This warrior code, it ran so deep, and it ran deep in her lover.
She bent over him again, taking him in another kiss as he slid in and out of her. This bond ran deep, too, this lover bond. He was such a part of her.
She had to tell him she wanted more.
He kissed her, and he teased her, and he made sweet, hot love to her, until the fire lit deep inside her, and when she came, her soft cries of pleasure in his ear, his arms locked around her, he pushed into her one last, hard, deep time, and came undone with her.
Sex in hot tubs, right, that could kill a guy, if he wasn’t careful, and yet Johnny had never seen that in any of his training manuals. Of course, other guys weren’t having sex with Easy Alex, and she was just so freaking hot. He’d never had a woman like her, and he never had her enough. Some changes needed to be made. Five months of hit-and-miss hot sex, and missing her way too damn much, just wasn’t cutting it.
He needed her close more, needed to taste her more, smell her more, be with her more. She was such a safe harbor for him, and God, sometimes he needed a safe harbor, especially when he was home.
She’d gone to Cheyenne with him last August and helped him deliver that letter, and it had been so good to have her there, good for Lori Heath. The other girl had been harder to face, Cassie McAllister. When a guy was injured so badly that he turned away from people he loved, it was a hard thing to explain, even to himself. What had happened to John Paul Cooperman, Johnny’s best friend through three tours of combat, could happen to any soldier-the debilitating injury, the deeply scarring wounds-and Johnny hadn’t had any words of solace for the young woman going it alone out on the Wyoming prairie. He’d check on her again, though, and let Cooperman know how she was doing. He’d promised.
He had managed to keep his name out of the paper, with Lieutenant Loretta’s deep understanding and help, and what he’d learned over the last five months was that no matter how long he’d lived at Steele Street and the Commerce City Garage, no matter how much he’d thought he’d known about Special Defense Force, being on the inside was far, far different than being on the outside. The missions took everything he had and then some. Hell, keeping up with Creed was damn near impossible, and the guy had years on Johnny. Years. He hadn’t even worked with Red Dog and Travis yet, and quite frankly, he knew he wasn’t ready. Skeeter and he made a good team, because they’d spent ten years in each other’s faces. They could almost literally communicate telepathically. Hawkins and Dylan still intimidated the hell out of him, trying to meet their standards, but the two of them hadn’t been around much since he’d come on board, so a lot of his training had been supervised by Kid, and a lot of his missions had been with C. Smith Rydell. Johnny literally loved working with the guy. Rydell was like a wall of titanium, sixteen feet long, eight feet high, twelve inches thick. It didn’t matter how you washed up against him, he was so fucking solid, the experience was always the same. Not even Hawkins had that going for him. And because it was always the same, because Rydell was more consistent than an atomic clock, Johnny learned, and everything he learned from Rydell, he learned right, and every time he did something, he did it right, and that’s what made Rydell happy, and if Rydell was happy, a guy’s chances of surviving were damn good.
But this thing with Esme, this had to change. This was fluid, and growing, and becoming so important to him. She was his, and he wanted to make those ties that bound even closer.
“Baby?”
“Hmmm,” she sighed in his ear, her warm, wet body so soft and lovely in his arms.
“I’ve got something for you,” he said, reaching behind him into one of the cargo pockets on his BDUs.
She lifted her head from his shoulder, curious as he rummaged around in the pocket until he found what he wanted.
It always looked so sappy when guys did this on some reality television show, and it always sounded so sappy when some guy was talking about doing it, and it looked sappy when some guy put his big moment up on YouTube.
But when a guy was doing it himself, it felt, and looked, and sounded so profound, so different from what a guy had imagined. For one thing, he’d never imagined he’d be proposing to a naked woman in a hot tub unless there had been quite a bit of tequila involved.
Go figure. Here he was, stone cold sober, and she was as beautifully naked as a woman could get, which in his book was pretty well summed up by the word “completely.”
He pulled the small jeweler’s box out of the pocket and showed it to her, and his mind went blank. Just like that. Completely blank.
No, he thought, no, this couldn’t be right. He’d had it all worked out. He’d sweated over it, practiced it, memorized it, just the right words. Something about… about love, and life, and forever-sure, something about all that, except better, with a part about how wonderful he thought she was, more wonderful than anything else, and a small part about kids, maybe? What had that part been like?
“Honey? You look confused,” she said, and when he shifted his attention back to her, she was grinning at him.
“I had this all planned out.” It had been so perfect. “But I can’t quite remember how it went.”
“You mean your proposal of marriage, where you tell me you can’t live without me, and we’ll work out all the logistics, because in your heart you know we’ll both be happier if we’re together, even if certain sacrifices have to be made? That part?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, grinning back at her. “That part, but there was more.”
“You mean the part about how much you love me, and that you can’t imagine finding what we have together with anyone else?”
“Yeah. That part,” he agreed, settling back against the hot tub and just enjoying the view. “You’re pretty smart, aren’t you.”
“Valedictorian of my senior class,” she admitted.
“Smart enough to say yes?” He opened the box, revealing a one-of-a-kind Nikki McKinney creation, a gold band with platinum inlaid wings and a diamond set in a swirl of sapphires.
“Too smart to say no,” she said softly, taking the ring out of the box and slipping it on her finger.
“I don’t think we should wait, no long engagement or anything like that. I think we should just get married.”
She glanced back up from the ring, a small smile on her face. “Sounds like you got that part right.”
“Yeah.” He figured he did, and he kissed her again.
She pressed herself against him, getting even closer, her mouth so hot and sweet on his, and he could instantly see where this was all going to go, with her legs straddling him, and him being so much in love with her.
“I’m glad we’re not going to be on YouTube,” he said after a while.
“Yeah, me, too.” She kissed him again, with his ring on her finger, and it was all so perfect, cold snowflakes coming down, hot steam going up, and Esme the Wonderful on top.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pseudonym for Glenna McReynolds.
Tara Janzen is the author of the award-winning CRAZY and LOOSE series of romantic suspense novels about Steele Street, a team of Special Ops forces. Her books have appeared on the New York Times and the USA Today bestseller lists.
Tara lives in Colorado with her family.
