Page 99 of Seal of Honor
She nuzzled his neck, opening her mouth over the strong beat of his pulse. His skin tasted like salt and sand and her man, and she adored the way he shuddered when she kissed him there.
Gabe’s breath hitched, his grip on her tightening almost painfully as control slipped from him. His thrusts became erratic, desperate. “Audrey…”
The sound of her name like a prayer on his lips was her undoing. Her body clenched around him, back arching off the sand as the tight knot of pleasure uncoiled inside her. It was a soft release, stretching out into oblivion, sweet and lovely, like floating on a cloud.
He tangled his fingers in her hair to tilt her head up and kiss her forehead, her nose. Before taking her lips, he drove in deep one last time and growled her name against the shell of her ear. His body went rigid above hers, his grip on her turning into a vise. He buried his face in her hair as he spilled himself inside her with a raw groan.
When the tremors finally subsided, Gabe collapsed onto her. She welcomed the weight, wrapping her arms around him and nuzzling the crook of his neck. His heartbeat was strong and steady against her chest. It all made her feel safe and cherished.
They lay together, entwined in the sand, for a long time, the ocean lapping gently at their feet as the sun sank toward the horizon.
Audrey traced lazy patterns on Gabe’s back, her fingers dancing over his trident tattoo. “Stay with me.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” He shivered under her touch, pressing himself even closer to her as if he could somehow fuse them—skin to skin, heart to heart.
From the water, one of the dolphins chortled. It sounded a lot like laughter, and Gabe lifted his head to scowl at the animal.
“Except,” he added and scooped her up into his arms, “to bed, where we don’t have an audience.”
CHAPTER 36
LOS ANGELES, CA
“Danny? Honey, what are you still doing up?”
Danny Giancarelli looked up from his laptop and managed a smile for his sleepy-eyed wife despite the headache pounding directly in the center of his forehead. She wore a ratty USMC T-shirt from his military days, which he’d given her before his deployment. Leah said she’d worn it to bed every night for the entire year that he was gone, and even now, all these years later, it was still her favorite nightshirt. His, too. She’d been wearing it the day he’d arrived home when he, knowing without a doubt at the ripe old age of twenty that she was the woman for him, popped the question. She’d worn it on their wedding night, and it was sexier than any of the lingerie her girlfriends had bought her for her bridal shower. She’d also worn it the night they’d made their first baby and every subsequent baby after that.
And it still looked sexy as sin on her.
“Come here.” He held out a hand, his wedding band glinting in the soft glow of his desk lamp. When she set her hand in his and he pulled her onto his lap for a kiss, he thought, not for the first time, that he was the luckiest man alive.
Leah drew back and soothed her thumb down the crease between his brows. He’d been noticing more and more of those creases in the mornings when he gazed into the mirror to shave—around his eyes, his mouth, his forehead. He looked more like his father every freakin’ day. Luckily, he hadn’t started losing his hair yet like Pop, but it still made him feel old, especially when his wife was as hot at twenty-nine as she’d been at eighteen.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is the Patterson case bothering you?”
“No.”
One brow arched the way it did when the kids told a lie, and she gave him a dubious expression.
“Yeah, okay,” he admitted, “it’s bugging me.”
His last case, a local hostage situation involving a girl named Sylvia Patterson and her ex-boyfriend, hadn’t had the same happily-ever-after as the Van Amee case, ending in a murder-suicide.
“But not how you’re thinking,” he added. “I did everything in my power to save that girl. It wasn’t enough, but that’s part of the job. You accept it and move on. You have to, or you’d drive yourself insane with guilt.”
“Like Marcus did,” Leah said.
“Yeah, like Marcus.”
“I can’t believe he finally called.” She hesitated and rolled her lower lip through her teeth. “How is he?”
Danny lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know. He’s… Marcus, you know?”
If anyone knew Marcus as well as he did, it was Leah. The three of them had grown up together, running wild on the beaches of Southern California.
She laughed softly. “Still hiding behind that slick charm of his?”
“Like nothing ever happened.”
