Authors: Karyn Lawrence
“I told you, one of the seven breweries in North America.”
She was weary from traveling, ready to be off the plane, and long before she’d made out the New York skyline, she’d assumed this was their destination. “Could you be less specific? How long is the flight?”
“Two and a half hours.”
When she sighed, his expression shifted and his eyes clouded with doubt. “You want to stay here? Because we can.”
“No, no, it’s fine. I’m still tired and being ungrateful.” The longer she thought about it, the more she like the idea of not staying. It would feel more like a getaway somewhere else. Not just a getaway from her previous life in the States, but a getaway… with Shawn. The appeal grew every second.
The refueling stop didn’t take long, nor did the flight to their final destination. While their luggage was loaded into a sleek sedan, one that was far too expensive to be a rental, a man handed Shawn a set of keys and a clipboard to sign for them.
“Whose car is this?” she asked moments later, when he was helping her into the seat.
“Mine.”
“Did you just buy it?”
He smiled. “Maybe.”
The airport itself was too far away for her to figure out where they’d landed, although it obviously was too small to be one of the larger ones like Chicago.
“Okay, I give up,” she said. “Please tell me where we are.”
“I have a place outside of Tomahawk. I thought before we go back we could visit the Madison plant.”
“Wisconsin?”
He nodded, but he had no idea that what he’d said had just set a ticking clock in her head.
Before we go back
. She didn’t want to think about that or her feelings about returning to Europe. They’d just arrived.
Of course he’d have a second home here, where the largest population of Germans immigrated after the war. The hour-long drive was pleasant and they chatted about simple things: movies, music, books. The sun hung low, painting oranges and yellows across the sky when it broke through treetops. But as the forest closed around the road and houses faded from view, the time change began to catch up with her.
“When Ethan made me pass out, did you hit him?” She asked it quietly.
“I almost did,” his face was dark and serious. “That was difficult to watch.”
“Yeah.” Why had she brought it up? “I was surprised to see you there. I mean, I was so happy to see you. But surprised.”
“I’d been told to stay in the car, but then I saw Ethan carrying you.”
And he had to get to her, because he always got what he wanted, didn’t he? If the roles had been reversed, would she have done the same? Left the safety of the car while a gun battle raged, to see him again? She studied him, his long fingers curled around the steering wheel, his tousled, chocolate-colored hair. Yes. Oh, definitely yes.
They shopped for several days’ worth of groceries at a supermarket, and she found this activity oddly intimate. The only other man she’d done that with was Paul.
It was seven o’clock when the car turned off of the road and followed a driveway that wound through dense forest, leading up a small hill. And as they crested that, Shawn followed it down and the car climbed a much steeper one. As the driveway bent back, the lights of a house shone through the leaves.
“This is what I expected,” she remarked when it came into view, “only in Munich.”
A sprawling house was perched on the hillside with large panoramic windows overlooking the wooded ravine below. He pulled the car around the house and beyond to the four-car garage, then left it running as he got out and punched a code into the keypad to raise a garage door. There weren’t any cars in the garage until he parked there. Shawn offered to help her out, but she declined. She felt stronger every minute that passed since returning home.
It was no less impressive inside. They wound through the kitchen that was endless granite countertops and a monstrous side-by-side fridge, and into a living room with built-in bookcases and leather couches, facing a flat-screen TV that covered most of the wall.
He deposited her on a couch and went to finish unloading, but she couldn’t stay here and do nothing. She didn’t want to be alone, not even for a second, so she went back to the kitchen and tried to figure out where to put everything. And when it was done, he set his tired eyes on her.
“Where should I put your suitcase?” he asked, hesitant.
She gave him a half-smile. Sweet Shawn was still worried about what she was comfortable with. “It goes wherever your luggage goes.”
It went into the enormous master bedroom, and he tucked it against the wall opposite a fireplace, away from the king-sized bed.
Shawn had spent thousands and thousands of dollars not only to take care of her but also to bring her to this secluded house. There was little else for them to do but spend time with each other, which had probably been his intention. That made it impossible not to feel pressure to express her gratitude towards him in an intimate matter. He hadn’t even hinted at that, but the word
obligation
flitted through her head as she watched him unbutton his dress shirt.
It’s not like she didn’t want to. She absolutely did, but she was tired. And weirdly nervous, even though she’d slept with him several times. He didn’t seem to notice her nerves, and she hurried to dig out pajamas from the suitcases someone else had packed for her.
Her eyes avoided the wide mirror over the double sinks in the bathroom when she changed for bed. The last thing she wanted to see right now was the fading bruises or her limp, travel-flattened hair. When she padded back into to the bedroom, he was already undressed and in bed. The window beside him was open and the breeze rippled the sheet covering him, and her heart beat faster at this gorgeous man waiting for her.
She shut off the light and slid in beside him, breathing rapidly but trying to be quiet so he wouldn’t notice.
“You’re looking at me like I’m a piece of meat,” he joked, “but I’m too tired.”
Her nerves disappeared as a smile warmed her face. And when he leaned in to kiss her goodnight, the flames of her desire flared up instantly, demanding more. His mouth was gentle, but she wasn’t having it. She kissed him back with intensity, sliding up against him. Like she’d commanded him silently, his large hands obeyed and roved over her skin, tracing patterns and drawing goose bumps.
“You don’t seem tired,” she murmured against his kiss, parting her lips and filling his mouth with her tongue. It sent that electric current flooding through her body and she was thrilled, eager to have it again. The warm skin of his chest was against her bare arm as he pressed into her, deepening the kiss further.
