Thrown Down (Made in Jersey #2)(39)

She turned shimmering blue eyes on him. “Maybe I’m crazy, but I want to try…us again. I’m thinking maybe it would be crazier if we didn’t.” Her laugh was watery and self-conscious. “Okay?”

“Okay?” He could barely speak around the relief pressing against the walls of his throat. “Yeah, Riv, that’s pretty f*ckin’ okay.”

“Okay,” she breathed, blonde hair falling across her face when she ducked her head, probably to hide the flush creeping up her smooth cheeks. But when their gazes met again, he saw there was more, could feel purpose radiating from her. “Tonight at dinner…the way you talked to me. I need that all the time, Vaughn. No more keeping things to yourself. We can’t be a team otherwise.” She paused. “Please?”

“Yes.” The word ripped out of him, because what else could he do or say when life was bleeding back into his body? River. He was getting a second chance with River. “Yes.” They stared at one another across the console a moment, before she turned to exit the truck. But she paused. And then she was launching herself across the truck’s cab at Vaughn, who’d been halfway to diving after her if she’d actually managed to escape. “Where were you going, huh?” He growled against her mouth. “You were just going to sneak out after that, doll?”

“It’s silly. I know it’s silly. You just…we just…”

“Fucked like the world was ending.” He smoothed a hand down her ass, ran a finger up through the sweet divide in the center. “Invite me in, and we’ll end it for good. Burn the motherf*cker right on down.”

“I can’t yet.” She kissed the underside of his jaw, then slid back to his ear, delivering a groin-tightening lick. “We have to ease into this. Marcy can’t wake up one day and find you sleeping in my bed.”

Vaughn nodded through the ache in his gut, knowing she had a point. “Okay, doll. You’re right. I just…Christ, I want to hold you while you sleep again. I never stopped taking that job seriously.”

“Soon.” Their mouths locked together, tongues competing for the best taste, before River pulled back. “Soon…I hope. Taking this slow isn’t just because of Marcy. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking you didn’t want me. Just let me get used to you again.”

Ah God. She didn’t mean to twist the wrench in his chest, it was just a casualty of the war they’d been fighting to stay alive while apart. Vaughn wrapped two fistfuls of blonde hair in his hands and tugged her close, pressing their foreheads together. “As long as it takes, Riv. I’m staying right here.”

Forever starved for River’s mouth, Vaughn moved in again, but River evaded him. “Vaughn.” That pink tongue skated across the seam of her lips. “What happened that night overseas, and the hard time you had coping…is that the only reason you left? Because you didn’t want to burden me with it?”

An image of the deed flickered in his conscious, but the truth never made it out. He was too close to having her back. And God knew, he would not only f*ck up the explanation, but the relationship between River and her father, a relationship he’d never had with his own. “I couldn’t ask you to heal more of me, doll,” he finally pushed through stiff lips. “You’d already wasted enough time doing that.”

“It’s not a waste,” she whispered. “It never was.”

They shared one final desperate kiss, pulling away with a mutual groan. Watching River climb the stairs to her house, the past collided with the present, creating a sense of completion so strong, he couldn’t house it all, even as the necessary lie by omission tried to roam his mental hallways.

Hope grew, sprouting green and rolling into fields…until Vaughn went to put the truck in gear and saw River’s father parked in a running car across the street. The older man glanced toward the house, then back at Vaughn, before pulling away from the curb and disappearing down the block.

…

From the corner of her eye, River observed Vaughn squashed into the driver’s seat of her red Pontiac—his white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel, the stress around his mouth. Before they’d loaded into the car in preparation for the drive to the ceremony at Fort Hamilton he’d been jumpy, but refused to say why. When she’d noticed him go still as she strapped Marcy into her car seat, she’d realized it was his first time driving with a toddler in the backseat.

“Jesus, I was less nervous driving a Humvee,” he admitted now, raking blunt-fingered hands through his hair. “Did you…how do you decide which car seat to buy? Don’t any of them come with a steel cage around them?”

River laughed into the paper cup of coffee he’d brought her from the deli. “The first time I took her to the supermarket, I kept checking the rearview mirror, double checking I didn’t accidentally leave her on the sidewalk or something.”

He cast her a measuring look. “How did you hold her and shop at the same time?”

She rolled her shoulders forward. “They have these slings—”

“You used one of those?” The muscles in his throat moved in a pattern as he swallowed. “Do you have any pictures of you wearing it?”

“Somewhere,” she murmured. “Probably.”

“I’d like to see that.” His brows drew together. “One of you in the hospital. One of you feeding her. Even the bad, out of focus pictures. I want to see them all.”