SEALed With a Kiss: Even a Hero Needs Help Sometimes... (38 page)

Jax's heart rate doubled before he had the bedroom door fully closed. In the golden radiance of the bedside lamp, high-posted bed glowed like an island of light floating in an intimate darkness. Pickett sat on the bed cross-legged, even sexier than he had hoped for in white lace camisole and matching lace panties. It was all he could do not to pant. White lace did it for him every time.

Pickett didn't look up from the large book in her lap, although he sensed she knew he was there.

"What are you doing?" Jax pulled his T-shirt over his head one-handed, never taking his eyes off her.

"I've looked up genus and phylum, and now I'm looking up species." Pickett shot him a sultry glance that said she enjoyed what he was thinking, but was determined to play her little game. "I need to get them straight if I'm going to properly classify you," she added in an erudite tone.

Jax lifted the heavy dictionary from her hands, closed it, and set it on the floor. Then he carefully pulled off her little round reading glasses. "I'll tell you how to classify me. Put me in the horny category."

"Ah!" Pickett's eyes sparkled like the ocean in bright sunlight, even though she tried to maintain a scholarly expression. "I shall name the species the Eastern Seaboard Broad-chested Horny SEAL! Then I can present a learned paper on his mating habits."

Jax seized her under her arms and flipped both of them so that he was lying down and she was straddling him.

As always Pickett was amazed at how absolutely secure she felt in the face of his vastly superior strength. It was as if instead of his strength being a threat to her, he always offered it in her service.

"Don't move." She pressed her palms into the hollows of his shoulders. "If you struggle, you will only hurt yourself." The lazy-lidded amusement in his eyes told her Jax enjoyed her pretense that she could pin him as much as she did. "Now that I have such an excellent specimen of the Horny SEAL in my possession, I must examine him."

The way the lacy white camisole snugged around her pretty breasts had him salivating from the moment he stepped into the bedroom. Her nipples were just barely visible as slightly darker smudges, but already the tips were pushing against the white flowers. He could smell her growing arousal.

Trust Pickett to be turned on with brainy sex games.

"I think you should remove your specimen's shorts. Strictly in the interests of science, you understand."

Her hand stopped its careful measuring of the bulge under his zipper. Her eyes widened. "Are you saying I may have discovered a Horny SEAL
Erectus?
This is too wonderful. I can be published in
Scientific American."
She flopped back to lie on top of his legs. "I am overcome with the thrill."

Jax sat up and began to draw the tiny bikini panties over her hips, letting his fingers tangle in the dark gold curls as he did so. "Let me tell you what else you're going to be overcome by ..."

He dropped the panties on the floor, stood briefly to divest himself of his shorts and came back down on top of her. He whispered in raunchy detail exactly what he had in mind.

"Oh no!" Pickett wailed. "This is a dark day for science!"

Jax stopped swirling his tongue around the velvety areola of her breast to look into her eyes. They glittered with fun even as the lids lowered in sensual anticipation.

"I'm almost afraid to ask, but why?"

"After extensive research, I'm going to write the world's most learned paper, and now, because of you, it's going to be unprintable!"

Once his breathing had returned to normal and he could move again, Jax reached across Pickett to turn out the lamp, then drew her next to him again.

He liked the time after lovemaking with Pickett as he never had with anyone before. Maybe it was because it never seemed completely over. Even when he had just had her, he still wanted to touch her. His hand, almost of its own volition, traveled over her breasts, down her belly, to let his fingers comb lazily through the still-damp curls at the apex of her thighs.

He gave a soft tug and was rewarded with one of Pickett's sexy little humming sounds.

"You like that?"

"Um."

"Do you like it better here or here?"

"There. If you keep doing that you're going to get me turned on again."

"And that would be a problem, how?"

Pickett chuckled, a lazy, sated, totally sensual sound. "I've been thinking about something you said tonight. You said your apartment isn't what you think of as home."

"It isn't. It's just someplace to leave my things. I'm not there much."

