Am I still whole?

* * *

Danny’s eyes watered.

As he looked at the beautiful woman before him, her lowered head and the awkward way she held her arm off to the side gauged into his chest.

But at least what she was looking for from him was something that was easy to give.

Walking forward, he reached over and turned off the water. Then he put trembling hands on her shoulders and slowly drew them down her upper arms. She stiffened as he got to her elbows, but she did not pull away.

He waited until her eyes swung up to his own. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

By way of answer, he dropped his head and began to kiss her. When he felt her mouth finally relax against his, he moved her arms up to his shoulders, stroking them.

Her body was lithe strength, everything smooth under his palms as he drew her against himself. He loved the feel of her hips, the dip in the small of her back . . . her ass, so tight as it filled his hands. Most of all, he loved the trust she was putting in him.

Breaking the contact at their mouths, he pulled the tie out of her hair and fanned the brunette rush around her shoulders. Then he traced her features with his fingertips, her cheeks, her nose, her mouth, her chin. The column of her throat was a path he followed to the wings of her cheekbones . . . and then he went lower, teasing her nipples with a soft touch, first on one and then the other. Anne began to breathe harder, her front teeth biting into her lower lip.

Farther down, still. To her belly . . .

Lower. To her sex.

She gasped as he slipped his hand between her legs, and he took over from there, wrapping an arm around her and bending her back so he supported her weight. As he kissed her again, he stroked at her wet core, so slippery, so hot.

“Anne,” he whispered against her lips.

“Yes . . . ?”

“Do you want to know how I feel when I see you like this? Do you want to know what looking at you does to me? What my dreams at night are like and my fantasies during the day?”

There was the faintest trace of fear in her stare as she looked up at him.

When she finally nodded, he put his mouth back on hers, licked his way inside of her . . . and made her come so hard she gasped his name, her hand clawing into his shoulder.

Sometimes, it was best to show, not tell.

As she cried out, he held her and kissed her and told her he loved her in his head. And when she was finished, he picked her up and lowered her into the warm water. She went lax against the back of the tub, her body loosening under the undulating waves, her lids lowering as she relaxed.

“Don’t you need a bath, too?” she asked.

Say. No. More.

If not for the fact that Danny had nothing else to wear, he would have torn his fucking clothes off. Instead, he bitched internally at the two minutes it took to whip off his muscle shirt, kick of his boots, and lose his pants.

As he joined her, water splashed out onto the floor, but he didn’t care. He was going to redo the floor up here anyway. Maybe the ceiling down below, too, now.

He wouldn’t have cared if he’d had to raze the entire damn house.

Cupping water in his palms, he brought it to her shoulders, letting the warmth flow over her. He did the same with her sternum, the level licking at her nipples, leaving them a glistening wet that nearly had him orgasming. He carried more to her upper arm, her elbow . . .

The place where he had cut her.

When he went to touch what was left of her forearm, he wondered if she would stop him. She didn’t. She just watched him take the blunt end into his hands.

His eyes teared up again as he relived bringing that axe down on a part of her precious body. He could see the remnants of the infection’s ravages; the skin across the end was bumpy and discolored.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she said quietly.

Well, it was agony for him.

Drawing her arm up, he kissed the inside of her elbow, where the blue veins ran down, and stroked her skin with his thumb. Then he went lower with his lips as he cradled her limb in his hands.

“It must have been hell,” he said hoarsely. He had been through pain, but losing a spleen, what did that matter? At least when he’d been hurting, he’d known that when he came back from that stretch of torture, he was going to be himself again.

Physically, that was. Mentally, he hadn’t been right—although how much of a change was that?

“I don’t remember much of the infection. But it’s true what they say about phantom limb pain. It’s terrible. I could feel my hand and my palm, even though they weren’t there.”

It had been the same for him back at the stationhouse when he’d returned. He’d seen her at every turn, in the break room, the bunk room, on the engines and the ladders. He’d heard her voice, caught the scent of her shampoo.

And yet she was not there, and it had been agony every time reality had come crashing back to him, reminding him that she was gone.

“Sometimes I still can.”

It took him a minute to catch up with what she was saying. “Does it wake you up at night?”

“Yes.”

He knew how that went. It was why he drank so much. The alcohol helped him get through the dark hours when his brain insisted on running through that series of events like somewhere, in those memories, there was the treasure he searched for.

Forgiveness.

“Kiss me,” she said.

He would have given her the world. That all she wanted was something he would have begged her for was more than he deserved.

They ended up with her straddling him, her thighs split around his hips, the tub big enough to accommodate them. Sitting her up straight, he took one of her nipples into his mouth and held her core against him through the warm water. As she arched, he entered her and they both groaned.

Anne rode him slow, and as he leaned back into the curve and cupped her breasts, he had never seen a woman so captivating, the fading light making her glow.

Or maybe that was her soul.

Before he got lost in the orgasming, he said, “I need to tell you something you’re not going to want to hear.”

She stopped. “What.”

Brushing some of her wet hair back, he picked the lesser of two not-so-hots. “I don’t want this to be the last time.”

Chapter 38

On Monday, Anne dropped Soot off with Don at the office and proceeded over to SWAT headquarters. Having been born and bred in New Brunswick, and then having worked on the fire service, she knew every nook and cranny of the city

It took her three tries to find the sprawling, unmarked building out by the airport. Talk about hiding in plain sight. With all the airplane hangars, UPS storage facilities, and shipping businesses, the SWAT team’s base was just one more metal-sided, flat-roofed location.

As she pulled up, a side door opened and Jack gave her a wave. “Park over there.”

“Got it.”

She eased the muni sedan off the asphalt and parallel to the facility. “Thanks for having me out here.”

“No problem.” He gave her a quick hug, and then welcomed her into an open bay that was so big it should have had its own zip code. There were thirty or so marked, unmarked, personal, and armored vehicles lined up, along with all manner of four-by-fours and ancillaries. The ammo room was a locked cage in the far corner, the weapons mounted on pegs in rows, everything from assault rifles to shotguns to handguns registered and accounted for, in addition to whatever the officers had on their bodies at the time.

“Check out our new BEAR.” Jack played Vanna White in front of an armored troop transporter. “Her name is Shirley. We also call her Big Momma.”

“She is beautiful.”

“I love a woman who can appreciate fine equipment.” He led the way over to a coded door. “Come on in, I’ve got everything up on the computer.”

The conferencing space was a lecture hall with two dozen tables set up facing a dais and a screen. Off to one side, a dozen men of Jack’s physical description were clustered in groups over laptops, and there was both an electronic board and a dry-erase with all kinds of staffing notes and tables on them. Framed photographs of teams from different eras were mounted around a blacked-out American flag, and a glass display shelf had a lineup of badges, officers killed on the job.