Rescue Me: A Bad Boy Military Romance (17 page)

He trails his fingers down my sides and up my back. He rests a flat palm against my spine and presses me down so I’m bent forward over the countertop. I hear him unzip his jeans. He pulls my hair to the side, my stomach pushed hard against the newly-refinished laminate. “We said some things last night,” he whispers.

“Things that needed to be said,” I retort angrily, trying not to breathe hard under the weight of his seduction.

He laughs. “I’m sorry for what I said.” He nibbles at my earlobe and my knees buckle.

“I’m…not…sorry,” I gasp as he moves one hand between my legs from behind. I hear the crinkle of a condom wrapper.

“You don’t need to be,” he replies, bending me over harder and pinning my arms behind me with one hand. I feel him slip into me roughly, my cheek pressed against the cold countertop, the smell of burning butter a foot from my nose. But I don’t care. He’s angry, and I can feel it.

And so am I. I growl and groan as he pounds himself into me over and over and over. I’m helpless against him.

And I like it.

I’m about to careen over the edge when he pulls out and lets go of me. I turn around, pawing at his shirt, tearing it over his head. Our mouths are on one another’s, tongues and heat and skin and passion. He lifts me up on to the kitchen counter and I wrap my legs around his torso, pressing my heels into his perfect, muscular ass. I trail my fingers down the tattoos on his arms and he pins my hands above my head this time, tacking them with his fingers against the cabinet doors.

He’s staring into my eyes as he slides into me again, this time harder and rougher than before. I’m driving my heels into his back, willing him to be deeper and deeper inside of me. I want to feel every inch, every centimeter, every millimeter.

We fall together into bliss as the smoke alarm goes off.

I can barely walk so he carries me to the sofa, laying me down gently. He kisses my forehead as the alarm continues to shriek at us. “I’ll clean up and make breakfast. You just lay here.”

“Okay,” is all I can muster, my chest still heaving from our little culinary interlude.

I lay on my sofa, totally naked, the thick cotton twill soft against my skin. The ceiling fan spins from the high ceiling above me and I feel my eyelids start to flutter shut, Jason the furthest thing from my mind.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

ELLA

“We’ll just need you to run the water dunk booth. That’s it,” Tanya intones from the doorway of my office. She keeps trying to sit down but I’m up to my eyeballs in paperwork and I don’t want to have this conversation.

“I really, really don’t have time for volunteering
or
for this right now, Tanya,” I reply, flipping through three different patient charts looking for a sticky note I lost.

“Hot date tonight with you-know-who?” she asks knowingly.

I start to object to the implication but the blush in my cheeks gives me away. I glance up at the clock. “Yes,” I say in a measured tone.

“You two have been seeing an awful lot of each other recently. Or I presume you have. Tim tells me he hardly hangs out with Luke anymore.”

I bite my lip. “He broke Man Code to tell you that?”

“You know me. I can needle anything out of anybody, sweetheart.” Tanya traces her fingers over the doorframe. “He even told me that Luke missed karaoke night last week.”

“We were doing some renovations. Lost track of time,” I reply. I’m still flicking through charts but I’ve lost the entire trail of what it is I’m supposed to be doing. The letters flicker before me and none of the words are reaching my brain. I think back to last week, the smell of sawdust at Luke’s house, how he’d been standing behind me as I held a hammer drill in my hand. How our renovation work had turned into a sea of salty flesh and sex on top of a drop cloth. Three rounds of sex, to be precise. By the time we’d thought to look at a clock, karaoke night was long finished.

“Renovations? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”

I slam the charts down. “Tanya, you’re not going to leave until I say that I’ll volunteer at the fundraising festival, are you?”

She smiles and nods. “That’s correct. Everybody in town does it, and you’re no exception just because-“

“Just because I have full clinic hours, am open on Saturdays, take night calls, and make time to go to the school to check in on the kids twice a week?”

She nods. “Hey, I was the history teacher, guidance counselor, and mayor for a time a few years back. I know the song you’re singing better than you do.”

I sigh and slip my glasses off of my face, rubbing my eyes. I can’t wear my contacts when I’m this tired. “Alright. Okay. I’ll do it.”

She claps her hands together. “Great! You’ll be paired up with Amy Waters.” Tanya grimaces and waves goodbye. “Alright, have a good evening!”

