MIDNIGHT QUEST: A Short 'Men of Midnight' Novel (2 page)

He’d rip out his lungs for her. Kill for her. Die for her. This? No biggie.

“Sure, honey. It’d be fun.” Would, too.

“Cool! We can start on that over the weekend.”

“Maybe even tomorrow. I reported in that I got the job done early and would be in tomorrow and Senior said just the morning. Afternoon is covered.”

“Wow. A whole afternoon off. You okay with that?” Lauren knew—everyone knew—that he loved his job. Taking time off was not a thing Jacko did.

“Yep. I can do some stuff around the house. The Beast needs a tune-up and I wanted to install that new sound system in the rec room.” An extra afternoon off—that would have pinged his pain-o-meter a couple of years ago. Now it was just some extra time to do his thing.

Lauren smiled up at him. “I do hope you realize that a free Friday afternoon will inevitably be followed by a free Saturday and Sunday. You won’t freak, will you?”

Jacko had a sudden vision of keeping Lauren in bed for forty-eight hours straight. Eating in bed, having sex, showering, repeat. For two days. Feasting on Lauren like she was a chocolate treat, hours and hours and hours of sex.

It made him slightly dizzy. That was exactly how they were going to spend the weekend—in bed.

“I’ll cope. I’ll think of something.” She narrowed her eyes at the sudden thickness of his voice. It was naturally deep—Lauren called him a human woofer—and the blood that left his head to go straight to his dick made his voice rasp. She was visibly trying not to look at his groin. Her cheeks colored a deep pink.

Her pretty mouth opened but nothing came out.

Shit
.

She enjoyed their sex life. Jacko made sure of it. But she wasn’t up for sex every single second of every single day the way he was. Not home five minutes and he was petitioning not very subtly for an immediate lay. The fuck was wrong with him?

“Hey.” He made his voice smooth. “Anything to eat? I’m starving.”

“Oh!” Lauren immediately lost that slightly stunned look and snapped into motion. “Of course! I didn’t know you were coming this evening but I made some really good vegetable soup and like I said, Isabel gave me a loaf of her five-grain bread.” She reached up to kiss his cheek then dropped back down to her pretty bare feet. “Why don’t you take a shower and everything will be ready when you come out?”

He kissed her forehead and headed toward the bathroom, feeling like a real shit. It had been so easy to distract her. All he ever had to do was hint at the fact that he was hungry or thirsty or needed anything at all and she immediately hustled to surround him with creature comforts. She took pride in making him happy, not knowing that just her breathing was enough to make him happy.

This couple thing was hard. No wonder he’d never tried it before. It was particularly hard when he lost control when he was around Lauren. Just a little. But just a little was a lot for Jacko. He’d forged his own life, step by painful step, every single second of the way exercising iron control.

He’d been brought up in a broken-down trailer park in a dusty shithole in Texas. Everything—every single thing—he had in life, he’d carved out of the face of the rock with his bare hands. He hadn’t even been brought up, in the sense most people had. His druggie mother drifted in and out of his life, and he’d had to see to his own upbringing. He’d been a troublemaker, barreling straight toward juvie when Sheriff Pendleton had said, “Son, it’s either the military or jail. Choose now.”

So Jacko had joined the Navy and finally found his place.

Losing control around Lauren was not allowed. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him—even better than making it into the SEALs—and he was not going to fuck this up.

Lauren went into the kitchen and he walked into the bedroom.
Their
bedroom, though you couldn’t really tell he lived here. Pure chickville. Flowers in vases, silver bowls with dried flower petals, pretty, delicate furniture. A chair that Lauren called a nursing chair for some reason, which he was terrified to sit on. A big bed with flowered sheets.

If someone had told him a year ago that he’d sleep between flowered sheets, he’d have punched his lights out. But here he was, sleeping between flowered sheets, and there were flounces around the bed. He’d never even seen them before. Didn’t even know they were called that.

The Navy was not a place for flounces around beds. A cot in the barracks with a trunk at the foot of the cot. That was his sleeping quarters in the military. And once he got out and started working for ASI, his own bachelor pad had been super spare with a couch, high-end TV and big plain bed with black sheets.

