Seduced by Three (3 page)

He used his survival interests as a way to enjoy spending time with her. He’d taught her to shoot, can food, make soap, and all sorts of odd but interesting things. Grace just appreciated that he had been there and wanted to spend time with her. She didn’t really care what they had done.

All that building and storing he’d done to prepare for an event like this, and he wasn’t even around to benefit from it. If this EMP was widespread, there was more than just a slight chance that she would never see her father again. As she let that thought sink in, it sparked a hopeless feeling that threatened to drown out everything else. She couldn’t lose her dad. She just couldn’t. Just the thought of it wrecked her. The loss of his presence in her life would be absolutely devastating. She’d be truly alone. Grace had to force her train of thought away from the grim imaginings that started to congregate in her mind. She closed her eyes tight and said a silent prayer for her father.

For the time being, she was on her own, and so was he.

She’d been dozing when she heard Sarge sit down in the little sitting area next to the bed. She turned over to face him. It was dim in there, but he was close enough for her to take him all in. She mentally picked him apart as if he were just another lab dissection, and she was trying to figure out what was underneath the skin. He reeked of alpha male and looked like military man with his dark, short-cut hair, fit and muscled body, and tanned skin. Put fatigues on him and he would look like he just stepped off the plane from Iraq. His expression was the same stone-cold mask he’d worn since they met.

But there was more to him than just his look. He had that feel. He declared that he was in charge and in control of his environment without saying a word. When he did speak, the deep rumble of his voice drew her toward him, while a part of her subconscious warned her that he could slit her throat when she got there. She had no question in her mind that he was capable and lethal. It just oozed out of him, and it was smoking hot.

He was fuckable, very fuckable. Grace stopped herself short. Well, surprise, surprise, it had been a long time since she had allowed her thoughts to play in that part of her brain. She shouldn’t allow herself to do it now, either, but this intense man, oh God, he was magnificent.

Grace absorbed every part of him, taking in the smallest details, from the small scar above his eyebrow to the structure of his large hands. When their eyes met, she realized the sudden compelling fascination he held and the pull it had on her. She broke her stare. He had been examining her just as she’d been doing with him.

To avoid his continued scrutiny, Grace swung her legs over the side of the bed and started to investigate the shelter. She stopped and stood underneath a lens emanating from the rafters and illuminating part of the basement shelter in a circle of sunlight.

“Does the shelter at my house have these?”

“It has one. It’s ingenious, isn’t it?” he asked, standing up and following her. “It uses mirrors placed…”

Grace’s brain tuned out Sarge’s words. He stood so close to her that the air he exhaled as he rumbled out syllables swept over the back of her neck, raising the little hairs at her nape. She shuddered, caught her breath, and tried to focus on the conversation instead of the man.

“…Your dad wants to put in another one. He said it was still pretty dark down there during the day.”

Grace felt a wave of grief at the mention of her dad. And as if Sarge could sense it, he changed the subject.

“Would you like the tour?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on up.” He motioned her to follow him up the stairs. At the top, he pushed forward on the wall to the right. A small rectangle of it gave way easily, and he set it aside. She exited through the cubbyhole into a screen of hanging shirts and pants before making it out of the closet and into a room with some bookshelves and a computer station.

“This is my spare room,” he said as he walked forward. “Across the hall is my bedroom. Next to it is the bathroom, which has no running water anymore. I tried it this morning.”

They continued down the hallway until it opened up into a family room to the right and kitchen to the left. “The lake is about a ten-minute walk from here. It’s our closest fresh water source, if you consider Lake Erie fresh water, that is. It will be a lot safer to make the trip there in a few weeks, maybe a month. Most people will be out of the city in search of food by then.”

Sarge turned the deadbolt on the back door and held the screen door open for her after he walked out. The small backyard and detached garage were completely encircled by a six-foot wood fence.

“I started digging a latrine while you were resting,” Sarge said, pointing to the corner of the yard.

“I’ll help you dig,” she said, then hesitated. “Do you have any materials to put together something I could actually sit on instead of crouching over a hole?”

Sarge raked his gaze over her and chuckled. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Grace could feel her cheeks turning red at the mental picture she’d just painted for him. But it got him to lower his mask for the just the slightest of moments, and she saw that the ice cube melted from time to time. Good to know.

He handed her a shovel and walked off without a word. Her eyes had a mind of their own and followed his retreat to the garage. The tight denim molded an utterly spectacular ass. He was easy on the eyes from every angle. She couldn’t stop herself from grinning. Wow, once her mind decided to go there, it was difficult to get it to behave again. It had been a long time since she’d been truly drawn by a man.

