Natches stared back at her, his eyes narrowing. Had she come looking for him when he had believed she was gone?

“I was called in that afternoon for a mission. It was a quick strike; I was flown directly to my drop-off. I returned three days later, and you had left Baghdad,” he told her.

He remembered his rage. He had torn apart his quarters with it, and then he had torn apart the hotel room they had shared. The MPs sent after him hadn’t fared very well either.

As he stared at her now, he remembered all the reasons why he had gone insane over losing her. The lush lips, the stubborn angle of her chin. The way she knew how to smile, the feel of her coming alive against him. He had known all that before the day she had lost little Beth. He’d known it because he had spent two weeks haunting that damned hospital, teasing a kiss out of her, a laugh. Knowing she was married, knowing she was bound to a traitor.

And she had known. She had known, and like a flower opening to the sun, she had slowly begun opening for him.

She shook her head now, her eyes, that deep golden gaze locked with his, the color shifting, shadowed with so much pain. “Timothy said he checked. He was there that morning I went in to finalize custody of Beth’s remains.”

She crossed her arms over her breasts as though she were huggingthe pain inside herself when all he wanted to do was wipe it from her. “He wanted me to leave immediately to take Beth home, then join DHS. I wanted to talk to you first.” She shrugged stiffly. “You were gone. He said he checked to see if you were on a mission and you weren’t.”

Lying bastard. Natches grunted at that. “DHS ordered the mission. They had a line on Nassar Mallah. I went out after him. When I finished and returned, you were gone.”

Chaya bit her lip as she moved across the room and lifted herself heavily onto one of the stools that sat at the counter. She looked tired; she looked hopeless. And that look tore at his heart.

“Sounds like Timothy.” Her voice was nearly toneless. “But it didn’t matter, not really. I couldn’t function then, Natches. Not for either of us.”

God he wanted to hold her now. What the hell was it about this woman? She was inside him, and five years of fighting it hadn’t managed to push her out of his soul.

Was it love? Hell if it felt like anything he had seen out of Dawg and Rowdy. He didn’t feel gentle. He felt like he wanted to devour her from head to toe. He wanted to roll around in oil with her. He wanted to lift her to that counter and spend hours eating the tastiest flesh he’d ever found between a woman’s thighs.

She was hurting, enmeshed in memories that he knew had to be ripping her guts to shreds. The sight of it made him crazy. He would do anything, say anything, to ease her pain, but by God she wasn’t hiding from him anymore.

She held that past between them like a spiked shield, and he’d had enough of it. Five years. He’d let her torment him through endless, aching nights. He’d suffered every nightmare he knew she suffered, and his pain for her sliced through his soul with each memory.

“You’ve had long enough to begin functioning then.” He had to force himself to stand back from her, to not touch her.

She looked lost, lost and lonely, almost as broken as she had looked the day they told her her husband was the traitor who revealed her to the terrorists who had kidnapped her.

He watched as her shoulders straightened then, her chin lifted. He didn’t know what the hell she had in her mind now, but he knew exactly what she intended to do, and he’d be damned if he would let her.

She was not walking out on him again. Not like this. This was the closest he’d managed to get to her since the night her daughter had died. And then, it had been comfort, not need, not hunger. She had needed someone to hold on to. Someone to take her away from reality while she found a way to handle the coming grief.

He’d given her that. He wasn’t willing to be that someone to her again though. He wasn’t a warm body to hold back the pain, and damn her to hell, he was sick and damned tired of being relegated to her past. A part of a memory she desperately wanted to forget.

“I would have divorced him for one night with you.” And all the need, the hunger, the driving, aching desperation he felt himself was echoed in her voice.

Her declaration surprised him though. And he could tell by the tone of her voice that it filled her with guilt.

She turned to him then, her gaze haunted. “Using the excuse that our marriage had been lost before then doesn’t help. I took vows, and I meant them. But I was going to leave him, even before I knew he had betrayed me. I was going to leave him, Natches, and I made that decision because of you.”

He could feel the “but” coming, and he knew it was going to piss him off. He could feel it in the tension gathering in the air around them.

“He was a bastard,” he snarled before she could say anything more. “You knew it, even if you didn’t have proof of it.”

He had known it. Any man who allowed his wife to face danger alone deserved to lose her to another man. Women were precious. Women who loved, who honored their vows, were more precious than the finest gems. And Chaya would have honored those vows until the ink dried on the divorce papers. He knew it. And sometimes he wondered if he hadn’t hated that part of her.

“That doesn’t excuse it,” she said, staring at him from where she sat, her expression somber, her gaze flickering with guilt. “I wanted your kiss, Natches. I wanted you; I wanted your touch and your voice whispering all those naughty little secrets you used to whisper to me when I was in the hospital. I wanted it. I was married, and I ached for it. And I paid for it.”

It took a moment, one long, disbelieving moment, for that comment to soak into his head and light the spark of his normally rational temper.

“Son of a bitch.” He stared back at her in complete amazement. “I’ll be a son of a bitch. You’ve let that bastard steal your soul even from the fucking grave.” His voice rose as he spoke. “Is that how you’re blaming yourself now, Chay? That Beth was taken from you because you wanted me?”

