Chapter Five
Roux had been deployed overseas for fifteen of the seventeen years he’d served, and he hadn’t had a Christmas stateside since he was twenty—he was always happy to stay on base in Stuttgart if it meant a guy with a wife and kids got to go home and play Santa.
All that was to say, fifteen years deployed, and Roux had never received a care package. Not once. Not even at Christmas. So when the box arrived, unexpected on that bright day in the dead of summer, his excitement was nearly embarrassing.
Scratch that. Definitely embarrassing.
He and his team were busy ignoring the brutal heat, relaxing inside a large makeshift tent cobbled together with plastic tarps. The men were playing cards, cigarettes dangling, telling filthy jokes and pretending they were anywhere but there, fifty miles outside of nowhere, when mail arrived.
The guys on his team immediately noticed the change in Roux—the way his eyes went wide as he snatched the box from the hands of the young soldier who delivered it. Thank God they didn’t notice the way his hands trembled as he held the box close, as though someone might steal it. But the comments came anyway.
The first came from BK, who’d grown up in the projects of New York City and was always first into the fray. “Where’d the present come from, Daddy?”
Red joined in with his Tennessee drawl. “You know someone outside this fuckin’ place? I am”—he paused, white teeth shining from his bushy red combat beard—“shook.”
BK smirked. “You got a girlfriend?”
Roux’s heart pounded at the question. At the desire that flooded him with it. At the truth that joined it. Girlfriend was all wrong to describe Abby. She wasn’t his girlfriend.
She was his. Period.
“Nah, gotta be human to have a girlfriend,” someone else answered. “Everyone knows Sarge is a goddamned machine.”
“They just bring him back to Germany to recharge his ass and send him back here.”
The jokes didn’t rile Roux. Part of being team leader was letting your guys razz you. And besides, it wasn’t as though he was going to tell them who the box was really from. “That’s right. Combat would be over if I wasn’t dragging you pussies around with me.”
“Captain Fucking America!”
“Fuck that,” Roux said with a grin. “Iron Man or fucking nothing.”
“After six months in the desert, it’s iron, man,” Red joked.
“And it’s sure as shit fucking nothing,” BK added.
The group laughed, long and loud, nothing but the sand to hear them.
“Tell the truth. It’s a Fleshlight. Shipped from Amazon for our American Hero.” This one from the newest man on the team, 20-year-old Martinez, too green to have earned his nickname. The men around Roux laughed as he flipped the kid the bird and stood. He’d waited long enough. As he crossed the camp to get to his bunk, Martinez called out, “We’ll give you some privacy while you test it out, Sarge!”
The chorus of laughter that followed would have ordinarily entertained Roux. But right then, he couldn’t give a shit. Let them think he was in there with the most embarrassing stuff that could be mail-ordered.
The truth was, he was in there with Abby.
He ripped the box open, pulling crumpled sheets of the Denver Post off the top to reveal the contents.
Coffee. She’d sent him coffee. Two bright yellow cans of New Orleans ground coffee with chicory. He caught his breath, reaching for it, his fingertips brushing over the shining metal with reverence, as though she’d sent him diamonds. She’d brought him to his knees with fucking coffee.
He lifted the cans from the box, revealing more treasures: a giant box of Junior Mints, a bag of Sour Patch Kids, a pack of mini peanut butter cups, three packs of what looked like specialty beef jerky from a place in Boulder, a can of Pringles. There were also three books inside—two thrillers and a biography of Lafayette. His heart pounded with every new discovery, with the thought that Abby had placed each of the items in the box for him. That she’d been thinking of him as much as he thought of her. Well. Not as much, because he thought of her all the damn time.
And this would make it worse.
That’s when he saw the beads. Right there at the bottom of the box, three long strands of Mardi Gras beads. Green and purple and gold, looking at once familiar and totally out of place, draped over two large packs of hand warmers. Roux took them out of the box, wrapping them around his hand, imagining the beads on Abby, warm from her skin. Imagining what he could do with those beads. Against her. Inside her.
He was hard as a fucking rock thinking about it, and he opened his fly, running those beads along his cock, rubbing his thumb over the crown of it, capturing the precome already there. He was leaking like a damn teenager. Not that the thought stopped him from fisting himself once, twice, the beads against his cock almost too much.
He looked down at himself, thick and throbbing, and imagined her there, on her knees, pretty pink lips open, eager for him. He imagined her taking him deep, sucking and licking greedily, her fingers in her pussy, working herself as she worked him. As she looked up at him with her gorgeous eyes and devoured him like a fucking goddess.
He closed his eyes, pistoning his cock, knowing he shouldn’t.
Knowing that nothing he could do would compare to a moment of Abby. With Abby.
Not without her.
The thought came fast and unexpected, but the moment it arrived, Roux released himself like he’d been burned.
Not without her.
He laughed humorlessly at the thought. At the idea that he might be able to think of her, to read her words, to drink her coffee and not bring himself off. And not come hard and fast in thick jets meant for her.
That was the point, of course. It was for her.
He was for her.
All of him.
Not without her.
He zipped up and looked into the empty box.
Not empty.
