Him.
“Carinõ!” I screamed, collapsing on the bed, the wet spot be damned.
Moments later, his cock swelled and spurted as he roared like a fucking lion, stiffening behind me before collapsing on top of me. His cock, still hard as a rock, slipped out of me when I rolled out of the wet spot and pulled him into my arms.
“You didn’t…”
“I did. I wanted… I needed you to know I hear you. I see you, Declan. I see the struggle. I might not understand it, but I do appreciate it. You’re the most important person in my life. And figuring out how this is going to work between us is going to be damn near impossible, but I’m up for the challenge.”
“Same, Papi.”
34
DECLAN
Isat at the table in the tiny kitchen of our apartment, working on some of the spreadsheets Walker and Foster asked me to help them with. I’d been taking on more of an administrative role lately. It wasn’t my cup of tea, but Walker talked me into it because Hayden would be deployed for long periods of time. If I split my time between fieldwork and admin duties, I could be here when Hayden was and working security details when he wasn’t. I’d been hesitant until Walker explained how deployments worked.
Apparently, we were on a clock—a never-ending clock that could snatch Hayden up and ship him out to battle whenever.
According to the deployment schedule, rotation, or whatever the Navy and Marine Corps call the thing, Hayden would be deploying in a week or so. To say I’d lost my shit a few months ago when I realized it was putting it mildly. Luckily, Walker was the one to see my freak out, not my husband. He had enough to worry about without stressing out about how I was handling being a Marine spouse.
Unlike the last trip, which about killed me, this one was slated for six freaking months. What pissed me off about it was the wishy-washy time frame. They’d deploy somewhere in this time frame and be gone six months, but it could be nine months. I wanted to grab hold of the brass and be like, just give me the date and time when you are planning on snatching my husband from our lives, and oh hey, could you throw in a freaking itinerary so I knew where you’d stashed my husband for god knew how long. And could you maybe tighten up the return window from ninety days to, oh, I don’t know, a few weeks? Please? Thanks.
I wouldn’t do it. I wanted to. I considered it every time I spoke with Uncle Matthew or whenever Hayden and I were out on base, and he paused to salute someone who outranked him. A couple of times, I bit a hole in my tongue to hold it all in because I knew Hayden would pay the price for my outburst, and not a damn thing would change.
It freaking sucked, and I wasn’t a fan. Walker was right when he said I’d fucked up falling for a Marine. I had. In more ways than one, but I wouldn’t change it. Would I prefer not to have the DOD, the Navy, and the Marines up my ass, telling us what to do, when to do it, where to go, and how to get there? Absolutely. But I fell in love with a Marine, and I’d deal with anything to be with Hayden.
I glanced at the clock. Hayden would be home in a couple of hours, so I decided to give my head a rest from the numbers and figure out what to do about dinner. Some days, I felt like Suzy Homemaker, or was that Stevie Homemaker.
Whatever. It didn’t matter.
I loved to cook, and feeding Hayden somehow cleared the chaos of my mind that being a switch sometimes caused. And I was all for that. It wasn’t that I was confused. I wasn’t. I was a switch. That’s who and what I was. But if cooking for my husband helped me accept the more submissive side of myself, I was all for it. Plus, Hayden was so damn appreciative. He’d told me so many times I didn’t need to cook for him that we could afford to eat out sometimes, and we did. But fuck me, the man could put away food like a ranch hand working roundup. And I wanted my cooking to be what caused him to make the sounds he did when he enjoyed his food. Kinda like I didn’t want another man’s dick making him come.
I glanced in the cabinets, then moved to the fridge, but paused when my phone rang. Turning back to grab it from the table, I slid my thumb across the screen as I went back to deciding what to make for dinner.
“Yeah.”
“That’s gotta be the rudest way to answer the damn phone.”
I rolled my eyes. Heidi hated talking on the phone, so she rarely called me, but when she did, she bitched me out every damn time about how rude I was when I answered the phone.
“What do you need, Hide?”
“There’s an issue.”
“What issue?”
“What was it you called her? Oh! Right, Little Miss Sparkle Tits got herself in trouble and is blaming Holt. It’s all hands on deck, and I was forced to call your rude ass.”
“Blunt. Not rude. There’s no reason to say a bunch of words I don’t need to when I can get the job accomplished with one.”
“Asshole.”
I refused to be baited into her meltdown. This is what Heidi did. She turned into a raging smart ass when pissed.
“What do I need to do?”
“Kiss that sexy ass Papi goodbye for a couple of days because somehow all of Holt is being dragged through the mud in D.C. because Daddy Sparkle Tits says we failed to do the job he hired us to do. I called bullshit, but no one fucking listened to me.”
