Embattled Minds (Military Romance) (Lost And Found Series) (16 page)

She bumped her head on his hard chin when she pounced on him, but she didn’t care. He shifted to his back as she peppered him with kisses and straddled his hips.

“I guess you like the idea, huh?” he chuckled beneath her.

Shannon paused long enough to look him in the eyes. “I love the idea. And I love you. More and more every day. Thank you.”

She rocked her hips against his length and was rewarded when he went hard beneath her. “When do we leave?” she whispered.

“Uh, next week.”

“Mm, just enough time,” she gasped as she guided him inside.

*****

Saturday Ember took Drew to Ms. Miller’s house and headed into work early. It was a busy day. Deliveries were coming in and the crowds were out with the after-Christmas returns and sales. She hadn’t heard from her dad, so she assumed he wouldn’t be in yet. Which was fine. He had stuff to work through, too.

Two of the afternoon shift girls called off. Ember sighed as she listened to the second girl, Brandy, cry about her broken down car. “If you get it fixed, come in. We’re slammed.”

She hung up on a sniffle. She had no time for their crap.

The grill was packed, with a thirty minute wait for a table. Ember worked harder than she had in a long time to keep things running smoothly, but she did try to step back and manage more. The wait staff seemed to appreciate the guidance, which surprised her.

At six o’clock, her dad walked in from the back. Ember whooped, joined by the rest of the staff, when they realized who was pulling the bar apron around his hips. Her father waved, a little embarrassed, but smiling nonetheless. She couldn’t resist walking behind the bar and giving him a big, smooching kiss on the cheek. “So glad to see you, Dad.”

“You know, I’m glad to be here. I thought you would be busy tonight.”

He settled back into his rhythm quickly, pulling beers from the tap and chatting it up with every soldier that took the time to talk to him.

Ember watched the clock hands anxiously. Seven o’clock approached, and she watched the door as much as she could. But no dirty blond head appeared towering over the others. None of the other guys showed either. She owed them beer, so it was curious that they didn’t appear.

As eight o’clock rolled past, she lost hope that they were coming. She checked her phone for the millionth time and found a text message.

Grill was jam packed, so we headed to Chad’s. You be home later?

Yes! By 10.

See you there.

Ember was relieved they’d at least been here. She should have left word with the hostess to get them in, but in the rush it hadn’t even entered her mind.

She left the grill in her father’s hands and climbed in her cold car for the fifteen minute drive home. Zeke climbed out of his truck and met her at the sidewalk when she got home, warming her from the inside out. Snow swirled around them as he pulled her into his arms for a desperate kiss.

Ember looked up at him in concern when he eventually pulled away. “Are you okay?”

He nodded and walked with her to retrieve Drew. The boy was asleep on Erin’s couch, but woke when they shook him.

“Hey, Zeke.”

“Hey, buddy.”

As Zeke steadied him, Ember slid the boy’s coat on, fastening the hood over his head. Snow boots next. The big man then lifted him into his arms.

“Thanks, Erin.”

Ember rushed ahead to open the door for her boys. Zeke kicked off his shoes when he came in, then padded through the apartment to Drew’s room, and they reversed the process. While Zeke steadied him, Ember took off his coat and boots.

Drew’s eyes never opened the entire time, but he did smile when they tucked him into bed, pulling the covers up to his chin. “Night, guys.”

Ember laughed. He was already out.

She returned to the living room to take off her coat, and draped Zeke’s over the chair. “I’m sorry it was so crowded tonight. If I had known you were there I would have tried to get you in.”

He shrugged as he settled on the couch, his look somber. “I don’t know that we could have come in anyway. Diego saw the people inside and damn near had an anxiety attack right there at your front door.”

Ember cringed, feeling bad for the Hispanic man. He’d been a real sweetheart when he’d helped her move in. “That must be so hard.”

Zeke turned up his hands. “For the most part you get used to it. People stare at me all the time. Diego’s going to take a while though. He was shot by an Afghani policeman he was training. One of our allies. In a group of people.”

“No way. Seriously?”

Zeke nodded.

That just seemed so wrong. And sad. Disheartening.

Ember leaned into him and he wrapped his arm around her shoulder, pulling her into his side. Even though it was cool in the apartment, his burning warmth seeped into her. “You feel so good to me,” she sighed. She tightened her arm across his lean middle.

Zeke pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Hey, I, uh, need to go away for a few days.”

She pulled back enough to look at him. “Okay…For work?”

He frowned. “Kind of, yes.”

She felt like he was hiding something, but she didn’t know what. “Okay. I’ll be here when you get back. Can you call me?”

He shook his head. “At least not for a couple days. I will when I can.”

“Is it dangerous?”

His look darkened and he squeezed her hand. “Yes, but I p-p-promise I will do my best to stay safe.”

That sounded true enough, but even if he was lying did she have the right to call him on it? They were sleeping together, but he hadn’t even hinted at anything more permanent. Ember knew she was in love, but she had a feeling if she told him it would spook him.

“You do that,” she murmured, leaning into him tighter.

Zeke kissed the top of her head. Ember turned her face up and he pressed his lips to hers. She opened her mouth to his seeking tongue and was swept away by the desperation and need she felt in his movements. Pushing from the couch, he tugged her to stand, then swung her up into his arms to carry her to the bedroom.

Ember felt cherished. And feminine. Protected. He was so obviously male, layered with muscle, and he felt like her champion, her hero.

When he dropped her feet to the floor, he started working on her clothes. He didn’t move fast enough, so she stripped her jeans and long-sleeved shirt away, tossing them to the corner. He stripped himself down and pressed her to the mattress, climbing between her thighs. Ember moaned as he slid against her heat.

“I need in you.”

