Under His Hand (2 page)

“How long do you think it took me to climb up on the porch roof, open the window and get in here?”

Dammit.
She wasn’t going to be able to duck this or make it up to him the old-fashioned way. Worse for her, one hard, fast fuck hadn’t been enough—not in her sultry, stifling bedroom, not after twenty-six days without him, not after the scare of her life—so distracting heat licked at her skin while she tried to estimate how long she’d been in the bathroom, brushing her teeth. Thirty seconds? The American Dental Association recommended brushing for two minutes, twice a day, but she never lasted that long. She gave up and split the difference. “A minute?”

He set his teeth against her slick shoulder before replying. “Ten seconds, Tess. Ten seconds to pull myself up onto the roof, walk across the peak, open the screen and climb in. It takes longer to describe it than to do it. You didn’t even see me when you came into the bedroom.”

“You were already in the room when I came up? I didn’t hear anything,” she said, peering over her shoulder.

He met her eyes without expression. “One, opening a screen doesn’t make much noise. Any kid who’s snuck out of a house could do it. Two, as loud as you were playing Nickelback you wouldn’t have heard an M-16 firing. Not safe, Tess. Not safe at all.”

Sheer embarrassment heated her cheeks and closed her eyes as she turned back to the wall. She’d had “Far Away” on repeat for over an hour, ostensibly for background noise as she sketched versions of an ornate spiral staircase destined for a downtown loft. The developer knew her earlier work and asked for designs; if she got the commission, she’d create twenty unique staircases and add to her growing reputation for custom work. The payment would buy a new HVAC system, and put a little extra in the bank. But between Drew’s prolonged absence and the vulnerability in the song, the pages were half sketches of intricate decorative work, half rough drawings of his face in ten different attitudes.

With a firm but gentle grip he turned her head to the corner, still hung in dark shadows. “I watched you. You took off that sexy skirt I love and put on this undershirt,” he said. Her belly jumped as he fingered the hem of the tight white tank he wore under his uniform. “Then you made the bed just so you could get in it, brushed your teeth, and tried to cool off with that wet cloth. Water trickled down your neck and over your breasts, Tess.”

He drew a deep breath, and she took the moment of respite from his hot, hard voice to try and slow her pounding heart. He’d been close, less than two feet from her. Watching her, getting hard for her. The images were flat-out carnal, but what if someone other than Drew had been hidden in the corner?

Despite the heat, goose bumps shimmered over her skin. “I see your point.”

“Do you? Put yourself in my place and then tell me you see my point.”

He was taut against her back, biceps bulging in the deceptively lean arms braced on either side of her face, and she tried to imagine the scene from his perspective. Driving up her street after a month away, exhausted, hungry for sex and food and comfort, in that order, eager to see her, but finding the windows open late at night when he’d specifically told her it was too dangerous. But what was his
place
?

He was her boyfriend, which could mean a great deal, or not much at all. He took her out to eat. She packed picnic lunches for days at the beach. They went to street fairs and outdoor concerts and the movies. He slept at her house when he could. She kept him apprised of her ever-changing work schedule. They were exclusive and had been for six months, but when did exclusivity go from
I won’t see anyone else
to
I accept your right to make demands of me
?

She went rigid at the thought of such dangerous intimacies. “Do you want to hear my side of the story?”

Smart, smart Drew knew all too well how to handle her. Only when he’d gently pulled her back against him and licked a delicate path along the rim of her ear, then down to her soft earlobe, did he whisper, “I’m listening.”

“The air conditioner broke last week.”

She owned her aging house, a tiny, slightly off-kilter two-story painted a fading, funky shade of lavender unremarkable for the eclectic neighborhood near her studio space in the warehouse district. “Eclectic” meant affordable prices for interesting-if-dilapidated architecture, and diverse, opinionated neighbors who were passionate about the neighborhood, its causes and people. It also meant she walked home from her studio past addicts, dealers and drunks, hookers and pimps, homeless families and groups of aimless young men. Break-ins were frequent. After one weekend with her, Drew was already on friendly terms with her neighbor, Mrs. Delgado, given his polite manners and Southern drawl. But with his well-honed sense for trouble, he’d recognized the neighborhood’s good and bad elements and formed a decidedly negative opinion about her ancient air conditioner and the windows.

