Page 49 of Wreck Me
The worry line faded away, and those eyes she found she wanted to just stare into anytime he was around darkened with desire, causing a slow simmer to start in her belly.
Good God. What was happening to her? Since when was having one—actually make that two—orgasms not enough?
And yet, her body was beginning that low, steady burn of desire building. She shifted closer to him, and to her delight, he cupped her cheek and tilted her face up to meet his eyes.For several seconds, all he did was look at her, his eyes roaming over her face. A slow smile curved those talented lips. “Megan, what have you done to me?”
She was just about to ask him the same question, but before she could answer, his mouth covered hers.
It was a kiss that made her toes curl.
“So what’s the tattoo symbolize?”
They were lying face to face, tangled in the sheets. She didn’t have a clue of the time and didn’t care. All she knew was that she didn’t want the night to end. She’d lost count of how many orgasms she’d had so far, and the longer she lay in the bed with him, touching him freely like he was hers, the harder it was to stay on her side of the bed.
It was made worse by the fact that his hand hadn’t left her ass for the last several minutes.
Megan ran a fingertip over the black ink on his shoulder, studying the lines and letters of the dog tags he’d had permanently penned into his skin.
“The dog tags are for the guys I lost in my unit.”
Her eyes flicked up to his. They were closed, but his breath was even, almost as though he were asleep. She rolled her teeth over her bottom lip, wanting to ask more but unsure if she should.
As she mulled it over, he opened his eyes and looked down at her. “I know you have a million questions, Gentry. You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t.”
“Well, yeah. But I don’t want to be insensitive.”
“Ask away.”
She raised a brow. “Seriously?”
“Yeah.” He paused as something like resignation passed in his eyes. “I’m serious.”
She snuggled closer to him but continued to trace the lines of the tattoo. She didn’t want to break the connection of their touching. “Will you tell me what happened?”
He blinked and rolled his lips inward, not speaking for several moments. The silence stretched for so long that Megan started to tell him not to worry about it. Then he started to talk.
“It was during my last tour. I’d been pretty lucky up to that point. We’d had some men get injured, but we hadn’t seen much action that time around. We only had a couple of weeks left to go and then we were headed home.”
He stopped, and his eyes glazed over, as though reliving whatever it was he went through.
“We had some intel that told us there were some guys holed up in an abandoned building making bombs. It was dark and quiet. We could hear a couple of guys talking. I knew enough of the language to know that they were talking about the bombs.”
His nostrils flared as he exhaled. “They started to laugh, which I thought was odd, given the circumstances and what they’d been talking about. I realized they were laughing because they’d rigged parts of the building. And we had no idea where.”
Megan had an idea of where this was going and her heart broke for him. She wanted to soothe him, say something to ease the pain, but for once in her life, she had no words. So she kept her mouth shut and continued to stroke his skin.
“One of the guys tripped a wire. Took out him and the two guys around him. After that it was chaos. The building was old, made of crumbling stone, so it started to fall apart.” He stopped and sighed, his gaze meeting hers. “We went in with seven and came out with three. It was my last tour. I figured if I couldn’t protect my unit, I didn’t belong there.”
Aidan Reynolds was without a doubt a protector in every facet of his life.
“Four tags—one for each guy lost.”
He nodded.
“And this is why you don’t sleep well.”
He nodded again. “I’m better than I used to be. I don’t have nightmares anymore. It’s been a while now.”
But being who he was, Megan would bet her next breath that the guilt weighed on him like a cinder block. She leaned forward to read the words on his skin. “What are these numbers under their names?”
