Whatever Remains (29 page)

             
Her body welcomed him: sheathed him to the hilt and held tight, the tension radiating outward through her, all the way to her fingertips. She struggled to keep up on her toes, spine arched, her balance precarious. But Ben held her steady; he didn’t struggle with the slick, wet shower, but he kept the rhythm slow, almost gentle, the movements small.

             
When the water turned cold, he withdrew and turned her. Their competing, restless breathing patterns battled in the wet air between them, neither of them satisfied, both of them electric along their nerve endings and ready to burst. Ben reached up and tucked a stray piece of hair back behind her ear, his eyes hard with restraint. Jade’s body throbbed, her pulse thumping hard between her legs, but this wasn’t working.

             
She wanted to preserve the image in her mind: him in front of her naked, aroused, glittering with water and prickling with chill bumps. She wanted to save it and tuck it away and pull it out later, when she was without him, and remember how worth it it was to want him so badly.

             
“Do me later,” she urged. She dropped to her knees on the marble floor and took him in her mouth.

“Am I dead?” He had to be, because how did he explain what he was watching in the mirror? With his feet at the head, chin propped on his folded arms at the foot, he lay stretched out on Jade’s bed on his stomach, her hands working magic along his tired back. And he had a brilliant view of her reflection in the dressing table mirror across from him; she was naked, hair damp and curling, straddling his hips while she worked the knots in his shoulders, her skin glowing, her breasts full and pink-tipped and swaying as she leaned into the massage. “I have to be: a blow job and a back rub in the same night? But I never thought I’d go to heaven.”

             
“Ass,” she accused, but her tone was light. He watched her dig the heel of one hand right between his shoulder blades – it was the best kind of hurt – and her arms squeezed her breasts together. “I can put on clothes if it’s less distracting that way.”

             
“I’ll burn all your clothes if you even think about it.”

             
“Major ass.” But she smiled. “The whole point of this, though, is for you to relax.”

             
“I’m super relaxed.” And he was. Still lethargic from the shower, watching her was a slow sizzle of a buildup, prepping him for the horizontal he’d promised her before. And he owed her big time; the image of her glancing up at him through the crystal drops of water on her lashes with her lips tight around his cock wasn’t one that would fade. Oh, the things he was going to do to her for that…But first he would enjoy her nimble hands, even if he couldn’t understand why she was so generous.

             
“Good.” Her fingertips worked outward across his shoulders, along the grooves of the blades, sensation rippling down through his skin and deep into the muscles.

             
“How are you so good at this?” he asked, letting his head fall to the side; his neck was getting tired trying to keep eyes on her.

             
“Atlas took a fall in the pasture about six years ago,” she said, voice getting that light, almost musical quality it did when she talked about horses. They were her joy, he’d come to realize. It was automatic, that love, a part of her DNA, just like her love for Clara. “And he was sore for weeks. There was an equine massage therapist –  ”

             
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

             
“ – who showed me how to do this.”

             
“An equine…no. I refuse to accept that exists.”

             
She laughed. “Oh, but it does.”

             
“So I’m getting the horse massage.”

             
“More or less. Plus nakedness.”

             
“Shoot me now.” She reached the base of his neck and kneaded. “Or not. Maybe after.”

             
He let her rub in silence for a while, the only sound that of the bed shifting and her skin gliding against his. Two weeks – he had two weeks off and all he wanted to do for those fourteen days was this.  He wanted to live in her bed; wanted to feel her skin and smell her hair.

             
He was falling apart, he realized suddenly. For the first time in his whole career – the first time since he’d laced up his boots at age eighteen and joined the Corps – he’d chosen his personal life over his professional life. In the split second that he’d decided not to hand the Latham case off to another pair of detectives, he’d chosen Jade and Clara over his twenty-eight combined years of service to country and community. Maybe twenty-eight was a magic number; Jade was twenty-eight. They’d both spent the same number of years getting to this moment on her bed. Maybe that meant something.

             
Or maybe he’d finally snapped.

             
“I was married,” he said before he was cognizant of forming the words.

             
Jade’s hands went still. He heard her breath catch. “What?”

             
He laid his temple against his folded hands so he could just see her from the corner of one eye. “I was married, once before. A long time ago.”

             
Her face had frozen, locked in an unreadable expression. Her pulse fluttered at the base of her throat and her breasts lifted as she took a deep breath. Her eyes – denim blue in the low lamplight – betrayed the emotions tumbling through her. She wet her lips. “You were?”

             
“Yeah.”

             
There were a thousand things she could have asked  - wanted to ask – but what she said was, “W-why are you telling me now?”

             
He felt a smile threaten, then die. “Because I should have told you a long time ago.”

             
She took another deep breath and her hands resumed. Her brows knitted together, a little line sprouting between. “And you thought that talking about it now would, what, make this all more romantic?”

             
The hurt in her voice stung. “Jade.” She stared at her hands as they circled across his back. “Jade. Baby.”