She widened the cradle of her hips and tilted up, reaching down with one hand to guide him into her body. Though he hadn’t worked her like he normally did, she was still ready, because she’d been thinking of loving him for hours. As soon as he had texted her at the grill, she’d hoped this was how her night would end. She squeezed along his length.

As he began to lunge into her, she felt complete. This was where she was supposed to be and Zeke was the one she was supposed to be with.

All of the trials of their lives narrowed down to just his body gliding into hers, the desperation feeding their movements. They were both running toward that pinnacle of pleasure.

She found hers first, the head of his heavy cock gliding over the bundle of nerves to the front of her pelvic bone. As she bit into his neck and arched beneath him, crying out, Zeke lifted her hips in his hands, stroking her all the harder in the pursuit of his own pleasure.

Ember was lost in a daze of sublime sensation, quaking with aftershocks. “I love you,” she sighed.

Zeke stalled out above her, quivering. “W-what?”

Hell. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but now that she had… “I love you.”

The echo of her words still hung in the air when he ejaculated. A long, loud groan poured from his throat as his body climaxed above her, shoving himself as deep as he could go inside her. Ember felt every jet of release deep in her womb, and her body quaked with another release in reaction. She gasped, trying to drag oxygen into her shuddering body.

“Oh, fuck,” he sagged into her, but tried to brace the bulk of his weight with his elbows.

Ember wriggled beneath him, loving the contact. “You’re not too heavy.”

He relaxed a little bit, but not all the way. Leaning over onto one side, he looked at her in the dim light from the bathroom. “D-did you m-m-mean it?”

She smiled at the nerves she heard in his deep voice. “I did.”

“Tell me again,” he demanded.

Zeke held her all through the night, only moving enough to love her again, before asking her to tell him again. If Ember had been a less strong woman, she’d be worried that he wasn’t reciprocating the sentiment. But she understood that it would take a while to reset the belief that he was unlovable because of his scars. When he woke her the next time, she rolled him to his back and proceeded to kiss her way across every scar on his head, then she moved down the breadth of his body.

Just before she drifted off to sleep in the early hours of the morning, he stroked his hand over her hair. “Thank you, Ember.”

Z
eke crept out early the next morning, before either Drew or Ember had woken. As he sat in his truck, waiting for the damn thing to warm up, he shook his head. Who would have ever thought he’d be in this predicament.

Ember could, quite literally, drop him to his knees. If she looked at him with those soulful, dark chocolate eyes, he’d do anything for her. And tell her anything. That was why he had to get out of the apartment. If he didn’t, he was going to beg her to go to the hospital with him in the morning. That wouldn’t be fair to her.

Zeke prided himself on being self-sufficient. Chad had called him pussy-whipped. Maybe he was, hell. He just wanted her beside him. End of story.

When he got home, he crashed. He was scheduled for surgery at seven am, so the longer he could sleep up until that time, the better.

Chad picked him up at four am the next morning, looking bleary eyed but solid. He grinned at Zeke, and shook his head. “What the hell are we going to do when you get all purty?”

Shaking his head, he snorted. “I have a l-l-long ways to go until then.”

They didn’t say much on the drive south to Colorado Springs, but then, they’d done it several times before. They walked into the doors of the hospital at five thirty, an hour and a half before the scheduled surgery. A chatty nurse checked him in and took his vitals, then parked him in the waiting room to wait for an escort.

Zeke worried his thumbs back and forth over each other and fought the nausea in his stomach. This was surgery number thirteen. He should be used to baring himself for everybody to see by now, but it was still an effort to keep his ass parked in the chair.

An orderly called out his name.

Handing his cell phone to his buddy, he fought not to look at the display one more time. Ember had sent him an ‘I love you’ last night that made his heart stutter in his chest. “Her number is in there, but you can’t call her until I’m out of surgery.”

Chad nodded and powered down the device, pocketing it along with his own. “I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry about anything, just keep breathing on that table. You get me?”

He nodded and accepted a back pounding hug from his buddy. “I will.”

“I’ll be in the recovery room when you get there.”

The orderly waited patiently at the open steel doors. With a final nod, Zeke forced his boots in that direction.

*****

A smile spread her mouth as she saw Zeke’s number on the phone display. She dried her hand on the bar rag. “Hey, sexy man. I didn’t think you’d be able to call for a few days.”

“Uh, Ember,” a man cleared his voice. “This is Chad.”

A wave of fear trickled through her. “Chad. Why are you on Zeke’s phone? Is he okay?”

“Well,” the other man hesitated. “Not exactly. We came down to Colorado Springs for surgery and it didn’t go exactly right.”

“Surgery?” Her head swam. “I thought he was on a job somewhere.”

His boss sighed at the other end of the line. “No, he told you that so that you wouldn’t worry. He was supposed to have reconstruction today, but something went wrong.”

Her mind was reeling, and she dropped to her ass in a chair in the middle of the restaurant. “What?”

He sighed again. “I think you should come down. We’re in Colorado Springs. I’m sending somebody to pick you up and drive you, okay? We’ve made arrangements for your son, but he needs a bag. Your ride will be there in an hour, okay? Are you listening?”

She nodded. As if he could see.

“If Zeke’s as important to you as I think, you need to come down.”

“Of course he is,” she snapped. “I’ll be waiting.”

She debated whether or not to even talk to Drew, but she had a feeling he would want to know. He cried a little bit, then gave her a big hug and told her to go take care of him. She talked to Erin for a few minutes and explained that he would be gone for a few days, but that she was passing along Erin’s info in case they needed her help.

It felt surreal unlocking her apartment and looking for overnight bags in the mess of her closet. But she did. She packed enough for three nights, just in case. She packed extra clothes for Drew, knowing he tended to be messy.