Authors: Emily Ryan-Davis
“I’m going to push a little.” She glanced up and caught his gaze. “Hunter...”
“Yeah?” He muttered.
“I love you.” And finally, blessed fucking finally, she lowered her head to take his dick into her mouth.
He couldn’t stop the muscle reflex that arched his hips off the bed, shoving his cock over her tongue and deeper. Instead of closing up against his sudden invasion, Kat opened wider and granted passage. She took too, sinking her finger into his ass while she swallowed him into the back of her throat.
A string of curses fell from his lips. He grabbed her hair to hold her in place and speared into her again, instinctively searching for release. Kat denied him. She didn’t push him out of her mouth but she kept her jaw slack, denying him the suction he needed in order to blow. When he realized she wouldn’t let him come that way, he snarled and shoved her mouth off his cock.
“God damn it,” he growled and started to sit.
Kat pinned him with a single look. “Please wait. Trust me.”
She paused for a beat. Hunter gave in and closed his eyes, digging deep for an anchor. When he didn’t say anything else, she released a soft sigh and wrapped her fingers around his cock. She stroked his taut shaft with a light touch and, with her other hand, pumped into him slowly. The sensation of fullness, the stretching, threatened to drive him bat-shit crazy. His lungs felt tight, strangled by the breathing he was trying to modulate.
“Hunter? I’m going to use the dildo now. I would seriously love to try to make you come by stimulating your prostate, but—”
“Experiment another time.” His voice sounded guttural now. Christ. She would ruin him.
“Okay. God. You’re gorgeous like this.” The pressure at the base of his spine eased, but only for the span of time it took Kat to replace her finger with the leading tip of the dildo. The silicone quickly warmed with his body heat as it eased past the first ring of muscle.
“You look like you’re being tortured. I can see your ribs, you’ve got your stomach sucked in so hard.” Her words dropped to a whisper, and she increased the length of her strokes, rolling her cupped palm over the head of his cock before she gripped and pumped down again.
He couldn’t respond to her anymore. His throat locked up as the phallus pressed into him, the hooked tip riding over some hidden spot that made his hips buck and his balls draw up tight against his groin. Kat eased the dildo back, pressed a little deeper and stimulated that area again.
“Jesus. Fuck. Kat—” Heat splintered through him, bowing his body and robbing his voice before he could get the warning out.
He distantly heard her gasp of surprise as he erupted, thick jets of fluid pumping across his stomach, landing on his skin, hot trails of proof that his body approved of her ideas.
But that wasn’t the way he wanted to finish. When the violent spasms slowed, before he started to soften, Hunter surged up and caught Kat with an arm around her waist. Her stunned expression registered right before he rolled her beneath him. Hooking his forearms under her knees, he pressed her thighs back against her chest and surged deep. Her cunt dripped with the proof of how much fucking him had turned her on, and she cried out with the first downstroke that caught her clit. He drew out, pushed in, and she shattered, slick inner walls grasping and clutching around his cock, which still hadn’t finished emptying.
Releasing her legs, he sank on top of her and slid his forearms beneath her head, lifting her open, gasping mouth to meet his. The kiss was frantic—he retained enough sense to recognize that—but he couldn’t temper the aggression, which seemed to be working double-time to make up for all he had suppressed in order to let her fuck him the way she had wanted.
Kat responded in kind, gripping his hair and then abandoning the short blades in favor of wrapping her hands around his neck, her thumbs wedged below his jaw. Gradually, he came back to himself. She calmed beneath him, her kiss slowing and easing away from his mouth to pepper his neck and chest.
As his heart rate slowed, Hunter became aware of two things. The first was the dildo still buried in his ass. The second...
“I didn’t use a condom,” he said. Son of a fucking bitch. He hadn’t used a condom.
Semen glued their stomachs together, but he hadn’t finished shooting when he leaped on her.
“God damn it. Kat, shit. I didn’t—”
“Stop.” She placed her hands on either side of his face and held him still so their gazes locked. Her eyes were calm, dazed from passion but showing none of the panic he felt. “It’s fine. I have my IUD. I trust your history.”
Head heavy on his neck, he locked his elbows and peeled himself off her. One glance between her thighs, and he had visual evidence of his fuck-up. “It’s not fine. I should have asked. You didn’t even have a damn choice.”
“I have a choice now.” She pulled to sitting, crossed her legs and folded her hands on her lap, obliterating his view of his mistake. “Hunter, come on. Please don’t make this an issue for yourself. I’m on birth control, we’re in a long-term relationship. We just haven’t gotten around to the formality of vocalizing permissions. We would have sooner than later, especially once we have more regular access to each other. It’s okay. Really.”
