Save Me, SEAL Read online

  “This ass of yours is my kryptonite, Ambrose.” He turned on his stool to face me as his hand explored the contours of my rear end.

  “It’s yours. It’s totally yours,” I confessed.

  His hand dipped between my legs, but not far enough to give me the friction I found myself craving.

  “So, you’re really sore, eh? I should stop?”

  I gasped as his hand became more insistent, and I shook my head.

  With his free hand, he nudged his plate away and slid both our glasses down toward the end of the bar.

  “Come here, girl.”

  He put both hands on my hips and lifted me easily up onto the counter in front of him. His hands found the tops of my bare thighs and I mewed like a kitten as his fingertips ran up and down and all around them.

  “In a day or two, we might have a serious problem on our hands, you know that, right?” he asked me, his hands exploring the length of my legs, down to my feet and back up again.

  I leaned back with my palms on the bar top on either side of me, spreading my legs as far as the shirt would allow. I wished I’d had the presence of mind to pull it up over my ass when he set me in place. I was wet again, an acute feeling of emptiness surging inside me. My body was desperate for him. Like I had a full-blown addiction already.

  But he was right. The entire situation was untenable. The feelings I felt for him were deep and intense, but ultimately impossible, weren’t they? I’d considered it in the tub, tried to figure out how in the world Sledge and I could make this work, or even if he’d want to make it work, or if I was just a silly lovesick little girl with a crush who happened to have gotten lucky enough to be on the receiving end of what he had done to me.

  But he brought it up, so I tried to push aside how badly I wanted him to take me again and focus on a rational conversation, despite his hands all over me the way they were.

  Fuck it, how could I think when he was sitting right there, eye level with my pussy, and my body responding the way it was to him?

  If only he’d put on a shirt, I might have had a chance.

  “I don’t want to think about that yet. Can you just, I mean can we…”

  He leaned down and placed a kiss on the top of my right thigh, then the left.

  I sighed as the kisses became more passionate and moved closer to where I needed them. He looked up at me and stood, leaning in to kiss my mouth. I grabbed the back of his head to pull him close and remove any doubt he had as to my craving for more.

  He kissed me and mauled my breasts through my shirt, handling them roughly. Behind me his hand tugged the bottom of the shirt out from under my bare ass. The countertop was cold on the backs of my thighs, but he rectified the situation almost immediately. He’d let his pants fall to the floor, leaving his erection bobbing in the air in front of him.

  “Hug my neck,” he commanded. I did so, and he reached down and lifted me from my perch and positioned me over his cock. With an adjustment of his grip, he impaled me, letting me slide slowly down his length while he kissed me. I wrapped my legs around him and rocked my hips to accommodate him in the most pleasurable way I could find. My grip behind his neck tightened as I held on for dear life, riding him as if I were weightless.

  He put a hand in my hair and pulled back on it, making me gasp. He attacked my exposed neck, kissing and biting as I writhed against him, most of my weight supported by the thick manhood with which he filled me.

  As I grew more frantic in the way I ground against him, he began to growl. Bestial. Primal. The growling went straight to my sex, and I came hard on him, clutching at his shoulders and back as I clenched down on his shaft.

  “Oh! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” I muttered, first under my breath, then practically shouting it as the orgasm blasted through me.

  He pressed down on the small of my back, holding me stone still as I massaged his cock with the aching walls of my pussy.

  “That felt so fucking good, Ambrose. I have to taste it.”

  He carried me across the room, still buried inside me, and set me down on the sofa. I Lay back into the corner, and he took my inside leg and pushed it all the way up onto the back of the couch, leaving the other to dangle down to the floor. Even my gyno had never seen me so lewdly exposed.

  He knelt and without hesitation buried his handsome face between my legs. The effect was immediate, as his tongue probed deep inside me, where his cock had just been, and he began to swirl and probe. I bit my bottom lip and made guttural noises, throwing my head back and abandoning any pretense of civility.

