Seven Days to Forever (16 page)

That had been Thursday. This was Sunday. Once again she wondered how it was possible that only three days had passed. It was as if she’d known him longer, as if she’d been waiting for him for years, the man in her dream, the one who would guide her through the sensual maze of candle flames without getting burned.

She twisted, tipping up her face to improve the fit of their mouths. She felt a smile flicker over his lips. She followed the smile with her tongue.

He groaned and brought his hand to her face. His fingers were unsteady where they stroked her cheek, the muscles of his thighs and arms were rigid with tension, yet he kept his strength under control. He tunneled his fingers into her hair to hold her steady as he answered her caress with one of his own.

She could feel his erection against her hip. It exhilarated her, like the rush of air on her face as the roller coaster took her through a swooping turn. Her body remembered how this went. Responses long denied were swelling with a force that was far more powerful than anything she could have dreamed.

He pulled back. His gaze burned into hers. “That’s why.”

She spread her fingers over his chest. “What?”

“Let me show you again,” he murmured.

His kiss was more certain this time. He tasted her with lush sweeps, using his lips and his tongue in a way that made her melt. When he closed his hand over her breast, it felt so inevitable, like an extension of his exploration of her mouth, that she didn’t even consider resisting. She arched herself more fully into his palm, exclaiming in delight as he found her nipple through her clothes.

Something creaked. Abbie felt herself falling sideways. Before they could tip onto the floor, Flynn flung himself backward and hauled her on top of him. She landed on his chest, her legs sprawled between his, her nose against the hollow of his throat. The cot slid a few inches upward, wobbled, then steadied.

They were both breathing hard. Abbie braced her hands on his shoulders and lifted her head. She shook the hair from her face so she could look at him.

He was smiling, his lips still moist from their kiss. Dimples creased the grooves beside his mouth. Warm little laugh lines spread from the corners of his heartbreakingly blue eyes. His black hair was tousled into soft curls that fell carelessly back from his forehead. And somehow his palm was still cradling her breast.

Oh, but he was a wickedly handsome man. So sure of himself, so sexy, so appealing. He was stretched out beneath her, watching her with a hunger that sent a shudder of response down her spine. He hooked his legs over hers, pressing their lower bodies together. The intimate contact made her shudder again.

“Does that answer your question?” he asked.

“What question?”

He gave her breast a light squeeze, then moved his hand to her cheek. “Why you wouldn’t be happy with Peter.”

It took a moment for her brain to register what he’d said. The response that bubbled through her started to ebb. “Is that why you kissed me? Were you trying to prove something?”

“Hell, no. I just wanted to kiss you, that’s all.” He stroked her jaw. “You’re a passionate woman. I thought you’d like it.”

“Passion isn’t all I want, Flynn.”

He moved his thumb over her lower lip. “But you did like it.”

She sighed and kissed his thumb. “I think we had this conversation before.”

“Uh-huh. Right before you claimed I’m not your type.”

“You’re not.”

He tilted his hips. It was a subtle movement, only a slight shift in the angle. The quiver it sent through her body made her a liar.

Oh, yes.
Yes.
At this moment he was exactly the man she wanted. “Flynn, this shouldn’t have happened. We shouldn’t do this.”

He lifted his head and sucked lightly on her lower lip.

Abbie made a low noise in her throat. She tried to summon the energy to argue. She fought to remember
why
she should argue. She moved her head aside. “I’m not that kind of woman, Flynn. I’m not casual about…”

“Sex?” He kissed the side of her neck. “Desire?” He ran his palms down her back and cupped her buttocks. “Mutual enjoyment?”

She pressed her face to his shirt. For a weak moment she let herself absorb the pleasure of his touch, his familiar scent, the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. But she knew better than this, didn’t she?
Didn’t she?

But it had been so long. And this felt so very, very good….

But it had felt good with Stuart, too.

She blinked and raised her head. “Please, stop. I can’t do this.”

Flynn’s smile faded. He immediately took his hands off her buttocks and released his hold on her legs. “Abbie? What’s wrong?”

