His mouth closed on hers, and if the kiss hadn’t taken her breath away, his sudden hard thrusts would have. He plunged into her over and over, touching her in places she hadn’t known she had, his pelvic bone doing a delicious number on her clit every time he thrust.
The tingle deep in her tummy became a lightning bolt faster than she would have thought possible, and her teeth found their way to one of those perfect shoulder muscles of his as she bit down on him to hold back the torrent of screams that fought to burst out of her.
The rush of pleasure was almost too much as she tumbled off a cliff and kept right on falling. Then Knox followed her off the precipice, half groaning, half growling as he orgasmed.
Rachel wasn’t sure what happened after that because the details were kind of fuzzy, but the next thing she knew, she was lying on top of Knox instead of under him. It was seriously comfortable and she didn’t plan on going anywhere. So, she stayed glued to his awesome chest, listening to his heartbeat return to normal and enjoying the tremors of pleasure that continued to rock her body every few seconds.
It must have been a good fifteen minutes before she had enough energy to think, much less move. But when she finally did, she pushed herself up on Knox’s chest to smile at him.
“On a scale of one to ten, that was probably a hundred,” she told him.
He reached up to cup her face, his touch a caress, his dark eyes soulful. “Yeah, it was.”
She bent to press a tender kiss to his lips, prepared to go into detail about how much she loved what they’d just done when a thought occurred to her.
“Not to change the subject, but I’m almost certain I locked my door last night. How did you get in?”
He ran a finger up and down her arm, mouth edging up. He had a gorgeous smile. “It was locked, but when I heard you scream, I kicked it in. Don’t worry, though. I slipped out of bed after you fell asleep and wedged a chair from the kitchen table under the door handle so no one could get in without some serious force.”
That answer led to about a dozen others, such as why he’d shown up at her door in the first place and how he’d been able to get her to calm down when she couldn’t figure out how to do it herself. But then a bigger question came to mind and everything else suddenly took a back seat.
“When you offered to help me find someone I could talk to about my nightmares, you said you’d be willing to come to the sessions with me.” She hesitated, praying he really had said that and she hadn’t dreamed it. “Did you truly mean that? You’d come see a shrink with me? Hold my hand and crap like that.”
Knox nodded, his expression suddenly sincere. “Yeah, I was serious. I know how hard it can be to open up about stuff like this. If it will help, I’ll be there for you.”
Rachel once again wondered how the hell she’d stumbled across someone like him right when she needed him the most. But at the same time, she also realized Knox seemed to have some personal experience when it came to dealing with stuff like this. What else explained his ability to calm her down last night or his confession about knowing how hard it was to open up about things?
“I’m not trying to dig into your personal life or your past, but something tells me you’ve been through the same thing I’m going through now,” she said. “Did you?”
* * *
“Wait, what just happened?” Knox sputtered, gazing at the beautiful, sexy woman lying on his chest, baffled by the sudden turn in the conversation. “One second we’re talking about me going to therapy with you, and the next, we’ve somehow jumped to the topic of my traumatic experiences.”
Rachel folded her hands on his chest, resting her chin on them and regarding him with a genuinely hurt expression. “Sorry. I was only asking. If you’d rather not talk about whatever happened that gave you so much experience with stuff like this, you don’t have to. Really. I honestly wasn’t trying to pry.”
Ah, hell. Now, he felt like a jerk. Last night, Rachel had opened up her personal suitcase of issues and dumped them all out for him to see, yet here he was acting like his secrets were too special for her to know about.
“I know you weren’t prying,” he said, gently running a finger down her cheek. “You caught me a little off guard, that’s all.”
Rachel regarded him silently for a moment, then slipped off his chest to pull the blankets up over the both of them. When she had the covers the way she wanted them, she didn’t climb on top of him again, but instead put her head on the pillow beside him. While they were technically still close enough to almost touch, it felt like a tremendous space had opened up between them.
That feeling bothered the crap out of him.
“I was with a four-man SEAL team in Nairobi,” Knox said softly, turning to stare up at the ceiling. “It’s not something that makes the evening news very often, but the extremist Islamic activity there can be as bad as anything you’d see in Iraq. We were there to do some low-level surveillance work and start a dialogue with members of the Kenyan Ministry of Defense and National Police about future joint operations. We didn’t expect to directly engage with hostile forces, which was why I had two newbies fresh out of BUDs with me.”
Knox didn’t mean to stop there, but thinking about that day was enough to start the scenes replaying in his head—memories he’d tried like hell to forget.
“But?” she prompted.
Knox jumped a little at the softly spoken word. How long had he been lying there trapped in his head, alone with his dark thoughts?
“But there was a terrorist attack at an office complex near where we were meeting.” He remembered every second of the fight like it was yesterday, instead of more than a year ago. “It had nothing to do with us, but we became involved anyway. The ministry officials we were with were high-level officers and were armed. Fortunately, the officers from the National Police were, too. Even with them, we were heavily outnumbered. One of the new guys on my team, Lawrence Vasquez, was hit in the chest and went down before he even had a chance to fire his weapon.”
He swallowed hard. He’d never forget the expression on Lawrence’s face as he stared at the blood pumping out of his own chest. Knox had slapped a self-sealing combat bandage over the wound, but it hadn’t helped. Those bandages were amazing, but there wasn’t much you could do on the battlefield with an injury that severe.
“I’d been in so many firefights that I’d stopped counting them,” Knox continued. “I’d seen a lot of people die, including fellow SEALs, but nothing hit me the way Lawrence’s death did. The damn guy had been through nearly a year of the most intense, grueling training that had ever been created just to prepare him for that moment, and he died from a random gunshot in less than a minute. I watched him die right there in front of me, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.”
Rachel rolled onto her side and rested her warm hand on his chest. It felt good. “Is what happened to Lawrence the reason you got out of the navy? When you talked about it before, you never really said.”