  I lay back and basked in it, this man slavishly worshipping at the altar of my femininity. Kissing and making love to my well-fucked cunt as if his life depended on it. I soaked his face with my arousal, my climaxes wasting no time in arriving. One after another, first from his tongue simulating the action of his cock and then from his lips wrapped around my super-sensitive clit.

  Everything melted away, all stress, worry, and negativity, and I surrendered completely to his expert mouth. It was the only thing in the world that mattered to me at that moment; coming on Sledge’s face.

  When I’d had all I could stand, having long since lost track of how many times I’d climaxed, I put a hand on his forehead and tapped out.

  “Please. Have mercy. My body can’t…”

  “Yes it can,” he said, rising from his knees and letting his cock replace his face between my legs. My cry was of anguish and ecstasy as he plunged into the soaking wet bundle of hyper-stimulated nerve endings he’d left in his wake. His thrusts were ferocious, his cock like a piece of angry steel inside me. He kissed my mouth hard, transferring my flavor back to me.

  The last orgasm I’d had on his face hadn’t quite subsided, and it rolled right into one from his cock as he hit that secret place deep inside me again and again until my body gave up all its secrets to him. I thrashed and shook, and the intensity of my release spurred his.

  He emptied himself inside me gloriously, the growl returning as his pace slowed and the power of his eruption overwhelmed him.

  When he finished, he was laughing, a sound of pure, almost child-like joy.

  He kissed me again with his forehead touching mine he spoke:

  “Happy New Year, Ambrose. I love you.”

  What. The. Fuck.

  How was I supposed to reply to that?

  Seriously?

  Me, being cooler than cool and a worldly woman with vast experience seducing devastatingly sexy older men, did the only sensible thing, given the situation.

  I burst into tears.

  7

  The past few hours, from the spa with my best friends, to the sea of humanity on the Strip, to the brush with rape or slavery or death or whatever would have happened to us if Sledge hadn’t been there as our guardian angel, to the life-changing sex with the literal man of my dreams, to orgasms beyond my wildest fantasies to being told that he… it was all too much.

  All the emotions mixed up inside me finally bubbled over, coming out as tears. I nuzzled into his chest and ugly cried as he held me.

  “I love you so much. I can’t believe any of this. I’ve never been so happy, then so scared, then so happy then so, I don’t know, whatever this is. But I do, too. I love you. I’ve loved you for so long and you didn’t know it,” I rambled more into his shoulder than his ears.

  “I knew it. I felt the same way. There’s always been something different about you. Something so special. So beautiful. I used to think that some guy would be so incredibly lucky to wind up with you. And now I’ve had a taste of it, what it would be like, and it’s even better than I could have imagined.”

  I was confused. I thought, or maybe just hoped, that somehow we were together. Or would find a way to be together. But he was talking like this was just a fling or something.

  “It isn’t ‘just a taste’. Not to me,” I insisted. “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “How can it be anything more? Ambrose, I’m so much older than you. What could an
old SEAL like me possibly offer a young, beautiful, ambitious, amazing young woman like you?”

  I answered him with words and with my hands. “This,” I reached down and squeezed his half-hard cock, eliciting a grunt from him. “This,” I patted his chest right where I could feel his heart beating. “These,” I said, my hands squeezing his biceps. “And this,” I concluded, jabbing my index finger at the center of his forehead.

  Sledge smiled and blushed. He actually fucking blushed. Shane “Sledge” Hammer, a man made of granite.

  “Hey, I’m not saying I’m not interested in you. Completely the opposite, in fact. I just thought this might be one of those ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ flings for you. I had no idea,” he insisted. “I always wished I could be twenty years younger. Or twenty-five. Ever since you turned 18. I’d wondered how I was going to get out of attending your wedding. Not that I wouldn’t always want to be there to celebrate your successes, I’d just be too damn jealous of the lucky bastard to let y’all enjoy your day.”

