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He smiled against her hair at the thought. Her cheek was cradled against his heart, his arms holding her snugly to him, and for a few short minutes he actually contemplated going back to sleep. Until he felt her breathing pattern change, and he swore he felt her wake up.
There was an awareness that he could feel moving through him, a gentleness, an initial confusion and then a feeling of contentment and satisfaction.
“I didn’t expect you to be here when I woke,” she muttered with a drowsy smile against his chest as the fingers of one hand curled against the mat of hair that covered his chest. “Do you know how good it feels, Brogan, to awaken with you?”
He knew, because he felt the same. He didn’t just feel his own contentment, but he knew he was feeling hers as well. It had to be hers, because it was completely different from what he knew contentment felt like.
It was gentle; it was innocent. And Brogan knew he had no innocence left inside him. His innocence had been ripped out of him the day he learned his child had been deliberately destroyed before it could even begin to live. An innocent life barely formed because a condom had failed and had somehow acquired a tiny, tiny hole at the tip.
It had been so long ago, he should have forgotten it by now.
It had been years ago, and it still felt like yesterday.
“What?” she asked, watching him closely.
“What?” He shook his head, confused.
“That look on your face,” she told him. “What were you thinking?”
He breathed out heavily. “I was engaged once. ”
“The fiancée who aborted your baby?” She nodded, her palm flattening against his chest comfortingly.
Pushing her hair back from her cheek, he watched as it fell about her face and over her shoulder.
“Like you, my father wasn’t married to my mother,” he told her softly, his fingers tangling in her hair as he felt a sense of comfort wrapping around him. “Like yours, my mother struggled—until I was five, when she was murdered by a drug-crazed teenager who had stolen a gun from home and came to the diner she worked at looking for a meal. ” He shook his head bitterly. “If he had asked her, she would have bought him a meal, but he asked the owner first. When the old bastard wouldn’t feed him, he pulled the gun and shot Mom in the head. Then he turned back to the owner and asked again. He got the meal. He sat and ate it as Mom bled out on the floor and the customers in the diner rushed to save themselves. ”
“I’m so sorry, Brogan,” she whispered, her compassion wrapping around him.
A bitter smile tugged at his lips as he let his hand cup her cheek for a moment, drawing in the gentleness that was so much a part of her.
“I want you to understand,” he explained. “As I said, I was five. My father didn’t know I existed. When Child Services showed up on his doorstep with me, he looked down, and I saw disgust curl his lip when he said, ‘Hell, I paid her to abort the little bastard. ’”
Her eyes widened in outraged pain.
“He took me in, though. ” He sighed. “Two weeks later I was in a military school four states away. I came back to Somerset during the holidays and for summers and stayed with my aunt until she died in a car crash when I was sixteen. ”
“What an abrupt change from a loving home to a cold, emotionless world,” she whispered, her emerald eyes dark with distress, with banked anger at the thought of his father’s cruelty.
And yes, it had been cruelty.
“I was eighteen and working with the FBI as an informant against a particular clique of students I was a part of when John David Bryce was assigned as the director of the bureau office I reported to. ” There was something about the fact that he was holding her, his hands stroking her shoulders, his fingertips relishing the feel of her soft flesh, that dimmed some of the fury he usually felt at those early memories.
“What happened?” she asked.
He snorted at the question. “I was the pride of my regional office because of the information I was reporting on a small, select group of students creating their own homeland militia group. I was pulling in information on their parents, political and military figures, their sharing of information and top-secret files. And when John David, or JD as I usually call him, came into the office he felt the need to announce the fact that I was his son. Pride and all that. ” He grunted in disgust. “Thirteen years of being ignored by the bastard and suddenly I was his son. When graduation came I dropped out of the program and went my own way for a while. That was when I met Candy. ”
The feel of her lips pressing against his shoulder soothed him, and he found he didn’t want to get pissed. He didn’t want that darkness to mar the peace he found with her.
“I missed you, Eve,” he admitted as she lifted her head and stared up at him.
Regret filled him at the memory of the pain he had caused her the week before, the feeling of betrayal he knew she felt. Hell, he didn’t blame her for feeling it.
“I missed you. More than you know, Brogan,” she admitted as his lips lowered, taking a small, lingering kiss before pulling back.
The memory of last night swept over him again. The feel of her coming for him, destroying his senses with their combined pleasure and the heat that had built between them. Even clearer, though, was the memory of her crying out her love for him, and how he’d known in that instant that the emotion that swirled and drew them together was indeed love.
Yet he hadn’t told her he loved her as well.
