Storm Watch

3

JASON WATCHED HER GO and let out a long breath. He couldn’t believe it. Shy, carefully controlled Lizzy Mann, with the sweet-smelling brunette hair, and those melting chocolate eyes, the ones that had once revealed everything she thought every time she thought it, here in his house.

When they’d been young, she’d been a danger to herself for no reason other than he always knew exactly how she felt about everything: school, life, him.

But she’d be a danger to him now, because they were adults, and incredibly enough there was something there between them, something undeniable. Actually, it’d always been there, and it had nothing at all to do with her sweet, curvy body.

Okay, it had a lot to do with that curvy body, but it was more, far more. Once upon a time she’d stimulated his brain, and she’d been the first girl to do so.

And now she was no girl.

Which was bad timing all around, because since Matt’s death, he’d been pretty screwed up and wasn’t ready for a relationship. Hell, he wasn’t ready for real life. He had no idea what he wanted anymore, or even what was important to him.

Not with the damn rug yanked out from beneath his feet.

A gust of wind hit the house with what felt like a battering ram, immediately followed by the sound of glass shattering, and a short, startled scream. He whipped down the hallway just as the lights flickered once and went out. “Lizzy?”

The bathroom door opened as he craned his neck to see the broken glass, which had come from the bedroom across the hall. The window directly over his bed had blown in.

“It just scared me,” she said, following his gaze. “Sorry.”

With the driving rain the only sound around them, he suddenly became aware he’d pulled her to his side.

It’d been instinctive to do so, simply about concern, but that was draining quickly, replaced by something else entirely as his hand slowly moved up and down her arm.

Adrenaline. It was churning inside him now because of the blown window. Hell, it was still in him from his last mission.

From coming home again.

From being awoken after his first deep sleep in…forever.

From losing Matt.

It’d been a long time since he’d touched a woman, held one. Since someone had touched him in return.

Too long.

Knowing it, knowing damn well he was treading on thin ice, he bent his head for the simple pleasure of rubbing his jaw against hers.

She swallowed hard and, against his chest, he felt her hand settle, then slowly fist into his sweatshirt, not to push him away but to pull him in even tighter as she shivered.

“You’re cold,” he whispered, skimming both hands up her slim spine now.

“No. Not cold.”

God. God, he wanted…

This.

Her.

More.

Then her focus dropped to his mouth, and her lips parted, and that was all he needed. The sign that she felt it, too, this crazy heat. She wanted him to kiss her.

With that his only thought, he leaned in and did just that, all coherent thought going out the broken window as she opened her mouth beneath his and tentatively, sweetly, hesitantly, met his tongue with hers. It made him groan in sheer pleasure because, God, her mouth. She might have grown up and toughened up on the outside, but on the inside she was still soft and sweet, still just a little shy.

He’d take that, he’d take all she wanted to give and to that end, he cupped her head in one palm, running his other hand down her back to nudge her even closer. She crawled right in, right up against him as if made for the spot, accompanying the movement with a little purr from deep in her throat. He loved the way she didn’t keep her hands to herself, loved how they ran up his arms, over his chest, around his neck and into his hair.

Loved.

It.

But then more glass fell from the bedroom windowpane, flying into the room, the hallway, hitting the floor around them with a musical tinkling sound that had them tearing free of each other.

Breathing almost harder than the wind outside, she stared up at him, mouth wet, eyes wide. “What was that?”

“A damn good kiss.” He expected her to pull clear, but she surprised him when instead, she leaned back in and pressed her face to his throat. Not breathing any more steadily than she, he wrapped her up in his arms again, cupping the bare nape of her neck. Indulging himself, he bent his head and inhaled her in.

“Are you…smelling my hair?”

“Yes.” He did it again, drawing in her scent. “God, you smell amazing. I’ve smelled nothing but dust and other guys for so long I just want to wrap myself up in you.” But the house was taking a beating. He needed to cover up the window openings to prevent more damage…

“Do you have a sheet of plywood for that window?”

“I hope so.” The tree just outside his bedroom was whipping back and forth, dangerously close to the blown-in window. Glass shards lay across the bed, on top of the sheets and blankets where he’d been only a few minutes ago. “Good thing you woke me up.”

