The Cornerstone (45 page)

Shannon’s hands fisted in my shirt, tugging me close. “What’s next for you?” she asked.

I shook my head. This was one of my favorite locations on earth, and I was here with some of the best people I knew, but the only thing I wanted right now was her bare skin against mine. “I’ve been thinking about that, and I have some ideas, but…I don’t have the answers yet.”

“Then you should think about it in Boston,” she said. “You should call Nick when we get home. He’s a cradle-robbing asshole, but he’s a really good doctor. He’ll give you smart advice. And…you can always train the hedge fund wives or model for romance novel covers. There’s no shame in either.”

Surprised by the random compilation of ideas, I leaned back and studied her. “You’re not going to jump in and micromanage?”

“No,” she snapped. “You’ll ask for my help if you need it, and you know I’ll always give it to you.”

My chest throbbed with the pressure of my affection for her and long unspoken words. “Shannon, I have to tell—”

“Not now,” she interrupted, pressing her finger to my lips. “Not here.”

She linked her hands behind my neck and pulled me down, touching her lips to mine, and when her tongue slipped into my mouth, it tasted like my eternity.

SHANNON

W
e spent hours
talking and drinking with his friends and teammates.

They were a big, rowdy crew, and they served each other a ton of shit at every turn, and I saw why this was home to Will. It was just like my big, rowdy crew.

They told stories about their training days, their deployments, and the never-ending series of pranks they pulled on each other. It was a facet of him I’d never seen before, and I adored it. His arm stayed draped over my chair, his fingers mapping the space between my shoulder and elbow, and for the first time, I couldn’t grab hold of the darkness I felt when he was gone. As far as I reached, I couldn’t dredge the anger and emptiness that simmered beneath the surface just weeks ago.

I didn’t know whether that meant I’d let it go, or was allowing the steady pressure of his affection to slough it away for me. Or perhaps it was like he said while we watched the waves on the shore of La Jolla Cove this morning, “The best medicine is always salt water. It heals everything, every time.”

I couldn’t find any of it, so I stopped looking. I curled into his easy touch, sighing in relief when his thigh edged to mine and my body hummed with another point of contact.

We were tipsy as we walked back to his parents’ home, and my mind was heavy with questions—was he really leaving the military? After all this time? What was next? What did it all mean for us? Was he in pain now? Was there anything I could do? Would his shoulder ever improve?—but the questions could wait.

Once inside the front door, his palms dropped to my hips, squeezing, speaking the language that required no words. I looked up at him in the darkness, smiling, and took his hand. I led him through the house to the blue-gray room, motioned for him to step out of his sneakers, and then walked him backwards until his legs hit the bed. Wedged between his knees, my fingers tangled in his hair while his hands traveled over my back and thighs.

I threaded my fingers through his short beard, tugging just enough to bring his eyes up to mine. “I have something to say to you,” I said. “And I expect you to listen.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, a smirk playing on his lips.

“I love you,” I said. I could live for centuries, and I’d never forget the way Will’s eyes softened and glowed when I said those words. “And you have to know I don’t come to that statement lightly, and—”

“Shut up,” Will interrupted. His hands raced up my body to cup my face. “I love you, too, and I’m not listening to any opening remarks or qualifications on the matter. You are my fire and ice, my calm and chaos, my
everything
, and I can’t remember life before loving you. Now shut up and strip, unless you want me ripping those clothes off.”

He started unbuttoning his shirt, but I shook my head, wrapping my fingers around his wrist, and said, “Let me.”

His gaze never left me as I peeled his clothes from him. With an arched brow, he watched while I undressed without ceremony and crawled into his lap.

My hand smoothed up his flank and over his chest, pausing at his scarred shoulder. “Let me,” I whispered.

Will sucked in a breath as my lips feathered over his skin. I kissed every spot from his shoulder to his ear and back again, and I gobbled up each sigh and hum that slipped from his lips. Rising up on my knees, I pushed him back toward the pillows. He was quiet and obedient, and his eyes bathed me in the most glorious heat. I gathered him in my arms as best I could, my head on his chest and my hands flat on his back, and though his hips were bucking up in slow jabs and his cock was sliding against my center, hard and insistent, it was possible he required this moment exactly as much as I did. “Let me,” I said. “Let me take care of you. Let me love you. Let me be yours.”

“Shannon…you’ve always been mine.”

“Are you sure I’m not too much for you?”

“How could you ever be too much for me when I can’t get enough of you?” he said.

I reached between us, our foreheads bowed together to watch as he disappeared inside me. Our moans echoed around us when he was fully seated, and I held myself there, my eyes screwed shut and my hands on his neck with the beat of his pulse steady against my palms, his mouth a torment on my breasts and his beard tickling my belly, and my body moved of its own volition, knowing what we needed without conscious thought because we knew. We knew.

There was nowhere for these sensations to go but around and around, spinning and spreading out in waves that stole my words. The only sounds were of our shared murmurs and breaths, the creaking bed, the ocean.

He said my name in a long, content groan as he came, his mouth on my breast and those syllables marking me with a possession that felt boundless, eternal, permanent.

Our relationship was formed on the basis of really good sex, the types of which I hadn’t known existed before this man. We knew hate sex, angry sex, quick and easy sex, dirty sex, lazy morning sex, slow sex, kinky sex, but none of that encompassed this night.

This wasn’t sex.

This was love, and we both knew it.

SHANNON

Will:
Thank you for breakfast

Shannon:
Gross

Will:
What?

Shannon:
You can’t call clit-licking your “breakfast”

Will:
I can. I did.

Will:
I’ll do it again.

Shannon:
Such a meathead.

