Six
thought they would continue the discussion they’d been forced to leave unfinished, but she was sadly mistaken. Booker didn’t show any interest in discussing … well, anything. Not even where they were going except for a grumbled “Montana.”
She hadn’t asked any more questions.
Two hours into the mystery road trip of silence they stopped at a truck stop, where Booker bought her a pair of flip flops for her bare feet, and a hot meal in the attached restaurant. Where they ate in, yep, silence.
Six hours into the trip they stopped for gas. Using one and two syllable words to communicate, Booker escorted her to the restroom, waited outside the door for her to finish, and then escorted her back to the truck.
As though she were a child.
The ten-hour mark found them inside a discount store, where Booker upped his syllable count to insist she put whatever she needed into the cart—clothes, toiletries, shoes, snacks, whatever. Since her wallet was in the duffel bag back at the cottage, she didn’t have much choice but to allow him to pay for the toothbrush and toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, a pair of sleep shorts, a four-pack of ribbed cotton tank tops in various colors, and a six-pack of boy short style panties. His jaw had tightened as she’d thrown the last item into the cart. Well, to hell with him. She would pay back every cent the minute she had access to her bank account.
By the time they rolled into a motel parking lot outside of Pueblo, Ellie’s nerves were shot. Thirteen hours of uncomfortable silence and side glances were more than she could take. She had no idea what was going on in that head of his, and right now, she didn’t give a damn.
She wanted out of the truck. She wanted a hot shower and a comfortable bed. Most of all, she wanted away from him.
Booker stopped in front of a door marked Office and let the truck idle. With his hand on the door handle he turned to her. “Don’t move.”
She was going to fucking choke him.
She had no money. No mode of transport other than him, and she was umpteen miles away from home. She was totally dependent and didn’t like it one bit.
Pouring every ounce of irritation she could muster into her glare, Ellie turned to him. “And just where the hell do you think would I go?”
He leaned over, close enough she could see the flecks of yellow gold in his eyes. Could smell the faint scent of the cinnamon candies he’d spent the last hundred miles eating. Without her consent her gaze dropped to his mouth. His tongue darted out, wetting his full bottom lip. This was bad. This was very, very bad.
“Be careful, Ellie. One day that sassy mouth of yours might get you into trouble.” His voice was low and steady. Seductive.
Her body loosened, heated, stirred between her legs.
From the first time he kissed her, Booker had been able to do that to her. Ramp her up. Play to her senses. Turn her on like no man before or after, and then make her fly.
No. There will be no ramping. No playing. No flying.
Ellie almost groaned.
God, she missed sex. She missed the intimacy of being held and touched and stroked. The feeling of warm skin pressed against her, inside her.
One side of Booker’s mouth curled slowly upward.
Hers went the opposite direction.
Damn him. What kind of game was he playing? Teasing her was nothing short of cruel after he’d basically laid the entire responsibility of their failed marriage at her feet.
“Not today.” She turned her burning cheeks away. She hoped he took the gesture as a dismissal and not what it really was—an attempt to hide the embarrassment of being so easily aroused.
“Don’t be so sure,” he growled and got out of the truck, slamming the door behind him.
Ellie groaned and covered her eyes in frustration. Though if she were being completely honest, she also did it to stop herself from staring at Booker’s firm ass.
Stop it.
Clearly, the years of unintentional abstinence were messing with her head. Booker was a gorgeous man with a body built for pleasure. Of course she would respond. What woman wouldn’t?
He probably had a string of women lined up, waiting for a turn with him.
The thought shouldn’t bother her, but it did. A lot.
Booker climbed back into the truck and drove them around the back of the motel, parking close to the curb.
Ellie held out her hand. “May I please have the key to my room?”
He held up a single key attached to a large plastic rectangle with the number 117 emblazoned in gold on one side. “You mean our room?”
Oh no. She’d shared enough space with him for one day, thank you very much.
“I want my own room. I’ll pay you back for the expenses. Not just for the room. For everything.”
Ellie climbed from the truck. She opened the rear door on the extended cab and wrapped her fingers around the handles of the shopping bags. Booker opened the opposite door and met her gaze.
“Not gonna happen,” he said. “Not on either count.” He grabbed the olive-green duffel bag from the cottage and slung it over one shoulder. He tucked the laptop under his arm. “If memory serves, the last time I turned my back on you didn’t turn out so well for me. I’m not looking for a repeat performance, so you’ll have to forgive me if, for the time being, I don’t let you out of my sight.”
The man was exhausting.
