Page 29 of Jonas (Silver Team #4)

CHAPTER TWENTY

On the walk back to the cabin, my head was filled with five hundred and fifty-two things. None of these having to do with the impending doom the Chinese had already instigated. None of them had to do with meeting the President of the United States in a few hours.

I mean, the President.

My head was filled with Jonas, our kiss, and his phone in my hand.

And, yes, right then his phone was more important than meeting POTUS, more important than getting back to the basement in the big house and checking to see what new intel Kira had been able to uncover, it was more important than everything.

Normally, a man handing over his cell to a woman he barely knew, would be a show of trust. Jonas doing it was a sign of absolute trust.

So, yeah, his phone in my hand—and what that meant—was taking up a lot of space in my head, and what was left over was taken up by our kiss.

Not the first one—the second one. The first one was brilliant.

The second one was so hot, if my hair hadn’t been wet and caked with mud it would’ve caught fire.

It might’ve been a while since I’d kissed a man—okay, a long while—but none had ever come close to being that good.

I was no relationship expert—hell, I wasn’t even a relationship enthusiast, more like a novice, so I couldn’t know for sure—but evidence was strongly suggesting that having a mysterious emotional attachment to someone, no matter how much it was in its infancy, made everything better.

Part of that everything went beyond the kissing, and the ass grabbing, though unfortunately I didn’t get to cop a feel before Jonas put an end to making out.

At the risk of sounding like a whackadoodle, his honesty fed something inside of me I knew had been starved, I just hadn’t known how hungry for it I was.

I’d always known I was missing something, I just never understood what it was—not fully.

I’d thought it was simply love and attention.

Those were part of it, but what I’d really been missing—what I’d been ravenous for—was to be seen, to be understood.

I didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for me, I didn’t want sympathy or even empathy.

What I needed was someone who understood that I am not who made me, I’m not the circumstances of my childhood, I’m not defined by the abuse, and I’m most certainly not responsible for my father’s hate.

And that was what Jonas gave me.

Different circumstances. Different dysfunction. Different hardships.

Same pain, rejection, and distrust.

We weren’t in the ‘same boat’ but we were in the same water and we’d both found a way to make it ashore.

I’d been so lost in thought, I startled when Jonas’s phone vibrated in my hand.

I glanced down at the screen and announced, “You have a text.”

“Thirty. Twenty-seven. Seventeen.”

Holy shamoly, did he just give me the code to unlock his phone?

When I didn’t immediately tap in his password, Jonas prompted, “Check it.”

I got it, everything he’d said about trust and honesty. But this was too much.

“Here.” I held out the phone.

“Dee Dee?—”

“There’s honesty then there’s invasion of privacy,” I cut him off. “This.” I shook the phone. “Feels like an invasion. Trust is trust and it isn’t real if I need to check a phone.”

Honestly, I couldn’t even remember why he’d given it to me in the first place.

I couldn’t read the expression on his face. It was somewhere between casual and alert, and maybe a little uncertainty tinged the edges.

Sluggishly, he reached for his phone. Perhaps he was waiting for me to change my mind and decide I wanted a look after all.

I wouldn’t and I didn’t. I meant what I said.

And maybe that was something else I’d longed for—trust. I didn’t have that growing up, either.

My father could go from happy to enraged in a blink of an eye, so I learned not to trust someone’s mood.

My mother, a woman who had been sweet and kind in private but turned cold and standoffish in front of my father, had taught me not to trust someone’s actions.

Everyone in my life had turned on me at one point or another.

My brother’s betrayal had been the worst, the hardest to reconcile.

At one time he’d been my playmate, my protector, my confidant.

Then he wasn’t, and in the single worst act of cruelty committed against me, he’d used my deepest, darkest fears as weapons, teaching me never to trust anyone with my secrets.

Secrets were weapons.

Trust was the blade that would sink into your back and kill you.

I learned these lessons well.

Yet there I stood, desperately wanting to trust Jonas.

I also desperately wanted a shower now that the mud was dry and starting to crack.

“Fuck.” Jonas’s outburst sent my attention from the cabin, which had just come into view, straight to his scowl.

“What’s wrong?”

“Anson Sutton is dead.”

Oh shit .

