One and Only(44)

He took over where she’d left off, moving her pants down enough that he could get his hand in there.

“Oh, fuck, you’re so wet.” Just like last time. Just like every time. Her responsiveness made him crazy.

“I need you,” she said again, whimpering.

“I know. Shhh.” He breached her with a finger, arranging his hand so his thumb was free to press against her clit. Normally, he would have liked to take more time to tease her, but she was so ready. And though they were in the woods, they weren’t very far from the main buildings.

Making a hooking motion with the index finger inside her, he searched for the telltale spot. None of her vibrators had had a g-spot stimulator, and he wanted to fucking rock her world. His finger brushed over something different from its surroundings, something slightly spongy. There it was. Watching her like a hawk, he pressed down gently, experimentally.

Her eyes flew open, and she shattered in his arms.

He wanted to pump his fists in victory. Because he’d made her feel good, but also because it had felt like something only he could do for her. Which was ridiculous, objectively not true. But all the same, he held stubbornly to the notion.

It took her a few minutes to come down, for her panting to return to normal. He held her, as she’d done for him earlier, waiting for her to solidify, to come back to herself.

When she did, she was embarrassed. Her cheeks pinked, and she had trouble meeting his eyes. He pressed a finger under her chin and tilted it up. “Thank you,” he said.

“Thank you?” she echoed, incredulous. “I haven’t done anything yet.” She glanced meaningfully down at the bulge in his jeans.

“I’m fine,” he said, and, miraculously, he was. He was back, fully in his body, fully in the present. It was he who should be thanking her. She had brought him back. And as much as he would love for her to return the favor, anyone could stumble by and discover them. It was time to get her—literally—out of the dirt. So he tried to gently dislodge her from his lap, but she held tight.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You can’t be that selfless. Tell me what you want.”

She was still wearing the lavender crown. So instead he reached over, grabbed it, threw it on the ground, and said, “What I want is for you not to hook up with Kent.”

She surprised him by laughing. The musical sound washed over him like a benediction. Then she tilted her head, narrowed her eyes, and said, “What happened here?”

He looked around exaggeratedly, trying to make her laugh. “I finger-fucked you in the woods?”

She shook her head like that was the wrong answer. “It’s the PTSD, isn’t it? You were having some kind of flashback when I first got here.”

Shame washed over him. He didn’t want her to know how weak he was, how much he’d needed her just then. But how could he hide it? He’d been shivering in her arms. And after what she’d done for him, he owed her the truth.

“This is about what happened with Eric and Haseeb, isn’t it?” she said gently.

He shook his head. “No. This is about what happened with Becky.”





“It wasn’t the same at all,” Cameron said, pressing his hands into his temples. “So I don’t know why it’s all happening again.”

He was clearly frustrated with himself, angry even. Jane wanted to take him in her arms and tell him everything was going to be okay, but she couldn’t. Whatever else had or still would happen between Cameron and her, they didn’t lie to each other. “Tell me,” she said, scrambling off his lap and pulling up her pants, which, in almost any other circumstance she would have found comical. “What happened that wasn’t the same? Who is Becky?”

“Master Corporal Rebecca Mannerly. Becky was my best friend in Iraq…I guess.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You guess?”

That drew the smile she’d been going for. “Well, you know. I’m not very likable.”

She shrugged. Maybe that was true for other people, but she liked him. As evidenced by the spectacular orgasm he’d just given her. Which was a problem. But now was not the time to argue the point or to embark on an analysis of what the hell kind of whammy Cameron MacKinnon had put on her. So she waited.

The silence between them stretched on. He lifted the hem of his shirt to wipe some sweat from his face and took a deep breath.

“It’s hard being a woman in the military.”

“I can imagine,” she said.

“Guys can be jerks, you know?”

“You think?” She was teasing him—she hoped not too much. She wanted him to keep talking, and she suspected the best way to do that was to treat him like she always did. If she was overly solicitous, or if she did what she really wanted to, which was, astonishingly and against her better judgment, to wrestle him to the ground and wrap her lips around his dick, he would clam up.

“Yeah, so Becky was one of us.” He absently picked blades of grass as he spoke. “Any of the guys would have taken a bullet for her, I think. Well, most of them would have. But she also wasn’t really one of us, you know? She put up with so much shit. Like, every day. I sort of…made friends with her.”

“You stuck up for her, is what you mean.” Cameron shrugged, but Jane could imagine it very well. The lone woman in a group of male soldiers. It couldn’t have been easy. And despite the bad-boy image that Cam projected, and seemed to believe in so fervently himself, he had a definite white knight thing going on.

“Our captain was a real dick. And it makes such a difference in terms of the culture of the unit. My first tour, my captain was a real stand-up guy. He was why I went back for a second tour. It sounds cliché, but he was a role model. He’s part of why I thought I might…” He broke off, shaking his head. A corner of his lip curled up, as if he were about to sneer at some unseen enemy she was pretty sure was himself.

“Thought you might what?” she asked gently.

The sneer arrived full force. “I was looking into going to university. You can’t be an officer without a degree.”

“I think that’s great,” she said. She meant it. It made sense. He was smart. And equally as important, he was kind. He would be a great leader.

“A moment of temporary insanity,” he said dismissively. “Anyway, that part is beside the point. This captain of ours—Biggs was his name—was a grade-A prick. A real power tripper, you know? One of those guys who got off on being in charge. He was always barking out ridiculous orders just for the sake of it, making us run laps at noon in the sun because he felt like it, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds like a real charmer.”

“Yeah, well, so at some point he started hitting on Becky.”

She could picture it. Unfortunately she, like probably all women alive, knew the type. “Gross.”

“It was his latest little exercise in dominance, you know? She wasn’t interested, but he kept pushing.”

“Oh!” Jane exclaimed as the pieces fell together in her mind. “The trial.” Oh God, Cameron had gotten himself kicked out of the army over this.

Cameron started throwing the grass that he’d pulled up into the stream. “I thought it was low-level stuff. She and I talked about it sometimes. She said she could handle it. She was used to it, unfortunately. I kept telling her to document it all and encouraged her to go up the chain of command, but she always refused. She didn’t want to be a shit-disturber or a test case or any of that. She begged me not to make a big deal of it. She just wanted to put her head down and be a soldier. That was the ironic thing: she was the best soldier in the bunch. I sometimes wonder if that’s why Biggs picked on her.”

“Like he was threatened, you mean?”

“He shouldn’t have been. Becky and I were only non-commissioned members—that’s army-speak for grunts—but yeah. I guess I can sort of see why. She was going places. But shouldn’t that have reflected well on him, as her commanding officer?”

“So what happened?” Jane asked, even though she was afraid she knew the answer.

He turned to look at her, his eyes glittering with rage. “What happened is that I walked into her tent and found him attacking her, and I lost my mind.”

“And you were charged and tried,” Jane said, her stomach swirling.

“Pretty much. I’m lucky I wasn’t court-martialed, I guess.”

“But there were some really big extenuating circumstances!” she protested. It didn’t seem fair that he had to throw everything away—and not only his career, but the whole university thing, too.

“Irrelevant. I was quite clearly in violation of the code of service. And Biggs was tried separately.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was demoted to lieutenant.”

“So you can attack a woman and get a slap on the wrist, but you defend the same woman and they kick you out?”

He sighed. “It’s complicated. I was a reservist, and just a driver. I was a lot more expendable than a career officer in the regular force. Also…”

He made a frustrated noise and looked up at the sky. There was clearly more to the story.

“Also what?” she prompted.