Steve. He was the last time.
And that thought jerked her right out of her grinning appreciation of Sarge’s retreat.

She’d just fully recovered from that breakup. Ironically, Sarge’s name was Steve, too, but he was nothing like her ex.

Ex-Steve thought he was Mr. Bad Ass. His life was an unending cycle of boozing, mediocre sex, and trying to get through life doing as little work possible. Eventually, Mr. Bad Ass found someone else to be bad with, which would have been fine if he’d have had the courtesy to mention that fact to her.

In the end, the whole experience left her changed, more cynical, with intimate knowledge of what it felt like to love and be betrayed.

Grace tried to figure out what went wrong, why her choice of men was so faulty, because Steve wasn’t the first time her man-picking skills left something to be desired. It was the bad boys who hooked her. There was just something about them. They had that unnamable quality that attracted her every time, similar to the way well fed and perfectly happy dogs are still attracted to a stinking pile of garbage. But it seemed like these men also came with very nameable negative qualities like lazy, liar, and loser.

During the last several months of self-imposed celibacy, she realized that a contributing factor to her history of dating disasters was that, at first blush, she scored highly on the femininity scale. But if ever there was a poster child for “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” she was it. Eventually, guys felt a little irked by her independence and refusal to need them. So after a time, her relationships fizzled out.

She stabbed the earth with her shovel and then stood on it with both feet to get the edge to sink into the hard, dry clay.

After Steve, she wasn’t looking for love or for the touch of a man. She hadn’t had sex for months, not that she didn’t have the urge. It was just that recently she didn’t let herself get close enough to a man to sate those urges on his cock. She was what she liked to call “vibrator dependent.”

Grace snorted at her inside joke with herself and tossed another shovel full of dirt aside. She’d promised herself that next time, falling in love would be a conscious choice, not something she just let happen to her.

* * * *

While Sarge worked, his thoughts gravitated toward Grace, as if that’s where they belonged. The woman had already tunneled into his brain and set up camp there. There was some kind of chemistry between them.

He wondered what kind of woman lurked beneath the surface, because his initial impression of her was obviously dead wrong. In hindsight, it made sense that she wasn’t the type of woman he’d originally thought. She
was
Ethan’s daughter, after all.

She was pretty. Not seductress, lingerie, stiletto heels pretty, but more like fresh, down-to-earth, girl-next-door pretty. There was something about her so-short blonde hair, serious blue-gray eyes, and the perfectly honed angles of her face that flared his desire. Her strong, lithe figure and the upturned points of her nipples through her tank top were hot enough to sear the picture of it into his mind and have him returning to it over and over again.

He had a tendency to be attracted to strong women. Ironically, they always seemed to be the best submissives in the bedroom, wanting—no needing—to give up control, if only for a little while. He closed his eyes for a moment and enjoyed the erotic scene forming in his mind before shaking it away.

Damn, Ethan, I’m sorry, man.

He felt guilty for thinking about his friend’s daughter that way. Then he tilted his head, and an interesting thought sprung to mind. Sarge knew his friend well, and Ethan always knew exactly what he was doing. He was systematic in his thinking and wouldn’t have made the decision for Sarge to take care of Grace lightly. But Grace didn’t need anyone to look after her. Ethan had to have known that, too.

Was it possible that Ethan wanted them to be together? Ethan wouldn’t have wanted his daughter sentenced to a long solitary confinement. He would want her to have someone. Someone he thought would be a good companion.

Sarge tried to think back to conversations he’d had about Grace over the years. Ethan had mentioned some dickwad she had dated for quite a while. He had been elated when that situation had ended. Mostly because her choice in men made Ethan feel like he’d made some mistake in parenting somewhere down the line. Other than that, Ethan only mentioned her in passing, bringing up things like what survival recipe they’d concocted with each other over the weekend, or how smart and capable she was.

Sarge turned over the open cube he’d built. He needed to attach a toilet seat, and then Grace would have her requested setup. As he came out of the garage on his way to the house, he watched her in the corner of the yard digging. He eyed the dampness on the back of her shirt from her exertion and the heat of the day. He noticed the muscle definition in her arms and shoulders as she threw dirt aside. He smiled. The sight of her made him hungry and impatient for her. He already knew they’d end up fucking, but he was not looking forward to the awkward get-to-know-each-other part that had to come first.

A few minutes later, he exited the house with a toilet seat in one hand and a glass of water for Grace in the other.

“Here, drink something.”