  I’d come to Las Vegas hoping to have fun with my two best friends, ring in the new year, and make some memories. I did not anticipate my whole world going Alice in Wonderland upside down. But how many people stop for gas and, on a lark, buy a lottery ticket that winds up winning? Or walk into a grocery store to innocently buy a gallon of milk and reach for the jug at the exact same moment as Mr. or Mrs. Right? Making or missing that green light at the corner, the intersection you drive through five times very day, can change the entire course of your life.

  Sledge represented the end of all my best laid plans. I knew right at that moment that I’d follow the twinkle in his eye anywhere, that there had to be a way to convince the world that the two of us falling in love wasn’t a drunken New Year’s Eve fling, wasn’t a case of some weird version of Florence Nightingale Syndrome gone wild.

  Hormones may have lit the fuse, but it turns out each of our hearts had been packing this bomb full of gunpowder for years.

  Love never found me in high school or college, and to be honest I’d never wasted much time looking for it. All that time, my heart had belonged to a man who met me the day I was born. And, as it turned out, I wasn’t alone in yearning for someone who was off-limits.

  We lay on that couch, touching, kissing, and reminiscing until the sun rose over the cadre of workers charged with cleaning up the mess left behind by the tens of thousands of partygoers the night before.

  After drifting off for a merciful hour of sleep, we awoke and realized that neither one of us had checked our phone and that Taylor had probably been looking for me.

  Sure enough, we both had missed calls and texts galore, me from both Taylor and Christina, Sledge from both the girls and from his friend at the F.B.I. The crime scene with the six dead Romanians and their creepy van was national front page news, and thanks to local law enforcement, a house in Boulder City, between Las Vegas and the Arizona border, was raided overnight and four arrests were made in connection to the group that had tried to take us. That bit did not make the news, as the feds planned to use evidence at the scene to involve Interpol and hopefully take down a large international trafficking group.

  Sledge walked me back to our suite in the morning, but he declined an invitation inside. When I stepped through the door, Taylor and CC were sitting on the couch like parents waiting up for a curfew-breaking teenager.

  Christina patted an open spot between them on the couch and indicated I should sit down to be interrogated.

  I made it halfway there when Taylor noticed something different about me.

  “Ambrose, you don’t walk like that unless you’ve been…”

  I stopped in my tracks. “Walk like what?”

  “The way you’re walking. And glowing. You are so bad! I can’t believe it!”

  Christina’s mouth hung open.

  I detoured toward my bedroom, but they intercepted me before I made it there.

  “Tell. Us. Everything!” Christina demanded.

  Taylor pointed to my bed, and the three of us convened there.

  “Your dad is going to start by killing Sledge. Then killing you. Then, he’s going to come after us for letting it happen. Are you fucking kidding me?” Christina picked up a pillow and put it over her face, screaming into it, letting out emotions she couldn’t process.

  “Okay, okay, okay. Stop. Nobody is killing anybody. I can’t really talk about it, I mean it’s grown folks’ business, right?” I joked.

  “Fuck. That,” Taylor said, putting on her serious face. “Details, girl.”

  “Even the juicy ones?” I pleaded.

  “Especially the juicy ones!”

  I recounted the evening in breathless detail, and by the end Taylor was laying on her back, clutching a pillow to her chest.

  “Oh, Sledge,” she teased, kissing the pillow and then performing an Oscar-worthy fake orgasm.

  Christina sat there shaking her head. “I was wrong. Mr. Wellington is going to blow up Las Vegas. Like, the entire city. There’ll just be a smoking crater here when he’s done.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” Taylor interjected. “Ambrose has her daddy wrapped around her little finger. If she’s happy, he’ll be happy.”

  “Would your dad react that way?” Christina asked Taylor.

  After mulling it over for a moment, Taylor answered. “Maybe not, but come on, Ambrose and Sledge have always had a connection. And her dad is closer to him than either of our dads ever were.”