And on that firebomb, she leaves my office.

I’m so engrossed in what I’m doing an hour later I don’t hear the front door open.

“You should really lock that,” Luke says from the doorway.

“Mm,” I reply absently. “Just…hang…on…one…second!” I finish the last of my paperwork with a flourish. “Alright, I’m done.” I look up at him.

“You heard nothing I just said, didn’t you?” His arms are crossed, his tattoos clear and the lines of his muscles clearly defined through his skin.

I’m about to answer when I realize I’ve left yet another stack of files on the small table by the doorway. “Dammit!” I yell, walking over to pick them up. “I just need to run through these, I thought I was done. I’m so, so sorry.” I stand on my tiptoes to kiss him on the mouth quickly, but he pulls me closer to him before I can get away.

“I think I’m gonna need another one of those if there’s any hope of me waiting for you tonight,” he says in a sexy voice. I oblige, giving in to three more kisses that hardly make me want to do more work.

I push him away finally, adjusting my glasses. “Give me twenty minutes to work through some of this. That’s it. I promise. Then we can leave. Scout’s honor.”

Luke pulls a chair up next to me and rests his hand on my knee. “You don’t mind if I do some work while you’re working, do you?” he whispers in my ear.

I nearly drop my pen. “I’m not sure how productive that’ll be…” but I trail off as he kisses my neck. I force myself to stare at Mrs. Johnson’s chart, double-checking her bladder stone prescription and willing myself to not be distracted by Luke. He’s climbed down to the floor on his knees. He pushes my legs apart and shoves my skirt up my thighs.

I sigh and drop my pen. He looks up from kissing my inner thighs. “Keep working,” he says. “Otherwise we’ll never get to the main event.”

I pick my pen up again and scribble some more notes as he moves my panties aside. It’s getting harder and harder to concentrate as I sit here. “Can I just take a break-“

Luke stops again. “No. You said you needed to work, so keep working.” His fingers are underneath my panties, feeling my wetness there. He strokes the tender skin and I’ve lost all sense of what I’m reading in front of me. I grip my pen tightly and start writing nonsense on a scrap of paper to keep Luke satisfied.

His lips are against my skin, my panties pulled to the side. He licks me between my legs in all the right places. I squirm and moan against his tongue, which flicks and glides around, bringing me closer and closer to climax.

I drop my pen and scream, gripping onto my desk as hard as I can. Luke comes up for air, smiling. “You finished with your work yet?” He picks me up out of my chair and shoves his lips up against my ear. “Because I’m not.”

He carries me into the exam room and pulls down a fresh roll of paper. “Patient is presenting with extreme sexiness,” he says as he pushes me onto the table and unbuttons my sweater. “Insists upon teasing her boyfriend by wearing those glasses and putting her hair up onto her head.” He slides my sweater off my shoulders and starts working on the bottom of my tank top, his calloused fingers gliding up my skin. “Prescription is for her to sit up, shake her hair out, and take her glasses off her face like the sexy librarian she is.”

I laugh and cover my face with my hands. “Stop it,” I say, giggling.

“Oh no, I’m the doctor and what I say is gospel in this space.” Luke slides his hands under my lower back and pulls me upright. “Do it, Madame Librarian.”

I’m blushing uncontrollably but I can’t resist his stare. I take my hair out of its twist and shake it out around my shoulders, pulling off my glasses. I bite the end of the stem for full effect. Luke grabs at his heart dramatically, staggering around the room. “You’re trying to kill me, Ella.”

Then he’s back at the table, sliding off my panties and pulling my bra out from under my tank top. I’m still wearing my skirt, which is up around my stomach. He pulls off his pants, shoves my knees open and is close to pushing himself inside of me when I remember.

“Wait!” I yell. “Condom. Um, there’s some in the bowl in the front of the office.”

Luke takes a step back. “You sure we need one?” he says with a smile.

My body is aching for him to be inside of me, raw and bare and pressing flesh against flesh. “Yes, please.”

Luke leans over me and teases my nipples through my shirt with his teeth. “I’d love to fuck a baby into you, Ella Hanover.”

I moan as he bites and nibbles at my tender pink nubs through the lightly ribbed fabric. “Just…this…once,” I whisper back to him, totally losing my mind to the moment. It’s not hard for me to forget myself right now, and a second later when he’s inside of me, I lose all of my thoughts.

