Читать книгу A Few Good Men - Tori Carrington, Tori Carrington - Страница 10

SARA ROLLED OVER IN bed, pressing herself against the warm body next to her.

“Andy...”

It was a dream she’d had a thousand times before. Of waking up next to her husband…only to find he wasn’t there. And she always cried.

But this was the first time someone actually comforted her.

“Shh.” Arms encircled her.

Sara burrowed her nose against a rock-hard chest, clutching to the impenetrable wall that could protect her from everything. Her grief, her fears, the world.

Then she realized whose arms held her. And what name she’d said in her half sleep.

She rolled quickly away from Eric, the night before rushing back in snippets of sweaty flesh, soft cries and red-hot passion.

“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching for her robe.

“Don’t be. I miss him, too.”

She looked over her shoulder at him. He looked so damn sexy lying against the pillows, the top sheet draped dangerously low across his hips.

“Yes, but I don’t think you’ll be calling anyone else by his name.”

He glanced away, and she glimpsed the pain he must be feeling but was trying to hide.

“I’m going to be late for work,” she said.

“It’s Saturday.”

“I work Saturdays.”

Liar. Worse, she suspected he knew that. They’d talked about their hours during their many conversations and she’d complained about the nine-to-five grind and how she wished she could work from home with flex hours because sometimes she was best inspired during her time off.

Truman came in, toenails clicking against the wood floor, tail wagging, tongue lolling.

“I’ll make breakfast and take Tru for a walk,” Eric offered.

“I don’t eat breakfast and I’ll take care of Truman,” she countered.

She gathered the clothes she needed and headed for the bathroom. Before closing the door, she turned to look at where he still lay, grinning at her as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

Her heart skipped a beat.

Neither of them said anything for a long moment. Sara watched as the smile slid from his face.

He cleared his throat and propped himself up on his elbows, almost causing the sheet to drop lower. “Would you like me to leave?”

“Yes.”

ERIC FELT LIKE HE’D taken a rifle butt to the gut.

Last night…well, last night had been one of the best nights he could remember experiencing in a long, long time. Merely holding Sara postsex and listening to her soft snores had made him feel more of a man than the past five years in the service.

Of course, her calling out Andy’s name this morning he could have done without.

He ignored the pain that made it almost impossible to breathe, trying to conjure up a response.

Sara’s brow wrinkled. “Did you just expect to stay here your entire leave?” she asked.

Yes, he realized, he had. They’d made such a connection that despite the considerable obstacles they faced, he’d assumed that once she let him into her house, she’d let him in all the way.

How wrong he’d been.

He scratched the back of his head and stripped the sheet off, moving to sit on the side of the bed. He noticed the way she watched his movements, especially a particular area of his anatomy with which she’d become quite intimately acquainted the night before, yet now apparently appeared embarrassed to see.

“I don’t get it,” he said under his breath. “You’re like a faucet alternately running hot and then cold.”

“Would you prefer lukewarm?”

“I prefer a consistent temperature.”

“Sorry if I’m not made of metal with knobs you can adjust.” She picked up his clothes with jerky movements and tossed them to the bed. His T-shirt hit the side of his head and stayed there so that he had to drag it off.

“What did you think when I disappeared from the Internet?” she asked, giving up her efforts and stopping to stare at him. “That I was playing hard to get? That if you showed up on my front step I’d throw open the door and welcome you into my bed?”

Her cheeks pinkened at her words. Eric didn’t speak the obvious because both of them knew that in the end, that’s exactly what she’d done.

“I don’t need…” She gestured with her hand. “Want any of this, Eric. I’m not up for a relationship with anyone, much less my late husband’s best friend.”

“So you’d rather continue to play the role of grieving widow?”

“What?” she whispered. What color had seeped into her cheeks drained out.

Eric sighed and ran his hand over his close-cropped hair. “That didn’t come out the way I meant it to.”

“Well, what way would you have preferred it to come out? Because from where I stand, there aren’t very many ways to mean what you just said.”

“Then let me take it back.”

She shook her head slowly back and forth. “You should know that you can’t put the bullets back in the gun after they’ve been shot.”

“Damn it, Sara.” Eric stood up and faced her.

She turned away. “Please…just go.”

She disappeared into the bathroom and he was left with little alternative as the door clicked closed behind her.

Truman’s soft whine brought his gaze down to the questioning canine.