He pressed his thumbs against his eye sockets but nodded acceptance of her absolution. “Fine. Now, how do I get this thing out of my ass?”
The bed bounced slightly. He cracked an eye open to see Kat covering her mouth. The grin lifted her whole face, rendering her concealing hand pointless. He raised an eyebrow.
“Sorry,” she said, but her silent laughter jostled the bed again. After she composed herself, she lowered her arm and said, “I could take care of it—”
“I don’t think so.” He grimaced and eased off the bed. “Just tell me what to do. And don’t look when I walk away.”
Kat chuckled. “Just remove it the same way it went in, slowly and carefully. Breathe out, maybe push out a little, you know? It will need to be cleaned. I can—”
Hunter shook his head and started backing toward the bathroom. “No fucking way. I got this.”
“Here.” She leaned over and grabbed a spray bottle off the nightstand. “I wouldn’t use hotel soap on it. Rinse with warm water, clean with this and leave it on a towel to air-dry.”
He caught the bottle when she tossed it and loved her like fucking crazy when she nonchalantly turned away, busying herself with something other than watching his stick-up-his-ass hobble to the bathroom.
* * *
After Hunter finished cleaning up, Kat slipped away to take care of herself. Eager to get in some cuddle time, she finished quickly and hurried back to Hunter, who hadn’t moved from his spread-legged sprawl on the middle of the bed. The heat had cycled off while she was in the bathroom and her body temperature was dropping rapidly from its passion high. Suppressing a shiver, she crawled into bed next to him, turned off the lamp and pulled the blankets over them both.
Hunter opened his eyes and adjusted himself to cradle her against his side. “Don’t tell me you’re tired.”
Kat threw her arm across his chest and tweaked his flat nipple, which surprised her by responding. Raising an eyebrow, she lifted up on her elbow and looked down at him. “I was going to say don’t tell me you
aren’t
, but maybe you really aren’t. What are they feeding you guys in those military cafeterias?”
“It’s a secret.” He cracked a smile, which relieved her on a deep level. Kat settled her palm over his heart and lay back down, greedily soaking in his body heat. His chest rose and fell with steady, even breaths.
She wanted to ask how he felt about their intense lovemaking but reined herself in. He would need time to process without her quizzing him. He had obviously appreciated the physical sensations. She didn’t have a single doubt in her mind that Hunter was down with anal play, and she suspected he was unlikely to forget that toe-curling orgasm anytime soon. She’d done her part—and enjoyed the hell out of it—to show him what sex with Liam could be like. Now she could only cross her fingers and hope he decided to let down his internal hang-ups in order to deepen his physical relationship with Liam.
“Did you eat?” Hunter asked a while later.
Kat rubbed her cheek against his chest. “I thought you’d fallen asleep. You must be tired, top secret military grub aside.”
“I have a little juice left in me. I could probably manage to order a pizza if you’re hungry. Your flight wasn’t long enough for dinner service.” He played with the ends of her hair.
“I’m fine, unless you need something to replenish all that energy you burned off tonight?”
“No. I ate with a friend before I picked you up.”
She hooked her knee over his thigh and rubbed her toes up his shin, enjoying the difference in sensation between her smooth skin and his leg hair. “I forgot you’d said you have friends at Lejeune. It must be difficult to hold onto relationships like that, with everybody moving over a global chessboard all the time.”
Hunter shrugged. “I figure it isn’t any different from keeping in touch with friends who move away for college or a job. There’s email, texting and all that social media bullshit. It’s harder to shake someone you want to be rid of than it is to lose someone you want to keep.”
His disdain for technology both amused and frustrated her. She couldn’t help but wonder whether she and Liam would have reconnected with Hunter sooner if Facebook had persistently suggested him as someone they might know. Probably not. If anything, the social media match-up would have gouged the rift even deeper.
“Still, it can’t be easy to just drop off and pick up when the winds decide to blow you across each other’s paths. It’s a little awkward with me and my sister when we connect. She’s the queen of selfies and she comes back home every few months, but it’s still weird once we run out of the usual family-school-boys topics. And we’re women. We don’t have the taciturn gene guys have.”
He laughed, and Kat held him tighter to keep her place on his chest. “How is Tasha?” he asked.
“She’s good. She’ll graduate in May. I think she wants to stay in California but she doesn’t have a job lined up yet and Dad’s leaning on her to come home. He wants her to at least consider the East Coast, since she’s refusing to come back to Maryland. I’m afraid me moving to North Carolina is going to make Dad put more pressure on her.”
