His Very Own Girl (16 page)

They were so close now. Joined. Emotion tangled up with sensation as he laid his cheek against her shoulder and succumbed to the bottomless ache where her body sheathed his.

He thrust deeper. No matter how much he wanted to let go, to give in to the fierce orgasm that awaited, he focused on Lulu. He bucked his hips off the mattress, deeper into her slick depths. With both hands he gripped her bottom and gently separated those rounded globes, opening her even more fully.

Breathing hard, her rhythm growing more frantic, Lulu arched back, crying out. Her body quaked with the sudden release. Joe gritted his teeth, struggling for air. Black spots danced before his eyes. Her inner muscles convulsed around his cock, so tight now, tugging at him with each new plunge. Another trio of quick thrusts and he groaned. His head fell forward, pillowed by her shoulder, as the riptide yanked him out to sea.

Lulu slowly came to daylight wakefulness, her dreaming mind tinged with lingering visions of naked flesh and the sounds of gasps and moans. She smiled, her eyes still closed, and stretched from toe to fingertip. The warmth of that dream, when she’d been cradled and protected by Joe’s embrace, continued into the reality of morning. His arms tightened around her waist and curved her body into the shelter of muscle, skin, and passionate affection.

She sighed, utterly content.

“You look like a woman savoring something delicious.”

The low rumble of his voice was animal and rough. She fought the urge to scratch her forearms, so thoroughly did he get under her skin.

She opened her eyes, blinked, saw him. Joe was stretched out beside her on the narrow mattress, his elbow crooked and his head cradled in his palm. He was so close that his breath caressed the apples of her cheeks. He could lean a little nearer, just a fraction, and kiss her.

His sandy brown hair was paler than she’d ever seen it, touched by the plain light of day. Earlier, fresh from the terrors in the city, his skin had been tinged with copper, that taste of life and death together. His undershirt had been soaked with him—sweat and male. But now he smelled of clean cotton and plain lye soap. Her perfume, that cheap lavender stuff she’d bought from a pilot inbound from Puerto Rico, had been replaced by the mingled spice of their bodies.

In that early dawn light his eyes were an unusual shade of green, pale and flecked with gray. There was cheerfulness and laughter in his expression now, much like the jovial, uncomplicated soldier she’d first met, so different from his true deep waters.

The flop of slightly overgrown hair across his forehead said he was due for another standard army shearing, but she liked the softness those sunny locks lent his firm features. Morning stubble roughed his cheeks and chin, shading his skin with shimmers of light brown hair. He had never appeared so removed from the soldier she knew him to be.

This wasn’t just another brave boy. This was Joe.

“A nice dream,” she said at last. “Only I think it was more like remembering . . . and imagining.”

“For next time?”

She grinned, amazed at how three words could thrill her better than all the love poetry that had ever been written. “For next time.”

“Good.” He glanced at the clock on her writing desk. “We have twelve hours.”

Lulu’s smile broadened, but her heart pinched with a sudden, sharp tightness. Twelve hours. They had slightly less than twelve hours together.

No telling after that.

Ice lined the edges of her happiness and contentment. She pushed a tangle of hair out of her face, then slipped out of bed and into her dressing gown. Various pieces of his uniform scattered across the chilly bare wooden floor. What they’d done was irreversible. And inevitable, it seemed. She couldn’t imagine a path through the last twenty-four hours where sleeping with Joe wasn’t at the end of it.

“I’m going to pop downstairs to get us a bit of breakfast,” she said, suddenly shy.

“Lulu?”

She took a deep breath and forced herself to meet his gaze.

Joe had rolled onto his back, his long legs splayed artlessly in and through and over the sheets. His hands were laced behind his head, showing off the breadth and strength of his chest. Hair curled around his pectorals and trailed downward to where the bedspread barely covered but didn’t conceal his impressive erection.

Lulu licked her lip and swallowed. Heat pooled at the apex of her thighs. She wanted to touch and keep touching until the feel of him was a tattoo across her palms.

“Yes?”

He winked. “Don’t be long.”

A laugh bubbled up inside her. She stooped, balled up his T-shirt, and threw it at him.

chapter fourteen

“Don’t look at me,” Lulu said as she hurried past Paulie. Her goal was to reach the kettle and throw together tea and toast before attracting too much attention, but her friend was staring. The expression Paulie wore was midway between admiration and utter shock.

“Louise Davies, you come here this instant.”

Lulu slammed the kettle onto the hob to start the water boiling, then grabbed two porcelain cups from the cupboard. “Why?”

“Come here,” Paulie said, her voice clipped.

Shoving her hands through her hair, Lulu stood up straight and confronted the shorter woman. Paulie looked her up and down. Then she yanked the collar of Lulu’s dressing gown more securely around her neck.

“You really don’t want to show off that love bite to the boys, goosey.”

Lulu endured the heat of a hard blush. “Thanks.”

