He tucked her hair behind her ears. His commitment to restitution doubled. “Honesty, Amsterdam. Remember?”
She bit her lip and took both of his hands in hers. “I want you to dress in your combat uniform. Just once. So that my touch will know.”
The air left his lungs. For a long stretch, it did not return. He wanted to do this for her, more than anything, but there had to be rules, boundaries, so he didn’t end up a fucking mess, quivering like a newborn calf in his pajama bottoms in the pasture.
“It can’t be me, Olive. Your sculpture. Maybe someday I’ll be able to live with what I’ve done, but I can’t live with being the hero. Driving past it each day, knowing I deserved none of it. Promise me.”
She blinked twice, three times. Damned if she didn’t look like she was about to cry, before her expression eased and the corners of her succulent mouth tipped upward. The nod that followed was swift, decisive.
Her combat boots hit the barn floor, disturbing the hay between his boot soles. He had never wanted to strip someone of boots more. She had replaced the laces with alternating black and white silk and tied them like a lattice X. Even her shoes were an artistic fucking turn-on.
She tugged him to his feet, toward the partition that once separated them. Now, five bales rose to eye level.
Wes leaned over to the box at his feet, the one that caused him to nearly drive her away, and lifted his desert-sand jacket and pants free. He kissed the back of her hand; he didn’t want to let go.
She leaned close and whispered in his ear. “I’ll be right there with you.”
With a chaste kiss on his earlobe, she smiled and disappeared to her side of the barn. The pulley attached to the roof squeaked and the cable lowered her rust-colored scarf like a flag of complete surrender. This time, to each other.
By the time it reached the ground, Wes’s discipline, his command, his will, fell to her desires.
He was magnificent.
Wes’s uniform fit him like second skin. The pixelated-looking black boxes inside the camouflage matched the buzzed hair at his sideburns, the ebony stipple on his molded jaw, his healthy drizzle of charcoal lashes she wouldn’t be able to fashion from clay in a million years. He defied her skills as an artist, but she had to try.
He had buttoned his shirt most of the way up his chest. The collar hung open, emphasizing the angle of the slanted chest pockets where the name Meier was stitched. In the depth of winter, his cuffs were rolled up, past his elbows—something she knew was left to a commander’s discretion but represented a kind of unspoken defiance for Wes that did not go unnoticed. His wide shoulders and broad chest filled the durable cotton fabric. Pockets spanning his biceps were flush and pressed.
“Not even a peek for this?” He motioned toward her sculpture, covered by a drop cloth a few feet away.
“I might be tempted. If you give me something that inspires.”
“All night long, Amsterdam.”
His drawl on such a confident declaration and the resurrection of his nickname for her fired every synapse through her thighs and ass. Her panties dampened with a rush. Lightheadedness had already set in. Anything she churned out from this encounter would be more impressionist Rodin than realist Daumier.
“The artist blushes.” He put on a Texas-sized smirk she wanted to kiss right back off.
She play-punched his arm.
His body was a statue. Her knuckles felt like she’d hit bedrock.
“Good thing this isn’t a nude,” he added.
“I’ve done my share, Sergeant.”
“That’s First Sergeant to you, Fresh Blood.”
They shared a smile.
Against the rodeo lights set up to flood her workspace, Wes squinted and slipped the cover atop his head to shade his eyes. Wes in his cover, pulled low across his brow, was the sexiest thing she had ever seen. A veil of seriousness came over his features, a testament to his mental toughness to surge ahead of his past or a conditioned response to donning a sacred uniform, she couldn’t be sure. Whichever it was, Livie vowed to be a respectful steward of the moment.
“Tell me about ‘em,” he requested. “First nude. Go.”
She clicked off the cluster of lights closest to him then decided to eliminate another set. Sculptural detail was so removed from the visual that she might have explored his lines in the dark if it wouldn’t deny her the indulgence of seeing Wes in his element. He was a fine Marine. Daniel’s letters attested to that. That Wes agreed to share this with her was an intimacy rivaled only by their heated prelude.
“It was a man. Still want to hear?”
Wes thought about that for a moment. “Was he a Bonnat?”