“You were sleeping there?” Lizzy asked, sounding horrified as she pulled free.

“Yeah.” He shut the bedroom door, closing off the wind and rain freely flying in, and looked at her.

Her hair had been demurely pulled back into a low ponytail when she’d first arrived, but was loose now. The dark honey strands fell to her shoulders, with long side swept bangs framing her face.

Her mouth was still wet.

Which made him want to kiss her again. Forget the storm beating the shit out of his house, forget Cece out there in it-

Okay, he couldn’t forget that. He needed to get his mind off the fantasy currently running in high def in his head, the one that had him pushing Lizzy to the wall and kissing her again until she didn’t look so worried, and then taking that kiss to its natural course, which involved no clothes and her crying out his name as she came.

But life was rarely that good to him.

So he turned her back to the bathroom door, where the only window was narrow and high up inside the shower. “Change. I’m going to the garage to look for plywood.”

“The electricity is out.”

“Yeah, it’s probably going to stay out for a good long time, too.” What the hell. He slid his fingers into her hair again, smoothing it back off her face for the sheer pleasure of feeling her warm skin beneath his palm.

She caught his hand in hers. “Before,” she said. “When I screamed? You came running.”

He looked into her eyes, and there was a long beat between them, where the icy air didn’t seem cold at all but rather shimmering with heat.

The heat coming from them.

He’d survived the past two months by putting aside emotions and feelings. It was a tactic that had served him well.

But he was feeling now, big-time.

“I slay my own dragons these days, Jason,” she said softly, and went back into the bathroom.

At the sound of the lock hitting home, he smiled grimly. She didn’t need him. Message received.

He found no plywood in the garage, which meant that the room was going to be a wreck before this was over. Hoping that would be the extent of the damage, he came back into the kitchen and took another food foray. This time, in the dubious light of the morning, he found a box of crackers and Cheez Whiz.

Worked for him.

Loading up crackers and stuffing them into his mouth, he called his mom. She answered on the first ring, breathless and excited. “My baby! Honey, are you back?”

“Yeah.” At the sound of her love practically pouring through the phone line, he let out a breath and a reluctant smile. “You okay?”

“Oh, sweetheart, I’m fine. Tell me you’re coming here so I can fatten you up and see for myself you’re in one piece.”

“I’m in one piece.”

“Are you sure? Because the last time we talked, you were in such a bad place-”

That had been right after Matt’s death. He’d been a mess. “Mom.” He paused, his throat tightening. “I’m good.”

“I’ll be the judge of that. When will I see you?”

“Soon as this storm is over. Is Shelly okay? The house? You both safe?”

“We aren’t flooding, we’re both staying put, and we’re fine. I love you, Jason.”

“Love you, too, Mom.”

“Prove it and get up here as soon as you can.”

He promised to do that and shut his phone, resuming the stuffing of his face with the crackers and Cheez Whiz until Lizzy came into the room.

He still couldn’t wrap his brain around it. She’d once had a way of looking at him, of seeing things in him that had made him uncomfortable, to say the least. He hadn’t liked looking into those sweet orbs and seeing himself reflected back, because he’d never liked what he’d seen.

Of course she was no longer looking at him the way she used to. She’d learned to temper her emotions. And she’d gotten good at it, too, because she was staring right at him and he had absolutely no idea what she was thinking.

She wore his sweats, which swam on her. Covered from chin to toe, she was now shapeless, which was good. Now maybe he could forget how she’d looked when he’d first flicked on the light, when her thin scrubs had been drenched through and clinging to her curves. “Warmer?” he asked.

“Yes. Thanks.” She narrowed in on the jar in his hand. “Breakfast of champions?”

He turned the jar in his palm and read the ingredients. “Hey, it’s got five percent of my daily required protein. Practically a vitamin.”

She actually smiled, and whoa baby, that was new. He hadn’t seen many smiles out of her in their high school years. She’d been too shy, too reserved. The smile transformed her face, and while he stared stupidly at her, she came close and read over his shoulder. “It’s ninety-five percent fat, Jase.”