But living in a real girly place didn’t bug him as much as he thought it would. He worked in a high-testosterone business, so a touch of chick vibe was fine. More than fine, actually, because it was like being with Lauren even when she wasn’t there, like now.

He unpacked and put things away fast. Good thing the Navy had pounded neatness into him. The trailer he’d grown up in had looked like weasels nested there. It had taken him all of a week—and 250 pushups, because he hadn’t known how to stow stuff and had to learn fast through pain, the Navy way—to understand and practice neatness. It was a habit by now.

The bathroom was another testosterone-free place. Lauren had more lotions and creams and makeup gear than he had weapons, and that was saying something. It smelled really nice, too.

Showers in the ’Stan had been gross. Smelling of toe fungus and jism because everyone jerked off in the showers. Which was always better than jerking off into the sheets. They got hard and stiff. One of Jacko’s teammates had had sheets so stiff they crumbled and broke.

Lauren had stopped that cold. Now that he had her, he couldn’t give himself a hand job. Just couldn’t. It felt like cheating, even if he was only cheating on her with a big calloused hand, not another woman.

So he stood under the shower and lathered himself with one of her flower-scented soaps that smelled like her, looking down occasionally at his hard-on and sighing. Showers were quick and there was no need to dry his hair since he shaved his head.

Five minutes after stepping under the water, having willed the hard-on down by thinking of the ’Stan, and he was in clean sweats, walking into the kitchen.

Man, everything in this house smelled great.

The dining room table was decorated with a pink tablecloth and a small vase of flowers. There was a wooden cheese platter and an omelet she’d whipped up fast. She was ladling soup into their bowls and it smelled like heaven.

Lauren looked up with a smile as he walked into the room. “I hope you’re as hungry as you said. There’s about a gallon of soup. And it’s a six-egg omelet.”

Jacko took in everything at a glance. His beautiful woman, watching his eyes, the pretty table, the food he knew for a fact was going to be delicious.

“I thought you were coming home tomorrow,” she said with a slight smile. She was watching his face carefully. “I was planning a special dinner for you.”

He bent down, kissed her. “I can’t imagine anything more special than this,” he said truthfully. “Everything looks great.” A thought suddenly occurred to him and he looked at her just as carefully. “Was the special dinner supposed to be for a special occasion?”

His heart started pounding hard and heavy in his chest. He could feel his fingertips tingle.

He’d asked her to marry him many times. It had become a joke. They shared everything—a bed, a home, a life. She’d even said yes…
but
. Yes, but not right now. Yes, but it was a big step. Yes, but things were just fine the way they were.

She was going to say “yes” without a “but”. He could feel it. She had a glow to her, as if something special had been switched on inside.

Jacko had no idea where this obsession with marriage came from. He’d never been a marrying kind of guy. SEAL marriages were rare and usually didn’t last long. One of his teammates had been divorced four times.

Jacko had been in his thirties and employed at ASI before he’d even seen a happy marriage. Two of them, in fact. ASI’s bosses—John Huntington, aka “Midnight Man”, and Douglas Kowalski, aka “the Senior”—were both very happily married. The few married couples Jacko had seen growing up back in Cross, Texas had been shit unhappy. Most marriages there’d been toxic, some so dysfunctional the bad vibes were almost visible. The marriages he’d seen had been fueled by lust, alcohol and rage, the same things breaking the couple apart.

His own mom hadn’t married. She’d been toxic enough for two people, though.

Marriage hadn’t even been a blip on his horizon until Lauren. And now look at him. He was worse than a girl pining for a husband. He pined for a wife. Lauren. It pained him when he introduced her as his girlfriend, because she wasn’t. She was more than that. He’d had plenty of girlfriends—well…mostly fuck buddies, but still—and they were light-years from what Lauren was to him.

He wanted to call her his wife. He wanted everyone in the world to know that she was his and would be until the end of time. He wanted other men to look at her and understand that
Back off motherfucker, she’s taken
was written in invisible letters on her forehead.

He knew it made him an asshole, but it didn’t change his feelings at all.

He’d asked Lauren to marry him and she was finally going to accept.

Hot damn
.

Yeah, they were going to celebrate that tomorrow night, in the best way possible. In bed. For hours.

Blood shot back to his dick, so sudden it almost made him feel dizzy. Massive transfer of blood from big head to little head.