             
She sighed; her fingers stilled again. She shook her head and when she met his gaze, her eyes glittered with unshed tears. “I know, okay? I know that you’re not a sharing and caring kind of guy, and that, on some level, I should be grateful that you’re letting your guard down. Disclosure’s a good thing, right?” Her lips pressed together. “But just once could you let me be stupid and pretend?”

             
“Pretend what?”

             
She didn’t answer.

             
“What do you pretend?”

             
“That you’re just heartless,” she said woodenly. “Not that you’re capable of marriage and commitment. Because if you are – capable – then it’s just me. You just can’t do those things with me.”

             
Why had he opened his mouth? He guessed that’s what falling apart did to a guy. “I was eighteen,” he said. “And I was going into Basic and I wanted to make sure my girlfriend had something to fall back on. If something happened to me, I wanted her to have my benefits. We got married at this shitty little falling-apart church – it didn’t even have a steeple – five miles off base and spent two days together before I had to go. I had no idea how to be a good husband. I thought if I wrote to her, called when I could…I thought marrying her proved something. That when I got back, she’d be happy to see me.”

             
She wouldn’t look at him, still, but she was listening; she was listening so hard she was shaking.

             
“Instead, I got home and found out she was living with some guy named Stefan, and that she’d pawned the ring I’d bought her for two hundred bucks, and that she hated me.”

             
Her eyes cut over to him, wide and blue.

             
“My parents have a good marriage,” he said, “but not
because
they’re married. Same with Chris and Jess. Getting married isn’t some magic thing. I didn’t tell you about Shelby,” he said, realizing the reasons even as he said them, “because I don’t want to pretend that she was some important life stage for me. She was a bitch, and I was stupid, and I thank God every day I don’t have her in my life anymore. And because,” he admitted, “I didn’t want you getting some crazy idea that I was broken and needed fixing. Or that what happened then affects what happens with us now.”

             
She stared at him, blinking, for a long time. Then her hands slid down his arms and she leaned down, laying across his back. He felt her breasts and her hips and more tender places. She tucked her face into his neck, right beneath his ear.

             
“You stupid, stubborn, idiotic, prideful man,” she whispered.

             
Ben rolled – slowly so she had a chance to brace her hands on the mattress and not get tossed to the side – and gathered her up in his arms, a hand finding the back of her silken head and bringing her face in close over his. “You almost make that sound sweet.”

             
He knew what she wanted to say – he’d watched her almost say it so many times – but she kissed him instead.

             
He rolled again, so he was suspended above her. “It’s after three, and you have to be up in a couple hours,” he reminded.

             
The comment rattled some of her seriousness, as he’d hoped. She lifted arched brows. “Are you trying to beg off on sex?”

             
“Never. Just don’t blame me when you’re tired tomorrow.”

             
She grinned. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Married. He’d been
married
. Jade didn’t know what to do with that. And in the moment, she couldn’t put more than a fleeting thought toward it. Her fingers speared through his hair, holding his head to her, because as much as she wanted him to go exploring, she didn’t want the kiss to end, either. It was slower, gentler than before. They were both exhausted, and too many raw emotions had been plucked in both of them. But she wanted this, and so did he, and that mutual need did generous things to the contact between them.

             
Her tongue played against his, lips accommodating the demand of his. He had one hand braced on the mattress beside her head and the other worked between her legs; she was slippery wet, but he was taking his time.

             
Their lips finally broke apart and his mouth trailed down her throat. He traced the line of her collarbone with his tongue; she shivered. He went lower, hand sliding away, going to the soft inside of her thigh, removing one stimulation and adding another as he nuzzled at her breast. He left soft, suction cup kisses along the side, spiraling in. He reached to take her in hand – fingers slick – and pushed her breast up and in as his mouth closed around her nipple.

             
She let her head fall back off the foot of the bed, the weight of her hair drawing her down. Through half-closed eyes, she found her reflection in the dressing table mirror. Ben looked large and lethal as a panther on top of her, the bunched muscles of his shoulders carved with lamplight, his dark head bent to her breast. When he drew her nipple deep in his mouth, she watched it through the mirror, and heat moved through her like a whip-crack.

             
“Shit,” she murmured, hips lifting of their own, legs closing around his waist.

             
He flicked her nipple with his tongue and chuckled, the deep rumble reverberating through her chest. He moved to her other breast, giving it the same treatment. And she watched it all in the mirror, transfixed.

             
When her nipples were swollen and tender, he moved on, still downward, kisses skipping between her ribs. Across the flat of her stomach. He lingered just below her navel for long, tortuous seconds, sucking at her skin, probably leaving a mark.

             
“Don’t be a tease.”

             
His head lifted and he flashed her a grin in the mirror; he knew she was watching. The knowledge sent sparks fizzing through her belly. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, and spread her legs wider, wedging his wide shoulders between them.

             
She watched his head lower, felt his breath…and closed her eyes, delirious with sensation when he put his mouth to her.

             
When she came – it felt like forever, and just a heartbeat all at once, intense and intimate and overwhelming – he prowled back up her body and she lifted her head. “Thank you,” she murmured, winding her arms around his neck. “I
needed
that.”