“I figured as much,” he said, his voice dry.

“And you still scared the daylights out of me?”

He ignored her question, or at least she thought he did. “Why didn’t you get it fixed?”

She threw a glare over her shoulder. “I need to pick up extra shifts at The Blue Dog to come up with the money.”

“How much?”

“More than I have until I work the extra shifts.”

“You said they were overstaffed and tips were down. How much, Tess?”

This relentless Drew was new to her, as if a stranger had come home in her boyfriend’s body. “Six hundred dollars,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t like the answer.

His teeth ground, then he shifted his weight behind her. “I left money for you.”

This was true. He’d tried to give her a thousand dollars in twenties, and the names of two navy buddies she could call day or night, for any reason, when he was gone. She’d refused both. A short, tense “discussion” ensued, one she’d thought she’d won when he stuffed the neatly rolled money into the pocket of his cargo shorts. She’d turned her back on him for less than a minute to retrieve his wallet from her nightstand. On his way back to the base he’d called to inform her that in the sixty seconds she’d left him alone in her kitchen, he’d put the cash in an empty Folgers Instant can at the back of her narrow pantry and the phone numbers in her cell phone. The next day he’d left on his most recent mission.

She had no intention of using the phone numbers, let alone the money.

“This is my life, Drew, not an emergency. I won’t take your money. If I used it I’d need months to earn enough to pay you back, and besides…”

Her voice trailed off when his head dropped forward to rest on her shoulder.

“You don’t have to pay me back.”

“I do.” This was important, although for reasons that grew hazier with each passing day.

There was a pause while his even breaths merged with the sweat trickling down her back. “Tess,” he said, his voice totally without heat, “what do I have to do to earn your trust? Because I can’t keep going like this.”

The words, their empty tone, sent a shiver down her spine. She pulled her hands free of his and spun to face him. “You can trust someone and not take money from them, Drew!”

“You think I’m going to count up favors and make you work them off on your back?”

Her eyes widened at his crass question. “Of course not!”

He kept his arms on either side of her head while his blue eyes, somehow both sad and curious, searched hers. “Because it’s not just the money. For all practical purposes I live here, and yeah, I buy groceries or fix things around the house, but it’s a dirt-in-the-eyes, bare-knuckles street fight to get you to take anything I offer. You work harder than just about anyone I know, but half the time I come over here and you’ve got four cans of corn in the cupboard and nothing in the fridge. Christ, you won’t use six hundred dollars to be safe, not to mention comfortable. It’s hot as hell in here!” He took a deep breath. “I know how you grew up, Tess. I respect your independence. I’m just trying to do the right thing here. If I can’t, I can’t stick around.”

She’d dated her share of losers—artists, bartenders, even a couple of suits—and none of them, not a single one, looked in her cupboards, let alone gave a rat’s ass about honor. Doing the right thing. But the problem wasn’t that taking the money felt wrong. It was how right it felt, how easily she could add to his burden by letting him shoulder some of hers. Serving his country was the ultimate honor, but no one got rich doing it.

“You don’t have all that much more money than I do,” she protested, cravenly sidestepping the far more important issue he’d laid at her feet.

For a moment his normal laid-back sense of humor surfaced. “Damn, you’re hard on a guy’s ego,” he said, but just as quickly the smile disappeared into the firm line of his full lips. He shrugged. “I have enough to fix the air conditioner. You don’t. I’d give it to you with no strings attached because I love you, but you won’t take it.”

Shock once again flooded her veins. He pushed away from the wall and a fear more potent than the icy torrent that had immobilized her when he’d stalked out of the shadows settled in the pit of her stomach. “Drew, wait!” she said, and grabbed his arm.

Her grip was strong from lifting kegs and welding heavy, awkward pieces of metal, but he stopped because he wanted to stop. He stopped because she asked.

“You love me?” God, could she sound any more doubtful? Prickly?

