Johnny understood the concept. Rangers slept when they could. It was just good standard operating procedure, but he was pretty damn sure he wouldn’t be napping.
“You should probably have a stitch put in this, maybe two,” she said.
He’d been cut on his face, fairly deep, where Mitch Hardon had hit him. The guy must have been wearing a ring.
“If you want to do it, get a suture kit out of the pack.”
She leaned back and gave him a look. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No.” Johnny wasn’t kidding, he was dying. Esme was standing in front of him at the kitchen table in the safe house, doing her Florence Nightingale impersonation, and all he could think about was her cleavage, the soft shadow between her breasts, the soft curves at the V of her jacket.
He wanted to touch her so badly, he hardly dared move.
It had been quiet on the corner of Vine and Hoover since they’d arrived. The blue neon sign for the Commerce City Garage was lit up across the street, and that’s where his apartment was, on the ground floor. One of the other SDF operators had the second-floor apartment, Red Dog, Gillian Pentycote.
The building he and Esme were in had started out thirty years ago as a restaurant with a few office suites on its upper floors. Since SDF had bought the place last year, the restaurant had been gutted and converted into a garage for storing cars, and the two upper floors had been redesigned into working and living space. Steele Street Annex, it was called, with some talk going on about building another team. General Grant wanted it. The world situation needed it, and Johnny wanted more than anything to be part of it.
Except for right now. For right now, there wasn’t anything he wanted more than Easy Alex.
He’d pulled Solange into one of the bays on the ground floor, and the whole place was locked up tighter than a drum with all the building’s security systems up and running.
Esme was safe from everything in Denver except him, and he was safe from everything except the tightness in his chest that got worse every time she bent over and dabbed at his cheek with an antiseptic-saturated cotton ball. It stung like hell, and he didn’t feel a thing. He was completely removed from the minor pain of having his face cut open in a fight, and completely, totally fascinated with the cut of her jacket-low.
He knew what was underneath it, the red lace bra, the one that matched her panties, which was all that was under her skirt, except for her black satin slip.
There had to be a way to get her out of all that stuff, but he’d been enduring her tender care for half an hour and was down to four and a half hours before they left, and he hadn’t gotten anywhere.
Four hours, if he included drive time over to Bleak’s warehouse-much less than that, if this Dax guy shook his tail and showed up.
Great. He had two hours he could count on, max, and he was sucking air.
Dax. The name had thrown him for a second there. He’d only ever heard of one guy named Dax-Dax Killian, the Gunfighter. But where he’d heard about him was over in the Sandbox, never anyplace in the States.
Esme leaned over him again, this time with a small gauze bandage and a couple of pieces of first-aid tape, and he had to remind himself to breathe.
His heart was pounding deep in his chest, and he knew if she’d had any idea how much he wanted her, she’d be running in the other direction.
And he didn’t want that, so he kept himself still. If all he got was her company until five o’clock, he’d take it and be glad. Nothing in Afghanistan smelled like her. Nothing in Afghanistan looked like her. She was soft curves and golden hair, strands of it slipping loose and curling along her cheek. She was high heels and a tight skirt, and everything about her got him hot.
She laid the gauze on his cheek and oh, so carefully smoothed the tape down with the tips of her fingers.
It was crazy, and he wondered why it always had to be like this, with a woman so cool and calm and going about her business, and a guy driving himself nuts thinking about that hot, sweet place between her legs and how much he wanted to touch her there with his tongue, and his fingers, and be with her there, so deep inside her.
Geezus. The way she smelled made his head swim. It made it hard to think, made him hard… harder than Chinese arithmetic.
The sound of a car door being slammed shut on the street below had him reaching for her. He closed his hand around her wrist, stopping her from finishing with the bandage. Another door slammed shut, and he quickly rose to his feet and headed toward the bedroom that looked out onto the Commerce City Garage.
Okay, maybe he did have a brain left in his head. That was very reassuring.
And he had an erection.
And maybe that was reassuring, too, though to date, that hadn’t been a problem for him. His problem was the exact opposite.
Standing at the window in the darkened room, he watched two men approach the garage where he normally would have been for the night, if he could have stood the place on his own.
“Dovey,” she said, stopping beside him, her gaze angled toward the street.
“And the other guy, the one from O’Shaunessy’s, do you know him?”
She shook her head.
Below them, Dovey Smollett and the guy in the Chicago Bears jacket walked back and forth in front of the garage, trying the doors, and looking in the windows. Dovey stepped back and looked up at the second floor, but like the first floor, all was dark, quiet, empty. With Solange parked inside this building, there was nothing there to make anyone think he and Esme had run for home.
Dovey pulled out a phone and made a call, and after a few more minutes of wandering around, both he and the Chicago guy got back in the Buick LeSabre and hunkered in-stakeout.
“Looks like we’re going to have company for a while,” he said, glancing down at her, and for an instant she was looking up at him, but only an instant, before she looked away, a soft casting downward of her eyes, a lowering of her lashes.
And that was it, the one missing piece in all his heated lust and yearning, the one admission of awareness that she had any clue of what he was feeling, and that maybe she was feeling it, too-a guy needed that. Just because she’d kissed him twice in the car didn’t mean she wanted to kiss him here, where the distance between a kiss and the bed was shorter than a shift worker on payday.
Geez, she was so beautiful.
The blue glow of neon washed over her face, deepening shadows, highlighting curves, like the curves of her mouth, the soft fullness of her lower lip, the sweet dipping curve of her upper lip. Her face was more contoured as a woman than it had been as a child, even as a teenager. She was far more alluring, far more lush. He’d wanted her so desperately at eighteen, it was hard to imagine that he would have ever come to want her more-but he did. At sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, it had all been hormones and whatever ideas of love he’d managed to comprehend at the time.
Tonight the need was deeper. She’d been there with him during that firefight, only her out of all the people he’d ever known. He’d never claim to understand why, but he knew his tie to her was strong. It had happened in an instant, at first sight, a long time ago, and what he wanted from her was a chance to see where it all went.
Just a chance to lay himself up against her, to connect with her, mouth to mouth, body to body, to see if she could save him just a little bit, just enough to take the sharp edges off his dreams, to take the tension off his mind.
No. He didn’t have PTSD. He had what everybody else over there had, three tours of combat and a lot of rough living in between, and there had to be a break in there somewhere. When he’d seen her on Seventeenth, that’s exactly what he’d seen: a worn-out little hooker and a safe harbor all wrapped up in one blonde.
He’d been home for two weeks without being with a woman, and the need for her was running through him hard, cutting deep, straight to his core. There were other girls. There were always other girls, but the whole damn night had been about this girl, about winning her for himself, and the win was to have her sweet and naked beneath him, wanting him, her mouth parted, her legs spread, letting him push up into her, take her, fuck her, make her his.