Page 26 of My Forbidden Commander

“Thank you,” he says.

Then he walks toward the command hut before I can answer, and I stand there in the mud, shot, exhausted, grinning at his back like an absolute idiot.

Fucking worth it.

13

GABRIEL

It’s raining again, and the whole base smells like wet canvas and the popcorn Delgado apparently smuggled in. The mess hut doubles as our theater. Hayes rigged a projector against the far wall, and a sheet that used to be a cot liner serves as the screen.

Kestrel doesn’t get many luxuries, but command approved a hard drive of movies for morale, and morale, as it turns out, means twenty-some soldiers packed onto benches watching a British man in a suit explain time travel to another British man in a suit.

I don’t sit, standing instead in the back where the light doesn’t reach, arms crossed, and tell myself I’m here to observe unit cohesion. That’s the phrase I’d use in a report. Unit cohesion.

Reyes sits three rows up between Hayes and Delgado, and Walker’s wedged in beside them like he’s been a part of this unit for months, not days. I’ve watched that happen over the last two weeks like an inevitable crash—Walker cracks a joke, Hayes cracks one back harder, and now they finish each other’s sentences like they were separated at birth.

I called it the day he arrived. Predictable.

Reyes laughs at something, his head tipped back, shoulders shaking, and even though the sound doesn’t carry to me over the admittedly fantastic movie score, I don’t need to hear it. I have it memorized by now. I could pick his laugh out of a crowd of a thousand men.

I should be watching the base. I should be watching the wire for movement. Instead, I’m watching a twenty-three-year-old laughing at dumb jokes.

He turns around. Doesn’t scan the room first, doesn’t pretend to be looking for someone or checking the time. He finds me in the dark like he knew exactly where I’ve been standing this entire time. My pulse does something idiotic.

Reyes leans in to say something to Hayes and Delgado, and then he gets up, unhurried, and walks over to the drinks table at the side of the room. He picks up a can of soda, cracks it, and takes a sip.

Then he walks toward the back. Toward me.

I go still like I’m about to be fired at, my muscles locking down as I wait.

Instead of stopping in front of me, he leans against the other side of the support beam I’ve been bracing up, close enough that if either of us took a deep breath, we’d be touching.

“Colonel,” he says, his voice low. There’s nothing regulation in it. It’s equal parts worship and challenge, wrapped together in a dangerous package. It’s an invitation.

I close my eyes long enough to remind myself of all the insignias I’ve earned, every rule I’ve built my life around, the many sets of eyes currently forty feet away watching a movie about a man who can’t tell what’s real.

I open them when I feel something warm against the back of my hand.

His pinky. Behind the cover of the beam, out of line of every line of sight in this room except mine, Reyes has moved his hand a fraction of an inch, and now the side of his pinky finger is pressed against my hand. He’s stroking back and forth, slowly, deliberately, the motion too small for anyone to define, and too big for me to survive it.

I shoot him the look, the one that’s been ending arguments for over two decades. It fails me now.

Reyes’s mouth curves, unbothered, daring. I can see the words in his eyes. If you don’t like it, walk away.

I don’t walk away.

My body has made the decision for me, blood rushing south so fast it’s dizzying, my breath stuttering in my lungs as he bites his bottom lip and sweeps his finger in broader strokes. My slacks go from comfortable to a genuine tactical problem in under three seconds.

I breathe deep, then shallow, then deep again, so badly out of rhythm as I think about his fingers on me. Not this small, maddening graze, but wrapped fully around me, and my cock pulses hard enough that I have to fight not to make a sound.

Hayes laughs out loud at something on the screen, and the sound snaps me out of the fantasy. I clear my throat and step away from the beam, walking away from Reyes and his fingers. My skin still tingles where he touched me.

I don’t look back to see if he’s smiling. I fucking know he’s smiling.

Okafor is coming up the side aisle from the other direction, and the last thing on this earth I need right now is Sergeant First Class Okafor getting a good look at the front of my pants, so I duck through the side door into the latrine instead. It’s blessedly empty.

I brace both hands against the sink and look at myself in the mirror that’s mostly rust spots. My slacks are tented. Obviously, humiliatingly tented, over a graze of a pinky finger behind a support beam, like I’m nineteen years old and not a full colonel who has commanded men through Velin Pass.