MILITARY ROMANCE: The War Within Himself (Alpha Bad Boy Marine Army Seal) (Contemporary Military Suspense & Thriller Romance) (64 page)

Chapter 2

“Where am I?” Amanda asked, though she didn’t know if there was anyone around to hear her. All she could see was bright light and white, and all she could hear was the purr of something electronic humming. Her body felt warm, but there was cold air all around her, and even though she was lightheaded and dizzy, she’d never felt so calm and at peace… not ever.

As quickly as Amanda wondered where she was, she stopped caring. She felt so wonderful—so soothed, yet so alive—that it no longer mattered where she was or how she had gotten there. All she cared about was staying right there, in the moment… with the bright light and the humming, with the cool air rushing over her warm body and the smell of… the smell of…
What’s that?
Amanda thought as her mouth began to drool and her brain registered the word “bacon.”

“What the hell happened to you last night?” Marie said, rushing into the room, gnawing on a piece of the irresistible cured meat. Amanda felt a jolt surge through her body, and she sprung up in bed a moment after her cousin entered.

“What do you mean?” Amanda asked, looking down at the clothes she was wearing. She had on white panties and a white camisole, though she couldn’t recall whether she’d been wearing the garments for a day or for a few hours. She grabbed the blanket from beside her and wrapped her lower legs in it. “It’s cold in here,” she said, running her hand through her hair.

“You must have had
some
night,” Marie chided. “I heard you mumbling in here earlier, and gave you some time to wake up. But, now, I’ve waited long enough, and I want details. So why don’t you get dressed, come to the kitchen, and tell me all about it?” Marie couldn’t help but notice that her cousin was totally disoriented and out of her wits, but she figured Amanda must have had one too many the night before and was still recovering.

Marie stood up and walked out of the spare bedroom, leaving Amanda to herself. It took a good minute or two before Amanda was able to get up on her feet, and when she did, the first thing she did was walk over to the window. She pulled back the curtain and gazed out at the driveway beyond. Her 1992 Chevy Cavalier was parked there, safely and soundly, and Amanda cocked her head to the side as she tried to remember how on earth it got there.

The last thing she could remember with any degree of clarity was leaving Pittsburgh for Washington. Then, something happened… but what was it? She could vaguely remember pulling her car over to the side of the road before she saw a bright light, and then…

“What? Are you gonna make me beg you for the details?” Marie said, reappearing at the bedroom door with a steaming cup of coffee. Amanda looked at it and suddenly felt thirsty—very thirsty, perhaps even parched. It was that same disgusting, dry-mouthed taste she got after a heavy night of drinking, and she found herself licking her lips to get rid of it.

As Amanda ran her tongue over her lips, she tasted something sweet, and, in a flash, her mind was hit with an image. She saw herself seated at a table with a man, drinking something warm and green from a glass mug. She couldn’t see the man, or what was going on around them, but she could see the liquid in the mug—and, by golly, she could taste it. It was the same taste that still lingered on her lips, and it still tingled her taste buds.

“Son of a bitch,” Amanda said, sitting back down on the bed. She reached for the pair of jeans that were neatly folded beside the bed and pulled them on. Her memories—or lack thereof—had obviously stirred her back to her senses.

“I don’t know what type of moonshine they serve in bars around here,” Amanda said, zipping up her jeans. “But, whatever I drank last night, it really fucked me up… and, I can barely remember what happened.”

Amanda slid her feet into a pair of flip-flops that were beside the bed, thankful that everything she needed to get up and go about her day had been so conveniently located near her.

“Are you sure someone didn’t slip you something?” Marie asked, sipping her coffee.

Amanda looked at her cousin and shook her head in the negative. “We both know this isn’t the first time I blacked out from drinking too much,” Amanda admitted. She hung her head low a little and felt humbled—she’d never been a lush, but she’d always had a rather low tolerance for alcohol.

What was just enough for some people was usually too much for Amanda, and what sent them over the top usually floored her. She’d blacked out a few times over the years, and because of that, she tried to pay extra close attention to her drinking habits—but, like the way she gauged her gas consumption, her calculations must have been a little off the night before, and she’d consumed more than her limit. Though, for the life of her, she still couldn’t remember drinking in the first place, but that had to be what happened, right?

“Well, what
do
you remember?” Marie asked, as hungry for information as Amanda was for the bacon she hoped to find in the kitchen.

“All I remember is drinking something green with a guy at a table,” Amanda said, walking out the door and down the hallway.

“Was he at least hot?” Marie asked, following after her.

“I don’t remember what he looked like at all,” Amanda said with a chuckle, trying to make light out of a heavy situation. “But, yeah, he was hot. I remember that much.”

Amanda stopped dead in her tracks and turned to look at her cousin. “Actually, I think he was the hottest man I’ve ever met in my life.”

“Yeah right,” Marie said, slapping Amanda on the shoulder. “He was so hot, but you have no idea what he looked like? Whatever! Stop giving me a hard time.”

