The SEAL's Second Chance: An Alpha Ops Novella (6 page)

“Eight hundred thread count Egyptian cotton,” she said. “Enjoy.”

He settled down and tucked the sheet around her ribs, then closed his eyes.

“Was it worth it?”

The words were out before she could stop them, smacking of the pleading reassurance her mother wanted from a man.
Wasn’t I good enough? Just tell me what you want, baby, and I’ll make it happen.

“Was what worth what?” he asked, his face already slackening into sleep.

It didn’t matter, of course. She could have been the best he’d ever had, and he’d still leave in a couple of weeks, go back to San Diego and the life of a modern warrior. She didn’t even hope to be the best he’d ever had, just wanted to know that she hadn’t embarrassed herself. “Nothing,” she said, and curled up on her side. “Good night.”

Chapter Four

The next morning, Jamie watched Charlie sleep, and hoped it wasn’t too creepy.

He’d fallen asleep in her bed, so maybe it was okay to absorb the way the early morning light, gray and watery with the rain that was in the air, lay across her face and hair. She was lying on her side, facing him, as he studied her face, looking for signs of the girl he’d fallen for all those years ago. Charlie, as usual, didn’t give him what he expected; she didn’t look younger when she slept, or more innocent, but then again, she’d never looked innocent. When your dad was in the wind and your mother was routinely arrested for petty theft, innocence wasn’t something you could afford to retain. And look at her now. A pro basketball star, a degree, money in the bank, and a mission in life. Watching her with the students the day before made him both proud and scared.

Proud, because she was going to make a difference in those girls’ lives. She ran her team like he ran missions, all out committed to the people in her care, and the girls obviously worshipped her.

Scared, because his fantasy of swooping back into Lancaster and whisking Charlie Stannard off to San Diego’s sunny beaches wasn’t going to happen.

Even her house spoke to her putting down roots. Classic Craftsman homes occupied lots all over the East Side, but Charlie’s was recently renovated. Fresh paint, new windows. He wondered if she’d added home renovation to her skill set, chosen the colors, opened up the living space, stripped and sanded the hardwood floors. It wouldn’t have surprised him. When Charlie made up her mind to do something, it happened.

If she didn’t make up her mind that they were happening, it wouldn’t matter how deeply, madly, truly he wanted her. They wouldn’t happen.

Her breath hitched, then shuddered back out again. She slept like a mummy, her arms crossed over her chest, her loosely curled fists jammed up under her chin. The sheet was caught under her arm, revealing only the upper curve of her firm breast, but that was enough. Her musculature was so erotic, sensitive skin over toned curves, the dip and swell of shoulder, collarbone so tempting to touch, but he didn’t want to wake her. So he left bare millimeters between his fingertips and her shoulder, then the strong line of her jaw, the delicate hairs on the secret curve of her ear when Pitbull’s “Time of Our Lives” blared into the pearly morning light.

He jerked his hand away. Charlie’s eyes popped open, wide, startled, staring up at him blankly.

“It’s Jamie,” he said.

Her eyebrows pulled down. “Did you forget your own name over night? I know who you are,” she said, her voice husky with sleep.

Jamie snorted, then looked at the clock. 6:27 a.m. “Why six twenty-seven? Why not six twenty-five or six thirty?”

She rolled over, pulling the sheet up as far as it would go before reaching overhead and stretching. Laid out from tiptoes to fingertips she was longer than the bed. It was kind of crazy hot.

“Six thirty is too late. Six twenty-five is too early. If I can get two more minutes of sleep, I’m going to get it,” she said, then reached out and swiped Pitbull into silence.

“I take it this is a precisely calibrated morning routine?” he asked, amused.

“It is. Run, shower, slam down a protein bar on the way to school.” She sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. In the filmy light her spine was a series of delicate knobs bracketed by the ridges of muscles he associated with SEALs and bodybuilders.

He steeled himself for a brush-off, figuring she wouldn’t want to run together early in the morning when someone might see them. Instead, she scrubbed at her scalp with her fingertips, loosening her hair even more, then looked over her shoulder at him. “I can make an exception,” she said, softly, as close to hesitant as he’d ever seen her.