Leaning nearer like a conspiring vaudeville spy, Paulie said, “If you need more prophylactic kits, Lee keeps a stash under a loose floorboard by the toilet.”

“How would you know?”

Now it was Paulie’s turn to blush. She shushed Lulu and retrieved the tin of tea leaves from the cupboard. “Just . . . no, later. You get back to your Yank before the others wake up.”

A little stunned by her friend’s admission, but actually quite pleased, Lulu snuck back up to her room. She balanced a tray in both hands, feeling a sweet ache in the muscles between her shoulder blades and along her inner thighs. Each step reminded her of how her body had been used and worshipped so thoroughly. By Joe.

Her chest tightened, full of emotion and giddy, thoughtless longing. Less than twelve hours. She was going to make the most of it.

Back inside the room, closed in with her deliciously nude soldier, Lulu found Joe snoring softly. His facial muscles were relaxed, his lower lip slack. He’d pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes out of someplace, but it remained unopened on his bare chest.

Moving softly and quietly, Lulu eased a few papers out of the way and placed the tray on her desk. She sat down and sipped her tea, watching Joe as he dozed.

She wanted to know everything about him, not just the cryptic, painful secrets they’d managed to drag into the light. Favorite color, favorite food, favorite song. But more than the trivial little details, she wanted to know about his plans for the future.

Regarding that impulse, however, she thought it best to go slowly. They’d only just managed to crawl this far. The idea of investing in Joe Weber’s dreams was almost more terrifying than falling for him or making love with him. Dreams meant a future, and that was nothing either one could guarantee.

He awoke with a start. Eyes wide and unfocused, he gripped handfuls of bedding and sat away from the headboard. But then he was Joe again, his green eyes finding her face. A grin lit his expression. “Hey, gorgeous.”

“Hey, yourself.” She nodded toward the little teapot on the tray. “Tea?”

“I don’t know. Haven’t had much luck with tea.”

“Brits would sooner give up sleep.”

She fixed a cup with milk, regretting that they had no sugar to spare. She sat beside him as he devoured two pieces of dry toast. After a little grimace, he drank the tea, too. “Didn’t realize how hungry I was.”

“How’s your head?”

“Lousy. But you’re doing a great job of helping me forget.”

Lulu smoothed the frazzled hair that poked up around his ear. “That was a long night, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.” He took her hand and kissed her palm. “Thank you for your help in town. I know I was curt, but I appreciated what you did.”

“I suspect you carried on better without me to worry about.”

“I did at that,” he said with a nod.

“Then I’m glad I went home.” Lulu settled across his chest, her ear against his heart. She toyed with a whorl of hair around his flat nipple. “I don’t know about those you treated in town, but I must say, Doc Web—you have a marvelous bedside manner.”

After parting her dressing gown, he slid a flattened palm to the curve of her hip. “No complaints?”

Her body had been sated. Her desires had been quelled. But the slow, suggestive slide of his hand and the teasing heat in his eyes set her alight once more. Next time, they’d take it slowly. So very slowly, like his achingly sexy smile. She could only imagine what his firm lips might do to the rest of her body. She pictured him smiling as he knelt between her legs. Even if sipping the dew from her sensitive woman’s skin meant his smile would fade, his eyes would still goad and tease.

His erection pressed against her belly and she shivered. “No complaints whatsoever,” she said. “However, I hope my standards are somewhat different than the U.S. Army.”

“Just a little.”

“So they just taught you medicine? Doesn’t that take years?”

“Not so much medicine needed for meatball surgery—you know, triage.”

Lulu frowned.

“The first thing we learned was how to tell who couldn’t be saved,” he said. “Leave them for the chaplains. No wasted time or supplies. Then we learned how to look at the rest and prioritize. The man missing a leg comes first. The man with shrapnel in his eyes has to wait.”

He’d slipped back to a darker place, much darker than her sunny bedroom. Dawn’s gathering brightness over their draped bodies was replaced by the weight of his duties. Lulu wanted the teasing back, but she also wanted to know this side of him. Corresponding with Joe would be more wrenching than with other soldiers. She felt compelled to gather the fuel of information—the better to keep him whole and hopeful.

She knew the trauma of loving a man who’d lost hope.

“Not a recipe for keeping sane, is it?”

He grinned. “Unlike flying airplanes?”

“Flying airplanes is perfectly sane.”

“I beg to differ.”

She let her hand linger along his jaw, then rubbed her inner wrist along his stubble. Feeling. She needed more feeling.

“Soldier, I can think of much more entertaining things you can beg for.”

She raked the nail of her index finger from one nipple to the other, across the slope of his firm chest muscles. He rumbled something low and contented, his eyes closing. Lulu smiled, enjoying that he was still a man, with a man’s ability to succumb to the distraction of passion.

Easing onto her back, she stretched and showed off just a little. The dressing gown slipped to expose her breasts and her nipples puckered in the morning cold. Joe kissed the shallow well where her collarbones came together, dipping his tongue in that sensitive hollow. He caressed the sloping undersides of her breasts.

