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Thirty-Three
“I’ve never done that before…”
Sarah smiled and turned her head to Dean, who now lay on his back, his broad chest undulating and warm under her cheek. “What? Had sex?”
His low chuckle reverberated in her ear, filling her with a renewed wave of need. “You know what I mean. What we just did. That was different.”
She closed her eyes for only a moment and drew a slow breath, reticence holding her, even though she knew this man well enough that she should have guessed he’d cut straight to the point. To all that had changed between them.
That slow breath spilled from her lips now, and she opened her eyes again, rolling onto her tummy and pitching her chin on his pecs. “You know, around here, when someone says something is ‘different’, that’s really just their polite way of saying they didn’t like it.”
His easy grin grew, and he ran a finger over her hairline. “Oh, I liked that plenty.”
He shifted suddenly, pulling her up and catching her lips with his, driving in a deeper and more-passionate-than-expected kiss. Surprise ebbed and her body melted into him, an unintended moan breaking loose.
He pulled away and a full-scale beam took over his face, a beam she had the distinct feeling so few people ever saw. “See. You liked it plenty too.”
A quick and shuddering laugh escaped her, forcing her to press her lips together, and a heaviness shifted in her chest. Something about his clear happiness now—it lit an awareness that maybe he wasn’t happy all that often.
Then again, I’m no different. Though… lately…
She dropped her attention to the light sprinkling of jet-black hair across his chest. “Dean…”
“Sarah?”
She flicked her gaze back to his sparkling blue eyes, a tightness catching in her throat. “Tell me about your past… at least something.”
She tried not to wince at her huskiness and that damn returning prickliness in her eyes. For some reason, learning about him had become so important. She wanted to know all about the people and events that had shaped the man she was quickly falling in—No.
No. Not yet.
Right, well, learning about him seemed important, anyway.
The cobalt in his eyes deepened, and he squeezed his brows together. She couldn’t tell if he merely reacted to her strange behavior or genuinely resented her question about his past. “What do you want to know?”
She hadn’t thought that far ahead, mostly just assumed he would shut down her question, so now she gnawed on her lower lip while she decided. “Let’s start with what you were doing, say, at twenty-one? What sort of person were you then?”
The muscles over his forehead sagged, and he pushed out a rough breath, his focus snapping away from her and onto the dove-gray ceiling. A prolonged silence lingered, and she thought back to his previous insistence that he needed more time before he could talk about himself.
Granted, not much time had passed since that conversation, but he’d been the one to insist she let him love her, and she had, even though what he’d asked was huge. So now it was her turn to ask of him, and if he couldn’t be honest with her now, then when?
“Let me see.” He took a long pause, his gaze still searching the ceiling. “By twenty-one I was into my third year in the Marines. As for the sort of person I was—”
“Hang on now.” She grabbed his chin and made him look at her. “You were in the Marines?”
He raised a brow but said nothing. In fairness, so much about him did scream, “former military”, from his imposing physique to his shuttered demeanor, even his handling of the Chadleys the other week…
“Right.” She nodded to herself and allowed him to continue.
“I wasn’t too different to who I am now, a little more unsettled and brazen, typically impulsive. Though, there wasn’t all that much room for stupid mistakes.”
He reached across his body and ran the pad of his thumb down her temple, the gesture seemingly more to reassure himself than her, as though speaking about the past made him want to prove he was still firmly in the present.
“So, what made you leave the Marines?” She permitted a long silence while his chest rose with another sharp and hissing breath, the reaction and delay another clear sign this wasn’t an easy conversation.
“You mean apart from being young but not naive enough to notice that enlisting didn’t always mean ‘helping’ the people you thought you’d be helping?” His gaze left her again, his expression tense and twisted. A frown, but more than a frown.
His pause seemed more about grappling with emotion than thinking of what to say next. “And still, it wasn’t my choice to leave. The bad conduct discharge and two months in military jail saw to that.”
