Amber Leigh Williams - Navy Seal Promise

Erring, his study fell upon her lips.

Slow Down. No Crossing. Dead End.

She wet them. The lazy river of his blood began to eddy and flow. As she reached out to test the evenness of his ends, her outer thighs nudged against the inner seam of his, and she caught her lower lip between her teeth.

He felt taut again, but in a way which spoke of his six-month deployment and the lack of anything besides male companionship over that time. His thigh muscles flexed as something unfurled there, around his gut and the base of his spine.

Her teeth were slowly releasing her lip, letting it round gradually, red and wet. A strawberry ripe for the plucking.

No Thru Traffic. Wrong Way, Moron!

Kyle snatched himself out of the off-color reverie. Blink. It was Harmony’s face in front of his. Carrots. He’d read her to sleep with Little Golden Book stories as a kid. He’d watched her learn to walk.

He’d taught her to ride her bike, damn it. To swim. Soon the Little Golden Book readings had warped into E. B. White, Beverly Cleary, Roald Dahl, Laura Ingalls Wilder. He’d even spent one sulky summer speed-reading through a tattered copy of Anne of Green Gables for her. And ever since, he’d called her “Carrots” in consequence.

He’d watched her grow into a skinny-legged teen, then a self-possessed adult. He’d watched her and Zaccoe collide headlong. When something unexpected and timeless had grown out of that collision, he’d watched their destinies entwine. He’d been happy for them.

He’d been the one to tell her Benji was KIA. He’d stood next to her on the tarmac as his brothers-in-arms carried the flag-draped casket off the angel flight.

He’d been the first person to learn she was pregnant while she bent over Benji’s face one last time in the visitation room at the funeral home. She had wept then, tears dripping off the end of her nose combined with long piercing cries that belonged in the wild to some poor felled animal with no chance of mercy.

He’d cradled her baby in the crook of his arm and wondered not for the last time why fate had left him alive and taken Benji.

A space of a lifetime passed between blinks. Kyle tried to reassert himself in that space, but all he got was disorientation akin to what he’d felt in the hospital upon waking after being blown up by that mother-humping frag...

“Kyle?” Harmony’s gaze had zeroed in on his. She stilled.

All trace of relaxation was lost. So taut was he from head to toe, he felt like a live, loose electric line, crackling and precarious.

Yellow lights were flashing behind his eyes. Danger Ahead, the signs read, one after the other. He tried to get the message across to his body. Half of it was log-jammed by panic. The other was need-bound and gluttonously wondering still what that strawberry would taste like if he leaned forward...and nibbled...

You sick bastard.

The words were in his head, but they sounded doubly like Gavin.

Unlocking the breath trapped in his lungs, he exhaled tumultuously. Her honey-crisp eyes were out of focus, but they were there, framed by thick black fringe he’d never noticed before. There was a tiny beauty mark trapped like a tear beneath her right eye. How had he missed that?

Invoke ninja smoke. “Thanks, I gotta go.” One sentence rear-ended the other as he stood, removing the towel she’d draped over his shoulders before the trim.

Harmony rose, too, and touched the collar of his shirt. “I didn’t nick you, did I?”

“No. You’re fine. I’m fine.” He nearly ran into the jamb of the doorway that led from her kitchen to her living room.

One forbidden mouth. Years of training, instinct and self-awareness in the toilet.

“You forgot your hat,” she pointed out, chasing him with it.

“Thanks.” He squashed it down over his new do. Don’t follow me, woman. If you know what’s good for you, you will not follow me.

“You’ll come back, right?” she asked from the door as he found the screen door of her porch.

Doubling back, he asked, “Come back?”

“For mac-and-cheese,” she reminded him. “Bea’ll be devastated if you don’t.”

“Ah, yeah. Rain check on that.” Because she waited, he realized how rude he was being. It wasn’t her fault he hadn’t been with a woman in so long his testosterone had gone loafing after her. Holding the screen wide, he leaned against the rising wind that wanted to rap it shut and trap him in her comely circle. “I owe you.”

“You’re back,” she said in answer. “A haircut and macaroni are small change compared to Bea’s Kyle home from battle.”

It snagged him, the thought of Bea dreaming her dreams and climbing up on his shoulders to touch the moon. “Tell her I’ll see her. Tomorrow night. You’ll need to get your shutters up.”

“You let me worry about the shutters,” she told him, “and get your butt over here for dinner. Deal?”

Kyle nodded. “You all right, Carrots? Out here alone?”

The slant of her eyes narrowed further. “Locked and loaded.” And with a salute, she added, “Petty Officer, sir.”

“That’s Chief Petty Officer to you, ma’am.” Kyle touched the brim of his hat and backed down the steps when a laugh answered. It was a laugh timbered in brass like the tubes of the wind chimes she’d hung from the eaves of the porch tossing against the rising wind. It was a “crazy person” laugh. A “don’t give a damn” laugh. It was his favorite laugh in the world.

It was one of the myriad items he could add to the list of the sexy things he’d never noticed were sexy about Harmony. And that was bad. Real, real bad.

* * *

BRACKEN MECHANICS DIDN’T look like much, but the family business had been Kyle’s home away from home for most of his existence. In case the building itself didn’t draw enough attention, the vintage lineup of cars outside did. Shiny, waxed—they were just a few of his father’s many toys. But the garage itself was modest, a block structure made of rust-colored brick crowned only by the Bracken logo.

Kyle had learned everything there was to know about car engines, domestic and foreign, under its unpretentious roof. Long before training courses at Coronado, he’d learned how to maneuver in a stick shift versus an automatic, how to draw as much horsepower out of a car’s engine without overworking it and how to fix most motorized problems known to man.

When restless nights following deployment stalked him on land, there was one last vestige of peace to strike at. That was suiting up in a pair of coveralls and getting greasy beneath the hood of whatever the motley crew his father had long-employed was working on at the garage.

“Manifold’s cracked,” Murph “Hickory” Scott said, the words muffled somewhat by a wad of Copenhagen. He snorted, giving Kyle an earful of nasal congestion. He was Marines, retired, hard as hickory—true to his moniker—and still carried Vietnam with him behind the patch over his left eye. The shrapnel bugged him at the onset of rain, so today he was more ornery than usual. “Distributor cap, too.”

“Made in America.” Kyle leaned against the open hood, elbows down. “Parts’ll be easy to come by. It’s just cleaning her up. That’ll be the trick.”

Wayne “Pappy” Frye beamed at the thought. “Yes, sir. Needs everything down to seat cushions.” He didn’t look it, but Pappy was approaching eighty, a hobby-man who had taken the job alongside Hick in Bracken Mechanics’s early years, not because he needed revenue but because he worshipped cars. Like all Bracken employees, Pappy was as good as family. But as Kyle’s ex-fiancée’s grandfather, Pappy and Kyle had nearly been family by law.

Pappy kicked the treads of the old Trans Am. “Good tires.” He caught Kyle’s eye. “Have you heard about her mystery origins?”