“How?”

“Home invasion. Wife came home from dinner and found him.”

Um, right.

“Well, if that isn’t bullshit I don’t know what is.”

“We need to get back to the big house,” he told me something I’d already guessed. “You got the shower first.”

I wasn’t going to argue with that. I was starting to itch and I didn’t want to think about the possible bacterial infection growing on my flesh from the dirty pond water.

Jonas’s thumbs flew over his screen while still managing to navigate the dirt path.

“Impressive,” I mumbled.

“What?”

“You being able to text and walk and not trip.”

His gaze tipped up as did his lips. When his eyes went back to his phone I figured that was it.

I was wrong.

“Got you to make sure I don’t walk into a tree.”

It wasn’t just silly, it was ridiculously silly, because it meant absolutely nothing. But hearing Jonas say he had me to stop him from walking into a tree made my stomach twist in a way that was both a warning of danger and a sign to proceed with abandon.

I already knew the shower stall was small.

What my sneak peek hadn’t informed me of was that the water pressure was shit.

I would’ve been better off using the hose outside.

And, in my haste to get into the shower, I’d forgotten to get my shampoo and conditioner out of my backpack.

Not that either were going to do much good when it would take a millennia to wash them out of my hair.

I spied the only bottle in the shower—men’s body wash, which meant Jonas used it as an all-in-one. I could see this. He didn’t strike me as a man who primped. More like a shower-and-go kinda guy who would rather shave his head than be bothered with something as sissy as conditioner.

I, on the other hand, needed conditioner or my hair would be a rat’s nest.

That left me in a dilemma; dry off mid-shower and walk to the bedroom I’d stayed in last night in a towel—something I’d have to do anyway after my shower since I wasn’t going to put my dirty clothes back on—or yell for Jonas, hoping he was in the house, and ask him to get me my bag.

Or I had a third option—finish up and use the hose outside to wash my hair.

It was the lukewarm water trickling over my head that made my decision easy.

Outside hair washing it was.

Less than three minutes later, I bemoaned my choice. I did this loudly when I stepped out of the stall and was reaching for the towel I’d set on the toilet seat. My foot got tangled in my jeans and when I kicked them free, my toes hit the corner of the vanity.

Even though I’d spent very little time with him, I channeled my inner Zane Lewis and spewed more curse words all at once than I’d said in the last four months combined.

The bathroom door banged open, hit the wall, and bounced back. But before it could slam closed, Jonas’s hand reached up and stopped it.

“What the fuck?”

“Goshdarned, motherfucking cabinet.”

“What?”

“I think I broke three toes,” I grunted.

“Three?”

I zeroed in on Jonas to tell him he could shove the humor I heard in his voice up his ass.

His naked, very broad, very muscled, mouthwatering chest stole my grievance.

And if that wouldn’t have done it, which it did, his shoulders, biceps, and the fact he was only in a pair of tight black boxer briefs definitely would’ve.

But since his chest stole the show, the sight of all the rest left me panting.

“Fuck me,” he growled.

Yes! Please.

My eyes were still glued to the tattoo over his left pec when he reminded me, “You’re naked.”

Oh shit .

On instinct, one hand covered my downstairs lady bits and my other arm went over my chest.

“You know that’s not doing a damn bit of good, baby?”

I suspected it wasn’t but it was better than standing fully nude in the unflattering white light coming from the fixture over the sink. I mean, really, who wants all their bits and bobs on display under harsh lighting?

His voice was still a growl when he said, “Towel.”

I fought back the quiver his indecent gaze caused. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to fight my gaze from dropping to his crotch. What could I say, I was a healthy female, with a fine specimen of a man standing in front of me. I was also naked, so I figured some ogling on my part was owed to me.

Tit for tat, and all that .

“Derrika.”

That didn’t cause a quiver—it caused my clit to spasm. Suddenly, my broken toes were forgotten. Hair washing with a hose was a distant memory. Horrible lighting no longer mattered, not when the impressive tenting in Jonas’s boxers was all I could focus on.

My panting turned into wheezing as I tried to draw in a breath through my saliva-filled mouth.

Good Lord, am I drooling?

I sure as heck hoped not, because I didn’t have a free hand to wipe it away.