“You think you’re confused?” he asked the mutt.

He got dressed, gathered his things and headed for the front door, Truman following his every move.

SARA CLEARED the dinner plates from the dining-room table and brought in the apple pie she’d made from scratch. Her father-in-law had moved his chair back to make more room for his expanding stomach and rubbed the area in question, a satisfied smile on his face, while her mother-in-law stood in front of the banquet against the wall, picking up the photos there as she did every time she visited. Nearly every shot contained Andy. On the first vacation together in Colorado, their first anniversary, Christmas with the in-laws…every photo marked a moment in their lives that would never be repeated.

“We had a surprise visitor yesterday,” Gertrude said, putting down a shot of Andy and Truman as a puppy.

“Oh?” Sara used the server to cut the pie and picked up a dessert plate.

“Eric Armstrong dropped in as if he’d parachuted from a C-150.”

“C-130,” Howard corrected.

Neither of them seemed to notice that Sara had dropped half a piece of pie onto the white tablecloth.

Gertrude turned from the banquet. “You remember Eric, don’t you?”

“Sure, I remember him.” If they only knew that she had memories to draw on that were much more recent than their own.

Howard picked up his fresh fork to dig into the pie. “He said he stopped by here to pay his respects.”

Gertrude looked at him. “You didn’t tell me that.”

He shrugged. “Didn’t think I had to. He was Andy’s best friend. He was there when he went down. Of course he’d want to see his widow.”

“Yes, but why didn’t you tell me?”

Sara was glad the two were too occupied with each other to see her reaction to the news that Eric had told them he’d stopped by there.

She tried to stop her hands from shaking as she handed Gertrude her pie.

“You’re not going to have any?” she asked.

“No, no, I’m…” She swallowed hard. “I must have eaten too much pot roast.”

“You didn’t eat any at all. Howard ate enough for all three of us.”

He chuckled, his mouth full of pie.

“You’re getting too thin, Sara. Is everything okay? You barely eat when we go out, your clothes are at least one size too big, if not two.”

Howard looked at her. “She looks all right to me.”

Gertrude gave an eye roll. “Of course, you would say that. Men don’t notice anything until it’s waving flags in front of them…or a gun.”

“I’d notice if she’d gotten fat.”

Her mother-in-law ignored him. “Sara? You haven’t answered my question.”

“Actually, I think I will have some pie,” she said, concentrating on cutting herself a piece.

“Good,” Gertrude looked satisfied.

Problem solved. For now…

LATER THAT NIGHT she sat in front of her glowing laptop, her fingers hovering above the keyboard. There was a time not so long ago when she’d looked forward to logging on to her e-mail account and checking for new messages. Rather, she’d been eager to check “Saman-tha’s” box. But now that Eric knew who she really was, would he seek her out at her regular account? And if he did, what would she do?

“Ignore him,” she whispered.

Easier said than done.

Despite the awkward moments with her in-laws earlier, every time she turned around she was reminded of her time with Eric the other night. She hadn’t changed the sheets yet because at night she snuggled into the side he’d slept on, crushing his pillow to her nose, absorbing the scent of sandalwood and hot male.

He’d tried calling, but she’d had the answering machine on. His first two attempts he’d merely hung up. On the third, he’d left a message: “Sara, call me, please. You and I need to talk.”

What was there possibly to say? She’d made a mistake. A mammoth mistake. And while there was no taking it back, she did have a say on whether or not it continued.

Sara drew a deep breath and entered her password. She clicked on the mail button and scanned the contents. A couple of spams, an e-mail from a cousin in California and…nothing.

She squinted at the screen, sure she was seeing things.

She deleted the spam, then opened her cousin’s e-mail, which was essentially a vent about work.

“I hear you. Some days are a bitch to get through,” she wrote back. “I—”

An instant message popped up in the middle of her screen, scaring the daylights out of her.

Sara stared at a screen name she’d come to know very well over the past few months.

Armstrong3001 had written a simple: “Hey.”

She swallowed hard, trying to decide whether she should respond or to shut down the feature.

Before she knew that’s what she was going to do, she typed back: “Hey, yourself.”

She sat staring at the blinking cursor in the message box until her eyes grew dry and she had to blink.

What did Eric want? She’d been both afraid and hopeful that he would seek her out again. After the other morning, she wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t want to speak to her again. After the other morning, she was afraid she’d eagerly welcome a repeat if he offered it.

