Page 23 of Tony

He lifted his head to capture her cold lips in a searing kiss. The kiss quickly heated her lips and other parts of him as well. Wondering how the snow was not melting all around them, he rolled her to the side so that he could hoist himself up, pulling her along with him.

Her kiss-warmed lips opened slightly in surprise. “Where are we going in such a hurry?”

He swooped her up in his arms, kissing her soundly once again. “Wanna get you inside and get you warm, baby.”

Baby? He called me baby.She could not help the grin on her face, realizing that she had never been anyone’s ‘baby’. Holding tightly to his neck, she pulled him in closer.

Walking through the front door, he kicked it closed behind him, then carried her over to the fireplace. Setting her down gently, he noticed her wet pants. “Start stripping and I’ll get you something warm to put on.”

She watched as he took off his jacket, pulling a gun out from the pocket, checking it and then laying it on the table by the sofa.

He saw her questioning look and smiled. “I carry a weapon, darlin’. Never know what critters may have been out there. Four-legged or two.”

“Will you show me how to shoot sometime?” she asked, looking down at it.

“Absolutely. We’ll practice later. Right now, you need to finish getting out of those wet clothes.”

Her fingers and toes ached as she pulled off her boots and wet socks. She managed to get out of her jacket by the time he returned with her sweatpants, but her fingers fumbled with the button on her jeans.

Brushing them aside, he quickly had her jeans unzipped and slid them down her legs.

“How do you do that? You were outside too, so how is it that your fingers work and mine don’t?” she asked, trying to pull her sweatpants up.

He was attempting to not look at her near nakedness as he stripped out of his outer garments as well. “Training,” was his reply.

Cocking her hip, she looked up at him. “Training? How on earth can you train to not have cold fingers?”

He laughed as he pulled dry socks onto her feet and moved her closer to the fire. “I was Special Forces in the Army.”

“Oh.”

He looked at her and smiled. “You don’t know what that means, do you?”

“Well, kind of. I’ve seen it in movies. It means you earned the Green Beret, right?” She pushed him down on the rug in front of the fire and said, “Let me get some hot chocolate for us and I want to hear about it.”

Returning a few minutes later with steaming mugs, she sat down next to him. “Okay, Mr. Green Beret, tell me how you learned to not have cold fingers.”

Laughing, he said, “Not much to tell you other than we trained for-fuckin-ever, in the water, in the cold, in the heat. You learn to withstand the elements, work through them, keep going.”

“Did you always want to go into the Special Forces?” she asked, noting the pride in his voice as he spoke.

“My father was Army. My grandfather was Army. I did college and then officer training school, by that time I knew I wanted to be part of the elite.”

“What about the others? Gabe and Vinny and Jobe?”

“We all were assigned to the same unit. They were under me. We worked in squads of twelve. Tighter than brothers. You gotta know their thoughts as well as their moves and they sure as hell had to know mine.”

“Do you miss it?”

Tony thought for a moment, the firelight playing across the angles in his face. He shook his head slowly. “Nah. I don’t miss it. If I didn’t have them working with me, then yeah, I’d miss the camaraderie. The closeness. That bond that just happens when you share the good as well as the worst. But it was time for me to get out and as it happens, they felt the same.”

“What about the security business? When did that become your dream?”

“I started thinking about it a year before I got out. I didn’t have anything except for the Army. Not after…” Rubbing his hand over his face, he said, “Just felt the need to use my skills. To protect. To…” Looking at her, he said, “You know those commercials about serving in the military to make Americans safe? Well, I knew that you don’t have to go overseas to fight in a war to want to make people safe. I could do it here in my own backyard.”

They sat quietly for a few minutes, letting the crackle of the fireplace fill the silence. He leaned back and watched her as she closed her eyes inhaling the scent of the hot chocolate.Haven’t talked so goddamn much in years as I have in the past two days.Smiling, he realized that it felt fuckin’ good.

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