Authors: Suzanne Brockmann
Finally,
finally
, Juliana came back out of the house.
She stood in front of him, looking at him. “I was so mad at you,” she said. “You jerk.”
Was.
Webster straightened up. “Do you forgive me?” he asked, not daring to touch her. But his hands came out of his pockets, ready to reach for her, as if they had a mind of their own.
Juliana looked down at the letter she still held in her hands. “I have to,” she said. “Don’t I?”
Webster did reach out then, cupping her chin with his hand, pulling her face so that she had to look at him. “No, you don’t have to,” he said quietly.
“Yes, I do,” she said just as quietly, meeting his gaze steadily. “It’s like you said in your letter. If I want the sweet man who loves me, I’ve got to be prepared to put up with the jerk.”
Webster winced. “You’re taking liberties with your
paraphrasing,” he said, “but I guess that’s essentially what I said.”
They were both silent for a moment. Webster looked down at Juliana until she met his eyes. “Jule, will you take me back?” he asked, hardly daring to breathe.
As he watched, her eyes filled with tears. One escaped down her cheek, and she didn’t try to brush it away. Another fell, another and another. She was crying. Juliana, who only cried for death or the equivalent, was crying.
“Yes,” she whispered.
As he looked at her, he could see through the tears to the love in her eyes. She loved him. He was so happy he almost broke down and cried, too. Almost.
Instead, he leaned forward. His mouth brushed hers gently, and she felt him sigh before he kissed her again, harder this time. She melted against him, tasting coffee and the sweet taste that was so distinctly Webster.
From the kitchen door, Kurt, Sam, and Dr. Rogers stamped, applauded, and hooted.
Webster opened his eyes slowly to look at Juliana.
“How many of them were in the room when my letter was read?” he asked, bracing himself for the worst.
“All of them.”
He nodded, then kissed her again, ignoring the catcalls and hubba-hubbas coming from the kitchen door. Strangely enough, he didn’t care. They could tease all they wanted, but he didn’t even care.
“Marry me,” he said, catching one of her tears with his finger.
“You don’t care that I can’t read?” Juliana asked softly.
He gave her a look that said she had to be kidding. She gave him his answer in the form of a kiss.
Inside the house, Chris’s clear voice rang out, “Mom says if you don’t stop bothering Juliana and Webster, you’re all gonna be in
big
trouble.”
Webster waved to Kurt, then closed the big front door as the Jeep pulled back down the driveway. Juliana had already tiredly climbed up the stairs, so he went into the sitting room and grabbed a bottle of brandy from the sideboard.
The power had come back on, and the furnace was thudding quietly in the basement, sending warmth through the radiators.
Warmth. Webster wanted to feel warm. He wanted to take a warm shower and climb into a warm bed and sleep for two straight days. Well, maybe not sleep
right
away.…
He went up the stairs, stopping uncertainly on the second floor, looking into the room that had been his bedroom for so many weeks.
But Juliana wasn’t in there.
Slowly he went to the foot of the stairs leading to Juliana’s apartment. Slowly, he dared to look up.
The door was open.
She’d left the door open for him.
All of his final doubts vanished. She wanted him to come upstairs. She wanted to share her life with him.
Webster stopped moving slowly then, as he took the stairs two at a time. He went through the door and closed it tightly behind him.
He could hear the sound of water running. The Jacuzzi,
he realized, and more than his tired muscles approved.
The bathroom door was open, and he stood in the doorway, watching Juliana pull off her boots and her socks. She smiled at him and took the bottle of brandy from his hand, setting it on the edge of the tub.
Steam was starting to fog up the edges of the big mirrors, and Webster closed the door, keeping the warmth inside the room.
Juliana watched him in the mirror as she brushed out her hair. She let her eyes trail down the length of him, lingering on the tight bulge in his pants that gave away his desire for her.
“That happens just from
thinking
about me?” she said, her eyebrows raised.
“All the time,” he said huskily, crossing toward her. “Constantly. You don’t even have to be in the room.” He pulled her toward him, fitting her hips tightly against his. “And if you are in the room, it’s relentless.”
She kissed him, letting her tongue trail lightly across his lips. “That’s nice to know,” she said.
He pulled off her sweater, then stopped as his fingers felt her ace bandage through the thin fabric of her shirt. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, frowning. “Maybe we should wait.”
She stepped out of her jeans and took off the T-shirt. “Help me, will you?” she asked, motioning to the metal clasps that secured the elastic bandage.
