“Good timing on my part.” Lord, those lips of hers—all full, lush curves. The kind he could nibble on for days. They parted as she inhaled and prepared to reply. He leaned closer, despite the increasingly distant part of his brain that again said, Don’t touch.
“Under three minutes,” she murmured and came up on her tiptoes so their mouths hovered inches apart. “I believe I promised you a kiss, and I always keep my—”
He closed the last little distance between and claimed his reward. The sweet, achingly soft touch of her lips against his scorched every last cautionary thought about entertaining bundles of trouble straight out of his mind. He tangled all ten fingers into her hair and dove into the kiss.
Every part of her gave. Pliant lips parted. Soft, silk-covered breasts cushioned his chest.
He closed his fist around a handful of her red-blond curls and pulled her head back to the perfect angle. Then he sent his tongue on a tour of her mouth, stroking every part of her he could reach. The sweet, intoxicating slide of her tongue over his, the taste of her, made him hungry to taste her everywhere…her breasts, the soft, vulnerable skin below her navel, and the softer, even more vulnerable hollow between her legs.
She moaned. The hand on his shoulder tightened and the one pressed to the back of his neck urged him closer…deeper. He slid his thigh between hers, and barely stifled a groan when she ground herself against him and made a grateful sound in the back of her throat. He’d never gone from a low idle to full throttle so fast in his life. Her body shivered with need, equally out of control, and all he could think was, More.
He cupped her ass and hauled her up. At the same, time she looped both arms around his neck, twined a leg around his hip, and tried to climb him like a sequoia.
A lightning bolt ripped down his back and tore into his leg. The pain was so brutal, so overwhelming, for a moment all he could do was suck in air and pray not to pass out. And, just like that, the private in his pants retreated—a humbling reminder he wasn’t fit for active duty.
Fuck. Me.
The irony was nobody could. Not while his spine threatened to shatter into a million pieces at the least little thing. Has she felt him flinch? Had she, God forbid, felt him go limp?
He opened his eyes and stared into gray ones clouded with an absolutely annihilating blend of passion and concern. “Are you okay?”
“I have to go,” he muttered and looked down at their intertwined bodies rather than face whatever emotion played next across her expressive features. He let go slowly, returning her to her own two feet before disentangling himself, so she didn’t lose her balance and he didn’t crumple to the floor.
He straightened as if his vertebrae were made of spun glass and chanced a glance at her. She’d turned away and concentrated on tightening the belt on her robe, but her protective stance didn’t conceal her rigid posture and jerky movements.
“Sorry. That was…” What could he say? “Not the wisest move on my part. I can’t do this. I—”
Nice job. You sound like an asshole. “I’ve got to go.” He stepped around her, walked out the door, and just kept walking—along the hall, down the stairs, straight into the warm, spring night. When he’d gone about a quarter of a mile, he stopped, stared up at the big, full moon surrounded by a fleet of stars, and took a deep, head-clearing breath. He smelled cinnamon and honey.
“Fuck.”
Chapter Three
“Do you regain your virginity after a whole year of no sex?”
Chloe propped the phone between her ear and her shoulder and stared at the muscular-skeletal diagram hanging in the front office area of the Camp Pendleton Massage Therapy Clinic. “I don’t know,” she told Lynne, her recruiter at Helping Hands Clinical Solutions.
Lynne called every week to check in and see how an assignment was going, but Chloe always did well and never had any work-related issues, so her personal life had quickly taken center stage in their conversations. The thirty-seven-year-old, married mother of two couldn’t seem to get her head around Chloe’s year of living like a nun. According to Lynne, the word said it all. Nun.
“But I thought last night was the BIG night. Happy birthday, and all that? What happened?”
Chloe sighed and shifted her attention to the appointment book on the desk in front of her, which lay open to the afternoon’s schedule. Five minutes until her next client. “He canceled at the last minute. Turns out his coworkers kidnapped him and hauled him off to TJ for a birthday bar crawl.”
“Oh. That’s very disappointing.”
No argument, but, honestly, she heard more disappointment in Lynne’s voice than she felt herself. “It’s okay. This was fate’s way of telling me something. What, I’m not sure, but something.”
“Think you’ll reschedule?”
The question conjured an image in her head. Not of Troy, but, rather, Major Michael McCade, and how quickly he’d exited her apartment last night after she’d locked lips with him. “I don’t know, Lynne.” She picked up a pen and doodled the word “Fate” in flowing letters on a yellow Post-it note. “I’m beginning to wonder if, maybe, after all this time I’m actually…unfuckable?”
“Oh please. If you’re unfuckable, I’m downright untouchable. You still have your tight, firm, twenty-something body. Stretch marks haven’t slashed their way across your belly. Your hips haven’t widened to twice their original span from the ordeal of passing nine-plus pounds of bouncing baby boy—twice.”
“Your husband loves your belly and hips.”
“Yeah,” she sighed, sounding content, “but that’s love, not lust. Nobody’s lusted after me in a hundred years. You inspire lust simply by breathing, and don’t let your cheating ex-husband make you doubt it. By the same token, stop reading any message into Troy’s no-show. He doesn’t know what he missed.”
“He doesn’t,” she conceded, “but his no-show isn’t the only reason I’ve come to doubt my fuckability. I got a little…um…hung up with the handcuff, and my neighbor across the hall had to come rescue me.”