Surrendering To Her Sergeant (27 page)

Ethan didn’t bother shouting after
her. It hadn’t worked yesterday and it sure as fuck wasn’t going to
work now. Instead, he skipped straight to catching up to her,
hooking an arm around her waist, and hauling her into a nearby
building that was thankfully unlocked. From the desks he’d glimpsed
through the window, he guessed the place was a temporary production
office. The assumption was right. The room also contained a bunch
of filing cabinets, rolling chairs, and even a kitchenette with a
single-cup coffee maker. As settings went, it was fine. He wasn’t
too sure about the seething fireball of a woman still locked in his
hold.

“Let me go!” Ava demanded.

“Stop kicking and I will.”

“I’ll scream.”

“Empty threat, sunshine. You’re doing
a fine job of that right now.”

“Shut. Up. And take your goddamn hands
off of me!”

“Stop kicking first. Please.”
Ironically, he summoned some Dom mojo to emphasize the last
word.

“Ethan, if you don’t let me
go—ahhh!”

He released her. And watched her fall
right on her adorable ass. Because she’d been kicking so hard, she
had no proper footing to stand.

Because of how you hurt
her. How you’re still hurting her because of this ruse with Bella.
And have to continue digging that damn knife into her, until that
memory stick is found.

He turned, unable to contain his
grimace. He’d done shitty things for this job but this capped the
list. He hadn’t signed up to be lounging around a goddamn movie
studio, playing James Bond games, and earning himself a tormented
glower from the woman he’d pursued across seven months and over a
thousand miles. This woman he now had to treat like a possible
suspect in this fucking thing, at least in the eyes of his
team.

But if he went to Franz and
came clean about everything, told him that Ava Chestain had passed
his personal “body cavity search,” the captain would toss his ass
onto a plane for home faster than anyone could yell
Roll, mark, action
. He
couldn’t,
wouldn’t
, let that happen, not when Ava was working every day for a
man with tight ties to terrorists who’d been pulling some scary,
shifty shit lately. If he had to endure Ava’s hatred for that, so
be it. She’d be pissed but she’d be
safe
.

He held out a hand to help
her up. Ava glared, shoved to her feet by herself, then parked
herself in one of the rolling chairs, pulling a hand through her
hair in fury.
Hell
. She had to remind him of how the thick chocolate curls had
felt between his fingers, didn’t she?

It took every ounce of concentration
he had to keep his voice even. “Are you okay?”

“Do you care anymore?”

He caught her stare, afire with fury
and pain, and answered quietly, “After last night, is that
fair?”

She let out a bitter laugh. “After
last night, should I have expected to come to work and find Bella
straddling you like a lap dancer? Of course, after the two of you
warmed up at the cast and crew meeting—”

“Bella and I share a past.” The words
were tight with his tension. The truth was, Bella—at the time,
Brenda—was a mistake that never should’ve happened. Just being
around her the last forty-eight hours had shown him that. What had
he seen in her eight years ago? A sexual appetite that matched his
own, that was what—not that he was going to drop that particular
bomb into this conversation. “We’re comfortable with each other.
And this ‘consulting’ shit is a whole lot of brand-new and weird to
me. She’s trying to help.”

“Right. With her naked body in your
face.”

He hated this. Dancing on the line
between truth and fiction…this wasn’t how he did things. He was
called in when the op called for someone to dig at the reality,
uncover the facts. Bending them made him feel like a wolf in a bad
sheep fleece. Sure, he’d pulled on the wool before, just never
after one of the lambs had let him strip her, dominate her, and
bury himself inside her until reaching one of the best climaxes of
his life. Just the recall of it tempted him to pull the window
shades, lock the door, and take her all over again, spread-eagle
under him on one of these desks…

Fuck
. That stick had better turn up
soon
.

Dwelling on that mirage
wasn’t doing squat to help him right now.
C’mon, asshole, you
do
remember at least a few things about the art of
tact, right
?

“Okay, so her communication style
is…unique.”

“You didn’t seem to be minding
‘unique.’”

Ava deliberately dropped her gaze to
his crotch. Crazily, he opened his stance, letting her look her
fill of the engorged space between his thighs. The flush that
filled her beautiful cheeks turned the moment into agony, every
inch of his dick on fire, every drop of cum in his balls boiling,
but he didn’t waver as he summoned the strength for a
reply.

“I’m a man, Ava.
Biologically, I responded to her—after she rubbed and stroked and
dry-humped me for close to an hour.
You’ve
done this inside of twenty
seconds with your eyes alone.”

She didn’t say anything to that. But
her silence, tremulous and thick, was three times worse. She
wrapped arms around herself and rasped, “Is that supposed to make
everything okay?”

He looked to the floor. And was pretty
sure he saw most of his gut mixed with the grime between a couple
of loose floor tiles. “I can’t tell you what’s okay and what’s
not.”

“Really? You had no trouble
doing exactly that last night.” She sniffed and there was no
mistaking why. The sob that followed overlaid her next words. “And
I thanked you for it.
Dios
mio
, I adored you for it.” She shot out of
the chair and paced to the kitchenette. “
Qué tonta eres
. I’m such an Idiot.
Zoe was right, wasn’t she?”

He moved toward her in a couple of
silent steps. “Zoe?”

She started. His new proximity took
her by surprise. Good. That was his intent. Keeping her off guard
would keep her truthful. He didn’t expect her to spill anything on
Lemare, believing every instinct he had that she was ignorant of
his Lor side, but maybe this was his way of getting all the way
inside her emotional window and gaining her trust despite
everything he had to hide from her right now.

“My sister,” she explained, bracing
hands on both sides of the little sink. “She called this morning
before I came to work. I told her about you.” Bitterness stamped
her conclusion. “She wasn’t happy.”