“The last time didn’t work out so well for me, either. I’d appreciate it if you’d stop insinuating what happened between us was easy for me. I assure you, it wasn’t.” Why? She wanted to scream at him. Why didn’t you trust me enough to talk to me? Why didn’t you fight for me? For us? “But I see some things never change. You’re still making decisions that affect me without so much as a nod in my direction.”
His brow arched. “You want to have a discussion about the sleeping arrangements? All right. Let’s talk.” Booker shut the door and came around to her side of the truck. He crossed his beefy arms, his expression firm. “Do you have a weapon?”
“N-no,” she sputtered. “But—”
“Any self-defense training?”
“No. You—”
“In other words, you don’t have the tools or the experience to defend yourself if a situation arose. Would you agree?”
“It not that sim—”
“It’s not an essay question, Ellie. Yes or no.”
She clenched her fists. A day’s worth of frustration burst from her lips, half growl, half scream. Heat bloomed in her cheeks. She was tempted to argue, but she had no defense.
“Fine. Yes,” she spat. She wanted to wipe that satisfied smirk right off his face.
“There. We agree on something.” He cocked his head and studied her. “But we’re not done yet, are we? You don’t believe being defenseless is a good enough reason for me to be concerned, so for the sake of argument, let’s say you did have your own room. Let’s say whoever wants the information you may or may not have comes calling. Even if you were able to alert me to trouble, do you have any idea what kind of damage could be done before I could get to you? Because I do. Trust me, sweetheart, you were lucky yesterday.”
Her blood ran cold. Her bruises proved she had at least some idea, but Booker was right. It could’ve been so much worse. “Do you think we’ve been followed?”
“I think the better question is, are you willing to take the unnecessary risk? You have me. I have both the tools and the experience. I can’t fucking protect you if you’re not with me, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend the night on the hard sidewalk outside your door just so you can have some space. Hence the single room.”
Booker glanced at his watch. “We good here? I’ve got some work to do.”
He went to the door and worked the key into the lock.
“You don’t have to be such a jerk about it. You aren’t the one having decisions made without your wants or needs being considered.”
“Oh, I put your needs ahead of mine when I chose the room, Ellie. That’s the only reason there are two beds instead of one.”
#
worked the handle harder than necessary and flung open the motel room door. The room wasn’t special. It was small, but adequate for their overnight stay.
On one side of the room were the two aforementioned full-sized beds, covered with tacky bedspreads, with a nightstand set in-between. On the other side of the room, a desk with a small flat screen TV perched on one end. The door at the opposite end of the room must lead to the bathroom.
Booker led Ellie inside, motioning to the farthest bed as he secured the locks on the door. “You take that one.”
He dropped his bag on the bed closest to the door, staking a claim before Ellie could argue. Not that she’d win. If trouble followed them to the motel, it would reach him first.
He placed the laptop on the desk and dug around in his bag until he found the power cord. He plugged it in and powered it up.
He could feel Ellie’s eyes on him, watching him as one might a dangerous animal encountered in an unexpected place. He couldn’t blame her after the bomb he’d just dropped.
All goddamned day he’d fought with the memories of how things had gone down between them. The deeper he dug, the more he didn’t like what he found. Over and over he relived the scenes in his head. Every conversation they had about the military. His actions the day he joined up. He could make an argument that Ellie had known the military was what he wanted. But when it came right down to it, she hadn’t known for sure what he was up to until it was too late.
He hated the idea that Ellie had been right. Not because that meant he was wrong, but because it meant he had been a total asshole to the only woman he ever loved.
If that realization hadn’t been enough to darken his mood, his mental exploration of their relationship had taken a detour down naked lane.
Alone and trapped in the truck with Ellie and her tropical scent, watching her lip plump the longer she chewed on it, watching her long, jean-clad legs open and close as she shifted in her seat had been pure torture. Picturing her in those panties she’d tossed into the cart had almost been his undoing.
Fucking Christ.
He’d been hard for the better part of the day and fighting to keep his hands off her.
And now she knows it. Way to go. Way to stay focused.
Ellie shuffled behind him. “You never remarried.”
“I assume you don’t need confirmation since that didn’t sound like a question.”
“Why?”
“You know why.” Did she think he’d been kidding when he stood before God and family and promised to love her until the day he died?
Men say things all the time that they don’t mean.
Apparently, the joke was on him, because he kept his promises.
“I tried to get in touch with you.”
He glanced over his shoulder at her. Her new flip flops had been tossed to the floor. She was sitting on the end of the bed, legs crossed.
“When? Last night?”
“About a week after the attorney sent the papers.”
Shit. He turned back to the laptop. Talking about their failed marriage wasn’t something he wanted to do while his dick was still hard. “The divorce papers you signed and had forwarded to the base? Those the papers you’re referring to?”
