Page 54 of Fighting for Valor
With each thrust, I heal a little more, and fuck. She feels like heaven. “I won’t last,” I whisper as my need builds.
“I’m right here, Ripper. With you.” Cara cups the back of my neck, and I reach down and find her clit. Her keening cry sends me closer to the edge, and when I feel her inner walls clench around my dick, I shout her name and let go.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ripper
An hour later, after taking Charlie out to do his business, I let myself back into the apartment. Cara’s sitting at my breakfast bar, meticulously counting out pills. Charlie heads right for his water dish, and the choppy sounds he makes as he slurps make me smile. It’s getting easier—smiling.
And then I turn my focus to Cara. She’s wearing another one of my shirts, and under the shorts I lent her…well, her underwear’s in my hamper, and the ideas floating through my head of what I’d like to do with her? They’re getting easier too.
“Hemp milk latte with vanilla?” I say as I slide the cup in front of her. She beams up at me like I just gave her the moon and rests light fingers on my cheek as she leans in to brush her lips to mine.
“What is all this?” I ask as I grab an anti-depressant and a single anxiety pill and wash them down with my own drip. She has six pills arranged in precise order in front of her, along with a little notebook with checkboxes on the page. Taking a seat next to her, I try to figure out how not to offend her. “You don’t seem…”
“Sick? Someone who needs all these meds?” She arches a brow, but there’s a small smile curving her lips.
“Yeah.”
“These,” she points to two orange capsules, “are for ADHD. If I forget these, you probably won’t notice much change in me until mid-afternoon. Then, I’ll be extra tired, but I’ll also start forgetting things and I probably won’t make eye contact regularly. If I don’t take them a second day, you’ll swear I have a hearing problem.”
“Why? There was a kid with ADHD in grade school with me. He could never sit still. But that’s literally all I know about it.”
“Women have different symptoms, usually.” She takes the two orange pills, then checks off the boxes in her notebook. After another sip of coffee, her shoulders slump a little, and she fiddles with a lock of her hair. “I was okay until I got to culinary school. Or, I thought I was, anyway. Then I started feeling stupid. Like I couldn’t learn anything. If I had to carry on a conversation with anyone in a room that wasn’t completely silent, I’d miss stuff. I thought my hearing was going. But at the same time, I could hear someone chewing in the next room and it would drive me batty. Still does. Turns out, it wasn’t that I couldn’t hear the person talking. I’d get distracted halfway through their sentence by something else, and my brain just couldn’t keep up.”
“When were you diagnosed?” I rub small, slow circles on her lower back. Touching her grounds me, and even though it’s daylight, I’m still a little on edge being inside.
“Four years ago. It was like suddenly, my entire life made sense. And after a couple of days on my meds, I…” Her cheeks flush red and she looks down at the remaining pills. “I called my best friend at the time and asked her if this was what it was like to feel like a person. I’d never felt it before.”
“What?” She’s so open about her challenges that she makes me want to be better. With her and with Dax and Ry.
“Like I could keep up. I remember riding the subway to work the second day and pulling up a news article on my phone. I always scanned the headlines. But that day, I read the whole article. When I got to the comments section, I almost dropped the phone I was so surprised.” Her smile widens, and she shakes her head. “Reading that stupid article about landing a satellite on a comet? It made me happier than I’d been in ages.”
After another sip of coffee, she points to the other three pills. “The yellow ones are for anxiety. And the last one is a beta blocker. I was born with a genetic condition that produces a really high heart rate. It was manageable before I started treating my ADHD, but now, without the beta blocker, my blood pressure spikes and I’m in legitimate danger of having a heart attack. I need one of these in the morning and one at night.”
Checking them all off as she takes them, Cara taps her pen on her notebook, double-checks the list, and then carefully packs everything back up in her purse. “And that’s just the start of my crazy, Ripper. We…we need to talk about last night.”
Shame crawls up the back of my neck, and I can feel myself shutting down until she cups my cheek. “Not this morning, handsome. Not the sex. Or anything you told me. The guy last night. And why—”
Someone pounds on my door, and Cara yelps and clutches her purse to her chest. But I know that knock. “It’s all right, sunshine. It’s just a friend of mine. And whatever you have to tell me, you should probably tell him too.”
Cara
I don’t share Ripper’s confidence. The more people who know my secret, the more danger I’m in. But I gave him a part of me I didn’t think I’d ever share again, and I trust him.
Until he opens the door and a massive bear of a man ducks his bald head in order to enter the room. He’s followed by a second man, shorter, maybe six-foot-four, wearing a pair of tinted glasses and carrying a white cane.
As the taller man focuses on me, his multi-hued eyes narrow. “Fucking hell,” he mutters. “Caroline Phillips.”
My heart leaps into my throat and I jump up. “How do you know that name?”
Ripper looks back and forth between me and the giant. “Ry, what’s going on?”
“Those two spooks trying to get a hold of us? Asking about you? Trevor finally tracked one of them back to Fort Bragg. He can’t be sure, but he thinks the guy worked out of JSOC.” After pinning me with a hard stare, the big guy continues, “And Caroline Phillips was a chef at JSOC for three years. Until she disappeared twenty-two months ago.”
“Cara?” Ripper turns to me, his blue eyes full of confusion. “What’s going on?”
“Have you told anyone I’m here in Seattle?” I ask as I take a step closer to the door. Not that I’ll be able to go anywhere with these two men blocking my way. “Anyone?”
