Diana Palmer Collected 1-6: Soldier of Fortune / Tender Stranger / Enamored / Mystery Man / Rawhide and Lace / Unlikely Lover. Diana Palmer
her mouth. His face looked strained, but his eyes were blazing. “I want it,” he whispered roughly.
“But I’m hurting you,” she said achingly.
“Such a sweet hurt,” he whispered, bending. “So sweet, so beautiful…let me make you ache like this, Gabby. I won’t seduce you, I promise I won’t, but let me touch you…”
His hand moved between them and lightly touched her breast. The gown was thin, and his fingers were warm, and the sudden intimacy was shocking and pleasurable, all at once.
She gasped and instinctively caught his fingers. He lifted his head and looked down, and he smiled.
“Habit?” he whispered.
Her fingers lingered on his hairy wrist. “I…I haven’t ever let…” she began.
“You’ll let me.” His face nuzzled hers, his cheek rubbed gently against hers and he found her mouth, cherishing it with a whispery soft pressure that was wildly exciting.
And all the while, his fingers were shaping, probing, lightly brushing until they caused a helpless reaction in her body. He drew the gown tightly around her breasts and lifted his head.
“Look,” he said softly, directing her eyes down to the rigid peaks outlined under the gown. “Do you know what it means, what your body tells me when that happens?”
Her lips opened as she tried to breathe. “It means…that I want you,” she whispered back.
“Yes.” He brushed her lips apart with his, tracing the line of them with his tongue. His teeth caught her upper lip and nibbled gently, tugging it, smiling as she reached up to do the same thing to his.
“Jacob,” she whispered. Her hands crept around his neck. “Jacob…” She arched and pressed herself to him, and froze, shocked at what his taut body was telling hers.
“Body language,” he whispered, coaxing her mouth open again. “Now listen. I’m going to strip you out of that gown and hold you to me, just for a second, and then I’m going to get the hell out of here before I go crazy. I don’t know what we’ll be walking into today. I want one perfect memory to take with me, you understand?”
She did. Because it was just dawning on her that she was in love with him. Why else would she be doing this?
She felt his hands unbuttoning the garment and she looked up because she wanted to see his face, she wanted to remember always the expression on it. In case anything happened…
He eased the gown off her shoulders and she felt it suddenly drop to the floor. She felt the whisper of the breeze against her bare skin. J.D.’s eyes blazed as he looked down at her body. And then he drew her to him, and she felt herself go rigid all over.
“I won’t live long enough to forget how this feels,” he whispered. “Now kiss me, one last time.”
And she did, with all her heart and soul, without a single inhibition. And her arms held him and they fused together in a silence gone mad with tangible hunger.
He groaned as if he were being tortured and his arms hurt her, his lips hurt, his tongue thrust into her mouth in a deliciously fierce invasion. Finally he drew back, shaking, and put her from him.
He bent, picked up the nightgown, and gently drew it back on her without a single word.
“Worth dying for,” he whispered, studying her luminous eyes, her swollen mouth, her flushed cheeks. “God, you’re sweet.”
“Jacob, don’t go out there,” she pleaded.
“I have to.” He bent and retrieved his clothes from a chair where he must have flung them the night before and began to dress.
“But you’re a lawyer,” she persisted. She wiped away a tear and sat down heavily on the side of the bed, her green eyes wide and frightened. “You aren’t a soldier.”
“But I was, honey,” he said as he tugged on his jungle fatigues. He turned, buttoning the shirt, his eyes dark and mysterious as they searched hers. “You still haven’t worked it out, have you, Gabby?”
“Worked what out?”
He tucked in the shirt. “I served only three years in the Special Forces. I joined when I was eighteen.”
She was trying to do mathematics with a mind still drugged by pleasure. “You were twenty-one when you got out.”
“Yes. But I didn’t start studying for my degree until I was twenty-five.”
She stared at him, uncomprehending. “That means…you did something else with those four years.”
“Yes.” He met her searching gaze levelly. “I was a mercenary. I led First Shirt and the others for the better part of four years, in some of the nastiest little uprisings in the civilized world.”
Gabby stared at him as if she’d never seen him before. J.D., a mercenary? One of those men who hired out to fight wars, who risked their lives daily?
“Are you shocked, honey?” he asked, his eyes searching, his stance challenging.
Her lips parted. “I never realized…you said you served with them, but I never realized…I thought you meant in the Special Forces.”
“I was going to let you go on thinking that, too,” he said. “But maybe it’s better to get it out into the open.”
Her eyes went over him, looking for scars, for changes. She’d noticed the tiny white lines on his stomach and chest, partially hidden by the hair, but until now it hadn’t dawned on her what they were.
“You have scars,” she began hesitantly.
“A hell of a lot of them,” he said. “Do you want to hear it all, Gabby?”
“Yes.”
He rammed his hands into his pockets and went to stare out of the window, as if it was easier to talk when he didn’t look at her. “I stayed in the service because it meant I made enough to keep Martina in a boarding school. We had no relatives, you see. Mama was gone.” He shrugged. “But when I got out of the service, I couldn’t get a job that paid enough to get Martina through school. I wasn’t trained for much except combat.” He fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette and lit it. “I thought I’d given this up until the kidnapping,” he said absently, holding the cigarette to his lips. He drew in and blew out a cloud of smoke. “Well, Shirt was recruiting, and he knew I was in trouble. He offered me a job. I took it. I spent the next four years globe-trotting with my crossbow and a gun. I made money, and I put it in foreign banks. But I got too confident and too careless, and I got shot to pieces.”
She held her breath, waiting for him to continue.
“I spent weeks in a hospital. My lungs collapsed from shrapnel and they thought I was going to die. But I lived through it. When I got out, I realized that there was only one way I could go from there, and it was straight downhill. So I told Shirt I was quitting.” He laughed mirthlessly. “But first I went on one last mission, just to prove to myself that I still had the guts. And I came out of that one without a scratch. I came back to the States afterward. I figured that someday the guys I’d served with might need a lawyer, and I needed a profession. So I got a job and went to school at night.”
“You aren’t a fugitive?” she asked.
“No. In one or two countries, perhaps, if I were recognized. But not in the States.” He turned, studying her through narrowed eyes. “That’s why I guard my past so meticulously, Gabby. And it’s why I don’t like reporters. I’m not ashamed of the old life. But I don’t like being reminded of it too often.”
“Do you miss it?” she asked, probing