“Now, what is that for?” he asked.
“I…I don’t really know.” She dropped her hand, and her brows drew together. “This is fucked up, Lyons, what we just did. You know that, right?”
“It’s only as fucked as you want to make it,” he countered.
“We shouldn’t have done that.”
“So you keep saying, but I have proof that you liked it.”
She shook her head. “Always the confident one.”
“And hard again,” he said. “It’s a shame we only had that one condom because I could do this all night.”
“I’m sure you could, but we can’t do this again.”
“Why not?”
“Because we work together. Because I’m an officer, and you’re enlisted. Because every regulation in the book says this is a bad thing. Because we’re on a team together. For fuck’s sake, if it ever gets out that we—”
He kissed her forehead. “This is never getting out. Despite what you think, I don’t kiss and tell.”
It was the truth. Despite her belief that he fucked every young airmen on his time off, that wasn’t the whole truth of it. And, of those he had taken to his bed—because there was more than a kernel of truth to those rumors—the stories told during the light of day didn’t come from his mouth. He never once bragged or boasted about a woman he’d slept with, and he wouldn’t do that with Tia either. On the flip side, he never downplayed the rumors. Perhaps that made him cocksure, but he didn’t kiss and tell, and he certainly never fucked and talked about it afterward.
“Nobody needs to know we’re sleeping together,” he asserted.
“We’re not sleeping together. That’s not what this was.”
“What do you think this was?” he said in a warning tone. “Did you forget what just happened?”
“I know exactly what happened. We fucked.”
“We had sex. Wild. Unhinged. Passionate. Sex.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“Not in my book.”
“Well, what the hell is the difference?”
“Oh, there’s a whole hell of a lot of difference. This…” He pointed to her chest, cupping her breast for the first time. Soon, he would have her stripped and enjoy her full body rather than what was between her legs. They had a lot of exploring ahead of them. “This is mine.”
“You don’t own me, Lyons.” Her eyes widened, alarmed as he moved his hand beneath her shirt.
He cupped her breast. She bit at her lower lip and squeezed her eyes shut as he toyed with her nipple, drawing it into a tight bud.
“We’ve barely begun,” he said. “I plan on making love to every inch of your body. Until I do…” He was ready to make love to her for a long time to come, but he wasn’t bold enough to say those words. “Until I do, we’re not done.”
She gripped his hand, forcing him to stop his assault on her nipple.
“Lyons, we simply can’t. It’s too dangerous. Too much to lose.”
“Then, we’ll be discreet.”
Voices sounded in the distance, halting any further conversation.
He rolled off her. “Get dressed.”
Tia slipped her trousers up and over her hips, tucked in her undershirt, and fastened the buttons of her overblouse in half the time it took him to do the same. A wild look filled her face as she felt the disarray of her hair. With a curse, she pulled at the pins holding her bun in place, fitting them between her lips. Then, she finger-combed her long hair, twisted it back up and around, and secured the last pin in place before he had his belt buckled.
