his back? That I don’t want to harm him?”

“Time.”

“But we’ve run out of time. He doesn’t want me.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. You two just need to talk and work this out.”

Adam glanced up just as a warm hand cupped her upper arm, and a chill ran down her spine.

“Dance with me,
tesoro mio
?”

My treasure?

Marc! Her heartbeat pounded into her throat. She looked at Adam who just grinned.

In slow motion, she turned her face upward and found Marc standing beside the booth, several days’ growth of beard on his face, hair disheveled—and sexier than she’d ever seen him before.

“Marc?”

“In the flesh. Come, pet.” He held out his hand to her.

Adam cleared his throat. “I was beginning to think you weren’t going to get here, Doc.”

“There are some avalanche warnings out, so I tried to find a safer route. It took longer.”

So Adam had asked him to come—or at the very least knew he might come. She wished Marc had chosen to come here of his own accord; of course, he wouldn’t have known to find her here if Adam hadn’t told him.

She took Marc’s hand, and he guided her out of the booth and onto the dance floor. She’d missed his touch. She’d missed him, period. He cupped her chin and tilted her head back. Electricity ricocheted throughout her body, especially where the sides of his fingers touched her chin and neck.

“You look so beautiful,
mio angelo
.”

Walking into his arms again, she felt as if the world had suddenly righted itself after months of being off kilter.

Safe, protected…

No, wait!
She pulled a few inches away. How could she just melt into his arms like this? Nothing had been resolved. He’d shut her out for months. She steeled her resolve. “We need to talk.”

“Yes, but first, I need to hold you. What we need to do right now is dance.”

Angelina saw pain and something that looked like fear in his moss-green eyes and decided the time to talk could come later. She pulled him into her arms, wanting to comfort him and tell him everything was going to be all right—but she had thought that before and things hadn’t turned out so well.

“You feel so good,
cara
.” They danced for several songs, content to say nothing.

After a while, Marc’s hand glided up and down her back before creeping under her untucked blouse. He touched her bare lower back, sending a shiver up her spine. “You’ve lost weight.”

His accusation making weight loss sound like a bad thing made her smile. Even though she hadn’t intentionally tried to lose weight, she had dropped about fifteen pounds since she’d left Marc. But she could stand to lose a few pounds.

“I haven’t been very hungry lately.”

He grunted and pinched her ass. If she still lived with him and was under his training as a submissive, that grunt would have meant he planned to remedy the situation later—both by hand-feeding her in the kitchen and flogging her in the playroom so she wouldn’t neglect her body’s needs. Of course, his grunt meant nothing this time. Just an automatic response.

“Do I need to put you in culinary bondage and make you eat every dish your nonna in Marsala taught you to make? You know, this can be arranged quite easily. The equipment is still at my house.”

Her heart raced at the thought of being restrained by him again. She wanted to be in any kind of bondage with Marc again.

Stop it!

She admonished herself for being weaker even than Marc when it came to her desire for sex and submission. She needed to fight this urge to kneel at his feet. If anyone needed to be tethered to an appliance, it was Marc—to keep him from running from her. She wouldn’t let him use her body and send her away again. For Marc, their relationship always had been about the physical. She needed more than that. She needed an emotional bond that couldn’t be broken.

His hand crept farther up her back, and she felt her breasts freed of their bonds with a deft flick of the bra’s clasp. She tried to pull away, but he held on tightly. “Let me touch you. I missed you so much, pet.” His hands reached between their bodies to cup her breast.

“Marc, stop. We aren’t ready…” The catch of anticipation in her voice made her protest sound lame even to her ears. When he pinched her nipple, her hips jolted into his body, and she pressed against his erection.

But nothing had been resolved! Sex was a bad idea.

She pushed him away and looked up at him. “I can’t think when you’re touching me like that.”

He grinned. “I don’t want you to think.”

His charm wasn’t going to work this time. He’d played her body like this too many times, getting her to back down or forget what she’d wanted to say. Steering her focus away from the issue at hand. She needed to get him off this dance floor and turned to present her backside to him.

“Rehook my bra.”

Marc sighed. “You used to be so easy to distract. Where did you learn to be so focused?”

From you.

But she felt anything but focused now. Her nerves were raw, her mind scattered.

His hands slipped under her shirt again, and he took his sweet time fumbling with the hook of her bra, spending a lot of time rubbing the valley of her spine. Tingles coursed down her back to her pussy. He was touching her the way he used to when he prepared her for a play scene. Warming her up.

