Need You for Always (Heroes of St. Helena)(46)
“My food truck is a step forward,” she pointed out, the challenge in her voice strong.
“Your dad is making progress too. He’s figuring out what he doesn’t want.”
Dax watched as she let that settle. Then with a small nod she asked, “Is that what you’re doing? Why you’re going to San Jose instead of staying here or going back in the army? Because you didn’t bring home all your teammates?”
Dax felt the unfamiliar jolt of unease at her question. Since he’d come home, no one had openly asked him about the men he’d lost—good men, friends who’d deserved to come home but wouldn’t because life wasn’t fair.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he admitted. “I came home, some of the best guys I know didn’t, and I’m not sure what that even means. Or what it even feels like yet.” And then because he’d already started spilling his guts like a little girl, he added, “All I know is that being here, surrounded by my family and childhood, reminds me of how different my world is and how everyone else’s seems the same.”
She didn’t laugh or point out that everyone had problems, and that everyone suffered from loss. She moved her fingers around his knee, as though sensing his pain and needing to soothe him somehow. “So you’re looking for a place that doesn’t know you?”
“I don’t know what I’m looking for. But I know it’s not here, in a department filled with guys I knew when I was a punk with a motorcycle and tattoos.” A squad where he would be responsible for his brother and his friends. People who were his world.
“You’re still a punk with tattoos. Bummer about your bike, though,” she said, her fingers dancing up and down his leg, getting higher and higher and so incredibly high he sucked in a breath.
“If I was still that same punk, I wouldn’t tell you that’s my right knee.”
She kept rubbing—a little deeper and, holy hell, higher. “I know.”
“As in my injury is on my left knee.” And she was two inches from a touchdown.
“Oh, I know,” she said and Dax felt his eyes roll to the back of his head. “Just like I know that any department you decide to go to will be lucky. Just make sure that you aren’t so busy focusing on this new life of yours that you lose sight of the life you need.”
“And who’s going to look out for what you need, Emi?” Dax asked because he was tired of talking about things that made his head hurt and his chest ache. He wanted to feel more of that pleasure she was dishing out. And he could tell by the direction she was headed, she was all talked out too.
“I don’t know, Ranger.” Her hand stopped a scant inch from his flagpole, then she scooted that tight body of hers closer, so he could smell the amaretto from the bread pudding and turned-on female. Which was fine with him, because the motion caused her dress to ride up even higher, showing off a good three inches of leg and a little red garter belt attached to the sexiest pair of fishnets he’d ever seen. “Are you applying for the job?”
Normally he’d be a hell yeah kind of guy. He’d apply with the garter on or off or, hell, he’d wear it if it made her smile. In fact, he was applying for whatever position would bring them both back to that night in San Francisco and the way she’d moaned his name. The only thing he wasn’t applying for was forever, because he wasn’t the kind to offer that to anyone. He knew that life was tenuous at best, so unpredictable and ever-changing that he couldn’t promise something he didn’t believe in.
Nothing about Emerson was predictable—or easy. Normally she was cloaked in Converse, a leather skirt, and that hands-off attitude. Occasionally she dressed up like a giant cork. But tonight she’d shown up at the bar looking soft and sweet in a dress that a wife would have worn to greet her man at base. A part of him wondered what it would be like to have a woman like her waiting for him, but the other part knew better—he wasn’t that guy. Would never be that guy.
“I’m not a long-term bet, Emi.”
“I have enough long-term in my life, Dax. Tonight I’m just looking for some fun.” There was a playfulness to her voice that went straight through him.
“Then it looks like I’m your guy,” he said, sliding his hand around the nape of her neck and pulling her in. “Because babe, I am going to have you smiling so hard you’ll feel it straight through next week.”
“Big words again,” she said against his lips, then her hand slid that extra millimeter higher and she smiled. “Oh. Right. You brought backup.”
Her hands had him groaning in pleasure, but her making the first move was so incredibly hot, he reined in his focus so he could turn up the heat and make a move of his own. And this wasn’t a move from his standard playbook, because when it came to Emi the rules didn’t apply.
So he lowered his head and took her mouth without warning.
And that kiss packed more heat than a nuclear missile. It wasn’t the usual hot-and-heavy kiss or even the I-missed-this kiss that one might expect between two people who had a steamy but brief history. Nope, it was a tongue-down-her-throat, hands-on-her-ass, real lightning-worthy and let’s-get-it-on kind of kiss that a man gave a woman when he wanted to be clear about just how hard he was going to rock her world.
Only she moaned into his mouth, a sweet mewling sound that was as sexy as it was unexpected, and Dax admitted right then, with his ass frozen to the concrete step and Emerson’s hands giving him the massage of his life, that he might just be the one to have his world rocked.