There was a letter.
He reached for it, heart pounding, mouth watering, as though he could open the envelope and she would, somehow, be here with him in the Arabian desert. Like a genie. Hotter than a genie. Sweeter than a genie.
He pulled out the pink paper he had come to love and realized from the thickness of it that there was something else in the envelope besides a letter.
A photo. Fuck him. She’d sent a photo.
He stared down at it, at the beautiful blonde, laughing at something someone off-camera had said. She was gorgeous. Textbook perfect. Pretty as a picture, as his grand-mère would have said. He exhaled long and slow, taking her in, her slim frame and her silky gold hair and her sparkling blue eyes and her perfect, pale skin and the way she carried herself as though the whole world was at her whim. The way she smiled as though she’d practiced it a million times before.
There’s something off.
He shook his head at the words. Quiet. Barely there. He stopped the thought before it could come, refusing to allow it to be completed. He was being an idiot. The woman in the picture was stunning. Beautiful. A genetic marvel. What was wrong with him?
He lifted the photo closer, as though proximity might knock some sense into him.
And that’s when he realized there was a second photo, fused to the first, as though the desert heat had stuck them together at the bottom of the box. He peeled them apart carefully, berating himself for his strange response to Abby’s picture. She just didn’t look like what he’d expected. He didn’t know what he’d imagined her to be, but he’d thought she’d be different. He thought she’d be—
He caught his breath as he revealed the second picture, Abby, cheek to cheek with another woman.
Holy shit.
Cheek to cheek with a fucking goddess.
Brown hair shot through with gold, and huge brown eyes and a smile like a summer morning. She was soft and curved and Roux’s reaction was primitive as fuck, instantly imagining her under him. Around him. Imagining tasting her lips and then tasting every sinful curve she had, parting her legs and feasting on her until she screamed his name again and again, until she couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t have his tongue in her pussy.
What the fuck?
Roux dropped the photos like they were on fire.
It was clearly the desert heat getting to him. He just needed Abby’s words again and he’d be fine. He’d be set right. He opened the letter, the image of her handwriting, arching and curving across the page, settling him. Calming him. Reminding him of who he was.
Of who he belonged to.
Dear Roux,
I read online all about how to send a care package to someone in the military…what you might want, might need. Interestingly, there’s not a huge amount of information on what to send a stranger. The websites say to send your favorite snacks, and I don’t know what they are—so I ended up going with things that tend to be crowd pleasers. And Junior Mints because I like Junior Mints. (I sent some extra jerky—I thought maybe you’d like to share with the other guys on your team.)
Fuck that. He wasn’t sharing anything she sent him. They didn’t deserve her.
He didn’t either, but it was too late. She was his.
I hope the coffee is what you’ve been missing—I bought it direct from New Orleans—it came packaged with a mix for beignets and some Mardi Gras beads. I figure you don’t have a ton of time to fry donuts in the desert, but I thought you might like to have the beads to remind you of home.
The website also suggested the hand warmers. It said that at night, the desert gets cold and those can be a godsend. I don’t like the idea of you being cold…
He didn’t feel cold now. He felt hot as the sun, and desperate to be in Abby’s company. To curl up on her couch and put his head in her lap and let her stroke his fur until they were both panting.
The thought had him worked up instantly, but he ignored the desire coursing through him.
Not without her.
He wasn’t coming without her. Not ever again.
I couldn’t resist the biography of General Lafayette—another military hero who spoke French, no doubt winning all the ladies with his cher & bébé and asking them all to call him loup.
It’s August, and hot here—hotter than anyone ever imagines a city this high up in the mountains can get—but I felt a little like Santa when I was putting all this together. Christmas boxes feel so full of hope and possibility, and I want that to be what this feels like for you.
That’s what your letters feel like to me. Like Christmas morning.
God, he wanted to know what that was like—Christmas morning with Abby. He wanted to wake up with a foot of snow outside and shower her with presents. He wanted to watch Christmas movies on the couch with her cold feet tucked under his thigh. Die Hard. Bridget Jones. Elf. Whatever she wanted. He didn’t care, as long as they were together and the snow was keeping the rest of the world at bay.
I’m going to tell you a secret now: I’m rambling about the package because I don’t know how to compete with your last letter—you’re so good at flirting and I’m so terrible at it. But here’s a try…I know a lot about fur, Theodore LaRoux, and yours appears to be grade A.
Roux laughed out loud and ran a hand through his hair, feeling comfortable again—certain, once more, that she was made for him.
Of course, I would require a thorough examination if I were to give a true and accurate assessment of the fur in question, loup.
The laugh turned to a groan. If this was terrible flirting, he didn’t think he could survive Abby at level excellent. He reread the words, adoring her casual use of the pet name, then rubbed his beard and said, “Oh, you’re gon’ get a thorough examination alright, cher. Jus’ as soon as I can get home to you.”
Always,
Abby
P.S. You never sign your name.
Letter still in hand, he glanced at the pictures, discarded on his bunk, ignoring the thrum of excitement that coursed through him at the glimpse of golden brown hair there.
He didn’t need pictures. Not when her letters were the real thing.