She smiled at him, one of those mysterious smiles only she ever managed to produce. “Sort of a special occasion, yes. You’ll be happy.”

Fuck yeah, he’d be happy.

Well, he’d sort of taken a vow not to jump on her like a wolverine, but he needed something to calm down his hormones. He’d eat his way out of this.

He pulled out Lauren’s chair then sat down and powered his way through the meal. Lauren asked him about the business trip and he told her what he could. The security measures he’d installed were top of the line and top secret, too. They were worthy of a US Embassy. But she didn’t want to know the technical details of bank security. She wanted to know if he’d gotten along with the bank president and the bank employees. He had, to his surprise. He hadn’t punched anyone, not once. His social skills were coming right along, another thing to thank Lauren for.

“So I guess the bank president is going to be grateful to you, if they’ve been robbed nine times in the past year.”

Jacko broke off a chunk of the bread to accompany the omelet. “If they get robbed again, I’ll eat my hat. And if they’re stiffed by one of their own employees, they’ll know who.” He popped the bread in his mouth.

“Wow, I guess they didn’t feed you down Mexico way, did they?” Lauren teased as she started pulling stuff out of the fridge.

“They fed me,” Jacko protested, looking with interest at what she was setting on the table.

“Clearly not enough.”

In the end, he demolished half a Camembert, another half loaf of Isabel’s five-grain bread, a big bowl of tomato salad, half the omelet and a square of frozen eggplant parmesan Lauren nuked in the microwave.

Lauren sat back, watched him and shook her head when he finished. “Guess you’re still a growing boy.”

“I’m grown,” he growled. Oh yeah. He was 240 pounds of pure muscle, and right now he felt very grown up. He could feel every single male hormone in his body.

Okay. It was time. He’d been a good boy. He’d waited, they’d had a nice meal together—though Lauren had stopped eating half an hour ago—but now it was time.

He stood, aware that his groin was at eye level and that his erection was very visible in his sweats. Lauren’s eyes widened as she looked at his crotch and his dick gave a kick in his pants. Her gaze moved up to meet his and as she saw his face, she blushed a fiery red.

Jacko didn’t know many women who could blush, and was surprised that Lauren still could, considering how often they had sex together.

He got it that she hadn’t had that active a sex life before him. She often said that she felt like he’d found her “on” switch. But it also meant that he tried to be careful with her. If she was blushing, that meant he should go slow.

Jacko was raring to go after five days of abstinence, but Lauren didn’t work like that. She needed to get used to him all over again. It had to be one of those go-slow times.

Jacko held out his hands and her eyebrows went up as she put her hands in his. She thought he’d carry her to bed, which he sometimes did. It was his way to get them into the bedroom as fast as possible, though he knew she thought it was romantic.

Not romantic. Practical.

But Jacko could do romance.

He brought her hand to his mouth, watching her eyes as he kissed it. She smiled at him. Oh yeah. He bent to kiss her, just the lightest touch of her lips, and she sighed and closed her eyes. Jacko put his mouth to her ear, kissed it, then whispered, “Come to bed with me?”

She shivered and sighed. “Oh yes, darling.”

If Jacko had followed his own desires, they’d already be on the bed having sex. But this was nice, too. Hearing her sigh, having her smile at him. Yeah.

He left a bedside lamp on in the bedroom. He loved looking at her, watching how her body changed for him.

He tunneled his hands in her hair, holding her head for his kiss. “I missed you so much,” he said when he lifted his head.

Lauren laughed and pressed her hips against his. “Yeah. I can tell.”

“What about you, hmm?” She could feel his massive hard-on. When chicks were turned on, it was harder to tell. “Did you miss me?”

Jacko was suddenly dying to read her body. It was like a book, only better. Her body told him everything he needed to know.

He unzipped her sweat suit top, pulling the zipper down slowly, watching her eyes. She huffed out a little breath when the top opened. But Jacko huffed like a bull when he saw she wasn’t wearing a bra. God. He opened the top, sliding it off her shoulders, and tried to keep his breathing under control. Keeping everything under control—his breathing, his hands, his dick—seemed nearly impossible in moments like these. Like patting his head and rubbing his stomach.