Gently, he unfastened them and unwound the bandage. The bruise on her ribs was a rainbow of colors. It hurt him just to look at it as she stood naked in front of him.
Her hands found the button at the top of his pants,
but he took a step backward. “Jule, I’m serious,” he said. “We can wait. We’ve got the rest of our lives, right?”
Juliana reached out and took his hand, turning it over and touching his palm lightly with her fingers. “These hands were gentle enough to help bring a baby into the world, Web. I’m willing to bet you can make love to me without hurting me.”
He cupped her face with his hand, losing himself in her greenish eyes. “I love you,” he whispered.
“Tell me the truth,” she whispered back, unbuttoning his pants and pushing them down off his smooth, sleek body. “That wasn’t the
real
letter you wrote to me, was it?”
Webster smiled, kicking his legs free. He stepped into the Jacuzzi, holding out his hand for her.
“Aren’t you going to answer my question?” she asked, sitting down next to him in the warm, bubbling water.
“What question?” Webster asked as he gently pulled her onto his lap and kissed her. With a sigh, she ran her fingers through his dark, curly hair.
And in a matter of a few short seconds, she forgot the question, too.
Read on for a sneak peek at Suzanne Brockmann’s
thrilling new novel
B
orn to
D
arkness
Coming March 2012
Shane was winning when she walked in.
His plan was a simple one: spend a few hours here in this lowlife bar, and win enough money playing pool to take the T down to Copley Square, where there were a cluster of expensive hotels. Hit one of the hotel bars, where the women not only had all of their teeth, but they also had corporate expense accounts and key cards to the comfortable rooms upstairs.
But drinks there were pricey. Shane had spent his remaining fifty-eight seconds at the Kenmore commstation checking menus, and he knew he’d need at least twenty dollars merely to sit at the bar and nurse a beer. Fifty to buy a lady a drink. And expense account or not, you had to be ready to start the game by buying the lady a drink.
But then
she
walked in—or rather, limped in. She was smaller than the average woman, and slight of build. She’d also injured her foot, probably her ankle, but other than that, she carried herself like an operator. She’d certainly scanned the room like one as she’d come in.
Which was when Shane had gotten a hit from her
eyes. They were pale, and he couldn’t tell from this distance whether they were blue or green or even a light shade of brown. But the color didn’t matter; it was the glimpse he got of the woman within that had made him snap to attention—internally, that is.
She’d looked right at him, gave him some direct eye contact, then assessed him. She took a very brief second to appreciate his handsome face and trim form, catalogued him, and finally dismissed him.
Of course, he
was
playing the role of the hick just off the turnip truck—he would have dismissed himself, too, had he just walked in.
Shane watched from the corner of his eye as she sat at the bar, shrugged out of her jacket to reveal a black tank top, then pulled off her hat and scarf. She was completely tattoo-free—at least in all of the traditional places he could see from across the room.
Her light-colored hair was cut short and was charmingly messed. But it was the back of her neck that killed him. Long and slender and pale, it was so utterly feminine—almost in proud defiance of her masculine clothing choices, her nicely toned shoulders and arms, and her complete and total lack of makeup.
And Shane was instantly intrigued. He found himself restrategizing and forming a very solid Plan B almost before he was aware he was doing it.
Plan A had him missing the next shot—the seven in the side pocket and the four in the corner—which would lead to his opponent, a likable enough local man named Pete, winning the next few shots. After which Shane would clumsily sweep the table, proclaim it was his lucky night, and challenge the man to
a rematch, double or nothing, all the while seeming to get more and more loaded.
Because Pete was a far better player than he was pretending to be. Pete was hustling
him
, and all of the regulars in this bar knew it, and at that point the bets would start to fly. Shane would drunkenly cover them all, but then would play the next game in earnest, identifying himself as a hustler in kind as he kicked Pete’s decent but amateurish ass. He’d then take his fairly won earnings and boogie out of Dodge.
Because you don’t hustle a game and stick around for a victory beer. That could be hazardous to one’s health. Resentment would grow. And resentment plus alcohol was never a good mix.
Plan B, however, allowed Shane to stick around. It gave him options.
So he called and then sank both the seven and the four, then called and missed the two, which put the balls on the table into a not-impossible but definitely tricky setup. Which Pete intentionally missed, because making the shot would’ve ID’d him as the hustler that
he
was.
They finished the game that way—with Pete setting up a bunch of nice, easy shots, and letting Shane win. Which put five dollars into Shane’s nearly empty pocket.
Which was enough to buy a lady a drink in a shit-hole like this.