Hunter ran his palm down her arm. “What do your parents think about you moving to North Carolina?”
“I haven’t told them yet. I keep putting it on my to-do list but I don’t want to do it, so I keep ignoring that line item. And,” she said, pinching his thigh with her toes, “don’t think I didn’t notice you leaving me to do all the talking. Your turn. What did you and your good buddy get up to? War stories and football?”
“Many of us are like brothers. We know each other’s families, get to be friends with the wives. When you don’t see a guy for years at a time, there’s a lot to catch up on.” His voice was growing rough, slurring as he drifted toward sleep.
She bit her lip, thinking about Hunter’s problems with his dad and his chosen estrangement from the Croft side of the family. Between his lack of blood family and his preference to keep his relationship with her and Liam separate from his life as a Marine, he must spend a lot of time listening and not much time participating in those catch-up sessions. As his breathing deepened and his heart slowed beneath her palm, her own heart ached for him. She prayed he didn’t one day regret missing out on a life as a husband and a father.
Chapter Eight
Kat returned to Baltimore on Thursday evening, weighted down by a carry-on full of dirty laundry and a heap of frustration. Of the thirteen rentals she and Hunter had looked at that morning, exactly zero turned out to be suitable. Too small, too far away, too infested by things Hunter wouldn’t let her see for herself, too leased already. The only thing good that came out of the trip was her time with Hunter, who, as he waited with her until her flight boarded, told her he wanted to go away with Liam for the weekend.
“Is that cool with you?” he’d asked, studying his hands where they hung between his knees. “If you’re not down with it—”
“Is it cool with me if you two take some time together for some much-needed relationship fortification?” Ignoring the public PDA rules, she had leaned in to throw her arms around his neck and kiss him hard on the cheek. “I would love for you two to ditch me for a few days. Please, go. Do it this weekend. I’ll have a bag packed for Liam and you can whisk him away for a surprise retreat.”
And if she was a little disappointed that she wouldn’t be there the first time Hunter invited Liam to fuck him...well, she had her big-girl panties and knew how to wear them. The weak link in their triad was the Hunter-Liam link, and she would do anything to help shore up that connection. It hadn’t occurred to her to actively push them together without the buffer of her presence, but now that Hunter had planted the idea, she was full-speed ahead with the plan. Arranging a romantic weekend for two would help ease the sting of her failed apartment hunt. She’d start researching as soon as she got home.
An hour after she debarked, Kat paced the concourse at BWI, checking her phone every thirty seconds and getting more and more upset. Adele had dropped her off at the airport because of Liam’s meeting schedule, but he had promised to pick her up.
Except he was late. Her husband, who was never late for anything and had never failed to follow through on a promise to her, was late.
Something was wrong.
Clinging to the last shreds of calm she possessed, she paused outside a magazine stand to text him again.
Please text or call me.
She hit Send and called his phone, which rang through to voice mail, the same as it had the last four times she called. Tears stung her eyes as she ended the call without leaving a message. She racked her brain, trying to remember whether he had told her about plans that she had forgotten in her preoccupation with packing on Wednesday, but nothing came to mind. He stayed home because he had back to back teleconferences and he needed to meet with his legal counsel to finalize a contract. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that would have put him out of text or phone call range for more than twenty-four hours, which was the last time she’d received a response from him.
Her hands shook as she pocketed her phone and left the airport to secure a taxi. During the ride to Hampden, she texted both Adele and Hunter to let her know she had arrived in Baltimore. She doubted Hunter would know anything, but she filled him in on Liam’s MIA status and asked if Hunter had heard from him. A quick skim of email told her nothing about Liam’s whereabouts. By the time the taxi driver double-parked beside outside her house, she felt nauseated and overly warm. Lights were on in the house but Liam’s car wasn’t there. Where was he?
Kat shoved a fistful of cash at the taxi driver, jumped out of the cab and sprinted up the stairs to the house. The windows that faced the street were dark. She dropped her keys in her haste to unlock the door. The lock gave on the second try and she stepped inside. Her rasping breath sounded loud and erratic to her ears, and it was the only thing she heard besides the hum of appliances.
A low light glowed from the kitchen so she went there first, dropping her carry-on and purse in the living room. The kitchen was likewise empty, but at least it held signs of life. A large pizza box sat on the breakfast table, full of discarded crusts, wadded-up greasy napkins and several paper plates. Confusion dampened some of her panic.
“Liam?” she called again, leaving the takeout mess where she found it. She backtracked through the house and climbed the stairs, saying, “Hello?”