"Then where is home? Do you still think of your father's house as home?"

"No. It wasn't ever home."

"So where is it? Home, I mean."

"I don't know." She was getting a little too close to what he was thinking about in the driveway earlier. "Do I have to have a home?"

"Most people do. Tyler's going to need one."

"Well, I don't have one, all right?" Uh-oh. He sounded a little testy. Maybe if he answered her she'd get off it. He made his voice sleepy, almost bored sounding. "I guess the last place I really felt like I was home was Corey's parents' house."

"Oh yeah. They bought you a bed and checked your homework. They were your real family." Pickett yawned. "Do you visit them much?"

"No. I joined the Navy the day after Corey's funeral."

"They just let you go?"

She sounded incredulous. What was with her? This was old, old stuff.

"They wrote a couple of times. I couldn't think of what to say so I didn't write back."
I couldn't give them Corey back.

"So when Corey died you lost
everything?"

"Huh?" Time to give her thoughts another direction. He rolled her on top of him so that he could stroke that downy place at the base of her spine. That always made her melt.

Big mistake. Her eyes were colorless in the moonlight that was just beginning to come through the window, but they were darkly troubled.

She pulled up on her elbows to look more fully into his face. "You lost your best friend, who was closer than a brother,
and
you also lost the only parents you knew,
and
you lost the only place you called home?
Whoa!"

It was like she had taken her dainty little foot and with one well-placed kick broken the lock on the door between that time and this one. He sucked in his breath as all the pain, the
yawning nothingness
came flooding through. He couldn't let her see, and in a second, being Pickett, she would. Then she would want him to talk about it. And if he talked about it right now, he'd probably start to cry. Besides, he didn't want her sympathy. He wanted
her.
He took her mouth in a deep, plundering kiss.

After a moment her tongue sought his with equal greed. "Are you trying to distract me?" she murmured against his lips.

He slid tickling touches along her cheek, then bit into her soft earlobe, instantly soothing the sting with his tongue. "Um-hum."

Pickett pulled back as if she was trying to read his face in the dark. "Well, if you're trying to keep me from pointing out the connection between losing everything at once and a job that keeps you too busy to notice you don't have a home and makes you turn a relationship with your son into a job description," she offered him the side of her neck, "it's working."

Sprawled in the wide old porch rockers, the two SEALs who had accepted Jax's invitation to dinner traded jokes and insults with Jax, while Pickett listened. The afternoon light faded from golden to violet, and Venus pierced the cobalt glow lingering in the west.

During the meal of shark steak cooked on the grill, potato salad, and grilled squash, the men had carefully drawn her into their conversation. Forty-ish and burly, worldly-wise, yet kindly, Chief Lon Swales exuded a comfortable aura of rock-solid competence. He had rehabbed several houses himself as a sideline, and appreciated her work-in-progress farmhouse. When she explained she'd let Jax, desperate for more physical activity than running seven miles a day and swimming for a couple of hours, repair the storm damage to the garage roof and paint the three upstairs bedrooms, he nodded in sly approval. "You gotta understand how to manage these officers and keep 'em working."

Jax's friend Do-Lord, with his russet coloring, reminded Pickett of a fox—wiry, cunning, and very, very quick despite his slow-talking, country-boy ways. His questions about her work at the base were both knowledgeable and insightful. Pickett got the feeling that behind his good-ole-boy facade, he was secretly highly amused by finding Jax and Tyler at her house.

Pickett had wondered how Jax might be the same or different from other SEALs. Despite differences in physique and personality, in all three she sensed the same coiled and poised power, whose nature was to dominate any situation in which they found themselves. They granted Jax leadership of their group while clearly believing themselves his equal in every way.

The evening cooled rapidly once the sun slid behind the pines, but after dinner was done, nobody wanted to go inside.

The men seemed comfortable enough in Tshirts and shorts, but Pickett had retrieved sweatshirts for her and Tyler. She pulled her feet up to the seat of her rocker and stretched the oversized jersey over her folded legs.