Grace jumped and pulled the gun out of her waistband at the same time. She had that pistol pointed at him and ready to shoot in a blur. Sarge found himself thanking God that her brain registered who he was before she pulled the trigger.

“Shit! Don’t sneak up on me like that.” She glared at him. Then her face softened. She replaced her gun at her back and accepted the glass, then glanced at the toilet seat and smiled. “I’m going to assume that you didn’t get this water out of the toilet.”

“Hope we’ll never be that desperate,” he mumbled while watching her throat move as she gulped down half the glass. A low groan escaped his chest as he turned back toward the garage. He couldn’t stop himself from picturing her swallowing his cum as greedily, and he was starting to get hard despite the fact that his brain just glanced over that mental picture for a second.

He could feel her watching him as he walked away. It was a sixth sense he’d developed after so many years of having to be 100 percent aware of possible danger around him. A satisfied feeling shot through him. She felt it, too, the chemistry, the low-level thrum of the air when they were close to each other.

Back in the cool shade of the garage, Sarge attached the toilet seat so it would encircle the hole he’d cut in the open-ended box. It would do. He carried it out toward where Grace was digging.

When she caught sight of his creation, she smiled. “That’s perfect. Do you have any ideas on privacy?”

“Yeah, I have a tarp in the garage that I can nail caddy corner. Should be fine.” He took the shovel from her hands and started digging. “You rest for a while. Just keep me company.”

They stayed in amiable silence for a while as she leaned against the fence.

“I can’t help thinking that I’ll never see my dad again.”

“If anyone can make it through this on his own, it’s your dad. We’ve spent a lot of hours talking about all kinds of scenarios. He wasn’t the kind of man to be caught unprepared out on the road. Let’s not count him out yet, Grace. Not yet.” He glanced up at her. “But there are others that won’t be so lucky. People from our everyday lives that neither one of us will see again.”

“What about your family?” she asked. “Where are they?”

“Don’t have any. My mom died a few years back.”

“She was your only family?”

“Yeah.”

Grace looked at him, obviously expecting more. “Well are you going to share, or do I have to keep asking you personal questions?”

“What do you want to know?”

“What happened to your dad?”

“I’ve never met him. I have his last name, but my mom traveled from Ireland to the US while she was pregnant with me so I’d be born here—be a US citizen.”

“She didn’t like it in Ireland?”

“She wasn’t Irish.” He glanced up at her and sighed. “She was born in Germany during World War II. My family, her and my grandparents, escaped Germany hidden in the back of a vegetable truck when she was still an infant. They hid from the Nazis in France for a while until it became too dangerous. Then, my grandparents sent my mom away to a children’s refugee camp in Northern Ireland. She escaped the concentration camps, but she never saw anyone from her family again.”

Grace sat silent for several moments before pressing on. “She wasn’t married to your dad?”

Sarge shook his head. “No. They hadn’t been together long. I was a total shock to her—a very late-in-life baby.” He paused, not knowing what else to say, then shrugged. “It’s been almost three years since she died.”

“I’m sorry.”

He nodded his thanks for the sentiment. “Our family history gave her a unique way of looking at the world. She taught me not to blindly trust the government, to always be able to provide the basics of food and water for myself, to always be able to protect myself. It was important to her, and she made sure it was important to me, too.”

“It sounds like your mom and my dad would have gotten along.” She laughed. It was a sweet musical sound that made him smile. “I’ve always described being raised by my father as living in a case study on paranoia. At least I thought it was paranoia at the time. But I guess both our parents had it right all along.”

“Yep. They did,” he said, swiping at a trickle of sweat at the side of his face.

“Do you want go to the lake tonight to clean up?”

“No. Too dangerous.”

“Well unless there’s a big riot or something, I’m going. You can come with me or not. Your choice.”

Her mild voice took the bite out of her flippant attitude, but not enough as far as he was concerned.

“Grace, you’ll go when I say it’s okay, not before.” Sarge caught the straightening of her spine out of the corner of his eye.
Okay, here it comes.

“I agreed to come with you out of respect for my father’s judgment, but I don’t need you to protect me. I can protect myself. And, I sure don’t need you dictating to me what I can and can’t do.”

Sarge stabbed the ground with the shovel again and left it standing upright. He moved toward Grace and hovered over her until they were nose to nose. “I promised your father that I would take care of you, and that’s what I’m going to do. I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but you don’t really have a choice. I’m not letting you go off and get yourself killed because you got a little sweaty today.” His eyes roamed over her face while her breathing hit him in short, hot pants. “Don’t argue, Grace. This situation is nonnegotiable.”