CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Becca shrugged out of her lab coat and allowed Sterling to pull her toward the door.
“Time for food, a hot bath, and bed,” he promised.
“Hot bath?” Becca asked hopefully. “You have a tub here? Really?” It had been weeks since she’d had such a luxury.
“I have a whole apartment here,” he said. “Nothing fancy. Not the apartment or the tub. But it’ll hold plenty of water and a pretty woman to boot.”
Becca smiled at his not-so-subtle, country-boy charm. He was a gift in so many ways, just what she needed right now. He didn’t demand. He didn’t overwhelm. He didn’t try to be suave and debonair. There were no airs or niceties. He was who he was, and she loved that about him.
“By the way,” she said, as he led her down a hallway that looked like any one of thousands, basic carpet with doors on either side. “Where’d you get Chinese food at two in the morning?”
“I know the Chinese couple that owns the joint in the complex above. They hold a late-night kitchen poker game every Wednesday. If they’re winning, I can always talk them into cooking for me.”
“And if you’re winning?” she asked as he stopped at the end of the hall and shoved open a door.
“I never gamble. But I do enjoy the ritual of watching everyone else lose their backsides to Mr. Ling, who always wins. And no matter how many times the same people lose to him, they keep coming back for more. It’s worse than basic-training soldiers begging to be punished.”
She walked past him, their eyes briefly touching, her stomach fluttering with awareness as she entered the foyer. “I find it hard to believe you don’t gamble.” She brought the apartment into view and found it very basic—a place to live, not a home—brown leather couch and chair, leather-covered coffee table with built-in ottoman. Not much more.
“I’ll never so much as toss a dime in a casino’s direction,” he said, stepping inside and shutting the door, so close their shoulders brushed. Becca bit her bottom lip at the feel of him next to her. Had she ever wanted a man so badly?
He motioned to a simple table to the right of the living area. “Like I said. Nothing fancy.” He set the bags on the table and walked to the kitchen and opened the fridge. He continued talking over the bar that divided the two areas. “Sunrise City is really home. These are temporary quarters I use as needed.”
“Funny,” she said, sliding into a seat and removing the Styrofoam containers out of the bags. “I totally read you as a gambler.”
Sauntering back to the table, he set a Coke on the table. “Got your favorite.” He sat down at the end of the table next to her and popped the top off his Dr. Pepper. “And old faithful for me.” He took a sip and responded to her comment. “I’m a risk taker, not a gambler. I can control when I take a risk. Gambling would control me. I want no part of that.”
“I see,” she said. “You’re a control freak.”
He grinned. “Nah. Control is an illusion. None of us really have it. We just trick ourselves into thinking we do.”
Becca grabbed her Coke and popped the top, trying to hide her reaction. His words reached right inside her and twisted her in knots. No one knew better how true his statement was than a person who’d lived through a cancer diagnosis.
She tilted the drink back and swallowed as he continued. “So I just go for it when I have to. Live or die, I let it all hang out.”
Becca was seized by a sudden, gut-wrenching emotion, only it wasn’t hers.
Her gaze jerked to his, her heart in her stomach. “You don’t have any family,” she said, certain it was true. “You don’t worry about living or dying because you think no one will care if you’re gone.”
He arched a brow and stared at her, expression unchanged for several seconds before he opened the lid on one of the containers. Instantly, an alluring scent of simmering food teased her nostrils and made her stomach growl. “Spicy beef,” he said. “Extra soy sauce for the white rice.”
“You’re not going to comment on—” She stopped midsentence. Did a double take at the food. “How did you know what I like? Surely I don’t have a file this detailed.”
“So I was right then,” he said. “Huh. Strangest thing. I was standing there talking to Mr. Ling about what I should order for you, and somehow I just knew. Just like I know you love chocolate, but hate caramel. How you take two creamers and one Sweet’N Low in your coffee. And you could live on macaroni and cheese if there weren’t so many carbs.” He shut the food lid and sat back. “I have to tell you, Becca, I’ve never been much into analyzing food based on carb content—can’t think of one time in my life in fact. So I’m thinking this has to be me somehow getting inside your head and reading your thoughts.” He studied her. “Am I right on any of this?”
Shocked, Becca nodded. “All of it.”
