Page 95 of Boomer
Their mouths met again, harder this time, wet and open, a clash of breath and hunger and everything unspoken. He pressed her back against the tile, one hand braced above her head. She gasped into his mouth, his cock still deep and full. They didn’t move at first. Just stayed there. Joined. Breathing into each other’s mouths, foreheads pressed, the world suspended.
He released her, pulled out, and she grasped his shoulders from the intense friction. “Boomer…”
“I’ve got you,” he murmured, voice hoarse. “I’vealwaysgot you.”
Her fingers tangled in his hair, his mouth found the curve of her neck, her shoulder, her collarbone.
For a long moment, the only sound was water.
And breathing.
And the fragile, powerful rhythm of two people holding on in the wake of something they never expected to find.
Boomer sat in the briefing,needing this reprieve, knowing he was in no shape to operate. Every time he looked at Taylor, dressed in her gear, Glock at her hip, lashed down with a tie around one of those sleek, toned thighs, he felt her legs around him, and thank God he was too spent for a hard-on, but his freaking dick twitched. The fucker.
When he’d gotten back to his room, still wearing nothing but a towel, Breakneck had smirked, then taken one look at his face and whatever torture he’d planned died. He stared at Boomer for a moment, looking affected by whatever he was projecting.
“Next time, you might want to take a pair of shorts to the shower. Ambushes are unexpected, but you look like you’ve been ravaged and lived to tell the tale.” He took a breath and pulled open the door. “You deserve to be happy, Boomie. Fuck, if anyone does, you do.” Then he’d closed the door behind him. In the wake of that kid’s comment, Boomer’s legs had given out from under him. He sat down hard on the bunk, his heart turning over in his chest. How had he never seen the way his brother respected him…looked at him like there was always something to learn, and had just read him like a sniper targetand had refused to pull the trigger. Except that kid had just shot him through the heart.
He wasn’t the only teammate watching him. Iceman was deeply satisfied. Hazard and GQ nodding. Skull was smirking and giving him fist bumps with his eyes, Kodiak looked smug as hell, and Preacher’s eyes were filled with an understanding of what he’d just been gifted with, like he knew Boomer had just been baptized in fire.
That baptism had burned more than it had purified. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud.There are things inside me...I can’t.But it was too late to take it back. It had slipped out raw, like a pressure valve blowing under too much weight.
She’d held him like she’d heard every unsaid thing behind the words. Like sheknewwhat he hadn’t been able to give voice to and wasn’t going to let go until he could.
The problem was, he didn’tknowhow to work the problem. He’d tried. Hell, he’d tried a thousand times. Thought maybe the pain would burn out, maybe the guilt would settle, maybe one day he’d stop dreaming about Mike’s laugh right before that last mission.
But it always came back.
Now, with Taylor beside him, with Ansel in the picture, with something like a future clawing its way toward him, that pain wasn’t fading.
It waslouder.
His gut clenched, that same damn knot twisting tight. He couldn’t go on like this, not without figuring it out. But how the hell did you face a ghost you still couldn’t talk to?
Not here. Not yet.
But someday soon, he was going to have to look it in the eye. He’d have to tell Taylor, and he wanted to be whole when he did it. Before it took something from him he’d never get back.
Taylor...God…she hadn’t flinched. She hadn’t blinked. He knew in his gut that she wouldn’t. Her loyalty to him, her commitment to him, was laced in three goddamned beautiful words.
He felt her gaze on him. Met her eyes.
It was as if she could feel his turmoil, reading him like she always did, silent and exacting. Her eyes swept over him, and what he saw in hers leveled him.
Adoration. Support. That deep, aching need to soothe him…not because he was broken, but because she loved him.
It broke open something in him, something that had ached for so long it had become part of his architecture. Now it just feltincomprehensiblethat she had fallen in love with him.
But he took it. Every ounce she gave him.
He wrapped his fist around that love like it was a lifeline and swore,when he was free of this pain, this goddamn torturing pain, he would tell her.
He vowed it with the same will that had made him a SEAL. That never fucking quit, never-out-of-the-fight kind of grit they carved into their souls from BUD/S, from combat, from brotherhood, from being both shield and tip of the spear.
She set her hand over her heart, watching him quietly, awareness in those Nordic depths of how his love burned behind his eyes, contained for now, but aching at the seams, ready to pour out the second he found the breath to give it voice.
He wanted to kiss her, fuck her again, hard and slow and raw, until her essence soaked into his skin, clung to his sex, threaded through his bloodstream, and carved itself into the walls of his heart.
