The Player - By Rhonda Nelson Page 0,41

laugh rattle his belly. “I would think it would be obvious. I wanted your hands on my body,” he murmured softly. “Like they are now.”

He heard a stuttering breath leak out of her lungs, felt her touch grow a little bolder. She rubbed and kneaded, methodically working his muscles until they were melting under her exquisite touch. Meanwhile another muscle below his waistline was anything but melting. He felt her fingers trace an inverted heart, then linger and outline the tattoo on his right shoulder blade.

Sonofabitch, Jamie thought, involuntarily tensing. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, braced himself, knowing she would ask. And knowing that he was in no shape to resist.

“Oh.” She sighed softly, her heart in her voice. “Who was Danny?”

A fist of pain tightened in Jamie’s chest. Unbidden images from that horrible night flashed like a broken projector through his brain. He tried to stop it, tried to push it away, but failed.

Danny’s bloodstained chest, a huge gaping wound littered with torn cloth and sand. “Leave me, dammit! Leave me! You know it’s over!”

Panic, fear and adrenaline rushed through Jamie’s bloodstream, making Danny’s 240-plus pound body feel virtually weightless. Jamie’s heart threatened to pound right out of his chest and the urge to weep was almost more than he could bear. He had to get Danny to the truck—if he could only get him to the truck, they’d be safe. He almost tripped. Righted himself. Kept going. “It’s not over until I say it’s over.”

Bullets whizzed by, spraying up sand. “Goddammit, Jamie! Leave me. There’s no p-point in us both d-dying out here.”

“I won’t leave you,” Jamie had growled, running until his lungs had burned and he’d had to swallow the urge to retch. Then he’d looked down into his friend’s pale blood-speckled face and told the biggest lie of his life. “You aren’t going to die, dammit. I’ve got you. Just hang on.”

“Jamie?”

Audrey’s soft voice penetrated the waking nightmare.

“Are you okay?” she asked, her fingers still hovering over his tattoo, his memorial to a fallen friend—an eagle with a ribbon and the inscription “In Memory of Danny Boy” trailing from its beak.

No, he wasn’t okay. He would never be okay. He’d failed to keep his friend’s back. It was his fault Danny’d been hit and his fault that he hadn’t gotten him to safety.

He was a murderer by default and nothing would ever change that.

“Oh, Jamie,” she said, bending down to kiss his back. “Give it to me and let me help you,” she implored softly. “Tell me about Danny.”

For one blind horrifying instant he was struck with the impulse to do just that. That was her specialty, after all. Taking damaged people and fixing them. If he opened himself up to her, could she heal him? Jamie wondered. Could she mend the yawning hole in his soul? For whatever reason, he knew if there was a person on the planet who could do just that, it was her. Jamie swallowed. Being with Audrey, something as simple as sharing the same air, made him feel more human and more alive than he had in months.

Unfortunately he wasn’t worthy of healing—he didn’t deserve it—and even more importantly, he wouldn’t become one of those “life-suckers” who drained her that the Colonel had told him about.

He wouldn’t become her next pity project, dammit.

“Look, Jamie, I know this is hard, but sometimes talking about things—”

Enough already.

Before she could finish the sentence, Jamie turned over, rolled into a sitting position and pulled her into the open V between his thighs. Time to shut her up before he did something stupid, like spill his guts and cry. “No more talking,” he told her.

Then he fitted his mouth to hers and kissed her until he felt every bit of the resistance melt from her body and felt a new kind of tension—the right kind—take its place. Ah, he thought, the panic lessening. Familiar ground.

She parlayed every bold thrust of his tongue and pushed her hands into his hair. A little sigh of pleasure leaked from her mouth into his and there was something so inherently erotic about that telling breath that he felt as though his chest and dick were both going to explode before he could get himself inside her.

Her long curls trickled over his shoulder, framed them in a world of their own making, one where nothing existed outside the meeting of their mouths and the inevitable joining of their bodies.

Jamie slid his hands down her back, found the hem of