Someone stepped on the creaky section of floor right outside the guest room. Kat froze about three-quarters of the way up the stairs, unsure whether to speak again or to backtrack to the first floor.
Before she made up her mind, a tall, slim silhouette appeared at the top of the stairs and a gender-indeterminate voice hissed, “Shhhh! You’ll wake them up.”
The person—intruder?—came down the stairs toward her. Kat retreated a step but froze when Jen’s oldest son moved into dim light from the living room.
“Brady?” She stared at the teen, dumbfounded by his presence in her house. “What are you doing here? Where’s Liam?”
The boy—who was well on his way out of boyhood now—shrugged and gestured down the stairs. “It took forever for me to get Trina and Baker to sleep. Can we go downstairs so they won’t hear us?”
Kat raised her eyebrows but nodded and descended ahead of him. In the living room, she removed her scarf and coat while Brady sat on the sofa. “Talk,” she said, mustering as much kindness and patience as she could find. “What are you guys doing here? Where’s your mom? Where’s Liam?”
Brady rested his forearms on his knees and clasped his hands together in a gesture that reminded Kat of Hunter. He stared at his linked fists, white-knuckled and tense. Kat thought she saw him blinking, as if he held tears at bay, but he wouldn’t look at her so she couldn’t be certain. His vulnerability dragged a sigh from her chest. Even though he had grown taller than her since the last time she saw him, Brady was only a kid. Fifteen or sixteen now, the same age Jen was when she gave birth to him.
Kat sank onto the chair across from him and gentled her voice. “Please tell me what’s going on.”
He cleared his throat and straightened, wiping both hands across his face. “My mom’s sick. Uncle Liam is with her.”
Okay, that at least explained...nothing. Kat gritted her teeth together. It explained nothing. “Start at the beginning.”
Before her eyes, Brady’s features hardened. He squared his shoulders and glared at her. “My mom got an abortion yesterday. Today, she wouldn’t wake up. I’m sick of her putting us through this shit. I slapped her and dumped water on her and couldn’t get her to wake up, so I took Trina and Baker and came here.”
Trying not to cringe at the resentment and anger in his voice, Kat nodded. “Okay. I’m glad you and your brother and sister are safe. So Liam went to your mom?”
“Yeah. He was pissed that I drove instead of calling him to come get us, but whatever. Mom’s car has Trina’s car seat and Baker’s booster, and I have my learner’s permit. I knew what I was doing.”
That was debatable, but Kat decided to let it go. Liam was her bigger concern. “How long ago did he leave?”
Brady shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it was around five o’clock? He gave me money and told me to get pizza for me and the kids for dinner, and then he took off.”
Kat glanced at the clock above the fireplace. Liam had left more than four hours ago. Her plane was already in the air, which might have explained why he hadn’t called to let her know what was going on, if he hadn’t been out of touch far longer than that. “You said he was home when you got here?”
“Yeah. He said he would be working from the house all day.”
“I think I’m missing something.” Liam wasn’t typically in contact with Jen or her kids outside the few times a year Jen contacted him to ask for help with some trouble or another. She frowned, remembering the somewhat tense exchange with Liam in the car on the way to Longwood Gardens earlier that month. What the hell was going on?
Across from her, Brady looked miserable and tired. Guilt swamped her and she bit back the rest of her questions. She needed explanations from an adult, not from an obviously distressed child.
“I need to make a call,” she said. “Do you want to watch TV for a while? Do you want something else to eat?”
That pizza box in the kitchen was huge, but Brady had shared with his brother and sister. She suspected the hungry look in his eyes had more to do with his life than his stomach, but she only knew how to treat the latter.
Brady looked up at her when she stood. “I don’t suppose you’d let me have a beer?”
“Sorry, buddy, not in my house.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think so. Uh, I guess I could use a sandwich or something.” He reached for the television remote and leaned back into an ungainly sprawl on the sofa.
Kat swallowed her instinct to tell him to sit up straight and left him to channel surf. In the kitchen, she popped open a beer for herself and rummaged through the cabinets, trying to put her thoughts in order. As she dumped a can of chicken soup into a sauce pan, her cell phone vibrated in her back pocket.
Hunter’s name, rather than Liam’s, showed on the screen. She answered on a sigh. “Hey.”
“I just saw your text. I haven’t talked to Liam since last night,” he said.
Kat filled him in while she heated Brady’s soup. When she mentioned Jen’s abortion, Hunter sucked in a breath.
“Fuck. That
bitch
.” Fury radiated in his voice.
