Page 14 of Tempt
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been so insatiable either. There was just something about her I couldn’t get enough of. I’d spent hours trying to get my fill, but when she’d walked out the door the next morning, I had the crazy urge to pull her back in because I wanted more. I’d been fantasizing about her every night for a month.
I did it now as I fucked my fist, the way her pussy tightened around me as she cried out, her hands on my ass pulling me deeper. Fuck, fuck, fuck—I grunted through my release, leaving a warm, sticky puddle on my stomach.
I opened my eyes and frowned at it, wondering if this was how it would be for the rest of my life. Waking up hard, getting myself off, showering up, going on about the business of being close to fifty, divorced, the father of an adult son I’d never even met, and worried that somewhere along the line I’d peaked, only I couldn’t tell you exactly when or where that was.
During my years as a SEAL probably. That was when I’d felt the most alive, had the most purpose, done the most good. The work I did for Cole Security paid well, appealed to my protective nature, and occasionally allowed me to flex my muscles, but it didn’t feed my appetite for punishing bad guys the way a raid did.
But I wasn’t an idiot. Bodies aged, even if minds didn’t. They got injured. They got fucking tired. You could still want the same things you always wanted, you could still crave the rush, but you start moving a fraction of a second slower every time, and eventually you become a liability to your team.
I’d never once been afraid of dying. But I was always afraid of someone dying on my watch.
My cell phone vibrated with a call on the nightstand where it was plugged in, and I let it go to voicemail while I jumped in the shower. My flight east was leaving at eleven-thirty a.m., and it was already going on eight. I was packed, but I still had some shit to do before I left.
Ten minutes later, I came out of the bathroom, threw on some jeans, and checked to see who’d called.
Mason Holt.
My son.
It was still odd for me to think of him that way—it caused a brain glitch every single time. My immediate thought was always,I don’t have a son. I don’t have any kids at all.At least, I hadn’t right up until a couple months ago, when I got the email that said differently.
It was three months ago—a Tuesday in early July. Sitting in the conference room at Cole Security, waiting for a meeting to start, I’d pulled out my phone to check my email. At the top of my inbox was a message from a name I didn’t recognize, but the subject line saidpossible family connection please read.I thought maybe some distant cousins on one side or the other had found me through one of those ancestry sites. Since the meeting wouldn’t start for another five minutes, I opened it up.
Hello,
This will probably come as a shock to you, but I think I might be your son.
My brow furrowed, my head pulling back. Was this a joke? I glanced around the room, half expecting to see Jackson or one of the other jackasses I worked with pointing and laughing—I could see them trying to pull this kind of prank.
But the room was empty, the hum of the air conditioner the only sound. As the hair on the back of my neck stood up, I looked at the email again.
My name is Mason Holt and I’m twenty-eight years old. My mother’s maiden name was Andrea Weber. She passed away a couple years ago, but she would be forty-six now.
Two sentences in, I was pretty confident that there had been some kind of mistake, and this Mason Holt had me confused with someone else. I didn’t know anyone by that name, nor by the name of Andrea Weber, and twenty-eight years ago I was nineteen, stationed on a ship in the Persian Gulf.
And then I read the next sentence.
She grew up in Frankenmuth, Michigan.
My stomach lurched—
Frankenmuth.
Michigan.
Ten days’ leave after “A school” graduation.
Andi—the pretty girl with the blond braids.
Memories filled in like ink spreading on paper.
My dad and stepmom lived in Frankenmuth back then, which is this tourist town that looks like someone plucked it off out of Bavaria and stuck it in the middle of Michigan. It’s got German-themedeverything—architecture, food, beer, clothing—as well as a gigantic Christmas store that’s open year-round in case you need tinsel in June. It made no sense to me.
I’d gone up to visit for a few days before I had to report to Norfolk. I hadn’t really wanted to go—my dad and I didn’t get along great, and my stepmom thought I had “anger issues.” She wasn’t wrong, Iwasstill angry about the way my father had left my mom—I was angry about a lot of things—but my mother said visiting him was the right thing to do, since I’d only seen him once in the last year and wouldn’t be back for a while. So I made the drive from Cleveland and stayed for five days.
But I spent most of my time chasing after Andi, who I’d seen at her waitressing job at a brewpub dressed in one of those sexy Oktoberfest sort of outfits, like the chick on the St. Pauli Girl beer labels.
Later she told me it was called a dirndl, but I can’t remember if that was before or after we had sex in the pub’s bathroom when she got off work, or the back seat of my car, or maybe against the side of a barn on her parents’ farm just outside town. She was eighteen and had graduated from high school earlier that year, just like me. But she still lived at home with strict religious parents, and if I remembered right, she was working to save up for beauty school and her own apartment. She also had a possessive ex-boyfriend who heard about me, showed up at my dad’s house, and took a swing at my face.