Anger poured from him as he watched her flinch, saw the truth in her eyes. Stubborn pride lined every curve of her body. She actually believed what she was saying. Believed every word of it.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.

“I understand this, by God. If you were my wife, Chaya—my woman—you’d never, fucking never, be on a mission without me. You’d never face danger alone, and you’d never know a night that I wasn’t in your damned bed. How long had that bastard been out of your bed?”

“That’s not the point.” Her voice trembled. He could see the fear in her eyes now, a fear that made no damned sense because she had to know he would never, never harm her. But damn her to hell, he was so furious with her that he wanted to slam his fist into a wall to relieve the rage burning inside him.

“The fact that he was fucking every trainee he could get his hands on didn’t matter either, I guess,” he sneered, furious, consumed by that fury as he realized the ways she had made herself pay for her daughter’s death. And her hunger for him. “The fact that he managed to get your baby on a plane to Iraq without your knowledge because he was fucking your sister before the two of you left didn’t matter either, did it?”

Her face only tightened further. Her eyes raged though. He saw her eyes; he saw the banked fury, the agony that she tried to dim, tried to hide.

“Did it matter, Chaya?” He strode to her, his fist slamming into the top of the bar as she flinched from the sound of his voice and the crack of his flesh against the Formica. Hell, he cracked it again, and he didn’t even give a damn. “Answer me, damn you!”

“That was no excuse,” she screamed back, shuddering from head to toe, everything he needed to hear, everything he wanted to know, in her voice now. She wanted. Just as he did, she ached and she hungered for what was between them, and she was too damned scared to take it. “That didn’t give me the right—”

“No, it gave me the right.”

Before he could stop himself, and God knew he didn’t want to stop himself, he jerked her into his arms and slammed his lips down on hers.

He wanted to be gentle. She deserved it. She deserved sweet, liquid kisses. She deserved gentleness and warmth, and all he had was hunger, lust, and heat.

All he had was the need to taste the passion without the grief. The woman without the pain of loss.

And he had her. He felt the first resistance, shock and surprise. Her hands pressed against his shoulders, then her fingers curled. A second later, she made that whispery, whimpering little sound of surrender that he had only ever heard from her lips.

They parted beneath his kiss, opened to the stroke of his tongue, and a second later, a firestorm of need rocked through his body.

She kissed like a wanton, like a woman whose need for pleasure had grown to the same torturous depths his own had grown to. Satin-soft lips slanted beneath his; her tongue met his, licked and consumed and had him strung as tight as a banjo string within seconds.

It wasn’t enough. The kiss was only the tip of the iceberg. He needed so much more from her. He needed more than he had known in that fucking desert, more than he had fantasized of over the years. He needed her rocking in his arms, lifting to his thrusts.

He groaned into the kiss, lifted her closer, felt the soft swell of her stomach cushioning the hard-on raging beneath his jeans, and knew he couldn’t live without tasting more of her.

She was like a drug in his system, impossible to get rid of. And there were times he wondered if he didn’t embrace this particular addiction. Her lips moving beneath his, her moans filling his head.

He fought back a growl as she tore her lips from his. He needed more.

“I need more of you.” Her lips were on his neck, biting, sucking, kissing, as her hands lowered to his belt. “I need to taste you, Natches. Taste you all over.”

“Ah, hell.” Her fingers were lowering the zipper, parting the material, and shoving it aside to release the fully engorged, throbbing length of his cock.

As he watched, she went to her knees. How many times had he dreamed of this? Dreamed of her taking him like this.

“Damn you.” He flinched in agonizing pleasure as her lips parted and took him.

She was too hungry for preliminaries, and that only made him hotter. The head of his cock disappeared into her eager little mouth and immediately set flame to wildfire.

It flashed through his body, drew his balls tight, then had them knotting with ecstasy as her nimble little fingers began to caress and play with them.

And she sucked. She sucked his cock into her mouth, nearly to her throat, and drew on it, milked it until he was growling with pleasure. Her free hand wrapped around the shaft, stroked, tightened on it, and drove him crazy.

His hands were in her hair, his hips moving, fucking her mouth, and he loved it.

“Is this how you used that little toy, Chay?” The thought of that damned dildo infuriated him. “Did you think of this, baby? Of me inside your mouth, fucking those sweet lips?”

He had been dying to do just that, and she had filled her mouth with something else? Damn her. Not again. Never again.

She moaned around his cock head, and he nearly came from the pleasure of it. Sensation rippled through the shaft, into his balls, and up his spine. Holding on wasn’t going to happen for long. He could feel the cum boiling in his balls, knew he wasn’t going to be able to hold back.

“Damn you. Suck it, baby. Show me how you sucked that damned toy and thought of me.”

His teeth clenched as she moaned again, her mouth tightening, her tongue stroking and licking and drawing him so damned tight he felt as though he were going to break.

He was going to come. Ah, hell. Close. So damned close.

A second later he jerked back, fury pulsing, raging through him. Chaya fell back with a cry as he pushed her to the side and jerked the gun from the top of the couch where he had placed it and cursed furiously.