With one incautious move, she thumped her elbow on the wall. “There really isn’t much room here,” she said with a laugh.

“But it’s a horizontal surface.”

“This tiny little thing?”

“We’re plucky. I think we can manage.” His expression was poised in an erotic place between humor and ardor. He unveiled his slow, devastating smile. Had they been outdoors in the chilly dawn air, their bodies would’ve been steaming.

“Only a short time together and look at all we’ve learned.” She cupped his firm buttocks. “But I’d wager there’s more for us to discover.”

“Plenty.”

They kissed as if they had a lifetime together, not just a few hours. Joe explored her with a thoroughness that made her feel both self-conscious and treasured. She let her eyes roll closed, simply enjoying his attention. The luxury of being worshipped by him—leisurely, at his pace—was a treat she hadn’t dared imagine. For being a paratrooper, which seemed impossibly rash to Lulu, he had the calm of ten men.

She giggled. “Funny, don’t you think?”

“How’s that?”

“Me flying and you jumping.”

He braced his weight on his forearms at either side of her body. His lips were moist and reddened. “What of it?”

“For me, a brolly hop is the absolute last resort. Parachutes are for when all other means have failed. But you . . .
jumping
? On purpose! Isn’t it terrifying?”

“I’m more nervous about the flying.” He huffed a little exhale of laughter at her incredulity, then turned to lie beside her. “It’s true. At jump school, just before we boarded our C-47s for the first time, we jumped off a fifty-foot platform called the Tower.”

“No rigging?”

“Nope. We were strapped into harnesses. They were designed with enough slack so that we fell flat out for thirty feet. Then they’d catch and lower us slowly to the ground. The fear was in those first thirty feet of free fall.”

She touched his face, her chest aching with tenderness. “Do you realize that you use first person plural to describe military procedure?”

“Huh?”

“
We.
You say ‘we jumped’—you and the other men in your company.”

He shook his head with a bashful grin. “Never let it be said that army training doesn’t meld no-account boys into a single unit.”

“But surely you were scared of the Tower.”

“Not really. You would be?”

She tried to imagine what that would be like, standing at the lip of a platform fifty feet off the ground, knowing all that protected her from death was a thin bit of harness rigging. Jumping as a last resort, when the choice between life and death was reflex, no longer an actual choice—that she could understand. But to simply jump?

She wondered if that made Joe foolish or brave, and if her reluctance made her clever or cowardly.

“I don’t think I could do it,” she said. “But I’m rather impressed that you did.”

His eyes took on a faraway look. “I didn’t think about it. I’d already been to jail. It couldn’t be worse. So I just did it. And there’s this moment, Lulu—it’s amazing, really—when you just hang there, before falling.”

Lulu remembered sailing earthward, the ground rushing up to meet her. “It’s when you know you’re going to die.”

“No,” he whispered. “It’s when you know God.”

“Oh, Joe.”

“I mean it. I don’t know much about religion other than what the Sunday school teachers tried to make me learn. But what else is it, to give yourself over to something you can’t change?”

“I call it being powerless.”

He shifted on the bed, his arm draped casually around her waist. But she felt the tension gather in his muscles. “Which is why you didn’t jump when your Hurricane was failing.”

“I knew I could save it.”

“You didn’t.”

“What would you have had me do, Joe? Ditch it? That wasn’t the North Atlantic I was flying over. It was the Midlands, full of houses and families. If the worst had happened . . .”

His body had turned to rock. Lulu found that she couldn’t meet his gaze. “Go on,” he said, a quiet command.

“If the worst happened, then it was just me. I wasn’t going to put anyone else in danger.”

“Damn it, Lulu.” He sat up abruptly. The sheet dragged halfway down her body.

Lulu stared at the ceiling, trying to remember if he’d ever cursed in her presence. His anger was so great that it had barged past his manners.

Would it always be this way? They couldn’t talk about her work or his. The war always intruded. It barged into every room, spoiled every conversation, tarred every good-bye. She and Joe never would’ve met without it, but neither could they enjoy one another without its pall blanketing everything.

Out in the corridor the manor house was coming awake. Paulie and Betsy and even Nicky—they’d all be taking to the skies. The citizens of Leicester would begin picking through the wreckage and sorting their possessions into piles for salvage and scrap. Some would mourn the loss of loved ones.

Lulu sat up and knelt beside Joe. His expression was impassive, neither angry nor despondent. Just
empty.
She’d come to recognize it, when he was sorting or coping. She wanted more for him, for them both. Clasping her hands around his neck, mindful of his sutures, she pressed against his rangy body and planted a swift kiss on his lips. She wanted to see him smile again, but she settled for his powerful arms coming around her in an intense embrace.

The taste of him pushed onto her tongue, a coppery zing of tea. Then she was on her back again, with Joe’s hard torso stretched above hers. His mouth was open, his eyes intense, with desire thankfully replacing that fearful emptiness.