Will:
And remember which meathead left a handprint on your ass this morning

Shannon:
Oh that? Barely noticed.

Will:
Do not tempt me, little girl.

Shannon:
Yep, blah blah blah you’re going to spank me and tie me up. What else is new?

Will:
You’re real sassy until your wrists are tied behind your back and you have a cock in your mouth

Will:
And let’s put those vibrators to good use while you’re at it.

“Give me that,” Tom said, coming up behind me. He tugged my outerwear off and tossed it to the chair beside my desk. “You’ve been standing there, muttering to yourself and texting for five minutes. Whoever you’re talking to can wait but Patrick doesn’t have that muscle, and you
are
going to be late. We don’t need to start this week with an irritable Patrick.”

Tom pushed a Starbucks cup into my hand, and pointed toward the attic conference room. A hearty discussion of last night’s football game was underway when I arrived, and that distraction allowed my tardiness to go unnoticed.

Sam handed me a folder of documents I’d requested on one of his properties, and he pointed to my face. “Brought a little California sun home with you?”

A new swath of freckles covered my nose and cheeks, but thankfully, no sunburn. “Just a bit,” I said. “How was New Jersey?”

Sam tugged at his collar and straightened his tie, grimacing before he spoke. “Not great. Tiel had warned me that it wouldn’t be great, but…I figured I could handle a difficult family. Those people, though, they were
not
nice to her. I said something about it, and you’d think I was sticking up for Hitler and Mussolini.” He blew out a breath and reached for his coffee. “We drove back Friday morning.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Is Tiel okay?”

Sam released a low, rumbling laugh and leaned forward. “Tiel’s great, and it will be fine,” he said with a nod. “It’s unfortunate when you have a family but you can’t go home because they’re assholes. She has a real, living family—aunts and uncles, cousins, parents, grandparents—but they’re complete shit. But we’ll be fine without them.”

He joined the unending football conversation, and I opened my computer to a blessedly thin stack of unread emails. My calendar wasn’t enjoying the same levity.

Shannon:
Would it be possible to start this meeting?

Patrick:
It must be really annoying when people have no regard for your schedule

Shannon:
Yeah can we save the “Shannon’s always late” comedy for another day?

Shannon:
I’m prepping for the audit and closing on two investments today. You can speed this along, or I will.

“We should start with the beachfront,” Patrick said, gesturing to me. “Swampscott. Riley and I walked through it last Wednesday to get a sense of the fundamentals. What’s your angle on that?”

“It was a steal,” I said. “I haven’t thought through the restoration or marketing position yet, but they practically gave it away. And it tests new muscles for us. We’ll run out of farmhouses and brownstones eventually.”

“Probably not,” Matt said. “Statistically speaking, we wouldn’t. Not for hundreds of years.”

“And there’s your daily dose of
Matt Knows Math
,” Riley said.

Patrick leveled an impatient glare in Riley’s direction before turning back to me. “Get out there this week, or next, and decide which direction we’re taking this.” I made a note on my overstuffed calendar as Patrick shifted his attention. “Let’s get into status reports,” he said. “Matt, start us off.”

While Matt detailed his plans for the Mount Vernon project and his excitement about us visiting the site on Friday, I pulled my laptop close and read everything I could find about shrapnel wounds and nerve damage. I had no intention of project managing Will’s injury—as if he’d let me—but I wanted to get my facts straight.

The information was terrifying, and not because of what happened to Will, but what
could
have happened. The thought of him hurt, thousands of miles away, would always be too difficult for me to swallow, and reading about devastating injuries, lost limbs, widespread paralysis…it sucked the air from the room and had a knot of tension high in my throat.

I should have been engaged in the meeting, but pulled out my phone and sent a text under the table instead.

Shannon:
I love you.

Will:
Because of the vibrator, right?

Will:
I knew you’d like that.

Will:
We should figure out how to use them more often if that’s how you’re going to react.

Will:
Let’s get some other toys

Shannon:
Shut up

Will:
Ok, good talk. Love you too.

“Does that work for you, Shannon?”

My head jerked up, and I found Patrick, Andy, Sam, Matt, and Riley staring at me.

“Um…” I glanced down at my screen, which was currently displaying an article about nerve transfer surgery, and noticed several messages from Patrick.

Patrick:
You want to weigh in on this?

Patrick:
I fucking hate the PR people attached to Turlan. It’s a decent property but I’m going to be thrilled when we don’t have to deal anymore

Patrick:
Still with us?

Patrick:
Did you catch that?

“The media showcase,” Sam said. “For the Turlan project?”

I nodded, and motioned for him to keep talking. “Yeah, can you run that by me one more time?”

Patrick:
Are you ok?

Patrick:
You seem a little out of it

Shannon:
Tired. Jet lag.

Patrick:
How was California?

Shannon:
Really, really good

Sam’s lips twitched as he fought back a smirk. “The Turlans’ publicist called me last week, and wanted to finalize details for the open house event they’re doing in January. I’m just checking that you’re still good with the date, and them handling all the arrangements.”

“Yeah, there’s no reason for us to take on any of that,” I said. “We’re down to the punch list on that property, right?”

“Yeah,” Sam said slowly. “We were just talking about that. Riley went through all the remaining items.”

Shannon:
How was Korean bbq and pub crawling?

Patrick:
What you’re asking me is: How’s Erin? Did Erin mention if she’s ever coming home for more than a weekend? Did Erin discuss whether she’s ready to end the war of silence?

Patrick:
And the answer to all that is no because she didn’t get here. There was a blizzard and her flight was cancelled.

“And I didn’t pay attention the first time, so you’re going to need to run it again,” I said, pointing my pen at Riley.