elevator.
A huge gust of wind must have hit the building because the lights in the hallway flickered. She turned from the elevator and hit the stairwell instead, unwilling to be stuck in the elevator if the power went out.
Plus, she really needed to be on the move.
The stairs were hell on her tenuous balance and bare feet but somehow she got to her floor and into her room, where she lurched/limped into the bathroom.
She turned on the hot water, stripped naked, and stepped into the shower. Her first order of business was to stand in there until the hot water ran out or until her life improved, whichever came second.
As the water rained down on her she sighed in humiliation, hating that AJ knew so much about her, knew everything about her, including her fears.
Hated.
Especially because apparently she wasn’t good enough or important enough to get to know his fears in return.
It was like being naked in public.
Worse. Because it was AJ, and because somehow over the past two days she’d sensed a change in their relationship. She’d actually thought …
Damn.
She’d thought maybe she was falling for him. And that he was falling back.
So stupid—and clearly it couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only was he not falling at all, he’d just pushed her away.
He might as well have sent her packing to Switzerland.
She sank to the floor of the shower and brought her legs into her chest and dropped her head to her knees. Oh how she hated when she did stupid stuff that left her feeling open and exposed and vulnerable. She was usually much more careful. But somehow between opening up to Summer and spending the night next to AJ, she’d let down her defenses.
At least in here she couldn’t hear the storm. She didn’t have to slide into that big bed all alone and hide under the covers like a scared little kid. All she had to do was stay in here until morning—
She shrieked when the curtain was suddenly yanked aside.
AJ reached in and turned off the water and hauled her out of the shower.
“Hey!” She squirmed and kicked and shoved but it was all ineffective against a grimly determined AJ.
Wrapping her in a towel with clinical efficiency, he backed her to the wall. “Stop,” he said when she tried to knee him in the family jewels. “Jesus, just stop a second.”
When she didn’t, he leaned into her.
“What the—”
Ignoring her, he gripped her hands and slid a powerful thigh between hers, pinning her in place so that she could do little more than suck in air.
“You’re going to have to kill me,” she snarled at him. “Because if you let me go, I’m going to kick your ass.”
His eyes sparked an equal temper but his voice was quiet, calm, and controlled. “I’m trying to apologize.”
“Yeah, well, you have a hell of a way of doing it. Read the handbook,” she snapped. “You forgot the flowers and ass-kissing.”
His jaw was tight, the muscles bunching. “If I let go, will you listen?” he asked.
“Hell no.”
“That’s what I thought.” Gripping both her wrists in one hand, he yanked them above her head. With his free hand he cupped her face and forced it up so that she met his gaze.
Wet, naked, and furious, she was still staring at him, sending him the sharpest daggers she could, when he lowered his head and kissed her.
Seventeen
Darcy heard a soft, needy moan and realized it was hers as AJ held her prisoner against the wall and pillaged.
She let him.
Not only did she let him, she strained for more.
AJ’s big body always ran hotter than most, and she’d never been more grateful in that moment. Naked and wet and up against his fully clothed self, she should have been fighting him down and dirty to get free after what he’d said.
Instead she wanted to get down and dirty.
He fisted his hands in her hair and gave her what she wanted, and when his tongue swept against hers, she gave in, pouring every emotion she felt into that kiss. Fury. Hurt. Need.
God, the need.
Breaking away from the kiss, he slid his mouth along her jaw. “Ready to listen?” he said against her ear.
She went still for a single beat before shoving him.
He took a step back. “Come out when you’re ready,” he said, before turning and walking out of the bathroom.
She resisted the urge to chuck something at his head—not that that would help since he had the hardest head of anyone she knew. Closing her eyes, she just breathed a moment, which didn’t help. Then she wrapped herself up in the hotel bathrobe hanging off the back of the door and strode out after AJ, ready to brawl.
He stood in front of the windows, hands in his pockets, staring out at the night. His shoulders were squared off and full of tension. He never gave much away, but she’d had a lot of time to study him now and she knew the tells.
He was frustrated and uncharacteristically unsettled.
With a sigh, she came up behind him, catching his gaze in the glass. “I shouldn’t have asked about Kayla,” she said. “It’s none of my business.”
