Just Give In… (10 page)

It was too bad he was suffering alone in the shower, but that was the agreement, and that was what was smart, and frankly, he didn’t deserve her until he admitted how much he needed a woman in his bed. Not just any woman, though. No, only her.

Still, it was a shame that he was so stubborn and wasn’t there now. A crying shame, she thought, remembering the way his big body felt on top of her, feeling him push deep inside her, his hard chest rough against her breasts. In the warm sun, her nipples grew achy, and her hips arched, searching for him, wanting him. Desire flowed through her, as soft as the sun, and she could feel her body swell. From the other room, she could hear the sounds of his shower, knew the water was darkening his hair, glistening on his chest, running down his long legs…

Soon Brooke reached between her legs, imagining his hands there, his hungry mouth on her breasts. If she closed her eyes, it was his body covering her, his industrious finger pleasuring her, his burning touch that was heating her skin.

Faster she stroked, her eyes tightly closed, her hips straining to meet him. Finding nothing above her but cool air, her teeth cut into her lip, willing her hand to be longer, thicker, warmer…

But, no…

Furious with him, furious with her useless hand, Brooke swore and opened her eyes.

The Captain.

He was leaning against the doorjamb, a towel wrapped around his waist, not that it mattered because the man was huge when aroused. Brooke froze on the spot, legs splayed open, her body exposed.

If she smiled at him, if she opened her arms…

But, no. Instead she stared, melting under his white-hot gaze, willing him to take the step.

Only one.

It was humiliating to endure, her eyes pleading, her thighs wide, and the Captain standing fast. Eventually her eyes drifted closed.

For a long, long time there was only the lonely silence, and when Brooke dared to look again, the Captain was gone.

T
HEY DIDN’T SPEAK
for most of the afternoon—thankfully. Every time Jason happened to glance in her direction, all he could picture was the heavy invitation in her eyes, the glistening dark curls between her legs, the swollen pink flesh that begged to be filled.

His cock would never recover. Ever.

His cock’s opinion notwithstanding, he knew he’d done the right thing. Brooke was too vulnerable. When she got her own place, when she told her brother that she was basically broke and Hart told her he didn’t care, then she’d be glad that Jason had been the sensible one.

He noticed as she bent over a milk crate, her shirt gaping open, the line between her breasts damp with sweat. He wished that he’d never tasted her, never taken her. Best to ignore her, best to forget.

It was while studiously ignoring her non-presence that he ripped his finger on a jagged piece of metal. He swore, not loud enough that she could hear, because if she wasn’t concerned about him bleeding to death, he’d be happy to die in her ignorance of that fact.

However, Brooke didn’t seem concerned, picking through a collection of old vacuum radio tubes. Mumbling something unpleasant, Jason escaped inside to bandage his thumb. As he passed by the kitchen, he spotted a strange object hanging over the sink. A piece of wire, twisted into two cirlces with four dangling wires. Yellow resistors had been threaded onto the wire, and from the top circle extended a red Zener diode. It was either a hippopotamus or a… Jason cracked a smile. A unicorn.

A note was attached to the rear leg.

Jason laughed. It didn’t matter how bad things were in Brooke’s world, it didn’t register with her. A more level-headed man might have called her delusional, the way she plodded ahead, ignoring all the warning signs in front of her. But there was something fascinating about her world that made a less level-headed man want to stay and explore. Listen to the pure joy of her laugh, see the happiness she found in the ordinary, lick the sweat from the golden skin of her breasts.

Hell.

Shaking off the lust, Jason reminded himself that
platonic
was the word of the day. And platonic did much to explain why he spent the next two hours rigging up an old computer terminal display. By mounting a wireless router to it, he could send messages to the display via his phone. Best of all, the portable motion sensor would alert him when someone was skulking around. Elaborate, yes. Overkill, probably. Egotistical, definitely.

And somebody was definitely curious. He could see her spying on him as he lugged the computer into the house, where he wedged it on the kitchen counter between the vise and rotary saw. Three minimal modifications later and his first message was glowing in eerie 1970s’ green.

He stood back and admired his own genius, then returned outside. Brooke stood underneath the shade netting, clipboard in hand, unmoved by his genius or pretending to be unmoved. However, it was a mere twenty minutes later that the motion sensor triggered the alarm on his phone. Not so unmoved after all, he thought, aware that she was no longer nearby.

Patiently he waited until she returned to the yard, then he pocketed the gasket he’d been meaning to attach to the faucet and went to investigate what she’d done. Inside he found a new note hanging from the unicorn.

Quickly he changed his bandage, and escaped to the privacy of one of his sheds before he texted his response.

Shortly after that, Brooke changed her clothes, skipping down the porch steps with a pink scarf tied around her neck. She had stolen some of his white light-emitting diodes, using them as a light-up hair ornament. Mutely she glided toward him, nodded once, and then he watched as she drove off in her wreck of a car. Exactly forty-seven minutes passed before he allowed himself to read her response.

Jason tilted his head back and laughed.

T
HE
C
APTAIN WAS WAITING
up for her when she got home, and at first, she pretended as if she didn’t see him sitting in the kitchen, a half-gutted cylindrical gadget laying out on the table. Not that it was really a kitchen with the piles of tools, the clunky air compressor, and the neatly organized rows of milk crates along the wall. She liked that he was at peace amongst the chaos. It never flustered him or frustrated him. No, the Captain was a very passive man for a soldier.

“How was dinner?” he asked casually.

