She wanted to move, to open her eyes and see what was in his, but she drifted in half-sleep.
“It may have only been a week for you, but I watched you care for every beast on this farm from the cornfield for longer. I didn’t know it then, but I wanted you to care for me like you do for them, and I wanted to worship you for it. I wanted to take care of you with the same care that you do everything. I want to swim in your love and kindness that is the air of this farm. I am drunk on your lips. I am drowning without you.”
He kissed her then, a quick brush over her lips, and the instinct to touch him was stronger than even her exhaustion. She parted her lips, kissing him back, and smoothed one hand from his shoulder up his neck and threaded her fingers into his hair.
His quick breath intake was surprised, but his limbs coiled around her. His mouth opened, deepening the kiss, but his lips caressed hers with tenderness, not domination.
A quiet hunger seeped energy into her flesh, her bare stomach curving toward his naked body and her leg entwining with his.
The mint of his breath quickened, and he whispered, “Are you sure?”
She nodded, barely opening her eyes, her body answering when her brain was fogged with sleep.
Blaze reached to the nightstand on the side of the bed, wood sliding on wood, and the crinkle of cellophane. In another moment, he’d rolled her onto her back, his knees opening her thighs and holding himself there. “You seem asleep. Are you awake?”
I am,ran through Sarah’s mind, but her throat hadn’t made the sounds. She tried again, and her voice croaked, “I’m awake. Yes.”
His voice was husky as he asked, “Do you want me?”
Just enough energy flitted in Sarah’s arms to lift them off the bed and wrap them around his neck. “Always.”
He sank into her, his slow movements first too much on her sore body, but his whispers in her ear—that she was his everything, that the thought of leaving her emptied him—soothed the sting and then she was moving with him, his slow gentleness lifting her with him, pleasure flooding over her until it became waves that took her beyond thought.
As the tides subsided and she drifted and found the mattress under her back and Blaze’s body pressing her into the bed, his breath in her ear wasn’t the harsh rasp of spent passion but a catch in his throat as he whispered, “I’ll keep you safe. I’ll make sure the White Russians can’t get to you. I will give everything I have to keep you safe.”
15
A BROTHER-IN-ARMS
BLAZE
Blaze woke early the following day, uneasy. He uncurled himself from around Sarah’s sleeping form in the queen-size bed in the guest bedroom where he’d carried her limp form after he’d had her, and he picked his way through the dark house, found his shoes, and walked outside.
Mary Varvara Bell’s shock troops were surely on their way, amassing their forces and strategizing the attack.
He had nothing to work with. His only option was to retreat.
But a tactical retreat was always better than defeat. He would regroup and live to fight another day. Navy SEALs did not undertake suicide missions. The team secured victorytogether.
His black trail-running shoes crunched on the gravel in the cool dark, the sun only a sliver of scarlet fire on the eastern horizon.
Though he was walking toward the barn to check on Charlie and HowNow, he stopped at the henhouse to see Remi, who was waving his thick white banner of a tail like the dignified soldier he was.
Behind him, the chickens staggered out of the coop, pecking sleepily at bugs on the ground and flapping their wings to stretch after sleeping all night.
They were giant chickens, standing two feet tall or more, the tops of their heads midway up Blaze’s thighs. He would have assumed that a chicken would be a feathered version of the spinning rotisseried meat lumps at Costco, but these chickens werehugeanimals, looking more like chubby wild turkeys than fluffy volleyballs with feet he’d envisioned.
They swaggered around their pen like predatory dinosaurs, swishing their tailfeathers, moderately content with the beetles in the gravel until they found an opening to pounce on an unsuspecting human.
Yeah, these birds knew they were cousins to eagles and velociraptors.
Remi trundled out of the chicken enclosure and sauntered over, keeping an unconcerned watch on the sky and cornfield as he approached Blaze, who took a seat on a particularly large rock by the coop.
“Hey there, puppers,” he said.
Remi leaned against his shoulder and calmly scanned the horizon, a companionable watch.
Blaze dug his fingers into Remi’s thick white coat, bred for ten thousand years to herd sheep in the winter of the French Alps, and scratched.