He didn’t move a single muscle for a long beat, and then he turned to face her. “I was out of line. You were right, you were open to me and I cut you off at the knees when you went looking for the same thing from me. I’m sorry for that.”
She nodded. “Thanks. But I meant what I said. It’s not my business. And you didn’t have to come to my room.”
“It’s storming.”
“Well, yes,” she said, surprised at the quick subject change. “It’s why we’re still here, remember?”
“You’re afraid of storms, ever since your accident.”
Her first instinct was to deny. Her second was to throw herself at him and beg him to throw her down on the bed and make her forget the storm.
And her life.
Except he’d come here because he’d known she was afraid, which was just another example of how well he knew her and how little he let her know him. Which in turn reminded her that she was hurt and pissed, a bad combination for her. “I’m fine,” she said.
But she must have looked longingly at the minibar because he let out a low laugh and pulled not one, not two, but four mini bottles of scotch from his sweatshirt pocket.
Right then and there she nearly told him she loved him. In fact, she might have done just that if a heavy gust of wind hadn’t rattled the windows. “I know I can’t live my life being afraid of storms and driving on the highway,” she said. “But damn.”
He handed her one of the scotches. The wind kicked up and she trembled enough to nearly spill. To avoid that, she tipped the bottle back and downed it.
“Easy.” AJ took the empty out of her hand and set it on the nightstand next to his. He pulled the heavy curtains over the window and turned on a few lights and the TV. He flipped through the channels until he found an old repeat of Friends.
“Thanks,” she said, and climbed onto the bed. “But that’s not going to be enough to distract me.” She held out a hand for bottle number two.
He opened another one for each of them and clinked his bottle to hers.
“What are we toasting to?” she asked.
“Getting the hell out of Dodge soon.”
“I’ll second that.”
AJ sat on the bed, his long legs stretched out in front of him as he took a long pull on his scotch. “Okay. So you asked about Kayla.”
“Forget it.”
“I can’t make you face your fears and not face something myself,” he said. “Kayla was my fiancée.”
Her heart skipped a beat. How was it she hadn’t known this? Granted, until recently she’d been gallivanting across the globe writing for various travel sites and paying absolutely no attention to anything or anyone but herself. “Your … fiancée.”
“Yeah.” He stared down at the empty bottle in his fingers. “Sh
e was beautiful. Flawless, actually. She dreamed of getting out of the military and becoming a model. She had a big, supportive family and was always the center of attention. She was loved, happy. We were happy, too, stationed overseas together. She was a ship mechanic. Five years ago we had an onboard fire in the engine room where she worked.”
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
“She lived, though she was injured. Not all that badly when it came right down to it, not compared to the other two with her. They both died of their injuries. Kayla suffered second-degree burns to her hands and face, that was all, but she scarred pretty badly. She couldn’t handle it. In her eyes she was no longer beautiful, and even though she still had her life and family and friends, all of whom adored her, it wasn’t enough. She couldn’t cope because she thought she was no longer desirable, not to a modeling agency, not to the people who loved her, and not to me.”
Darcy tried to put herself in Kayla’s shoes but she couldn’t. She’d always looked at her scars as battle trophies, was even proud of them in a weird way.
“She changed,” AJ said. “She turned angry, withdrawn. Bitter.”
Darcy wondered how she herself must look to him, a guy who’d been engaged to perfection, and she cringed. “What happened?”
He’d been staring sightlessly at the TV but his gaze tracked to her. “She wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t see me. She completely shut me out. Shut everyone out,” he said. “I took a leave to try to help her. I dragged her to counseling, forced her into rehab when she got addicted to her painkillers. It took two years to bring her back to the land of the living, and I was with her for every minute of it.”
“She recovered,” Darcy said.
“She went through the motions, but in the end she wasn’t strong enough to beat it. I couldn’t fix her, and that … that sucked.”
Yeah. Darcy could only imagine how tough that had been, fighting so hard for her, and yet in return she hadn’t fought for him.
And maybe that was why he’d always pushed her so hard in PT, why he wouldn’t allow anyone to give up on their own healing.
“No matter what I did,” he said, “she still couldn’t come around and let herself love again. She felt no passion, no desire.”
“Because of the scars.”
