Saving Liberty (Kissing #6) (31 page)

Every time I spoke, it seemed to inflame him more. When I opened my eyes, I saw his body growing harder, every muscle standing out, his lips drawn back over his teeth in a snarl of lust. When one hand came up to maul my slippery breast and I said his name, I heard him moan in response, sounding almost helpless. The idea that I could do that to him, that the sound of my voice could make a man like him lose control, made me heady.

He sped up, his body slamming into mine. All I could think about was the hot, silken slide of him inside me, every thrust pushing me faster and faster towards my peak. My fingertips clawed at the slick tiles: I wanted to tear out great hunks of wall, it felt so good.

He put his mouth to my ear, never slowing his thrusts. That hint of Irish silver in his voice again: he was
incredibly
turned on. “I never want to stop fucking you,” he said, every syllable a hot little rush of pleasure in my ear. “I want to wake up and fuck you. I want to fuck you all day and I want to fuck you before you go to sleep at night. You. Are. Mine.”

I wanted to tell him how much I wanted him, too. I wanted to tell him how good that sounded. But my orgasm was seconds away and all I could manage was:
“Yes!”

And then he buried himself inside me and I felt the heat of him as he came. His possessive growl in my ear sent me over the edge and I screamed out my climax, grabbing his shoulders and squeezing him tight as I rocked and spasmed around him.

Kian

I’d wrung out our clothes and cranked up the room’s air conditioning to blow warm air at them, but it would take hours for them to be anything like dry. So we lay naked in the bed, me on my back and Emily cuddled into my side using my chest as a pillow. I could hear a helicopter in the distance but otherwise it was quiet, even the traffic dying down outside.

I felt...
peaceful.
It was more than just the afterglow. The simple pleasure of being alone with her, without having to hide our feelings, was a release unlike anything I’d ever felt. We were on the run with the whole world against us and yet, with Emily’s soft, damp hair against my chest and each slow breath she took wafting warmly against me, I felt calm.

And that meant that, for the first time, I could think about opening up. The idea of reliving things made my chest tighten... but I’d promised myself I’d do this, if I got her back. I knew that if I didn’t, if I kept myself locked up and closed off, there was no future for us... and no way was I giving her up.

What tipped me over the edge was when she reached out in the darkness and took my hand, tilting her head and looked up at me. A car went past outside, its headlights lighting up her face, and her expression said,
it doesn’t matter how bad it is. I’m here for you.
Just like I’d been there for her, at Camp David.

I swallowed. And began.

“It was in Iraq,” I said. “But that’s not the whole story.” I stopped for a second. Iraq was a more recent wound, painful to talk about but near the surface. What happened before that was dug in deep, right down in my soul. I’d never talked to
anyone
about that.

But I wanted her to know all of me.

“I come from a big family,” I said. “Lots of brothers. Irish dad, American mom. We moved around a lot when I was a kid, back and forth between Ireland and the US. Some of us were raised mostly over there; I was born here and raised mostly over here. It was sort of crazy: my dad travelled a lot and we were never in the same school for more than six months. But we all took care of each other and my folks loved each other.”

Emily looked up at me, listening. She could hear it in my voice: something bad was coming.

“I was still in high school when it happened. My dad was away working so we were living with my mom for a whole summer. She met these people—just friends, she said. And she started spending more and more time with them. Us kids didn’t think much of it. We figured she was lonely without my dad and needed the company. So she’d disappear all day and we’d... you know, mess around and get into trouble, like kids do.” I swallowed. “Only... it turned out, they weren’t friends at all. They were this organization. A cult.”

She slid one arm around me. “A
cult?”

I nodded. “By the time we realized, she’d been sucked pretty deep into it. She’d disappear for days at a time and she’d come back happy... but she’d look terrible, as if she hadn’t slept or eaten the entire time she’d been away.” My voice tightened. “I’m pretty sure they were giving her drugs.”

“Jesus... what did you do?”

“What could we do? We were just a bunch of kids. I tried to talk some sense into her but she wouldn’t hear a word against the cult—she actually came close to hitting me, when I criticized it, and she’d
never
done that before. We didn’t want to call the cops: none of it was illegal, at least nothing we could prove. And we thought child services might take us into care.” I stared up at the ceiling. “It got worse and worse. Guys started coming around to our house, not just to talk to mom but to talk to
us.
Really creepy questions, about what we wanted to do with our lives. And they gave us tests.”

“Tests?”

“Like personality tests. And they took photos. That scared the crap out of me. I started to ask around and I started to hear things... nobody dared to say much but there were rumors about what they did to children.”

Emily covered her mouth with her hands.

I swallowed and closed my eyes. I was back there, reliving that day. I could feel the summer heat throbbing through the open kitchen door, smell the eggs I’d cooked everyone for breakfast. “My mom’s changed,” I narrated. “I mean, changed completely. She’s talking about taking us to live full-time with the cult at one of their camps. But before that, she tells us that one of our brothers—Bradan—is going to—” I swallowed again, my voice catching. “He’s going to
not live with us
for a while. He’s going on a special trip, with some of her friends.”

“Oh my God,” said Emily.