She pushed off his chest. The cot started to tip with the shift in her weight. She got to her feet and half fell onto Sarah’s cot. “Flynn, I haven’t had sex in eight years.”

He looked as if he’d been punched. He jackknifed upward and twisted to face her. “What did you say?”

She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Don’t look at me as if I’m some kind of freak. Celibacy might not be fashionable, but—”

“No. That’s not what I thought. I’m surprised, that’s all. I’m…surprised,” he repeated. He moved his hand as if he was about to touch her, then shoved his fingers through his hair. “Why, Abbie?”

She hesitated. Normally, she wouldn’t talk about this to anyone, not even her sisters. But there had been nothing normal about her life since she’d met Flynn. She glanced around, belatedly aware of how thin the canvas walls were.

“It’s okay,” Flynn said, as if recognizing the reason for her discomfort. “The men on watch are too far away to hear us and the chief’s wearing a radio headset. There’s only you and me.” He swung his feet to the floor and sat facing her, his forearms braced on his knees. As he continued to regard her, his expression hardened. “Did somebody abuse you? Is that it?”

“No, not in the way you think. Stuart didn’t—” She stopped and took a deep breath. “I was twenty-one when I met Stuart Moran. He swept me off my feet. We lived together for almost a year. He was…very skillful when it came to sex. He always made sure I enjoyed myself and he taught me things about physical pleasure that I hadn’t known were possible. I loved him with my entire heart.”

Flynn’s expression didn’t ease. If anything, it grew grimmer. “And you’re still in love with him, is that it? Like the way Sarah is still mourning her fiancé?”

“No, Flynn. Stuart didn’t die. He only left.”

“He what?”

“He cleaned out his closet and emptied our bank account and he left,” she stated. “That’s when I finally realized that I loved him for his looks and his body. I loved him for the good times he showed me, all that mutual pleasure that you said men and women were made for. I was so completely wrapped up in a sexual infatuation that I didn’t see how empty it all was.”

Flynn regarded her in silence. Apart from a muscle that twitched in his cheek, he was completely motionless. He looked as if he’d been punched again.

“And it
was
empty, Flynn. It was hollow, just a shell of what a real relationship should be. I thought Stuart was my Mr. Right and that we would build a life together, but as soon as he learned there might have been consequences to all the sex, he packed up and ran.”

“Consequences?”

“I thought I was pregnant. I wasn’t, but I was eager to have a child. I love kids. I’d assumed Stuart and I would get married.”

He rubbed his face, then squeezed his cheeks between his fingers and his thumb and continued to study her. “I’m sorry, Abbie.”

“No, it was just as well I learned what he was like before I actually did become pregnant.”

“Yes, it was, but I’m sorry for that crack I made yesterday about picking out your china pattern and the names of your firstborn.”

“You didn’t know.”

“That’s right, I didn’t.” He took her hands and held them loosely between his. “But eight years is a long time to deny yourself. Plenty of people have bad experiences and try again.”

“What makes you think I’m not trying?”

“You said you’ve been celibate.”

“That’s because I learned from my mistake. I know exactly what I want now, and it isn’t a few stolen kisses or some shallow affair.”

“Then what do you want, Abbie?”

She knew the answer to this question—she’d thought about it for eight years. “I want the kind of love that doesn’t depend solely on how you look or how cleverly you perform a sex act. I want the real thing. I want what my parents have, what my sisters and their husbands have. What we saw when Anton and Neda Vilyas hugged their youngest child.” Her throat felt thick. She swallowed and went on. “I want commitment in the truest sense of the word, Flynn. I want a marriage that grows stronger with each baby that’s born and every gray hair. Every wrinkle. Every argument, every holiday and every twist in the road of life.”

He dropped his gaze to their joined hands. “Most marriages aren’t like that, Abbie.”

“I know that. That’s why it’s so important to find the right person to fall in love with.”

“You’re an idealist.”

“You say that as if there’s something wrong with it.”

“It’s not wrong. It’s rare.”

“Why? Because I have dreams and I won’t settle for less?”

“Because you don’t hold back. Everything you do, you do a hundred percent. Like the way you’ve let yourself feel about this mission. The way you cry. The way you believe in love.”

