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Then they were gone.
* * *
Grace wokeup and Nash wasn’t in bed, and she was mad. They had been so exhausted from the Four Frogmen of the Apocalypse, they had crashed hard, and now she wanted her man, and he had the nerve to be out of bed already. She pushed away the sheets padding out of the bedroom into the living room. The house was quiet. Then she heard noise from the garage.
What the heck? She went to the door and opened it. Stopped dead, her breath rushing out of her like a steam geyser.
Nash.
Stripped down to black, sinful shorts doing pullups with his back to her. She thought she had seen some beautiful muscle last night. Holy shit. Just like his brothers, Nash “Prophet” Rahim was a cut above. He was cool, calculating, always in control. If Trigger was the biggest, Nash was the deadliest and yet, physically, he had raw presence in spades, all of it sculpted into layers of muscle and sinew, the power of long legs, corded arms, broad shoulders, and a back designed by God and perfected by lifting iron, getting strong, then getting stronger, getting tough, then getting tougher. It’s what they all did. It’s how SEALs trained for the real world, how the guys stayed alive in the places they went, in doing the jobs they were tasked to do. All Nash’s strength and power belonged to her, surrounding her, warming her skin on the outside and causing a meltdown inside.
“Wow…” The word slipped out on a breath. Synapses sizzling, sweat breaking out on her body, hands trembling. “I approve of the pull-up bar, and Uncle Sam’s combat design,” she said hoarsely.
That got her a chuckle. “Why don’t you come over here and give me some of your gravity, SEAL babe of mine.” His words were warm, intimate and she was dying inside. Somehow she moved and crossed the concrete in her bare feet. “Grab my waist.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, come on. I need you to ground me. I have something to ask you in a minute.”
She wrapped her arms around that lean waist, and he didn’t even falter. He pulled up to the bar, then back down. Then another one. “That’s all you got, babe?” he asked.
She dropped down to the floor. Her eyes narrowed. Smug bastard. She grabbed the material of his shorts and pulled. They slipped off him, and now she was going to die from oxygen starvation.
She registered the leather first, and the firm globes of his ass in that harness. “I knew you would do that.” Then, with a raised brow, he asked, “What do you think?”
She couldn’t speak. She wasn’t sure she was going to survive seeing the front, not only the jock, but him.
“Grace?”
Her body was clenched, her hormones in overdrive, her mind hitting the red line.
“Grace?” he said again, then when she still didn’t answer him, he dropped down from the bar and turned around.
Thisman.
“Oh, shit. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she whispered. “Absofuckinglutelynothing, yousexybastard.”
“Okay, that sounds better. You’re swearing at me.”
She covered his mouth. “Please don’t talk. Your voice is distracting me.”
He chuckled. She ran her hands down his sweat-slicked chest to the waistband of the most sinful piece of male clothing she’d ever seen. Yeah, right. This was for working out. Not likely. She cupped him, sending her hand over the soft leather. He grunted, reached up and clasped the frame of the bar. For a moment, she simply held his gaze, his eyes so perfectly dark, his lashes so thick. His eyes heated and his mouth quirked up. His hair had grown longer and was now a sinfully silky mess around his face and forehead.
“The codpiece is removable.”
Her head jerked up to him, her heart jumped, her sex throbbed. “What. Nash. Oh my God.”
An overwhelming love filled her and it wasn’t his body or the jockstrap. It was him. Just this man. “Why don’t you unwrap me and check it out.”
So help her God, she could feel the echo of his heartbeat pulsing deep inside her, and it made him feel like a god.
He leaned down to press a soft kiss to her forehead. “I love you, Nash,” she whispered in his ear, and he tightened his hold, pulling her in even closer.
“I got a surprise for you.” Heat. A tidal wave of it suffused her. “Oh, honey, that’s not a surprise.”
“Remove the codpiece, Grace.”