Page 26 of Jonas (Silver Team #4)

I stopped at the edge and looked at the murky water. It was nothing like the crystal-clear creek of my youth but it was still tranquil. The yellow and white flowers dotting the far end of the bank added to its splendor.

“Did you know wild mustard and white Queen Anne’s Lace are considered weeds?” I blurted out.

“Is that what those flowers are called?” Jonas asked.

“Yeah. Back home they grew in the hay fields. It used to make me sad when I’d see him send someone out to spray, knowing they’d all be dead within a few days. But he was good at killing beauty.”

Shut up!

Any peacefulness that had seeped in at the sight of the glorified mudhole was quickly replaced with chaos. What the hell was it about Jonas that made it impossible for me to shut out the past? Why did the memories not only rattle around in my brain uncontained but also spill out of my mouth?

No. Those weren’t the questions that truly confused me, the actual questions were: why did I trust him with my past and why was he the only person I’d ever felt safe enough with to let a splinter of the real me come out?

“Where I grew up there was never any beauty to kill.” I tore my gaze away from the flowers and took in Jonas’s expression which matched his sad tone.

“Even before my dad died, our yard wasn’t much bigger than a matchbox.

The backyard didn’t even have room for a swing set.

Then he died and everything seemed to die with him.

There was a park a few blocks away from the house Adam and I used to go to.

The grass was so green, the bushes neatly trimmed, the playground well taken care of.

I hated that park. I hated how peaceful and pretty it was.

How happy all the kids looked. How the moms pushed their kids on the swings.

It was an ugly reminder of everything I didn’t have.

But still, it was better than being home. ”

I knew how that felt—the ‘better than being at home’ part. But unlike Jonas, I found solace among the trees and grass and wildflowers.

“Was there anywhere that brought you peace?”

“No.”

I hated that, absolutely despised it.

“There was this mountain in the back pasture. When I was little, maybe five or six, I used to climb it. It took forever to get to the top. On my tenth birthday, I went up there with a packet full of flower seeds I’d bought from the feed store.

I remember twirling in a circle as fast as I could, opening my hands, and letting the seeds fly.

When I was done, it dawned on me—getting up the mountain was no longer difficult.

When I was a teenager it occurred to me I’d been calling that place ‘my mountain’ for so long, I forgot to stop calling it that, because in reality it was nothing more than a steep incline.

It wasn’t even a hill, not really. The cattle would go up and down to graze.

But when I was little that incline looked huge.

Anyway, that’s not the point,” I huffed out.

“The point is I spent a lot of time up there thinking. I’d go up there after my daddy would take his belt to me, and lay on my stomach crying, asking God, why me.

My mother would do something Daddy didn’t like and he’d take a whip or cattle strap and bloody my back to beat the devil out of his home.

I’d go up there and yell at God and ask, why me?

Then one day I stopped asking. The day before I left I went up, laid on my back watching the clouds and got it.

Why not me? Maybe it needed to be me. Maybe it had to be me because God knew I was strong enough to take it.

Maybe it had to be me so it wasn’t someone else.

” I stopped speaking to concentrate on Jonas, to really look at the man standing next to me.

The strength he possessed earned by circumstance, by tragedy.

Like me, it wasn’t the kind of strength either of us wanted but nonetheless it was ours.

“Maybe it had to be me, so I could be the peace and protection for someone else. Maybe it had to be me so I could find power in the pain, find my strength, find my resilience, find empathy.”

Maybe it had to be me so when the time came all of my jagged fragments would slot and piece together with Jonas’s, making what was perfectly broken, perfectly whole.

Or maybe I was absolutely nuts and needed a delusion to mask my agony.

“Dee Dee,” he whispered.

“I wish I could’ve been the one?—”

“No, baby. Hell no.”

The growly rasp in his voice cut through the heat of the day and made me shiver.

I shuffled to face him. I felt my sneaker sink into the mud.

I pitched toward the bank, not wanting to fall into the water at the same time Jonas reached out to grab my arm.

My foot slid deeper, I grabbed ahold of Jonas’s shirt just as I completely lost my balance.

The next thing I knew I was falling backward.

At the last second before I hit the water, Jonas twisted.

With a splash we both went in. I only had seconds to register how warm the water was before my head and chest were back out of it.

