Disarm by June Gray Read Free Book Online

his arms. To say I devoured his face was kind of an understatement.
    Henry backed up
into the couch and sat down, taking me with him. He grumbled something about
putting steaks on the grill, but a tornado could be whizzing past our window
right now and you couldn’t have peeled me from that couch. Instead, I unzipped
his pants, drew aside my thong panties and pulled him deep inside me.
    Later, after we
finally got around to cooking and eating dinner, we lay on his bed sated and
drowsy. He was lying on his back and I was sideways across the bed, my head
resting on his stomach as we talked about the past,
too afraid to talk about the future—in case we didn’t have one.
    “How about that
guy you dated in your senior year?” Henry asked. “Did you guys date long?”
    I smiled against
his stomach. “You jealous?”
    “I was.”
    I ran my fingers
over the soft skin covering his ribs. “We only went out until after New
Year’s,” I said. “I wish you’d have told me how you felt.”
    “I almost did a
few times.” He twisted his finger around a lock of my curly hair. “I came home
early that Christmas to spend some time with you without Jason around.”
    “Would you have
told me then?”
    He shrugged.
“Maybe. If all the stars aligned. But I guess they
didn’t.” His blue eyes took me in for a long timeq until I became uncomfortable.
    “What?” I asked,
covering my face with my hand. I peeked through my fingers and grinned.
    He pulled my hand
away. “I was just wondering what Jason would think.”
    “He’d probably
tackle you to the ground, maybe give you a black eye or bloody lip.” I liked to
think Jason would have approved.
    “Sounds like Jason,”
he replied with a wry smile. He pressed his palm to my cheek. “I kinda think he
knew. I was always asking about you, trying to sneak your name into
conversations. Every time we talked about coming back home, he’d ask me if I
was looking forward to seeing you, but I’d just ignore him.”
    I beamed so hard
my cheeks hurt. “You wanted to huuuug me, you wanted to kiiiss me,” I said
in a singsong voice.
    He sat up and
tickled me and we wriggled around on the bed like children until his cell phone
vibrated on the nightstand. He looked at the caller ID and said, “I need to
take this.”
    I waved him off
and went to use his bathroom. On my way back out, I caught a glimpse of myself
in the mirror that made me pause. My hair was tangled and any trace of makeup
had been wiped off my face, and yet I looked positively delirious with
happiness. I finally saw the glow Henry had been talking about.
    He was wearing
pants and a grave expression when I rejoined him on the bed.
    “What’s up?” I
asked. “Everything okay?”
    “That was the
commander,” he said in a voice that made the hairs on my arms rise.
    I didn’t want to
hear whatever bad news was coming, but I had asked for honesty and it was too
late to take back. “What is it?”
    “The deployment
date has been changed.”
    A hopeful little
thought bubbled up from my chest. “It’s been pushed back?”
    “It’s been moved
up.”
    I spoke around
the thought that had lodged painfully in my throat. “When?”
    A gloom settled
over Henry’s handsome features. “To this Friday. As in two days from now.”
    That was about
the time I fell off the swing and fell face first into the ground.

OVER AND OUT

 
 
 
 
    We held each
other that night, never once losing contact as we slept. I clutched him to my
chest, afraid of losing his warmth, and in turn he nestled me in his arms with
his lips pressed to my head.
    I woke with a
start around two a.m., nearly hyperventilating from the thought that I hadn’t
even told him how I felt. “Wake up,” I whispered against his chest, pulling
away.
    He was hard to
rouse after the night we’d had, but I needed to tell him. We were fast running
out of time. “Henry, wake up.”
    “Yes?” he rasped,
keeping his eyes closed. He pulled me back against his