“That’s what she’d tell you.” He shook his head. “But the truth of it has nothing to do with that. She let the scars destroy her, and me while she was at it. She’d been pampered and adored all her life and she’d never had to develop a single life skill. She’d had everything handed to her and she didn’t know the meaning of the will to survive, much less how be a warm, giving person when there was even the slightest bit of a hurdle to overcome or any sort of controversy to face.”
Which had never been the case for him. He’d had to work hard for everything in his life and he’d been successful because of it, giving back to so many. And here he was, six hours from home trying to secure grants to help even more. “She should have tried,” she said. “For you.”
“I certainly wanted her to. But she’d never been broken before and had no way to come back from it.”
Darcy looked at him. “I think it’s okay to be a little broken.”
The very corners of his mouth turned up into a small smile. “Only a little?”
She smiled. “Or a lot. Either way, I’m pretty damn good at holding pieces together if you ever need help. Just wanted you to know that.”
“I’m not broken,” he said, like any alpha male, not willing to show a weakness.
“I think you’re one of the strongest people I’ve ever met,” she said quietly.
“Muscles don’t mean shit when it comes to living life.”
She shook her head and crawled across the vast expanse of the bed to kneel at his side. She put a hand on his chest. Beneath her palm she could feel the slow, steady beat of his heart. “Inside,” she said. “You’re strong inside. Kayla was weak, AJ. You need someone who can weather whatever comes along.”
On her knees as she was, she was taller than him, so he had to look up at her. “Like someone who’s fierce and loving with those she lets in, even though she can count those people on one hand?” he asked. “Someone who’d drop everything just because I need her for the weekend, someone who’d defend me to her brother, someone who cares enough to use her own money to pay for emotional support dogs and give them to people in need? Someone who has some seriously out-of-control hair at the moment and is terrified of storms even though she’s the biggest storm in my life?”
His words robbed her of her own but she didn’t know how to respond anyway. She sat back on her heels. “You shouldn’t say things like that. It’s like a game that I don’t have the rules for.”
“Have I ever played you?” he asked, wrapping his fingers around her wrist so she couldn’t further retreat.
No. No, he hadn’t ever played her. He was stoic and stubborn as a mule and he thought he was always right. But there wasn’t an ounce of duplicity in his big, perfect body.
A bolt of lightning lit everything in the room in bold relief, including the fact that AJ watched her as carefully as she watched him, crowding her space while he did so, making her feel important to him.
His eyes had changed, she realized as the ensuing thunder shook the hotel.
They’d … heated.
And that heat in turn did something to her. It melted something deep inside, like the block of ice she’d settled around her heart a long time ago.
“Come here, Darcy.”
Why the hell was that quietly uttered command the sexiest thing she’d ever heard? She had no idea. And as a rule, she didn’t do “come here.” She didn’t do commands period.
And yet she swallowed hard and said, “I’m right here.”
“No, you’re not.”
She scooted a little closer, but then unsure, stopped. Held her breath.
With his free hand he crooked his finger at her and she closed the distance.
He let go of her to open his arms and she crawled onto his lap.
His arms came around her, a hand sliding up her back to the nape of her neck, bringing her mouth to his. He locked his lips on hers, kissing her senseless before pulling free only enough to meet her gaze, his own dark and searching.
“I want you,” she said, answering his unspoken question.
“Be sure, Darcy. A few minutes ago you wanted to kick my ass.”
“I still want to kick your ass.”
He smiled. “And?”
“And … up until a few minutes ago I didn’t know we had the serious hots for each other.”
His hands skimmed down to cup her ass and rock her against a most impressive erection. “Liar.”
“Okay, so up until a few minutes ago I was pretending I didn’t know we had the hots for each other.”
“You’re as bad a pretender as you are a liar,” he said.
“You really going to piss me off right now?”
He laughed low in his throat and it was an incredibly sexy sound. “I think it’s a safe bet to say yes,” he said. “Yes, I’m going to piss you off. It’s what I do best.”
Brushing her mouth along his delicious rough jaw, she whispered, “Surely there are some other things you do even better.”
He let out a slow, sure smile, and on the menu of AJ smiles it was the appetizer and the main entrée and the dessert all in one. “As a matter of fact, there are,” he said, toppling her to her back