We ride each other until we can’t take anymore, me feeling like my throat is going to be raw and red from the screams he elicits from my body.

This man does things to me that even science can’t explain.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

LUKE

I kiss Ella’s nose and pull out of her, cleaning myself up and pulling on my clothes. I reach into my pocket and pull out a strip of cloth. “Wear this,” I say to her.

She laughs. “On what?”

“Your eyes. I want you to be surprised,” I say.

She reaches down to pick up her bra and panties. I shake my head. “Leave them,” I whisper to her. “You don’t need them and I want to stare at you in my pickup truck while you’re only wearing a skirt and a thin tank top.”

Ella blushes and I know I’ve completed my work. She slips her high heels on and grabs the blindfold. “Fine, but I’m not putting it on until we’re at your truck.” We walk through the clinic and she shuts the lights off, locking the door behind her.

She keeps her end of the bargain and ties up her vision for the entire car ride. When we get to my house, I help her out of the truck, stopping to kiss her.

“I think we’ll need that blindfold for later,” she replies, grinning.

I take her hand and lead her around the back of the house. Everything is just as I left it. I push her forward and tell her to open her eyes. She slips off the fabric and gasps. “When did you build that?”

It’s a pergola that I’ve been putting together in my garage for weeks. I’ve painted it white, and lights hang from the center of it. I’ve spread out a picnic in the middle of the octagonal space. Ella runs forward and then turns around. “It’s just like the movie,” she whispers to me like a giddy child. “Just like
The Sound of Music
.”

I grin at her. “That was the idea, Liesl,” I say, holding out my hand and twirling her around.

“Don’t make me sing the song,” she says.

I shake my head. “If I get enough alcohol into you, you’ll be singing
Sixteen Going on Seventeen
without a single prompt from me. I know you well enough to know that.”

An hour later, stuffed to the gills with the gnocchi and sauce that I made especially for her, we lay on the picnic blanket and gaze up at the twinkling lights above us. “You have no idea how embarrassed I was driving into Ft. Worth and asking where to find twinkle lights.”

Ella laughs. “I’ll bet you were.” She pushes herself up on her elbow and kisses me. She tastes like cinnamon. A second later, she has a serious look come across her face. “What happened with your leg? Was it…something to do with a kid?”

I feel my heart beating rapidly and my breath momentarily stolen from me. “Why do you say that?”

She traces her fingers across one of my tattoos. “The way you reacted the day after the tornado…I just assumed. When you saw that little boy you sort of shut down.” She stops her tracing. “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.”

I take a deep breath. “We were supposed to be doing a routine patrol. There were kids playing up ahead of us. Then suddenly IEDs were flying out of nowhere towards us. I was looking right at this little boy. Couldn’t have been more than five. I just always think that if I wasn’t there, he wouldn’t be dead. If the war weren’t happening, he wouldn’t be dead. If we hadn’t been patrolling, if we hadn’t been this glaring target, he wouldn’t be dead. I watched him bleed out. And I couldn’t help him. Because I couldn’t walk.” Tears sting at my eyes and I wipe one away before Ella can see it.

She takes my hand. “Do you want to hear about Eleanor?”

I turn to face her. “Eleanor?”

It’s Ella’s turn to look sad. “Our daughter. I named her. In the hospital. She was so, so tiny but they let me hold her in my arms for an hour. I knew she needed a name. I thought that was a nice one.”

I squeeze her hand as tears roll down her cheeks. “What did she look like?”

“Tiny. Green eyes. She looked like you. She had your nose and your fingers.” Ella gazes out and smiles. “I felt like you were there with me when I saw her. When I got to hold her.” The tears are coming hard and fast now. “She was so sweet, but she was just too small. I knew that she wanted to fight, but there was just no way. There was no way.” Ella collapses onto my chest and I breathe into her hair, holding onto her tight and letting her cry it out.

Soon enough, I’ve joined her. I can’t hold this in anymore.

We hold onto each other until we’re both dry. Ella tips her head up and kisses me slowly. I return the favor, entwining my fingers into her curly, auburn hair. She climbs on top of me and unzips my pants. “We don’t have a condom,” I whisper.