“Good,” she answered, equally causally, leisurely strolling across the room, clutching the brown paper bag to her chest. It was empty, there was no vibrator, but he was intrigued yet trying not to look intrigued and Brooke mentally patted herself on the back.

The Captain inspected the bag, met her eyes and then buried himself back in his task. Okay, not so successful after all.

“How was your brother?”

“Good,” she replied.

“Did you tell him?” he asked, still not looking at her.

Brooke stopped, aware of the knot in her stomach. It wasn’t a fun, sexual tension knot, but the less fun, truthiness knot. “Tell him what?”

“Tell him where you’re staying.”

“No.”

“Is he nice to you?”

She knew the words were an effort for him. The Captain wasn’t a man for light conversation, but at least he was giving it a try. “I think he’s warming. Given time, I’m sure we can establish a solid foundation, and at that point, I’ll explain my situation.”

At that, his scar silvered in the fluorescent lights. “Can I ask you a question?” Another surprise.

“Are you sure you want to?”

“Yes.”

She leaned against the sofa, the very place where he was going to sleep tonight—alone—and sniffed. All across America, men were sleeping on couches because their women had kicked them out of the bed. Trust the Captain to be the exception. “You should understand that asking questions implies something more than a traditional employer-employee relationship, and I’m not sure that it’s covered in our agreement.”

The Captain stayed silent, which told her much about his opinion of her snarky remark.

“I’m sorry.” Charlene Hart had been snarky when she drank, and although Brooke knew she had picked up some of Charlene’s less than admirable habits, that didn’t mean she had to like it.

“It’s about time somebody besides me gets to apologize.”

“I try not to screw up,” she told him, and she did. Lately, she seemed to be doing it less. Apparently his meticulous nature was starting to rub off on her, which was a good thing. Details had never been her strong point. “I think I’m doing a better job at not screwing up than you,” she added, only because it wasn’t very often she could feel superior. It felt nice to flaunt it.

“Can we get back to the question?”

“Talking about your mistakes is a lot more fun,” she answered, neatly dodging the question.

“Brooke,” he said, frustration in his voice.

“Captain,” she answered, with a pointed glance at the tiny sofa, equally frustrated. “What happened?”

As probing questions went, it was pretty much the worst. She didn’t like the abnormalities in her life. She didn’t like feeling like a freak, someone who never belonged anywhere, but out of all the people she’d ever met, it was the Captain who would probably understand best. She suspected he’d had his share of abnormalities as well, and he didn’t seem to care. Brooke dropped the useless sack on the couch, her fingers locked on the hard back for support, and then took a long breath.

“My mother was a very nice woman with what she called a joyous spirit, which meant she loved her spirits a little too much—usually vodka because it doesn’t smell. She had very little education and very few skills, and since she wasn’t very fond of the drudgery of the workplace, she usually avoided working and would hook up with whatever kind stranger wanted to take her and her daughter in.”

Just as she’d expected, he didn’t look surprised or disapproving. No matter the way the wind blew, the Captain stood tall. “Where did the two of you live?”

“A lot of places. The road was our home.”

“When did she die?”

“January 1, 2002. Cirrhosis of the liver, although there was no confirmed diagnosis. I just assumed.”

“You’ve been alone since then?”

“Yes.”

“Working?”

“Some. I lived in Rhode Island for some time, a receptionist for a chiropractor, Dr. Morgan Downey Knox, the third. He was very particular about the way I answered the phone, but I was able to improve my vocabulary. While I was working in the doctor’s office, I looked up Tyler, and arranged the meeting in New York. My mother didn’t like to talk about my brothers, or my father, or Texas, but I knew a little and I wanted to know more. I thought creating this great life in New York would convince them that I was normal, but it took a large pile of cash, pretty much everything I had.”

“You are normal.”

“No one’s normal,” she said, smiling at the one-eyed man surrounded by left-behind parts.

“There’s a point. So why do you want to be normal?”

“Don’t you?” she asked, but she knew the answer. She just wanted to understand why.

He shook his head, not giving her the answer she wanted. The Captain was a tricky man, particular about his secrets and not wanting people to know he was tricky. Being particular about her secrets as well, Brooke understood.

“Can I ask you a question?” she finally asked, because this was important.

The Captain considered it and then nodded. “Seems fair.”

“Why do you do all this? Why all the repairing and the fixing and the creating?” As probing questions went, it was pretty much the worst, but she figured the tricky man owed her.

“Because nobody else does.”

“You like to be different?”

“Different?” He frowned at her choice of words, scratched at the brown stubble of his jaw. “It’s not different. It just is.”

“What’s the best thing you ever created?”

His uncovered eye narrowed, not so impassive, not so comfortable now. He liked living in chaos, but the worst sort of chaos was the chaos inside. That sort of chaos wasn’t so easy to fix. Brooke understood that, too.

“That’s question number two.”

“You can have a question number two if you’d like,” she countered. It was only fair.

At first she didn’t think he would answer, but eventually he did, because in the end, the Captain was a fair man, too.

“I was a maintenance officer in Iraq. The
muj’s
were blowing up all sorts of shit, soldiers, too. Standard issue wasn’t working for the trucks, so we had to get creative. They needed metal plating, shields to protect from the blast. So, me and Mad Max, we started scrounging whatever we could get our hands on, and we hobbled together some of the butt-ugliest transports ever. It worked. The
muj
still tried to blow up shit, but after that, men came home. Finally the beltway clerks pulled their head out and got wise to the problem, and then the Humvees rolled off fully loaded with one thousand pounds of ballistic-resistant American steel. But for a while, me and Max, we did some good work.”