  We agreed to disagree on the whole thing, Taylor and Christina sticking to their opinions while I abstained. Sledge begged off our brunch plans, and I told the girls I needed sleep more than food, so they went down to breakfast while I napped.

  We requested late checkout and spent early afternoon packing. When the bellman came in to load our things on a luggage cart, Sledge was behind him, in his traveling uniform, carrying a small bag. He looked so fucking good.

  “I’m making the trip back to Little River with you,” he announced. “Different part of the plane, of course, but same flight. I want to talk to your parents in person about what happened with the Romanians. They deserve to know and to hear it in person. I have a few days until my boss gets back, and there’s no telling when I might get more time off, so this seems like the perfect opportunity to squeeze in some R & R.”

  As we gathered the last of our things, Christina snuck up next to me. “Whatever happens, now that I’m reminded how sexy he is, bravo to you. If it’s the last thing you ever get to do, sweaty SEAL sex sounds like a pretty perfect way to go.”

  I choked back laughter at her alliterative description of my night with Sledge.

  He and I acted as “normal” as possible around each other; no kissing or hugging or anything. I wasn’t sure how “public” he wanted our relationship to be, so I stuck mostly with my girls. His seat was awful, in the middle of three seats near the back of the plane, but it was the last seat available.

  When we arrived, he suggested to our parents that we all get together at my folks’ house, that he had something he needed to discuss with the group.

  In my living room, the four of us described meeting the four “Colorado football players” and going off with them. We fibbed about our group taking a shortcut walking to a nightclub, and Sledge backed up our story. The idea that we were going back to their hotel room to get high and Lord knows what else would have been a bridge too far.

  He explained, in a solemn tone, how he was watching us and how he handled the situation when things went bad. My mother and Taylor’s cried, and Christina’s father looked like he might explode with rage.

  There was a feeling that we, or Sledge, should have called home immediately, but they had all grown to trust him and his judgement, and in the end they agreed that none of them would have slept a wink and that we probably would have passed one another’s flights, ours home and theirs to Las Vegas, in the air somewhere over Nebraska in our haste to be reunited. Hugs were exchanged all around, and th
e men whispered plans to assist the law enforcement in any way they could to make certain nothing similar ever happened again on American soil.

  When things grew quiet, Sledge summoned my dad to come out to the backyard with him to discuss something. My heart sank as the two of them stepped out into a blustery January evening. Christina and Taylor both made eye contact with me and nodded their support.

  Pizzas my mother had ordered arrived on the front porch at the same moment we heard a crash come from the back patio.

  “Luke. Luke!” Christina’s dad yelled my father’s name when he reached the backdoor, Taylor’s dad right behind him.

  Moments later, my dad came back inside, gave me a stern look, and asked my mother to step into the kitchen. The tension in the house was thick and uncomfortable, and I felt bad for the guy standing in our foyer with a stack of pizza boxes and a bag of two-liters.

  Taylor’s father returned inside and got things situated, helping the moms organize plates and napkins and set the pizza and breadsticks out, buffet-style.

  I was eventually summoned outside with my parents and Sledge. The rest of our group stayed inside. Sledge was sitting at our patio table holding a bag of frozen peas over his left eye, and he had a trickle of blood coming out of the corner of his mouth on the same side. My father had a bag of frozen green beans draped across the knuckles of his right hand.

  I was flanked by my parents when we sat at the table, Sledge on the opposite side.

  “Is it true, everything he told me? About the two of you?” My father directed questions at me in a tone that let me know he wasn’t in the mood for any nonsense.

  I looked to my mother and then across to the man I loved. I nodded my head. “Yes.”

  My mother reached for my hand and squeezed it. “Honey, Shane has been a friend to our family since before you were born. He’s fought alongside your father and saved his life, and now he’s saved yours as well. I owe him more than anyone. The lives of the two people I love most in the world. But it doesn’t seem… I mean he’s not… I don’t know. Luke?” She ran out of steam and tossed the ball back into my father’s court.