Abruptly he jolted, as if realizing something, and groaned. “We have to stop.”
Stop?
His hand covered hers, stilling it, the hand that cupped him through his boxers where he was already semi-hard.
He seemed to like it, but he wanted to stop? “Why?”
“Because we’ve got lots of time for that.”
He was so clearly lying. “And the real reason?” She drew her hand away from him, shy now.
“I don’t want to hurt you. I brought you here so you could heal.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Oh, okay. And not to fuck me?”
Shawn rendered speechless? She didn’t think it was possible, and she savored the moment. It seemed like a rare event.
“I would like to do that, yes. When you’re ready, when your body’s ready.”
“Ready? I’m not broken. I’m all right.” She hoped he could hear the truth. Juric hadn’t defeated her, and she wasn’t about to let the monster take this from her, either. “I want everything how it was before. Help me get this back.”
In the moonlight, she could see the internal struggle raging behind his eyes. “Kara —”
“I want this. You want this,” she said, finding the arrogant words from outside the restaurant he’d uttered to her. “Stop resisting what we both want.”
He blinked and his eyes sharpened a degree. “Very well. Tomorrow? You’re fair game.”
She drifted off to sleep, utterly thrilled to see Adversary Shawn again.
-20-
Her blue-gray eyes settled on him when he stepped out onto the back deck overlooking the creek. Was she aware how much better the view was for him when she was standing there?
“Oh my god,” Kara said. “You own a pair of jeans? Careful, someone might mistake you for an American.”
Yes, Shawn felt more comfortable in a suit, but did she have any room to judge? She liked her professional clothes, too. But he preferred her now, the American girl in jeans and a casual T-shirt, her blond hair pulled back to reveal her slender neck. The marks were all but gone there.
He told her in German what he’d like to do to her.
“You remember I don’t speak your language?”
“Sure you do,” he said, skating his lips over the soft skin of her bare neck, drawing the tiniest sigh from her, proving his point.
“I need to ask a favor.” She twisted out of his embrace.
“What is it?” Her cup of coffee rested on the railing and he took a sip. It was so sweet it bordered on undrinkable, but he was too lazy to go back inside and make his own.
“Take out my stitches.”
He paused. “Isn’t it a little soon?”
“I don’t care.” Her voice was filled with fire. “He put them in me. I want them gone.”
Shawn set her cup back down, his gaze not leaving hers. He couldn’t do anything about the scar, but was happy to help her remove this final piece of Juric.
She must have laid it out while he was in the shower. On the coffee table rested needlepoint scissors, tweezers, and liquid bandage. He hadn’t noticed the scent of rubbing alcohol that hung in the kitchen from where she’d sterilized the tools when he’d walked through looking for her. She shed her shirt and laid down on the couch, facing him, waiting as he washed his hands in the wet bar nearby.
“Do you know how?” she asked.
“Yes.” He’d done it for Jason once when his brother had spent a ridiculous season of high school playing American football.
There was a sharp intake of breath when he set a hand on her waist to hold her steady. “Your hands are freezing!”
“Hold still.” It was easy enough to slide the scissors under and to the side of the knots and snip them open, one by one. He returned with the tweezers and tugged from the knots until the thread was free. Then it was done. He tossed the last physical thing Juric had done to her into the garbage.
He opened the bottle of liquid bandage and brushed it over the incision, inadvertently making her jump, then blew softly on it to speed the drying process. His warm breath washed over her skin. All it did was sexually charge the air around them so that when she flicked her blue eyes to him, he had to maintain an ironclad grip on his self-control.
“Don’t put your shirt back on until that’s dry. Shouldn’t be but an hour or two.”
She flashed him a knowing smile. “Thank you.”
“Anytime.” When he tried to stand, her hand shot out and grabbed his.
“For everything. I don’t know how I would have… without you.”
That was nice, but the voice in the back of his mind grumbled. He was still waiting to hear something from her, something he felt confident was true but he wanted to hear her say it out loud. To admit to herself.
Ten minutes later she sat up and disappointingly put her shirt on. “Do you have a plan for the day?”
He had this morning, but she’d woken before him and was in the shower when he rolled over and discovered her gone. So much for staying in bed all day. “I got us here, that was the extent of my planning. We could watch something.”
He picked up the remote and turned the television on, only to have CNN come on screen. With his dumb luck, it was an update on the brewery bombing and the American hostage that had been taken. He shut it off before she could ask him to, and he searched for something to distract.
“There’s a deck of cards; we could play a game. Strip poker?”
She acted unfazed, but he could see in her eyes that she was trying very hard not to think about that night on the lawn, or what followed. “We’ve already seen each other naked.”
“You’re saying you don’t want to see that again?”
Thankfully, her smile reappeared. “I don’t need to beat you at cards for that. Something tells me all I have to do is ask.”
She was so very right. Yet she didn’t. Instead, she asked him to go for a walk, to enjoy the weather and lack of civilization around them. Delicious and torturous anticipation built throughout the day, like she was waiting for something. For him to do something. After dinner, she sat across from him at the kitchen table and her icy gaze narrowed.
“What is it?” he said.
“I meant it when I told you to stop being nice to me.”
He put his glass down. The bastard inside him was desperate, but he wasn’t ready to release the gag. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
Her face went blank. “A good idea? Since when did you care about that?”
The muscles in his jaw tightened. He knew what she was doing, that she wanted to push his buttons like he did to her. She moved from her seat so she could loom over him, her breathing rushed.