He leaned back in his chair. “I’ll be damned,” he said, his brows dipping. “Are you somehow linking our minds together now?”
“Not that I know of,” she said. “And I could feel when we were connected before.” Intimately…almost erotically. “No. We aren’t connected now. Maybe this is all information you picked up when we were, and you’re remembering now…when certain triggers occur, like you ordering me food.”
She studied him, dumbfounded by this new turn of events. No wonder it had felt so intimate when they’d merged minds. They’d somehow delved into each other’s personal lives, dug deep into each other’s core. She wasn’t sure she wanted him to know what was there inside her. The battles she’d fought with herself recently—the insecurities, the fears. It was easier to think about what she’d learned about him, his thoughts. “You don’t have any family.”
He shrugged and then sipped his drink. “Like I said, the Renegades are my family.”
She gave him a gentle glower. “You know what I mean. You never talked about your mother back in the library. I remember you lived with your grandmother and that your father was killed in combat. Do you have siblings?”
“My mother died during childbirth. My grandmother died a few years back of a heart attack.”
A sudden memory flashed through her mind. Sterling’s memory—of him jumping off a building onto a car. His last thought—he could die, but not before he freed the little boy being held hostage in that car and returned him to his parents. He wasn’t afraid of dying. She felt not one tiny iota of fear in him.
She blinked away the image, thinking of the terror she’d felt over dying these past few months. “Don’t you ever feel afraid?” Her voice cracked. She wasn’t sure why, but there was emotion balled in her throat, tightening her windpipes.
Suddenly, he was on one knee in front of her, turning her to face him. His hands settled on her knees. Strong. Warm. His eyes searched hers. “You know when I feel afraid? Every time I think something is going to happen to you. I had nightmares about what Adam was doing to you at Zodius.”
“Because you blamed yourself,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault. You tried to save me. I knew that.”
“No,” he said, rejecting that idea. “A soldier finds a place to put that stuff. We have to if we’re going to keep going. That’s not what this is with you, Becca, and it wasn’t from the moment I met you. So in answer to your question…again, yes. I feel fear.” His hand slid to her neck, callused fingers sending goose bumps down her spine. “You aren’t alone anymore. We’ll be afraid together.”
Uncertainty rose inside her, along with one of the many fears her cancer had brought with it—the fear that had kept her from telling her mother about her diagnosis. She didn’t want to have someone taking care of her…draining the life out of those around her while she died.
She tried to pull back. “No,” she said. “I don’t need you to do this. I don’t want you to make me feel better.”
He kissed her, a light brush of his lips over hers, followed by a seductive sweep of his tongue against hers that seemed to touch her all over. “I don’t want to make you feel better,” he said, his voice rough with desire. “Better doesn’t begin to describe what I want to make you feel.” Again he kissed her, featherlight. “I’ve wanted you since the moment I laid eyes on you, most definitely since I saw you walking up that sidewalk to your house.”
As she had him. She remembered him standing there on her porch looking like sex and sin, recalling every pleasurable moment of her life she’d missed. She wanted to take what he was offering, to forget everything but him, to escape if only for a little while. But damn it, unlike in the lab earlier, she was now in her head, and in his for that matter, thinking instead of just feeling. She didn’t want to be selfish, to act without thinking about the aftermath.
Sterling leaned in and brushed his mouth over hers again, his teeth nipping her bottom lip, tongue caressing. Becca moaned softly, unable to contain the sound despite her best efforts. Control was not her friend right now.
Her hands settled on Sterling’s shoulders, the feeling of muscles flexing beneath her palms enticing her. To touch…to feel…Okay. Maybe she did want to be selfish. She wanted to rip his clothes off, wanted to see him naked—really wanted to see him naked. She barely stopped herself from arching into him, somehow reminding herself that when this was over she’d still be the girl with cancer that had become an ICE addiction, a load better carried alone.
His fingers trailed down one of her bare arms, and she felt that touch all over her body. Her stomach fluttered. Her thighs ached. Her breasts felt heavy and full; her nipples tight and sensitive.
“I’m trying to do what’s right here,” she whispered, her voice quavering as she struggled to find the will to resist him, even with words. There was something so enthralling about this man, so demanding about the desire he evoked in her. He was wild and thrilling, yet amazingly, what should feel dangerous felt safe.
