She reached for the T-shirt I’d left and slid it over her head, covering the body I still had burned on my brain. She reached up and undid the band which had been holding her hair back the entire day, and the dark curls rushed down and around her chin, spilling over her breasts hidden beneath my T-shirt.
She ran her fingers through her hair, rubbing over the scalp, and I had to control my body’s reaction to jump over and do it for her. To massage her head and then tilt her long, smooth neck so I could trail kisses along it. I wanted to touch her and kiss her more than I’d wanted much of anything in the last few years. Even before the mission which had cost me everything.
She finally took a sip of the ginger ale and grimaced. “Do we have any water?”
I nodded and pulled a bottle from the hotel minibar. I cracked it open for her, and our fingers collided when I handed it off. She watched me as she took a small sip before putting it on the table.
“I’m not sure I can even put the water in my stomach.”
I nodded.
She curled her legs up and rested her head on her knees like when I’d found her in the shower. Naked, pale, unmoving. It had been terrifying, and there wasn’t much that could terrify me anymore. There’d been another time I’d seen a pale, dark-haired woman who wasn’t moving. It had happened so long ago, and the pain was so piercing it was hard to remember anymore exactly what had happened when I’d found her that way, on the shore with the wind blowing the waves from the small pond onto her feet, the pale-blue nightgown clinging to her frame.
I hadn’t thought of that memory in a long time until seeing Dani in the shower.
Dani rested her head on her knees with her face turned toward me. She closed and then opened her eyes, a small smile quirking at the corner of her lips, and I felt relief wash over me. Relief that she could smile. “You’ve seen me at an awful low, Otter.”
I gave a curt nod. If this was the lowest she ever got, it was a good thing. The other dark-haired woman had been much lower.
“If you tell anyone, I might just have to kill you,” she said quietly but with a portion of her normal fierceness.
I returned her small smile with my own. “That’s the second time you’ve threatened my life today. Should I be worried?”
“Only if you spill the beans on what happened in that restroom.”
“You don’t have anything to be embarrassed about,” I told her.
“Still not a moment I want shared with the world.”
I couldn’t disagree with that.
“I feel like you need to share something completely humiliating about you so we’re even,” she said.
“You already know one of my secrets,” I told her and then regretted it because she went right to our night together. The secret I’d made her keep by forcing her from my bed. Before Dani worked herself up at the thought, I continued, “You’ve seen my hairless chest.”
Her eyes flicked to the black T-shirt I was wearing as part of the uniform for Garner’s company. Her flawlessly shaped brows joined together as she frowned. “What’s so embarrassing about it?”
“Well. It wasn’t always hairless.”
“Oookaaay,” she drew out her response.
I sighed. Was I really going to tell her this story?
“It once actually had quite a lot of hair.”
Her lips curled. “Did you shave your chest, Pretty Boy?”
Relief hit me. If she was feeling good enough to tease, she was coming through it okay.
“Worse.”
“What’s worse?”
“I had it all lasered off when I was nineteen.”
She laughed a soft laugh. “Why would you do that?”
“My sophomore year at Canoe U,” I started, and she snorted at the nickname for the Naval Academy. “I was approached by a woman off-campus who wanted me to do some modeling. Pose for a cadet calendar kind of thing.”
“Oh my God,” Dani said softly, covering her mouth and trying not to laugh, and at that moment, I would have told her a thousand embarrassing things just to keep her smiling and bringing color back into her pale cheeks.
I nodded. “Yep. When she saw my hairy chest at the first session, she handed me a card to a laser hair removal center and told me not to come back until I’d had at least two sessions. As you can imagine, I’d already bragged to a bunch of my pals, including Darren and some female cadets I had the hots for, that I was going to be on the cover of a cadet calendar. There was no way I was going to let a little hair be the reason I came up short.”
She was smiling and chuckling. “How many sessions did it take?”
I laughed. “A fucking lot.”
“As many as it takes,” she almost whispered, and I nodded.
“But after the second session, I was good enough to be oiled and posed.”
“I need living proof of this endeavor,” she said, her smile still in place.
“I’m sure it’s still out there somewhere.”
I had a feeling resourceful Dani was going to turn up with that calendar shortly. She’d hold it over my head the best she could. It was pretty fucking humiliating. One of the instructors at BUD/S had found out somehow in the middle of our training. He’d had photocopies of it placed in and on everything I owned.