He reached out and set two fingers at the tops of her shoulder blades, then trailed them down the valley on either side of her spine to the twin divots at the base. “You sure?”

“Yes,” she said.

He reached around her waist and hauled her back into bed, wasting no time getting her under him. School started at 8:05 come hell or high water, and she couldn’t be late. He splayed his hand on the side of her face and kissed her sleep-swollen mouth, nudging her lips open with his, touching his tongue tentatively to hers, waiting for her response to morning breath before he went any further.

Her response was to open her mouth and lick into his, all teeth and tongue and demand. His cock, half-erect, hardened in two beats of his heart, and he rubbed against the taut curve of her hip as he dragged his hand down her face to her throat. She moaned, a sound he felt under his palm as he heard it, and wrapped one arm around his waist and the other around his shoulder, shifting and squirming to position him.

“Shh,” he whispered against her mouth, then kissed his way along her jaw to her ear as he skimmed the backs of his fingers down her sternum, taking the sheet with him as he went. He left it at the tops of her thighs, then reversed direction and cupped her sex. The soft folds parted easily for his fingers, and he dipped into the slick heat. She gasped and trembled and arched, all at once. In response his hips jerked in a quick, opportunistic thrust, smearing precome on her skin.

Once he started he couldn’t stop, rubbing off against her hip as he circled her clit with his fingertip and trapped her choked-off gasps with his mouth. After a long minute, she stopped clutching at the small of his back and shoved at his arm. “No, no. Not like this,” she said. “Inside me.”

Her pupils were blown and her hair, which had dried while she slept, was a wild, tousled wreck around her face. The sheer reality of it all, her body warm and limber under his, the crease in her cheek from a wrinkle in the pillow, the utter wreck of her hair, so different from a primped, styled encounter at a bar, made his heart tighten in his chest. He wiped his fingers on the sheet and patted around on the floor for the box of condoms, and had to shift half his body off the bed to find it. The awkwardness got a little less troubling when she squeezed his ass, then worked her hand between them to give his cock the same treatment.

“Fuck, fuck, stop,” he said when she ran her loosely circling hand up and down his shaft. He heaved himself back upright and knelt between her legs, all butterfingers with the condom package. So much for field stripping a weapon blindfolded or assembling a bomb in the pitch-black of a cave in the Afghani hills. Broad damn daylight and he dropped the condom on her thigh.

She smiled up at him, warm and vibrant and everything he wanted in his bed, in his life, for the rest of eternity. Her foot skimmed up his leg to rest at the crease of his hip, waiting until he sheathed himself, then sliding around to dig a heel into the base of his spine and pull him down, into her waiting arms.

He braced his weight on his knees and one elbow beside her head, then used his hand to align his cock with her entrance and push inside. She winced as he did, and he stopped, just the tip wrapped in slick, hot pressure. “Okay?” he gritted out.

“Yes … just … tender from last night,” she breathed, her eyes closed. She inhaled through her nose, exhaled through her mouth; tension visibly ebbing from her muscles. The pressure around his cock eased a fraction.

Taking care not to push any deeper, he leaned down and rested his lips over hers while at the same time applying the slightest pressure to her clit, swollen and slick at the top of her folds. She tensed, stopped breathing. He stopped, too, his cock barely parting her folds, his fingertips applying the faintest of pressures. She was so wet, but her juices wouldn’t soothe the overstimulated nerves.

At least three other options flashed through his mind, none of them the slightest bit painful. “We should stop,” he said, getting a firmer grip on his control. He wanted to do this again as many times as he could, wanted to claim her and tie her to him, but never hurt her.

“Why?” she said, distantly, eyes closed, fingers tensing and releasing around his biceps.

“Charlie,” he started, when her eyes opened.

“It hurts so good,” she murmured, the words nothing more than a puff of air. “Jamie. It hurts so good.”

Understanding shot down his spine like a bolt of lightning. She was drifting on that rush of endorphins that accompanied a hard workout, pushing your body to its limits. His cock flexed inside her, and she gasped again, but this time she kept her eyes open and let him see the tide of desire rise in her eyes, let him see the pulse of blood, faint but visible in her cheeks and throat.

She liked it. Wanted it. Knew how to get lost in it, and trusted him to go with it.