“You’re on fire tonight,” Pete said, when Shane didn’t do an appropriate asshole-ish victory dance. “How ’bout a rematch, bro?”
And Shane wanted to sit Pete down and give him a crash course in hustling, because this was a beginner’s
mistake. You never,
ever
suggested the rematch yourself, not if you’d just intentionally lost the game. The mark had to do it; otherwise the hustle was too much of a con. The mark had to think he was going to screw
you
out of your hard-earned pay.
Pete’s suggestion made him significantly less likable and more of the kind of sleazebag who deserved his ass handed to him on a platter.
“I don’t know, man,” Shane said, massaging the muscles at the base of his skull as if he’d had a hard day at the construction site. “You’re pretty good. Let me think about it …?”
Pete thankfully didn’t push. “I’ll be here all night. But, hey, lemme buy you another beer. On account of your winning and all.”
Better and better. As long as Pete didn’t follow him over to the bar. “Thanks,” Shane said. “I’m going to, um, hit the men’s and …”
But instead of going into the bathroom in the back, he went to the bar and slid up onto one of the stools next to the woman with the pretty eyes. She was drinking whiskey, straight up, and she’d already ordered and paid for her next two glasses—they were lined up in front of her in a very clear message that said,
No
,
butthead
,
you may not buy me a drink
. She’d also purposely left an empty-stool buffer between herself and the other patrons. And the glance she gave Shane as he sat let him know that she would have preferred keeping her personal DMZ intact.
Her eyes were blue, but she’d flattened them into a very frosty
don’t fuck with me
, dead-woman-walking glare. It was a hell of a talent. The first chief Shane had
ever worked with in the SEAL teams—Andy Markos, rest his soul—could deliver the same soulless affect. It was scary as shit to be hit with that look. Even to those who knew him well and outranked him.
But here and now, Shane let this woman know that he
wasn’t
scared and
didn’t
give a shit that she didn’t want him sitting there, by giving her an answering smile—the one where he let his eyes twinkle a little, as if they were sharing a private joke.
She broke the eye contact as she shook her head, muttering something that sounded like, “Why do I do this to myself?”
Any conversational opener was a win, so Shane took it for the invitation that it wasn’t. “Do what to yourself?”
Another head shake, this one with an eye roll. “Look, I’m not interested.”
“Actually, I came over because I saw that you were limping,” Shane lied. “You know, when you came in? I trashed my ankle about a year ago. They giving you steroids for the swelling?”
“Really,” she said. “You’re wasting your time.”
She wasn’t as pretty as he’d thought she was from a distance. But she wasn’t exactly not-pretty either. Still, her face was a little too square, her nose a little too small and round, her lips a little too narrow. Her short hair wasn’t blond as he’d first thought, but rather a bland shade of uninspiring light brown. She was also athletic to the point of near breastlessness. The thug he’d wrangled with earlier that evening had had bigger pecs than this woman did beneath her tank top.
But those eyes …
They weren’t just blue, they were green, too, with bits of hazel and specks of gold and brown thrown in for good measure.
They were incredible.
“Be careful if they do,” Shane told her. “You know, give you steroids. I had a series of shots that made me feel great. They really helped, but ten months after the last injection, I was still testing positive for performance enhancing drugs. Which was problematic when I tried to earn some easy money cage fighting.”
She turned to look at him. “Is that it? You done with your public service announcement?”
He smiled back at her. “Not quite. I did a little research online and found out that that particular drug can stay in your system for as long as eighteen months. I’ve still got six months to kill.”
“Before you can become a cage fighter,” she said, with plenty of
yeah
,
right
scorn in her voice. “Does that usually impress the girls?”
“I’ve actually never told anyone before,” Shane admitted. “You know, that I stooped that low? But it
is
amazing what you’ll do when you’re broke, isn’t it?” He finished his beer and held the empty up toward the bartender, asking for another. “Pete’s paying,” he told the man then turned back to the woman, who’d gone back to staring at her whiskey. “I’m Shane Laughlin. From San Diego.”
She sighed and finished her drink, pushing the empty glass toward the far edge of the bar and pulling her second closer to her and taking a sip.
“So what are you doing in Boston, Shane?” he asked for her, as if she actually cared. “Wow, that’s a good question. I’m former Navy. I haven’t been out all that
long, and I’ve been having some trouble finding a job. I got a lead on something short term—here in Boston. I actually start tomorrow. How about you? Are you local?”