From the way Marie responded to Amanda, it was clear that she thought Amanda was teasing her or being sarcastic, but, alas, Amanda wasn’t. When she said that the man from the night before was the hottest man she’d ever met in her life, she meant it, and it simply wasn’t important to her that she couldn’t remember any other details.

Chapter 3

Marie’s kitchen was filled with cupcake tins, loaf pans, skillets, and mixing bowls, along with flour, sugar, a variety of spices, and just about every cold dairy ingredient you could imagine. She’d recently started running her own bakery business out of her home, and that’s why Amanda had traveled just two miles south of Pittsburgh to spend a few days with her.

Marie had just landed her biggest client yet, and she was much better at math than Amanda. She knew that she didn’t have the manpower to fulfill her orders alone in time, and she didn’t have a surplus of capital to invest in hiring helpers, so she reached out to her cousin Amanda to ask for a hand, and Amanda dropped everything she was doing to rush out to Washington.

“You can pay me in broken cookies and misfit cupcakes,” Amanda told Marie when she accepted her offer. Amanda could stand to drop whatever she was doing because she wasn’t doing much at the time, and the broken cookies and misfit cupcakes were a more appealing payout than anything else she’d received recently.

Like too many people her age, at 24, Amanda was a couple years out of college and tens of thousands of dollars in debt, but she had no steady income to pay it off and could barely support herself. She’d been an English major—of all things!—in college, and had taken on odd writing jobs since graduating. She’d done a bit of copywriting, some journalism, and some blogging, but it was all contract work, and it was all low-paying. Needless to say, it was nothing demanding or binding, and it didn’t prevent her from going off to help her cousin for a few days.

“Eat this,” Marie said, handing Amanda a plate as she eyed everything around her in the kitchen, looking for something ready to eat in a heap of utensils and ingredients. The small, thin dish had about five pieces of bacon on it, sitting alongside a muffin flecked with an abundance of fruit and nuts.

“Cranberry, apricot, and walnut,” Marie said as Amanda went straight for the bacon.

“Looks amazing,” Amanda said, chewing on the pork. As soon as she swallowed, she broke off a piece of the muffin and shoved it in her mouth. She was instantly pleased with the flavor, and, oddly enough, reminded of the sweet taste on her lips from the night before and earlier that morning.

“So you have no idea what this man from last night looks like,” Marie started, looking over her itinerary for the day as Amanda continued eating her breakfast, “but do you remember anything that happened with him?”

Amanda felt a chill move over her spine, and the moist muffin caught in her throat for a moment. “No,” she said, straining hard to swallow.

“Then how do you know nothing bad happened?” Marie asked. Of the two of them, Marie had always been the more sensible and grounded, and this morning was no exception. She thought her cousin was glossing over too many important details. “Maybe you should call the police or something.”

“And tell them
what
?” Amanda asked. “I can hear it now: ‘Hi officer, my name is Amanda Leonard, and I got really drunk last night. I hooked up with a guy and can’t remember what happened. I know he didn’t hurt me or do anything wrong, and I’m pretty sure I had a great time. But my silly old cousin is overreacting and thinks something is strange about it, so I’m calling you to file a report.’ Yeah, I can see
that
happening.”

“I’m not old,” Marie said, throwing a dish rag at Amanda, motioning for her to wipe up some crumbs that had accumulated on the counter. “And I’m not overreacting. You only have scattered memories of what happened last night, and that should concern you a little more.”

“Well, it doesn’t,” Amanda said, shoving more bacon into her mouth before wiping off the counter. She couldn’t quite explain it—to her cousin, or to herself—,but the fact that Amanda couldn’t remember much about the night before really didn’t bother her.

Her mind felt completely clear, and she had nothing that even faintly resembled a hangover. She knew that nothing bad had happened the night before—she could just feel it in her bones—and, if anything, she was sure that something
good
had actually happened. It didn’t matter to her that she couldn’t place her finger on what that good thing was because, whatever it was, it left her feeling so alive and reinvigorated that it really didn’t matter.

“Just forget about it,” Amanda said when she saw that Marie was still staring intently at her. “Please?”

“All right,” Marie said, shaking her head at Amanda. “But don’t let something like that happen again. You’re only here for a few more days, and you have a job to do. I don’t want you going out, drinking until you black out, and putting your life—and my business—in jeopardy.”

“I know,” Amanda replied. “I don’t plan on drinking again any time soon, so I promise. Nothing like that will happen again while I’m here.”

“It better not,” Marie said with a smile that was as sincere as it was playful. “I’ll be watching you.”

Something about the last sentence Marie said made Amanda feel ill at ease, and she was sure she’d recently heard someone else say it too…

Chapter 4

Amanda felt something swelling inside her, something ebbing and bowing against every inch of her flesh from the inside. It felt as if an octopus had crawled inside her and had extended its tentacles out in every possible direction, pushing and pulling Amanda to her limits and challenging her most tender boundaries.

