Page 14 of A Spark of Luck
With all speed he went out the door into the empty hallway, not looking back.
Temptation, thy name is Cait, and temptation led to foolishness. If there was one thing he wasn’t, it was foolish.
He shouldn’t have fallen for the lure in the first place.
Cait watched him go, dumbstruck and still awash in a sexual glow that permeated every cell. She went to the door, cracked it open, and glanced down the hall. That man moved like smoke. Here one minute, overwhelming her senses, and now gone. For a change, no one else loitered in the hall either.
She shut and locked the door and threw herself back on her bed. It smelled like Hunt, smelled like sex, smelled like them. Goosebumps shivered over her.
“Shit, what have I done?” She dropped her arm over her eyes. Unfortunately, her mind drifted and replayed every moment.
The fantasies she’d had after fixing him up had been hot ones. But he’d blown all of those into the stratosphere. The heat of his mouth sweeping over her skin, the weight of him against her, his hardness buried inside her – more glorious than she’d imagined. She sighed and then frowned. Mentally skirting the implications of how right he felt with her on her small bed, she sat up and stumbled over the difficulty of accepting that she’d stripped naked for him with hardly a sweet invitation.
“Fantasies should stay fantasies, Cait. You know better than this. Guys talk.” Further, she didn’t know him at all. Would he honor their privacy and keep the details of this to himself? How would she know whether he did or not? It wasn’t like the SEALs hung around spilling secrets and spreading gossip. Did they?
She tossed her blankets over her and fell back again. Familiar exhaustion crept through her. Her eyes drifted shut. Maybe he’d come back. Maybe she should try and converse with the man. On a thought, she snapped her eyes open and glanced at her makeshift nightstand.
The cookie lay there mocking her.
He’d brought her food.
Good strategy to get a woman in bed?
She squirmed against that implication, not liking it. But her brain and her body wouldn’t cooperate, and she dropped to sleep, feeling every ache of a body unused to lovemaking, and burdened with second thoughts.
Chapter Five
Week One Gone
“I think I messed up.” Cait stared at the woman on the screen in front of her. Feet tucked under her bedding and laptop propped in her lap, she pushed past her need to keep Hunt a secret and confessed to a woman who was like her sister.
Dr. Jacqueline Shay was her best friend, her sister from another mother, her colleague, and at times like today, her anchor. With her black hair twisted to the back of her head and a ratty gray Berkeley t-shirt, she looked about twenty years old, but she’d gone to medical school with Cait, and they’d been fast friends since millisecond one – even though she’d gone to the Army and Jackie had gone to Doctors Without Borders.
Jackie yawned. “How so? Patient wise? What?”
“Man wise.”
Jackie’s eyes widened. She quit fidgeting and leaned into the camera on her own computer. “Do tell, sister. You’ve been holding out.”
“Not holding out. It happened a week ago. I’ve been keeping it private. You can’t tell anybody.” Cait leaned in and mouthed the words right in her face.
Jackie cackled. “Who am I going to tell? Promise. Silence. Pinky swear and all that. Details. Details.” She made a move-along motion, and Cait resigned herself to telling the story. She wasn’t going to go blow by blow. Some of that needed to stay between her and Hunt.
“Did a stitch job about a month ago on a SEAL.”
“Hoo-hoo, girl. When you fall off the celibacy wagon, you fall off.”
Cait shifted in her seat, the mattress poking her. “Hush. You want to hear this or not.”
“What’s his name?
“Hunt. He’s a lieutenant.”
“Okay. So you doctored him up. What next?”
“There was a spark there. I thought I’d done a fairly decent job of ignoring it, but then he dropped food off for me. Then he appeared with dinner and lingered to talk. Obviously, amid his responsibilities for being here and mine, I’m trying to stay cool..”
“Uh-huh. Define cool.”