“Pull me in,” he whispered against her ear, holding his hips above hers, rock steady now. “When you’re ready, pull me in.”

He’d thought the hottest thing he’d ever felt was Charlie’s mouth on his cock in her shower, and that was true enough less than twelve hours ago. But in the shimmering, stretched span of time when her fingers tightened then stopped, easing his cock into her sheath in what felt like increments of a millimeter or less, he revised his opinion. She looked into his eyes as she took what she could handle, trusting him to hold himself back for her, letting him see how each bit of progress affected her. For his part, the heat and pressure engulfed him in torturous inches, tightening his balls, lighting up nerves from the tip of his cock to the base of his spine.

He lifted his fingertip from her clit. She caught his wrist and brought his hand to her mouth and licked her juices from the skin there, gaze locked with his all the while.

“You’re killing me,” he said, fighting to keep his hips still. “Killing me.”

She hummed as she let go of his wrist. “I don’t want that,” she said.

He wound his fingers into her hair, a possessive caveman move that had always felt artificial until now, when it took root in the most primitive part of his brain. Mine. Mine. “Can I move?”

“Go for it,” she said, eyes closing, half-drifting again, lost in sensation.

He wanted her back with him, so he carefully withdrew and slid back inside, slow enough to make him grit his teeth. Fuck, fuck, the impulse to pin her and pound her seethed under his skin. Charlie could take it. She was athletic, physical, spoiling for a fight, giving as good as she got. But she was tender, sore, slick and hot, trembling and pulling him into her with that long, strong leg. It was all Charlie, all contradictions. She’d ruined him for other women when she was seventeen, and this wasn’t making it any easier.

She arched and cried out when he did it again, not so slow, not so carefully, but he was learning her noises. The line between pleasure and pain was a fine one, razor sharp, as familiar to them both as breathing. She’d tell him to stop if she wanted him to stop, so he did it again, fighting for control the whole time.

“What does it feel like?” he asked—maybe not his smartest move, but he needed something to distract him. Forcing himself to translate sounds into words and words into coherent thoughts might work.

“Stretched,” she said. “Sensitive. Different from last night. Like you rasped all my nerves with steel wool and now you’re stroking them through honey. Sweet and tingling and hot and so good. Jamie. So good.”

Oh,
fuck.
“Can you come like this?” he asked roughly. Last night he’d made sure of her pleasure. “Charlie.”

Her eyes opened.

“Can you come like this?”

“I think so,” she said, both hands at the small of his back now, the sting of her nails anchoring him against the tide of sensation swirling around him. “I want to.”

Then she’d have it. He closed his eyes to shut off the visual stimuli of her face, growing pinker as sweat bloomed on her temples, only to discover his heightened awareness of her gasps and caught breaths, each one like a honey-tipped dart to his balls. Fuck it. He’d immerse in it, in the slowly building rhythm, in the sex flush building on her throat, on the way her nipples brushed his chest with each thrust as he counted backward from one hundred in Pashto. She tightened around him, heels digging into his ass, abdomen taut and trembling, her noises forced through her tight throat as she immersed in the pain and the pleasure, savoring both.

Then, victory, sweet, sweet victory as a dark flush swept up her chest, her throat, into her cheeks. She tightened around him, sharp cries piercing the air. He kept the same steady pace, his orgasm seething in the tip of his cock, until she subsided. Three thrusts and he lunged deep, each pulse of release like a shock, tightening his muscles as he emptied himself inside her.

When he regained control of his muscles he looked at the clock. “Six fifty-nine,” he said. “You shower. I’ll make breakfast.”

“Okay,” she answered fuzzily.

He pulled out and kept going, backing off the bed, away from her flushed, wrecked body, fetching up hard against her dresser. Halfway out of bed herself, she giggled when he swore, then stumbled when her knees buckled. “Like to see you walk a straight line, Stannard.”

“Ha ha,” she said, reaching for the dresser. They both made it into the bathroom without bumping into the walls. Jamie dealt with the condom and washed up quickly while Charlie started the shower. He treated himself to one more last lingering look at her body, all long lean lines and toned muscles, then got dressed in the clothes conveniently still on the bathroom floor.