His cheek brushed hers, whiskers erotically scraping against her skin, his breath warm against her ear as he whispered, “If I instinctively know something so simple as how to order your dinner, think what else I might know about you. What we might know about each other. How to tease each other…How to please each other.”
There was an emptiness inside her that shuddered with hope, with a plea that he would drive it away, fill it with something that wasn’t icy and cold.
He pulled back and looked at her, his eyes dark, passionate. Compelling. “No regrets, Becca,” he vowed, and she knew he’d found those words in her head. Words she’d sworn to live by when she’d left that German hospital without a cure. Words she’d spoken in her head in the lab earlier with him there.
She rolled them around inside her and let them take root, rewarded herself with a deep inhalation of Sterling’s addictive, masculine scent. “No regrets,” she said softly.
A slow smile formed on his lips. “I love it when you agree with me,” he teased.
Becca laughed. “You’re crazy.”
“About you,” he said huskily.
She felt a little schoolgirl rush from that. In the past, she would have felt like the geeky bookworm with the quarterback, uncomfortable and out of her league, but not with Sterling. Never before had a man taken her from such dark emotions to laughter. A place she might just find real escape.
She pressed her hands to his face, her lips to his. Absorbing him. Breathing him in like a little piece of life. They lingered that way, heat simmering between them. Expanding…drawing them in closer to one another without ever moving.
His tongue flickered against her lips, pressed past her teeth as he slid it against hers for a long, sensual taste. “Your kisses taste like honey,” he murmured. “What does the rest of you taste like?”
She shivered at the erotic comment—the promise he was going to find out. He kissed her again. Crazy-wild, hot-kissed her, and she loved every second of it. Loved his tongue, his lips, and his hands sliding through her hair, over her face.
Becca ran her fingers through his thick, blond hair. She loved his hair—a little wild like him. Hot like him too. With each stroke of his tongue, each touch of his lips, she felt liberated.
Her palms traveled over his chest—warm, hard muscle, her reward. She was extremely, intensely interested in those muscles, like the best science project in the world that had to be studied. She explored his arms, his biceps, how they felt beneath her palms. Inching forward in her chair, she arched into him, for research purposes, of course. To explore how he would feel pressed close to her. Her breasts ached for his touch, her nipples tight and swollen, in need of his mouth. God. Had she really just had that brazen thought? She was a good girl; she always had been.
His hands slid over her breasts, fingers teased the stiff peaks of her nipples. Her hands covered his, silently telling him she wanted more, because she couldn’t ask or demand. Because she was still that “good girl” at heart and couldn’t seem to let it go.
But she didn’t want to be a good girl. If anyone knew the meaning of “life is short,” she did. Becca ran her lips over his jaw, hid her face in his neck, and nibbled as she said, “You know what I want?”
He slid his hands around her waist. “If you say Chinese food, I’m going to object.”
“I’ll give you a choice then,” she said, feeling braver with his jest. “Feed me, or take off your clothes.”
“I’m all for getting naked, if you are,” he quickly agreed.
“You first,” she bargained.
And while the idea of standing in front of him naked, him fully clothed, would make her feel vulnerable, exposed, it apparently had none of those effects on him.
“Okay,” he said, unaffected by the idea as he pushed to his feet and started undressing. And only seconds later, he stood there in all his naked glory, and she sat there, fully clothed.
Becca wet her suddenly dry lips as her gaze traveled over that hot body of his, with the lithe muscles that bulged and rippled in all the right places. Her eyes lingered on his abs—oh man. The man had abs. Really, really nice abs. Etched like a canyon of hard rock with delicious dips and mountain, all of which called for her tongue. They needed to be licked, every single one of them. She swallowed, her throat now as dry as her lips, her gaze traveling over his jutting erection. Big, hard, and ready. She was wet. She squeezed her thighs together against the ache there.
Part of her wanted to rip her clothes off and just feel all that perfection next to her. The other wanted to savor every second of looking, exploring, touching.
Slowly, her gaze lifted to the smoldering heat in his stare. “Can I touch it?” she asked.
“If you don’t,” he said, “I might have to beg.”
Sterling, naked and begging. She was pretty sure she’d died and gone to heaven.