Angelina put several feet between them and turned around, not caring her girls were still loose. “I’ll be back and then we’re going to talk.” She marched into the ladies room and rehooked her bra, checked her makeup, and took several deep breaths.

Adam had vacated what was becoming “their” booth, and she slid into the spot where he had been sitting earlier but not far enough in to invite Marc to join her. She tried to ignore the disappointment in his eyes.

“Now, Marc, we’re going to talk. No more touching. Except maybe hands—no farther than the wrists.”

He sighed again. “You’ve gotten a little bossy. I told you there would be no encore for Mistress A.”

Despite his words, Angelina saw a smile flicker across his lips before he obeyed and kept his hands off her. She smiled back at him.

Before she could find the words to begin, Rico placed what looked like her favorite white zin in front of her and a glass of white wine in front of Marc.

She looked up and smiled. “Thanks, Rico.”

“Don’t thank me, babe. Just doing my job. Marc ordered them.”

She looked back at Marc. “Well, then, thank you.”

This was her second drink, so she’d better go easy on it. She needed to keep her wits about her in case something came of this reunion later.

After Rico returned to the bar, Marc’s expression became serious. “I’m sorry.”

She blinked rapidly, hoping to stave off the tears.

Do. Not. Cry.

Not in front of him, anyway. He already had too much power over her.

“You didn’t deserve the way I treated you, Angelina. None of this had anything to do with you.”

His words stung.
Nothing to do with her?
They were stuck in the same place as before. “Marc, when are you going to learn that when you hurt, I hurt? I thought you wanted me to share your life with you, but…” She picked up her glass and took a gulp of the fruity wine, searching for courage, then gazed across the table at him again. “What I didn’t deserve was to be shut out. If we’re going to have any kind of relationship, we can’t keep secrets from each other. We need to support each other—in good times and bad.”

Marc glanced down at her hand on the table. Had the familiar wedding vows sent him into retreat?

“I fucked up.”

Angelina nodded. “That’s an understatement.”

What did Marc want from her—from life? When he didn’t say anything, she leaned forward. “What are you going to do about what your mama told you?”

He met her gaze. Fear again. “I’m not sure.”

Two months to think about this on his own, and he didn’t have any answers yet? “Have you talked with her since February?”

He looked away again. No, she didn’t think so. Marc didn’t confront people about important issues.

“We’ve talked but not about that.”

What was his motto? KISS—Keep it Superficial, Sweetie. Or something like that.

She could see where his avoidance tactics came from. Marc’s whole family was the same way. How could his mother talk with him since that emotional breakdown in her office and
not
mention the enormous elephant standing in the room? The D’Alessios suppressed, repressed, and denied anything too painful. Mama had secrets she hadn’t revealed. Marc might even have discovered things from his biological father in Italy that Mama could confirm or deny.

But only if he’d
talk
with her!

“Do you even want to find out what happened back then, Marc?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

He’d been almost cocky before, supremely sure of himself. Now he was in full retreat. The world of illusion Marc had so carefully created for himself disappeared in the glare of reality.

* * *

Marc sipped his pinot bianco. Why did he act like a fucking teenager around Angelina? When he’d been with Pamela, he’d managed to have a mature, adult conversation. With Angelina, he thought with his little head. Sex wasn’t going to win her back. He set the glass down and reached across the table to take her hand, pulling back when he remembered she’d said no touching.

Talk to her. Don’t blow this.

Angelina met him the rest of the way and squeezed his hand. “I said hands were okay.”

She’d changed since she’d left. She’d gained a lot of confidence—without him. Or maybe because of him. She’d walked out on him, after all. But he’d shut her out for weeks—nearly two months, actually—before she’d finally given up on him and moved out. Coming home last week to find every remaining trace of her gone had been the wake-up call he needed. As long as her nonna’s furniture had been in his house, he expected her to come back to him.

Okay, he’d been an ass when she’d first left and pretended to himself he welcomed the time alone.

Until the mission to rescue Savannah. Seeing Damián’s girl beaten and abused had stirred up all the protective feelings he’d had for Angelina after the abuse she’d suffered at the hands of Martin. He hadn’t been able to get back to Colorado fast enough to check on Angelina but still hadn’t been able to make the call. He’d never been so paralyzed by fear. What could he offer her? What did she need from him? He was still the same man—totally fucked up and clueless about his past.

But what if she was happier without him? Tonight, she showed no signs she wanted to rekindle their relationship or even needed him.