“Well, what about you, Flynn? Don’t you have dreams? Isn’t there anything you want?”

He moved his thumbs over the backs of her knuckles, trailing them down the faint lines of her tendons. “Yes, Abbie. There are things that I want.”

She waited for him to continue. Another silence fell, this one longer than the last.

When he finally spoke, his voice was low and rough. “Each time I have to fire a round at an enemy’s heart so he doesn’t kill my teammate, or I see a wild-eyed teenager with explosives strapped to his chest, I want world peace. Every time the team is bivouacked near some village and I give my rations away to the hungry kids who beg on the edge of camp, or I see farmers with no legs because their fields were full of land mines, I want the scientists who develop our weapons to turn their energies into finding a way to feed the planet’s starving people.”

She might have been all right if he’d smiled or if he’d followed his comment with some witty quip. Instead he lifted his gaze and looked at her.

His barriers were down. He was dead serious. He was letting her see the pain she’d merely glimpsed before, and the depth of his emotion stunned her.

She felt the memory of her own troubles pale beneath the force of Flynn’s sadness. What had happened to him? It had to have been far worse than an unhappy love affair. Had it been a mission? Or was it something to do with the family he didn’t want to talk about? “It sounds as if you’re as much of an idealist at heart as I am, Flynn.”

“No, Abbie, I’m not. I learned a long time ago there’s a big difference between what we want and what we can have. This is the only world we’ve got. All we can do is make the best of it.” He tightened his grip and brought her knuckles to his lips. “So go ahead and call me shallow and empty because I believe in living in the moment and grabbing the good times.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You thought it. And that’s fine. Right now, this moment, is the only sure thing in life.” He leaned closer. “And right now, I want to kiss you.”

Abbie didn’t pull away. Somehow she couldn’t.

“I’m warning you this has nothing to do with wrinkles and holidays,” he said. “All I’m going to do is kiss you, okay?”

It didn’t seem to matter to her anymore that he was handsome enough to steal her breath. The vulnerability he hid behind his perfect face was his most compelling feature of all.

She felt a tear trickle into the corner of her mouth. She licked it off and nodded, then closed what was left of the distance between them and pressed her lips to his.

How could his kisses keep changing? Each time it seemed different, as if he were showing her another level, another layer of himself. His mouth was warm and giving, a silent caress with no demands, no promises, like a roller-coaster car slowing down and coasting to a stop at the end of the ride.

He got to his feet, slipped his arms beneath her and picked her up, then turned and placed her on her own cot. Without pausing, he took off her shoes, spread a blanket over her and tucked it under her chin. “Go to sleep, Abbie,” he murmured, leaning down to brush a kiss over her forehead. “There’s nothing more you can do now.”

She squeezed her eyes closed. Nothing she could do. About Matteo Vilyas? Or about her tangled feelings for Flynn?

* * *

Although every available man was at this briefing, there were empty chairs—a portion of the team was already deployed, spread out through the D.C. area to keep track of the men who had been followed after the botched exchange yesterday. Flynn focused on the map that was taped to the support pole.

“One LLA cell is in each of these locations. Two are roach motels, one is a rooming house.” Major Redinger used a pen to point at three of the four circles that had been marked on the map in red. “According to our information, the rent has been paid in cash through to this coming Friday. I believe that gives us an outside time frame for the LLA’s intentions.”

Friday, Flynn thought. That was only four days away. The mission would probably be over by then. He glanced at Abbie. She was standing at the edge of the group, her arms folded tightly over her sweater, her face pale. This morning he’d offered once more to take her home, but she had refused, just as he’d expected. The major had backed her up, saying she should stick around in case the LLA wanted to use her for another ransom drop.

Flynn didn’t like it. He didn’t want her taking that risk. Besides, she was already too emotionally involved. She was going to be devastated if this didn’t turn out well and Matteo was killed. Flynn had tried to warn her about maintaining her distance, but she didn’t know how to do anything halfway.

That guy Stuart had been a fool. How could he have tossed aside a woman as compassionate and wholeheartedly honest as Abbie?