Jase. No one had called him that since…well, since her, and he laughed, his first in a good long time. “Ready to roll?”

“Yeah. Listen-” She broke off to glance over his shoulder, at the window above the sink, and her entire body went tense. “Move!” she cried, adding a shove packed with surprising strength for a little thing, taking them both down to the tile floor with a bone-jarring thud.

Above them the kitchen window shattered, spraying in glass and wind and water, all of which rained down over the top of them.

Jason managed not to bash his head on the floor as he circled his arms around Lizzy, trying to cushion her fall but not quite succeeding. Lying there flat on his back with her sprawled over the top of him, he tightened his grip when she gasped and wriggled. “Don’t move,” he demanded. “The glass.” He slid his fingers into her hair and stared up at her, searching her face. “Are you okay?”

She craned her neck to look behind them, where he’d been standing, where the majority of the glass had hit. Rain was flying in freely now, pushed by the brutal wind. The branch that had broken the window shimmied and danced in the opening. “That almost got you,” she breathed.

“Well, it didn’t, thanks to you.” He turned her head back to his. “And do you ever answer a question?”

“I’m fine. And you’re not,” she said, pointing to where blood was blooming through the material of his shirt from a slice on his upper arm. She started to push herself up but her grimace tipped him off and he held her still, reaching for her hand, which was also cut.

He sat up, which meant that she was sitting, too, straddling him. In the back of his mind he registered the fact that it was a very nice position to be in as he ran his gaze over her carefully, looking for-“Damn.” Another cut. Gently he ran a finger over her cheekbone, which was beginning to bleed. “Just a nick, though.”

“I’m okay.” Using nothing but thigh muscles, she stood, then reached down with her uninjured hand to pull him up. Very carefully she brushed the glass from him, until he grabbed her wrist and moved them both from the shattered window, back into the living room. “Sit,” he said, gesturing to the couch, going for his first-aid kit from his bag.

“I will if you will.”

“So you’re still stubborn,” he noted, amused at both of them.

“As a mule. And I’m the nurse, remember?” She grabbed the first-aid kit from him as he sat next to her.

“I’m a trained medic.” He grabbed it back, holding it over her head.

“So, what, brute strength trumps brains?”

“Look at you,” he murmured. “You’ve grown claws. I’m so proud.”

“I call it a backbone.”

His smile faded. “Ah, Lizzy. You always had that.”

And while she stared at him in surprise, he got to work cleaning, gauzing and wrapping up her palm with medical tape. He swiped her cheek with antiseptic, then let her repeat the favor on him.

“If we’re done playing doctor…” she murmured when she’d finished.

He had no idea what it said about him that he loved this new version of her, all tough and no longer so reserved. Once upon a time she’d stirred protectiveness and affection within him, and definitely the normal horniness of a teenage boy. All of which he’d hidden.

The woman she’d grown into stirred a hell of a lot more. But what shocked him was that he didn’t feel like hiding from any of it.

“What are you grinning about?” she asked.

Other than he had his first hard-on in eight weeks? “I like this Lizzy.”

“You don’t know this Lizzy.”

True. But as he looked out the window into the sheer destruction of the day, he had a feeling he was going to get to know her pretty quickly. “I knew you once.”

“For a minute.”

“Longer than that,” he chided gently. “We were friends.”

She laughed. “Friends? We weren’t friends, Jason. I did your English papers, and you…”

“I…?”

“You were a jerk.”

“Not all the time.”

“All the time.”

“Come on. What about the day I taught you to kiss after that idiot Paul Drucker said you kissed like a poodle?”

“I try not to remember that day,” she said bitterly.

“I don’t know. It was a pretty good day for me.”

She turned away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“About which, the fact that we kissed behind the bleachers until you had it right? Or how afterward, you-”

She sent him a glacial glance over her shoulder. “I said I don’t want to talk about it.” She paused, then let out a sigh. “But thanks for teaching me how to kiss.”

“You are most welcome.”

“You know…” She narrowed her eyes. “Now that I think about it, the whole teaching process took a lot longer than it should have.”

“Did it?”

“Yes.”

He smiled. “You kissed like heaven, Lizzy, from the get-go. Paul was an idiot and an ass.”