Eyes wide, Kat dropped the spoon she was holding and planted her hand on the counter. “What—”
He cut her off. “I’m driving back tonight. Keep trying to get in contact with Liam and call me if you hear from him. I should be at your house in about six hours.”
“You don’t have to do that.” But she really, really wanted him to.
“Yeah, I do. You don’t know—
fuck
. I’ll call you when I’m outside so you can let me in. Try to get some sleep, kitten. You’ve had a long day.”
He ended the call and Kat’s stomach was even more of a wreck than it had been before she found Brady. Hunter had sounded angry, yeah, but that wasn’t all. He had sounded afraid.
And that really worried her.
Six hours seemed like a long damn time. She killed five minutes by assembling a sandwich for Brady, and then she had nothing left to do except wait. And obsessively text and call Liam, who still hadn’t responded by the time she fell asleep on the sofa after sending Brady to bed.
Her phone woke her from unsettled dreams. Kat lurched off the sofa, still half-asleep, and banged her shin on an accent table on her way to let Hunter into the house. He looked like hell but smelled like everything strong and reassuring when she threw her arms around his waist.
“No word from Liam?” Hunter kicked the door closed behind him and pressed her face against his shoulder. Kat shook her head and he sighed. “Great. Have you tried calling Jen?”
“No. That didn’t even occur to me. Do you think I should?”
Hunter shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt.”
“I’ll call now. Do you want to try to get a little sleep? The guest room’s full of kids but my bed’s free.” She had felt bad about sending Brady to sleep with his siblings while her bedroom went unused, but the thought of the teen finding traces of her sexual activities had overridden the guilt.
“No. I’m going to make some coffee, though. See what you can get out of Jen.” Hunter peeled off his coat and left her standing in front of the door.
She took a minute to collect herself before she moved away from the stairs. The last thing she needed at that moment was to wake up one of the kids.
Gah. Jen wasn’t her favorite person under the best of circumstances. The woman used Liam like he was her own personal crutch, both emotionally and financially. Every time Kat heard about a new man in Jen’s life, she hoped someone else would finally take responsibility for Jen’s issues. They never should have been Liam’s problem in the first place.
Kat didn’t know the whole story behind the history between Jen and Liam. She knew they had both ended up fostered in the same home for a period in their teens, and she knew that foster family had been irresponsible at best, neglectful at worst. The first time she had witnessed the degree of Liam’s response to Jen’s distress, Kat had suspected Liam and Jen had an old romantic connection. Teen love, drawn together—or thrown together—by circumstance. Liam denied it when Kat asked him, and Kat believed he was telling her the truth. She just didn’t understand what, if not an old romantic obligation, kept pulling Liam back again and again.
Hunter, who had known Liam longer than Kat did, knew more about Liam’s history with Jen. Whatever Hunter knew had dragged him four hundred miles in the middle of the night. Kat had a feeling she wouldn’t like the full story.
Disregarding the incredibly rude hour, she drew a fortifying breath and keyed up Jen’s contact info. An R&B tune Kat couldn’t place pealed in her ear. It was too early in the morning for that crap. Scowling, she held the phone away from her face and waited. Just when she had resigned herself to another voice mail dead end, Jen’s groggy voice answered the call.
“What the hell do you want?” Jen slurred, her words thick with what sounded like more than sleep. Maybe sedatives. Hopefully sedatives. Kat didn’t like the thought of Jen keeping other drugs in the vicinity of the kids.
“This is Kat,” she said, ignoring Jen’s less than cheerful greeting. “Is Liam with you?”
Jen’s laugh was not mirthful. “No, he’s not fucking with me. He stormed off like one of my kids in the middle of a tantrum.”
Kat sighed. “When did he leave you?”
“This is your fault,” Jen bit out. “If you had just agreed to take this baby, I wouldn’t have had to hurt him. Bitch. Don’t ever call me again.”
Jen ended the call by throwing the phone across the room, if the crash in Kat’s ear was any indication. Confused and unsettled, Kat joined Hunter in the kitchen.
“That conversation did not go as expected,” Kat said, surprised by her even tone.
“What did she—ah, fuck.” Hunter slammed his hands on the counter and tipped his head back. His throat worked and a muscle ticked at his jaw.
She watched him from a strange place of detachment as all the bits and pieces of the night, and the weeks leading to this point, tumbled around in her head. Maybe it was the insane hour, or maybe all the adrenaline and anxiety had done a number on her brain, but she couldn’t fit everything together. Hunter turned to her before she worked up the energy to ask what he knew that she didn’t.