“And we all...
know.
I mean, we’re just kids but we know that something really, really bad is going to happen to our brother. But we can’t stop her. She’s our
mom,
what are we going to do: hit her? We follow her outside and we’re grabbing her arms and trying to stand in front of the car and Bradan’s in the back seat screaming that he can’t get the door open and—”

Goddammit, my eyes were hot. I wasn’t going to cry. Fuck that.

“And she drove off and I never saw Bradan again.”

I didn’t open my eyes but I could feel Emily staring at me in absolute horror. I felt for her hand, found it and squeezed it. I needed that squeeze to be able to carry on but I wanted to be able to reassure her, too. She didn’t know there was worse to come.

“My dad arrives home and we tell him what’s happened. Now he’s been away for months: he hasn’t seen my mom since before she joined the cult. So at first, he can’t understand what the fuck we’re talking about. But then she gets home and he tries to talk to her. She’s convinced he’s evil: the cult turn you against outsiders. She says she’s going to take the rest of us, right now, and starts pushing us into the car. Her and my dad have this almighty row. And... she grabs a kitchen knife.”

I opened my eyes and looked down at Emily. “He wrestles with her but she’s fighting like crazy, she won’t let go of the knife. So he has to—” My voice caught. “He knocks her head against the floor. Hard.” I was having trouble getting the words out, now. “And she just goes limp.”

We just lay there in silence for a moment as she digested it.

“It tore my brothers and me apart. Losing Bradan, losing my mom... and then they sent my dad to prison and called it murder and some of us sided with him and some with my mom. We tried to hold the family together: that’s when we got the shamrock tattoos, to remind us we still had each other. But it didn’t work. We all went in different directions: some of us went into foster care, Carrick ran away... and I signed up with the Marines. Had to wait until I was seventeen, but I was waiting outside the recruitment office when it opened on my seventeenth birthday.”

I stroked Emily’s hair. “I’d lost everything: my mom, my dad, my whole family. The military seemed like it’d give me...
something.”
I paused. “They make you get parental consent, if you’re seventeen,” I said bitterly. “I had to go to the prison to see my dad—the only time I ever visited him. I didn’t say a word to him, just slapped the form down in front of him and waited until he’d signed it, then walked off. Haven’t seen him since.” I took a deep breath and let it out. “I get it. I’ve worked it through my head a million fucking times: he had to do it, he had no choice, he was trying to save us. But
he still killed my mom.”

Emily shook her head slowly. I understood—there were no words.

“So I signed up. Did four years in the marines. When I started I was pretty messed up but you know what?
It worked.
The military’s pretty good at building you back up. After a while, the guys around you start to feel like brothers. I had a family again. By the end of four years in Iraq, we were
tight.
”

She nodded and gave me a tentative smile. “That’s good.”

I nodded... but then she saw the pain in my eyes and her face fell. “Oh, no....”

“End of the day,” I said. “Sun’s going down. We’re in a pretty safe area of town, one we’ve been in plenty of times before.” I closed my eyes. I could feel the warm breeze on my face. “We’re laughing and joking and talking about how much we’d like a cold beer right now. We’ve been around there so many times, the locals know us: they’re friendly.” Then this call comes in: they want us to check out a store. Some moron claims that insurgents are storing explosives there. But I know this place: the guys a cobbler, for God’s sake. I know him. He fixed my boots for me. He doesn’t have anything more dangerous in his store than boot polish. But the guys on the radio won’t listen, so we all troop over there.”

I actually smiled as I remembered. “We’re like,
we’re sorry, but we have to check,”
and the store owner’s like,
didn’t I fix your boots for you? Were the boots not right?”
He’s not even pissed off, he’s
laughing
about it because we can both see how ridiculous it is. But we make a show of searching his store and, of course, there’s nothing there and I apologize and we all troop out again.”

I swallowed and opened my eyes. “I come out first, because I want to get on the radio and tell the guy back at base what an asshole he is. But just as I walk out into the street, the store blows up.”

Emily was staring at me but I couldn’t look at her anymore. I was deep in my memories, feeling the scratch of the sand against my face and smelling the smoke in the air. “See, the intelligence had been wrong... and right. The insurgents
were
storing explosives..in the store next door. They assumed we were working our way down the street and we’d go into their store next so they ran out the back and used a remote detonator to blow the whole place. Took out three stores, killed five locals... and every one of my unit except me.”

I finally managed to meet her eyes. It was easier because we had something in common. “That’s how I knew what you were going through,” I said. “I was damaged, too, just in a different way. Couldn’t let myself care about anyone again. Quit the marines. Went into the Secret Service. And I was
angry.
I was mad that I survived. I never stopped being angry. Not until I met you.”

She slid on top of me and hugged me tight, wrapping her arms around me and pressing her cheek to my chest.

“That’s what I am,” I told her. “That’s why I am how I am.” I looked down at her. “That’s what you get. If you want me.”

She immediately slid up my body, leaned down and kissed me hard. “I
do
want you.”

We stayed like that for a while, enjoying the closeness. I felt better, as if I’d cut out some toxic part of myself that had been slowly poisoning me. I didn’t have to throw it away; I could hold onto it, remember the people I’d lost. But it was out of me. And the anger that had controlled me for so long... now it felt a little more like I controlled it.