She remembered her mother-in-law holding the photo of Andy earlier and guilt settled around her shoulders like a heavy cloak.

Sara began to shut the laptop when the IM chimed and Eric’s response appeared.

“I can’t forget about the other night.”

The frank admission caught her off guard and her hand slowly dropped from the monitor as if of its own accord.

Although she was reluctant to admit it, her every other thought was about how nice it had been to be held by him.

The problem lay in that the other thoughts were about her betrayal of the memory of her husband.

“It seems like every time I takea breath, I smell you…”

Sara gave an eye roll.

“I swear I detect the scent of lavender and vanilla everywhere. Then I remember that it’s not around me now, but rather a memory of you.”

Her soap and bath oil.

Okay, so it would have been easy to dismiss his initial words as so much hype, but his specific mention of her fragrance told her he was being genuine.

Of course, if she overlooked the part of her brain that told her that any contact with Eric was a bad idea, she would have recognized his honesty. Would never have questioned his sincerity. It was those qualities that had captured her attention and had drawn her to him time and again when she needed to feel connected to someoe not her in-laws or work associates.

Someone who would be as honest with her as she was with him.

Her heart beat a steady, heady rhythm in her chest.

“You’re more beautiful than I ever dared to imagine Samantha might be,” he wrote. “More than just physical…although I loved touching you.”

She swallowed hard, captivated by his words.

“There’s a vulnerability about you, Sara. Yet you’re fearless when it comes to something that you want. The combination fascinates me. You fascinate me.”

She caressed the keyboard with her fingertips, but the words refused to come.

“Your skin…”

Her pulse hummed.

“You’re so soft. Softer than anything I’ve ever had the privilege to touch before…”

When they’d traded e-mails and IMs before his return, their sexy posts had been almost carnal in nature. Now there rang an emotional edge that reached out for her more powerfully than his hands.

“I loved making love to you…Hearing your quiet gasps…your low moans…You felt so good wrapped around me. Tight…Wet…Then there was your mouth…”

Sara found her lips were parched and she ran her tongue over them as if in preparation for his kiss. Only he wasn’t here. He was probably back at the base writing to her on his laptop.

“I want to touch myself right now just thinking about it, Sara. Just thinking about you…”

He might want to, but she was.

Sara found that her right hand had moved to rest against her neck. Right there, just below her ear, where he had kissed her, driving her insane with desire. She slowly trailed her fingers down over her opposite shoulder, feeling her bra strap under her T-shirt. She reached back and unfastened the confining material, letting it bow open, but not removing it.

“Your breasts…”

Yes…her breasts. She ran her palm over her right one, the nipple already drawn taut and achy.

“I could have kissed your breasts forever and never wanted for anything more…”

Sara wet her fingertips and lightly pinched her nipple, gasping as she imagined it was Eric’s hand against her rather than her own.

“Then there was the surprise waiting down below…”

Sara’s breath caught as she remembered him tugging her underpants down and gazing at her bare flesh. She’d started waxing when she was in her early twenties and had never really stopped, liking the feel of the clean skin against the sheets…against a man.

“I remember how ready you were for me…how engorged…”

She popped the button on her jeans and dipped her fingers inside the waistband, touching her swollen flesh through her panties first, then burrowing inside so that she caressed her hot, sensitive flesh.

“You were so wet…so ready…”

She was now, too. Oh, so ready.

“And you tasted like pure honey warmed by the summer sun…”

She dipped her index finger inside her sex and her own juices coated her skin. She pulled it out and fondled her clit, drawing small, wet circles even as she continued reading his posts through half-lidded eyes.

“But nothing compares to the moment I first entered you…”

Sweet Jesus…

“Feeling your body surrounding me, squeezing me…I’ve never felt for another woman what I felt in that one moment…”

Sara stiffened her first two fingers and slid them into her moist heat. But two wouldn’t do. Not when Eric had filled her so thickly. She added a finger and thrust them up into her wetness.

“Knowing you were so hot for me made me feel like I was burning up from the inside out…And then you moved your hips…I had to grab your bottom and hold on for dear life I was so afraid I was going to come right there and then…”

Sara shivered all over, running her tongue along her lips restlessly, longing to stretch out on the bed behind her but not daring to miss one word Eric was typing.

“I want you again, Sara…Now. Please let me in…Invite me over.”

“Come…please,” she wrote.