“Because my carpool van is a Black
Hawk and my negotiation suit is a set of BDUs.”

She sliced another glare
over her shoulder at him. He was used to getting such a look, that
mixture of
how did he know
and
thank God he
knows
. “A little bird named Rayna talked,
huh?” Her fingers pressed against the counter, betraying how she
intended to deal with her cousin about it.

“She was only trying to help,” he
contended. “Just like Zoe.” One more step brought him to the
kitchenette, as well. As much as he ached to pull her close,
breaching her personal space would shatter both their composures,
so he maintained a stance against the other end of the counter. “I
was starting to snap it together for myself, anyhow.”

That got him a longer look. It came
attached with a wince. “You snap too much,” she
whispered.

He threw back a gentle smile. “Hazard
of the job, sunshine.”

The wince crumpled into
another sob. “Don’t
pull out ‘sunshine’ on
me right now. Don’t you dare.”

He held up a hand. “Fair enough. As
long as you help me in return.”

She only answered by rolling her eyes
before shoving away from the counter. How was it that on any other
subbie, that shit reeked of gum-smacking twelve-year-old but on her
it was a gorgeous invitation to harness her sass with the power of
his tongue—or any other means necessary?

He gritted back the arousal to focus
on her more carefully. She trembled from head to toe as she walked
to the opposite side of a small round conference table. Yeah, she
was still pissed but a new epiphany hit as he studied her.
Witnessing the new “closeness” between he and Bella didn’t comprise
all of her anguish. That had only hit the start trigger. If his
intuition was running true, and there were few occasions when it
wasn’t, her torment was tied directly to his presence itself, to
the fact that he still stood here at all.

In his dress blues.

Smacking her in the face with
memories. Painful ones. Likely the stuff that Rayna was going to
tell him last night before Colton and his team put their unique
dent into things.

What the fuck had happened to
her?

Half hating himself for the move, he
pulled one of the chairs at the table and lowered into it. Yes, he
knew the impact of what he was doing. Visually, it made him
submissive to her. He emphasized the impact by opening his arms and
laying them flat on the table. “Pretend I’m Rayna and Zoe, too.
Pretend I just want to help. Help me understand, Ava. Talk to
me.”

Silence fell. Outside, a truck beeped
as it was thrown into reverse. A costume rack squeaked by. Leaves
skittered in the wind. Hollywood clamored on. The world
spun.

The woman who plummeted into the chair
next to him didn’t care. One look at her face, contorted in her
misery, told him why. Her mind wasn’t here anymore. It was in the
past, facing the heartbreak that waited for her there.

He ordered his arms to stay
where they were.
Grabbing her and holding
her isn’t going to help her through this. You can’t help her climb
a mountain if she’s on your back.

After several long minutes, she
spoke.

“I had a few boyfriends
from the base when I was very young.” Her voice was a wobbly rasp.
“They were fun but it always ended once a long deployment came up,
or a girl came along that wanted to hitch up, get a little house,
and start having babies and swing sets.” A little smile twitched
her lips. “I wasn’t the girl who wanted all that. My
mamá—
my mom—died when I
was nine, and watching what my dad went through, to say good-bye to
her…it broke my heart, too. It broke
me
in some ways, I guess. Crazy, huh?
One day, you’re a kid who cares about nothing except the next
school dance. The next, you’re wondering if your dad will ever
smile again. And it wasn’t
Papí
’s fault. Things just get…broken.
And so do people, right?”

Ethan wasn’t sure if she wanted an
answer or not. He chose silence. These were strange waters for him.
Listening to people, even the things they showed instead of spoke,
was part of his job, natural as breathing, because he was always
behind a window of his own. But that neutrality didn’t exist now.
He felt the ache in each of her softly accented syllables. Burned
with the sadness that clung to the indigo depths of her
eyes.

“Oh God,” she finally murmured. “Why
am I telling you any of this?” She shook her head, pulling
nervously at her hair. “You have to get to some meeting,
right?”

“It can wait.” Until next year if it
had to. Especially because his instinct didn’t want to shut up now.
Despite that, he dreaded giving voice to it. “So who was it that
didn’t make you feel broken anymore? Colin or Flynn?”

Her head yanked up. Across her face, a
race of emotions took place. First she gazed at him in fear. Hot on
its heels was amazement. Then trepidation again. “How the hell do
you know—” She visibly hauled back her thoughts from that gallop
and confessed, “Colin. It was Colin.”

He was a little surprised to watch a
soft smile tug at her mouth. Surprised and jealous. Tying back both
the useless sentiments, he ventured, “He was from the
base?”

“Oh, yeah.” She lowered a hand and
scooted it toward his. As she curled their index fingers together,
she went on, “I’d never met anyone like him. He was like a rock
star with a yut-cut. Bigger than life, so cocky and silly…he made
me forget I’d ever been sad in my life. I think I fell in love with
him inside a week. The day before he shipped out to Kirkuk, he
proposed. We didn’t have time to go find a ring, so he made me one
out of some wire and pieces of a seashell we’d found on Alki Beach.
He told me—”

She stopped herself with a hard
swallow. Ethan’s chest clenched. “It’s okay.” He added the rest of
his hand to their clasp. “Ava, you don’t have to do
this.”

“He told me he’d come back,” she bit
out. “He promised…we’d buy a real ring.” She pulled in a ragged
breath. “A lunatic with an IED made sure that never
happened.”

Again, he didn’t speak anything in
response. He let her have the silence. The normal things people
said with news like this…were just that. Normal. Standard niceties
used to make a story from hell feel less horrific. He’d buried
enough friends, grasped enough widows’ hands, to know the silence
was kinder.