“So you only pretended I needed kissing tutoring? Why?”

“Hello, I was seventeen.”

With an annoyed sound, she walked away.

Yeah, he’d been an ass, but only because of what had happened next, the thing she didn’t want to talk about, and for the first time in all these years, he remembered, and felt regret. “Lizzy-”

“I’m going.”

“We’ve been through this. If you go, I go.”

“I’m sure you had other plans today.”

“Yeah,” he agreed readily enough. “I had a whole list-sleep, food and sex.” He smiled tightly. “Not that I was going to get any of that. There’s nothing good to eat here, and as it’s just me, sex wouldn’t be much fun.”

She looked at him. “Is this what you do in the Guard?” she asked. “Rescue people?”

“A lot, yeah.” Or in the case of Matt, not.

“Are you going back to it?”

“That seems to be the million-dollar question.”

She let out a half smile, full of sympathy. “Still decompressing?”

“Yeah.” More than she could possibly know, and it was a reminder, a cold slap of hard reality that he had decisions to make for a future he didn’t want to face. So it was him who turned away this time, needing to break eye contact, needing to not let her in his head.

She was quiet as he bent to put on his shoes. “When we had the big fires here last year, I worked four straight days without much more than a few catnaps. My entire life was the E.R., treating the firefighters, the victims, and when I finally got off duty and out into the parking lot where I’d left my car, I had the weirdest thing happen.”

He straightened. “What?”

“I broke down.” She lifted a shoulder. “I just sat on the curb and cried like a baby for half an hour. I have no idea why.”

He could picture it. Hell, he’d lived it. “That was sheer exhaustion, Lizzy.”

“Yes. After only four days of hell.”

Knowing where she was going with this, he shook his head. “Don’t.”

She walked toward him. “I have to.” Her gaze touched over each of his features, feeling like a caress. “I felt that way after only four days of adrenaline and fear and craziness, so I can only imagine what it’s like for you after years.”

“I’m fine.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Very fine.”

Her words made him want to smile but he held back because she didn’t stop moving until they were toe to toe, until she’d once again put a hand on his chest.

Clearly she wasn’t finished with hacking at his hard-earned self-control.

“I’m sure there’s a transition period,” she said very quietly, giving him something he hadn’t had any of and didn’t want because it ripped at that control more than anything else could-sympathy. “Between what you’ve been doing, and being here…” Her hand slid over his chest until she laid her palm right over his heart, which was not nearly as steady as he’d have liked. “I imagine there’s a disconnect. A gap.”

She had no idea. “The size of the equator,” he agreed, not thrilled that his voice came out low and hoarse.

She was quiet another moment, then reached for his hand. “Don’t worry, Jase, I’m sure it’ll come to you, what you want to do.”

Well, he was glad she was sure. Because he wasn’t.

The moment broken, she dropped her hands from him and turned away.

He slipped into his rain gear while she did the same. He put two first-aids kits inside his backpack and shouldered it.

“Two?” she asked.

“Who knows what we’ll need.”

“There’s only a couple of inches so far.”

“Yeah, but even one inch in the wrong place can cause flash flooding, which can bring walls of water ten to twenty feet high. Trust me, there’s a whole town out there thinking this is no big deal, but it can turn into one in seconds. Plus, if we find Cece and she’s in labor-”

“When.” Her voice was unyielding as she corrected him. “When we find her.”

“If she’s out there,” he promised, “we’ll find her.”

“Yeah.” She broke eye contact, getting busy with adjusting her rain poncho.

Reaching out, he lifted her chin, ran the pad of his thumb over the cut on her cheek. “We’ll find her.”

She nodded, hugging herself in all those layers. He had to work hard not to add his arms to the mix. He’d come here wanting to feel nothing, but look at him, feeling emotions all over the place. Shaking his head at himself, he opened the door and, as the wind and rain drafted in, reached for her hand.

“Jason?”

“Yeah?”

She looked up into his eyes. “Thank you.”

He took in the craziness of the storm. Power lines down. Trees doubled over. Several inches of rain sloshing at the curbs. A flash of Matt’s face came to him, and his gut tightened. “Don’t thank me yet.”