She turned and looked at him at that, and her eyes were finally filled with life. It was a life that leaned a little heavy on the anger and disgust, but that was better than that flat nothing she’d given him earlier. “You seriously think I don’t know that you’re slumming?”
Shane laughed his surprise. “What?”
“You heard what I said and you know what I meant.”
“Wow. If anyone’s slumming here … Did you miss the part of the conversation where I admitted to being the loser who can’t find a job?”
“You and how many millions of Americans?” she asked. “Except it’s a shocker for you, isn’t it, Navy? You’ve never
not
been in demand—you probably went into the military right out of high school and … Plus, you were an officer, right? I can smell it on you.” She narrowed her eyes as if his being an officer was a terrible thing.
“Yeah, I was officer.” He dropped his biggest bomb. “In the SEAL teams.”
She looked him dead in the eye as it bounced. “Big fucking deal, Dixie-Cup. You’re out now. Welcome to the real world, where things don’t always go your way.”
He laughed—because what she’d just said
was
pretty funny. “You obviously have no idea what a SEAL does.”
“I don’t,” she admitted. “No one does. Not since the military entered the government’s cone of silence.”
“I specialized in things not going my way,” Shane told her.
“So why’d you leave, then?” she asked, and when he didn’t answer right away, she toasted him with her drink and drained it. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
“I’m proud of what I did—what I was,” he said quietly. “Even now.
Especially
now. But you’re right—partly right. About the shock. I had no idea how bad
bad
could be, before I was … kicked out and blacklisted.” Her head came up at that. “So, see,
you’re
the one who’s slumming. You could get into trouble just for talking to me.”
She was looking at him now—really looking. “What exactly … did you do?”
Shane looked back at her, directly into those eyes. “I spoke truth to power,” he said quietly. “But the men in power didn’t want truth. They wanted agreement, even if it was a lie. I couldn’t do that, and I couldn’t stay silent, and
someone
had to go, so …” He shrugged. “I was removed.”
She sat there, gazing at him. He just waited, looking back at her, until she finally asked, “So what do you want from
me
?”
There were so many possible answers to that question, but Shane went with honesty. “I saw you come in and I thought … Maybe you’re looking for the same thing I am. And since I find you unbelievably attractive …”
She smiled at that, and even though it was a rueful smile, it transformed her. “Yeah, actually, you don’t. I mean, you think you find me … But …” She shook her head.
Shane leaned forward. “I’m pretty sure you don’t
know what I’m thinking.” He tried to let her see it in his eyes, though—the fact that he was thinking about how it would feel for both of them with his tongue in her mouth, with her hands in his hair, her legs locked around him as he pushed himself home.
He reached out to touch her—nothing too aggressive or invasive—just the back of one finger against the narrow gracefulness of her wrist.
But just like that, the vaguely fuzzy picture in his head slammed into sharp focus, and she was moving against him, naked in his arms, and, Christ, he was seconds from release as he gazed into her incredible eyes …
Shane sat back so fast that he knocked over his bottle of beer. He fumbled after it, grabbing it and, because it had been nearly full, the foam volcanoed out of the top. He covered it with his mouth, taking a long swig, grateful for the cold liquid, aware as hell that he’d gone from semi-aroused to fully locked and loaded in the beat of a heart.
What the hell?
Yeah, it had been a long time since he’d gotten some, but
damn
.
His nameless new friend had pushed her stool slightly back from the bar—away from him—and she was now frowning down at her injured foot, rotating her ankle. She then looked up at him, and the world seemed to tilt. Because there was heat in her eyes, too. Heat and surprise and speculation and …
Absolute possibility.
“I’m Mac,” she told him as she tossed back the remains of her final drink. “And I don’t usually do this, but … I’ve got a place, just around the corner.”
She was already pulling on her jacket, putting on her scarf and hat.
As if his going with her was a given. As if there were no way in hell that he’d turn her down.
Shane was already off the stool and grabbing his own jacket, as Mac went out the door. Her limp was less pronounced—apparently the whiskey had done her some good. In fact, she was moving pretty quickly. He had to hustle to keep up.
“Hey,” he said as they hit the street and the bar door closed behind him. “Um, Mac? Maybe we should find, you know, a … dealer? I’m not carrying any um … So unless you have, you know …” He cleared his throat.
She stopped walking and looked up at him. Standing there on the sidewalk, he was aware of how much bigger and taller he was. She was tiny—and significantly younger than he’d thought. More like twenty-two, instead of the pushing thirty that he’d figured her to be, back in the bar.