“Forget it,” she huffed. “I’m going to take a shower and go to bed.”
Booker cursed. “No. Wait.” He reached out and took her wrist as she tried to move around him, intending to apologize.
Her skin was soft and warm. Her pulse jumped under his fingertips. Booker had a stupid impulse to feel that beat against his lips and he went with it. Raised her delicate wrist to his mouth and got his first taste of her in twelve years.
She gasped on contact and his lips absorbed the jolt.
“Booker.”
Oh yeah. He was a goner. “Why did you try to get in touch with me, Ellie?” he muttered, encouraged when she didn’t pull away. Her pulse raced against his lips. “Tell me.”
He brushed the tip of his nose along the curve of her hand. She untucked her fingers and he moved in, pressing a light kiss to the center of her palm.
Yeah, baby. That’s it. Open up for me.
“I-it’s not important. It doesn’t matter anymore. It won’t change anything.”
“Won’t it?” He flicked the tip of her thumb with his tongue. “Maybe what you have to say will change everything.”
“How can it?” she asked softly. “It’s been too long. Too much time has passed.”
He brought her hand to his heart and held her there, letting her feel the erratic beat. “Says who? Nobody here but the two of us, and I say it’s never too late. It’s true we can’t change the past, but I think whatever it is you want to say matters a great deal, querida, if you’re bringing it up now. Tell me.”
She spoke to the floor. “I was angry. Angry and hurt and alone.” She sucked in a breath and her head snapped up. Her cocoa eyes were shining with tears as her hand flew to her mouth. “Good lord. How did I not realize…? I did the exact thing I had blamed you for doing. I made a decision that affected your life without a word to you about it.”
“You wanted out. What was there to discuss?”
“I didn’t want out. You were my husband and I loved you. I thought you wanted out, remember? That thing you said to me about being done?”
“I already told you that’s not what I meant.”
“I understand that now. At the time it made sense. You joined the military the first month of our marriage. When I was excited about making a home with you and starting our lives together, you were excited about leaving me behind.”
That was bullshit. Booker opened his mouth to argue, but she held up her free hand, the one he didn’t have in a death grip against his chest.
“I didn’t say I was right. I was young, Booker. Hiring that attorney was stupid and impulsive and I regretted it almost immediately. That’s why I tried to reach you. The man I spoke with at the base said he couldn’t tell me where you were or what you were doing, but swore he’d get you the message to call me.”
Booker cursed. He hadn’t gotten any message. “I can’t give you the details, except to tell you the op was last minute and I was gone for several months.”
“You warned me that might be a possibility.”
“Do you remember who you spoke with?” Booker wanted to know whose ass he was going to kick.
Ellie shook her head. “No, but I tried again after a few weeks. Same guy, same response. I had no idea if you’d gotten my package. I didn’t know what to do. Then one day my attorney called and said he received the documents and that you’d signed them…” A tear slid down her cheek and she lifted one shoulder. “That was that. Eventually, I heard from Brandon. The two of you had been gone close to two years by then. The divorce had been final for a few months. He told me you had volunteered for a special task force and wouldn’t be coming back to the states for a while.”
“I couldn’t stand the thought of being home without you. Being away made it easier.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” Her voice was weak and full of pain.
“Ah, hell. I don’t know, Ellie. Getting those papers did something to me. In here.” He squeezed her hand and tapped it against his chest. “I wanted to fight the divorce, but how was I going to do that from thousands of miles away? I had just been informed my stay overseas had been extended six months to a year. I felt helpless and out of control. I didn’t understand. Like you, I was angry and hurt. I kept staring at your signature, wondering what you’d been thinking as you wrote it there. The only thing I could come up with was the obvious. You didn’t want to be married to me anymore. It’s too bad the military don’t allow alcohol when deployed. I really could’ve used a drink or two that day.”
Her tears were more than he could stand. He pulled her into his arms and tucked her head under his chin. “Don’t do that. Don’t cry, Ellie.”
“I’m sorry, Booker. I never meant to hurt you.”
He believed her. “I’m sorry, too, querida. You were the most precious thing in my life, and I’ll never forgive myself for giving you reason to believe otherwise.”
She sniffed and pulled back, looking up at him with those big brown eyes he could lose himself in.
“I’m glad we got that settled. I don’t think I could stand another day in the truck with you being so broody.”
“Broody?” Booker laughed, and the tension drained right out of him. “You think I was quiet because of the fight we left unfinished this morning?”
“Weren’t you?”
“In part,” he admitted and decided to hit her with another truth. “The other part of me was trying not to imagine how you would look wearing nothing except those panties I bought as I put your sassy mouth to work on something other than taunting me.”