“Holy shit,” I sputtered and spit.

When I could still taste putrid pond water, I spit a second time.

Unfortunately, that’s when I realized I was straddling Jonas. The water lapped around his waist, my knees rested in the mud, and my hands were on his shaking chest. I blinked away droplets coating my lashes and sure enough he was laughing. Not only that, but his hands were on my hips.

“Did I just spit in front of you…twice?”

“Yup.”

Someone kill me .

“Some nature girl I am, falling into a shallow body of water.” I tried for self-deprecating.

It was wholly inappropriate where my thoughts turned. I also didn’t care, not when Jonas’s gray t-shirt was molded to his chest, his face was only a few inches from mine, his hair was wet and spiky, and his fabulous blue eyes were dancing with humor.

I wanted to kiss him.

I wanted to sample what a future with him would taste like. I wanted to know if he could heal me with a kiss. I wanted to know what it felt like to have his hands on my breasts and other places besides. I wanted to rock my hips and feel what was behind the zipper of his cargos.

I did none of these things, except stare into his beautiful eyes and absorb the moment.

One of his hands left my hip and came up to brush back the wet hair stuck to my cheek.

“We need a shower,” I stupidly proclaimed.

A dark brow arched.

“Is that an invitation?”

Yes!

“I peeked and I don’t think it’s big enough for both of us.”

“Peeked?”

“Not while you were in it of course,” I rushed out. “But last night, I peeked behind the shower curtain. Actually, I don’t even know how you fit in there.”

“It was a tight fit.”

I bet it would be .

I felt heat hit my cheeks and prayed he couldn’t read my mind.

“Dee Dee?”

“Yeah?”

God, he really was gorgeous.

“Baby?”

“Huh?”

I felt my body sway forward, such was the magnitude of his pull.

His hand slipped back up to cup my cheek.

“You sure?”

I was too caught up in the way his gritty palm felt on my skin, not to mention the way his eyes had lost the humor, and in them now was something that looked a lot like lust. Therefore, I was multitasking—sinking into the feel of him and praying I was right about the look, too distracted to completely comprehend what he was asking, but I still replied, “Absolutely.”

When Jonas’s lips touched mine, the world melted away.

When his tongue touched mine, I lost the last vestiges of rational thought, and as I suspected, he tasted magnificent.

With each stroke of his tongue, my future came into sharp focus—what I wanted, what I needed, what I was going to have.

And the effort I’d need to put in, to keep him.

Bottom line, my soul had recognized Jonas, my body had fully engaged and was on board.

My heart was the holdout, but I didn’t think it would take long for it to catch up. Not with the way Jonas was kissing me.

The dichotomy of possessive and soft was life-changing. The way his hand gripped the side of my face, keeping me where he wanted me while his lips remained gentle, was life-affirming. The way his tongue coaxed instead of demanded submission wasn’t magnificent—it was out-of-this-world phenomenal.

Despite my upbringing, I was a believer.

I just didn’t believe the way my father and brother did, with an ugly, warped, bigoted view.

I didn’t strongly disagree with how they used The Word to subjugate and discriminate—I loathed how they did.

They bastardized and weaponized scripture.

Like they did with everything, they turned something that was meant to be about love, kindness, good works into something horrid and mean and disgustingly malicious.

But if I wasn’t sure, that kiss would’ve proven there was a God and He’d sent me someone to erase the teachings my father had beaten into me.

Yes, the kiss was that good. It was everything I needed it to be. It was full of desire and seduction and need, yet it was tender and slow and languid.

In other words, perfect .

So perfect, I squirmed to get closer. My lower half—this mostly being the area between my legs—wasn’t paying attention to the pains Jonas was taking to keep the kiss under cover. That part of me had a mind of its own and that mind was drenched in the need for more.

Unfortunately, my rocking had the undesired consequence of Jonas slowing the kiss to soft flicks of his tongue, which slowed even more to soft, gentle glides of his lips over mine before it morphed again to a softer peck to the corner of my mouth before he ended it altogether.

As endings went, it was just as fabulous as the kiss.

Still, I whimpered my protest.

Jonas growled his response.

My lady parts contracted.

That’s when Jonas smiled, and damn if that grin didn’t make my heart skip a beat.