She felt the sensation in her head, her arms, her legs, and, of course, her most sensitive regions, and it pulsed throughout her body to the most delicate yet steady rhythm. It was breathtaking and enchanting, and just as Amanda felt her body curling toward carnal completion, she woke up in a start, panting and sweating cold, sticky bullets.

Amanda looked around her and realized she was in the guest bedroom. She’d put in a hard day’s work helping Marie prepare for the upcoming event, and she filled up on plenty of tasty treats in the process. The hours had just flown by, and by the time nighttime came, Amanda more or less passed out as soon as her head hit her pillow. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep, but it was long enough that she felt rested.

What the hell was that?
Amanda wondered, still reeling from whatever it was that she just experienced. It had been such a primitive feeling, but it had been so ethereal, and, even if she—Amanda, the writer—tried to explain it, she’d have been hard-pressed to find the words.

But whatever that feeling was, Amanda wanted to feel more of it, and since she knew there was no way to feel
it
again, at least not that she knew of, she decided to make herself feel the only thing she’d ever felt before that came close to that feeling. Though it was in second place by a considerable difference, Amanda ran one hand over her firm breasts and slid the other down into her panties. She closed her eyes and called to mind the only memories she had from the night before—of the unidentifiable stranger sitting with her at a table.

Amanda tried to recall his features and strained to see him in her mind’s eye, but all she could make out was the shape of his face—which, put simply, was perfect—and the way his features were set along it in perfect balance. She struggled to focus on his lips, to see them and hear what he was saying. She eventually heard words come at her from the darkness, but they came at her randomly, in no specific order, and her mystery man’s mouth never moved once when he said them.

It frustrated Amanda to no end that she couldn’t recall more, and that frustration only fueled her fervor. Her fingers were moving furiously below her moist panties, and she began feeling a fraction of what she’d felt earlier while she was sleeping.

The closer she came to her sweet release, the clearer things became in Amanda’s mind. The perfectly shaped face with perfect features became more visible to her, and as she registered her mystery man’s pale, ashen skin, jet black hair, and steely gray eyes, Amanda felt a cool sensation web out across her body, like icicles crystallizing then abruptly shattering. Her back arched upward and her toes splayed out like talons, but right before she could reach the peak of her orgasm, something derailed Amanda’s momentum.

Outside, the car alarm on her 1992 Chevy Cavalier had gone off, and the old beast was wailing something fierce into the quiet night air.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Amanda shouted aloud as she ran over to the window and looked out into the driveway. Her car looked fine, and there didn’t appear to be anyone or anything near it. But, nonetheless, the experience shook Amanda a little.

It had been the second time in only a few minutes that Amanda was interrupted before she could reach any type of “climax,” and she didn’t like being iced so late in the final countdown. But even more disturbing than that—it had been the first time in over a year that the car alarm actually went off. It died a few months before the gas gauge did, and Amanda was pretty sure that it was shot for good.

But there it was going off in the middle of the outskirts outside of Washington, PA, and there was no rhyme or reason about it. All Amanda knew was that it had gone off at exactly the wrong moment and that she needed to shut it off ASAP. She was sure it had already awoken her cousin, and she was starting to worry that, if she allowed it to keep going, the echo would travel a few miles down the road and catch the nearest neighbor’s attention.

Amanda grabbed her car keys from her purse and ran outside, still wearing nothing more than a pair of short shorts and a T-shirt. Those were her normal sleeping clothes, not the panties and camisole she woke up in that morning.

“Really, Amanda?” Marie asked, when she opened up her door and saw her cousin running past her. “Shut that thing off already!”

“I’m trying,” Amanda called back, pressing the button on her keychain. It was supposed to disable the alarm, but apparently it wasn’t working. The damn security system wasn’t even a part of the original car package and was something that some previous owner had added on at a later point—and, Amanda wanted to slap whoever that person was because she’d never had any use for the system, and now all it was doing was causing her trouble.

Amanda kept pressing the button over and over again, trying to make a difference, and, at one point, she actually did. The moment she stepped out onto Marie’s porch, the alarm was effectively disabled. Amanda breathed a sigh of relief and, without so much as a second thought, she turned and went back into the house.

No sooner than the door shut behind her, Amanda felt herself falling forward. It wasn’t a hard, abrupt fall, however, but more of a gentle, slow descent into something soft and inviting. She felt her body keep lowering as waves of something indescribable passed over her, like the ocean’s tide gently lapping against the shore.

Pleasure. Pure, uninterrupted, and unchained pleasure. Amanda felt every cell in her body contract and tighten before ripples of bliss rolled beneath her skin and erupted. This was the culmination of her delayed orgasms—the cleaving together of the joys she’d felt in both her sleep and waking hours—and it hit her like a Mack truck from out of nowhere… or perhaps like a bright light shining in her eyes, traveling toward her.