who understood loss.
She gingerly touched his cheek with the back of her hand before her thumb caught his bottom lip, tugging it down ever so slightly. “You took me in your arms and let me grieve my parents’ death. I’ve never let myself do that. I was always too angry at them, too angry at myself for being so sad that I never truly just cried for my loss. Fifteen years later, it took a cowboy SEAL with a heart of gold to get me to open up.”
He half smiled, still working to fully accept her words and what she was trying to convey.
Had he spent the last six years being angry? Had he been mad at himself and the world for the death of his best friend?
Justice was served to the terrorists who murdered Marcus, and while it had appeased the SEAL in him, it had barely put a dent in the pain he felt at the loss of his best friend.
I think she’s the one for you. The words of Marcus’s ghost strummed through his mind, plucking at his heartstrings. It’s time to move on. Be happy.
Marcus was gone, and he’d left behind a wife. A widow now. How was that fair? But was Marcus right? Had A.J. been avoiding love and happiness out of guilt? Was it time to move on?
He gently swept Ana’s hand from his face to seize hold of her cheeks. She was real, right?
“How’d I get so lucky to have you walk into my life?” he whispered, trying his best to take Marcus’s words to heart. Ana was the first woman in six years who’d made A.J. want to keep his feet firmly planted on the ground. No taking off out of fear of deserving happiness.
“I guess it’s all those lines you’ve been crossing that brought you to me.” She lifted an auburn brow, her eyes still a bit red from crying before she’d gone to bed.
It’s time to move on. Be happy. He’d swear he heard Marcus’s voice again, and it had him releasing a shaky breath.
But then he followed Marcus’s advice. He gently held Ana’s face between his palms and slowly captured her lips with his. She clasped her hands atop his as he placed quick, urgent kisses on her mouth, neck, then back to her lips again.
With Marcus’s words surrounding him, the heated kiss he was sharing with Ana felt like a release from the prison of guilt he never realized he’d been trapped in until now. The power of this one kiss brought him to his knees, and she dropped with him so as to not break their connection.
He lowered his hands from her face, tracing the lines of her silhouette from her waist down to the curve of her ass. She arched into his touch as they continued to kiss, moving with frenzied need, touching every part of each other without releasing their lips.
They were both reeling.
Spiraling.
Right into each other’s arms.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Someone is either setting up the Volkovs, or Grigory Volkov is a freaking idiot, and since he’s survived this long, the latter is doubtful,” Harper announced, sitting next to Roman during the web call Wednesday morning, five hours after A.J. had bared his soul to Ana out on the porch.
A.J. folded his arms and glimpsed Ana out of the corner of his eye. She was in the leather chair in Grant’s office, hands knotted together on her lap, most likely bracing herself for whatever news Harper planned on sharing.
She was tense again. In desperate need of relaxing. On the other hand, after his strange ghost-dream encounter with Marcus in the middle of the night, he felt the opposite of rigid. The burden of guilt he’d shouldered for years after Marcus died had started to lift. Dream or not, something had clicked. Made him feel a little better about allowing himself to be truly happy.
As much as A.J. had wanted to take Ana back to his bed after the hot, emotionally charged kiss on the porch, he was doing his best to behave and wait for her to let him know when she was ready.
So, he’d been a good boy and jerked off in a cold shower after tucking Ana back into bed, same as he’d done after going down on her by the pond.
But based on her posture now, he’d need to help her loosen up again. For her sake, of course.
“The proprietary research the missing California source had been working on was sold on the Dark