Page 28 of Breaking Danger
She buried her head against Jon’s shoulder. His arms tightened around her.
“Take me to bed, Jon,” she whispered against his shoulder, eyes closed tight.
He stood so quickly his chair tipped over to the floor. He picked her up and carried her away, away from the terrible noises.
Mount Blue
Haven
His cane slammedto the floor, crossing right in front of two of the most beautiful female legs on planet Earth. The woman’s eyes looked at the cane running obliquely in front of her, following it up to his hand, then going all the way up to his face.
She met his eyes and flinched. It was Stella Cummings’ usual reaction to someone looking her right in the face. He was pleased to note that the reaction was less severe than it had been in the beginning, when she tried to hide, instinctively. Now, she didn’t avert her face much, just her eyes.
Lucius Ward reached out to hold her chin between thumb and forefinger and turned her face gently so she was looking him square in the eyes.
“Hello, beautiful,” he said and bent to kiss her. Her luscious lips—with that little indent on the pillowy lower lip that millions of men had dreamed of and lusted after in her previous life, were soft against his. He could feel the scar that slashed across her mouth as a little raised ridge. He didn’t care. He was covered in scars himself.
They were right in the communal kitchen’s entrance. People were streaming by them like water around a boulder. Keeping one hand firmly on his cane—no point falling on his ass just because this woman took his breath away—he hooked his other around her slender neck and deepened the kiss.
Stella gave up trying to maintain discretion and kissed him back. Man, it was heaven. She opened her mouth, her tongue licking his and right there, in their communal kitchens, right in front of just about the entire Haven population, Lucius’s body woke up.
It was a miracle that perhaps only this one woman in all the world could have engineered.
Before being taken prisoner by Arka Pharmaceuticals and subjected to harsh surgical tortures for a year, Lucius wouldn’t have needed a world-class beauty like Stella Cummings to get a hard-on. His dick had taken care of itself, and him, ever since he’d been twelve.
But after his rescue from the research lab-torture chamber where he and the rest of the Ghost Ops team had been held, standing upright had been almost beyond him. He’d pushed himself daily since the rescue, falling exhausted into bed each night. At first, simply standing with the help of a cane for more than five minutes at a time had been beyond him. But damned if he’d be a cripple, even though those sadistic bastards at Arka had done their best to reduce him to the level of an animal. Dr. Charles Lee, the head of Arka, and the man who’d orchestrated the brutal experiments in his frenzy to find the formula for super-soldiers, had been about to discard him as human waste when Mac’s wife, Catherine, led his former teammates to him.
He’d been in a coma when he arrived here at Haven, as near to death as you could be. But here he’d found his old team, he’d found superb medical care, solidarity and—love. He’d found love here in this outlaw community.
He deepened the kiss further, losing himself in her. In this beautiful, scarred, very smart woman who’d captured his heart. He would have sworn he didn’t have one. All he had was loyalty—to his teammates and his country, in that order—but it turned out that yes, he had a heart and it was hers.
Stella stepped forward, slipping one slender hand over his on the cane, the other around his waist and the instant her torso touched his it happened. While kissing her he’d felt a heaviness around his groin, the feeling of blood rushing around, looking for a place to pool. He always felt that way around her, aroused in his head though his body was too damaged to respond.
The blood finally found its old pathways and his body woke up and smelled the roses. Or smelledher, Stella Cummings, once considered the most beautiful woman in the world until a slasher took a knife to her. The surgeons had done their best to put her back together again but Stella’s face looked like a jigsaw puzzle. Lucius couldn’t see that. To him, she was still the most beautiful woman in the world. The most gifted actress of her generation, a woman who had enchanted millions around the world.
The woman who now held his heart in her hands.
His dick, too, apparently.
He felt the instant Stella realized what was pressing against her. Her lips smiled under his. He pulled back, pressed his forehead against hers. “Let’s go lie down for a while, Stella.” His voice came out thick, rough. As if it were the first time he’d spoken in years.
Stella kissed his jaw. Though she was a tall woman, she had to lift herself up to do it.
“I can’t,” she whispered. He could hear the regret in her voice. “And anyway, I don’t know if you should?—”
“Yeah. I don’t know if I should either. I don’t even know if I can,” he said honestly. “This is the first time it’s been anything but inert meat between my legs in over a year. Maybe if I used it, I’d keel over dead.” He made a rumbly noise in his chest which took him a few seconds to realize was a laugh. He’d laughed. He wasn’t a laughing man, never had been. Few things about this fucked-up world amused him. This last year had been pain and helplessness and desolation. And right now they were in a crisis as a plague unlike any other had been unleashed.
But this woman—she infused him with such joy. The world was in danger but there had to be some joy in it, otherwise why save it?
Lucius had lived with duty as his sole motivator for so long. For most of his life. But duty was a cold and harsh mistress. Right now he had something warm and alive and magical in his arms. This was worth fighting and dying for.
Someone holding a big tin vat of tomatoes bumped them as he sped by. “Sorry,” he called over his shoulder.
Stella straightened with a sigh. “I can’t take time off, Lucius.” She cupped his chin and tried a smile. “Much as I’d like to. Soon there will be almost three thousand of us. We’re already feeding in two shifts, we’re going to have to go to three soon.”
“We can take the time off and we should, my darling. You’ve been working almost 27 hours straight.” He touched his finger to the dark circles under her eyes. “You’re about ready to fall where you stand. General Snyder sent forty men and women to help you. He’s organizing what is essentially a mess hall. The Marines know how to do this. They’ll take their cues from you with regard to recipes and menus but they don’t need help in creating a mess hall.”
She sighed and bowed her head. He was speaking the truth and she knew it.