“Yeah, Tess. I love you.” Soft, even words. She marveled at the strength it took to casually put himself in harm’s way, both on duty and off. Right now the soft underbelly of his soul was totally exposed to her, easy to lay open with a few brittle, indifferent words. Until Drew, she’d defined strength by the thickness of walls she built around her heart, the barbed wire fences draping her personality. Compared to his willingness to walk into physical and emotional danger, she was weak. A coward, even.

“You…” She stopped, slid her hand down to clasp his, thinking through how best to handle the hidden sharp edges of another person’s feelings. “You’ve never said that before. Why say it now?”

After a moment, a very long moment, he returned her grip with a gentle squeeze. “I’m a play-the-odds kind of guy, Tess. Odds weren’t good I’d hear the words back. Tonight I needed to say it. You don’t have to love me back, not right now, but if you can’t let me in even a little bit, I can’t stay.”

The words could have sounded like an ultimatum, an effort to control her through an all-or-nothing choice, but he sounded taut, tightly wound, pushed to the point of no return. She wondered where he’d been, and what he’d seen or done that made him lay it all on the line. Not ready to walk away, but prepared to do so if she kept her defenses up.

Her choice. She swallowed against the ache in her throat, looked at their linked hands, then down farther to their feet, his braced wide, hers snugged together, the right foot curled over the left.

“I don’t know how to do this,” she said to the chipped, bright blue nail polish on her toes. Hard to admit, but true.

“You don’t have to do anything, Tess. I just want to take care of you. Fix your air conditioner. Make sure you stay safe when I’m gone. It won’t suck, I promise.” He said the words with a crooked smile, tipping her chin up so she met his eyes as he spoke.

“Why?” It was unfathomable to her. In foster care from the time she was eleven, on her own from the day she turned eighteen and the state no longer provided money to cover her food or clothes, she’d long since accepted that if she wanted something—a house no one could make her leave, a degree in industrial art, a client base—she had to scrap for it by herself. “Nobody’s wanted to take care of me my whole life. Why would you?”

“Because you’re you.”

Unable to help herself, she laughed, the sound mocking, derisive. “Yeah, right.”

He shrugged, the pain back in his eyes. “This is where the trust part comes in. What’s it going to be, Tess?”

Dammit, she’d rather handle rusty scrap metal without gloves than do this, but for the very first time in her life, someone wanted her company on a permanent basis, and not because the state paid for her upkeep. All he wanted her to do was put herself into his hands, into his care.

Terrifying.

Even more terrifying was the thought of holding back, and losing him.

Tension thickened and heated the air around them. Little dots danced at the edges of her vision and she realized she was holding her breath. After a shaky exhalation she took a deep breath, and the scent of him—clean sweat and musk over the harsh tang of no-frills soap—swept through her nostrils, triggering the memory of his unique taste, the silky smooth skin under his wrists, stretched over his hip bones, the underside of his cock. The tension in her muscles eased from her body again. She didn’t know how to do this, but Drew had good hands and limitless patience. He’d catch her if she fell.

“Okay,” she said, with a nod and a small, tremulous smile.

Fierce exultation gleamed in his eyes. He bent his head and brushed his lips over hers, a sultry kiss that started as the merest pressure, just the tantalizing possibility of something more. Then his tongue lazily traced her lower lip and she opened to him, her breath coming faster, mingling with his. She shifted restlessly as the promise in his mouth trickled down her jaw, hardened her nipples and settled between her thighs.

Then he pulled back. Tess waited a few racing heartbeats, then opened her eyes to find hot, possessive emotion surging in his. In his smooth, easy way he slid his hand into the hair at the nape of her neck. “Okay, what?”

“Okay, I’ll take the money to get the air conditioner fixed,” she said.

He began a gentle massage, right at the spot where her neck met her skull, the spot where she held all her stress after hours bent over a sketchpad or a project. A thrill shot down her spine even as her shoulders slackened with pleasure.

“And?”

“Hmmm?” That was all she could get out, given his magic touch on her nape.

Her eyes widened at his pointed glance over his shoulder to the open window. At the same time his other hand slid down her arm to encircle her wrist, where he rubbed his thumb over the quickening thump of her pulse. She felt the throb of blood now leaping against his gentle, unyielding pressure. The dark, hot, implacable look in his eyes dropped her gaze to her wrist captured in the cuff of his fingers.