Snow Leopard's Lady Read online

  She let him into her building. “It’s a bit shabby,” she said as they went upstairs.

  “No need to apologize for anything about your home,” he said in firm tones.

  So Mavis bit her tongue as they came into her apartment, with its secondhand couch and fraying blankets and pillows.

  She’d left everything behind when she left Daryl. All of the nice things they’d bought for their house were still in the house, where Daryl was living. Mavis’ lawyer said that they could get her some of her things, and that she would certainly get a half-share of the home’s value...but that was sometime in the future, and right now the lawyer’s fees were taking up most of her spare income.

  But Wilson settled into the Goodwill couch like it was the most comfortable place he’d ever sat. Mavis started up the coffee and came back into the living room.

  And suddenly she was faced with a choice—the chair catty-corner to the couch, or the cushion next to Wilson.

  She chose the cushion. Immediately, she could feel the warmth of his body heat radiating out towards her. She resisted the urge to scoot closer.

  “So,” he said quietly. “You were telling me about your daughter.”

  Mavis was struck suddenly by how much of a rock he seemed, a quiet, immutable foundation.

  This was a man who’d been in violent combat and kept his head. Who’d come back alive, and brought others back with him. Who’d commanded men for his entire adult life.

  Someone who would never fly off the handle in a crisis. Who would carefully assess a situation. Who wouldn’t scream or yell, or make a split-second decision and stick to it like glue, no matter what anyone said to him.

  Someone nothing like Daryl.

  Mavis drew in a breath. “Daryl threw Nina out of the house, and I stood by and said nothing. I didn’t know what to do—I didn’t know what had just happened to my daughter. Daryl was insisting that she was possessed, that she was some kind of devil-creature, and I’d just seen her turn into an animal...but that’s no excuse at all. She was my daughter. I shouldn’t have let him. I should have gone with her.”

  There was a short space of quiet, and then Wilson said, “Sometimes you make the wrong decision. And the consequences—well, the consequences can be irrevocable. And there’s nothing you can do to go back. I’ve—” He stopped.

  “What?” Mavis whispered.

  “I’ve done the same thing,” he said in a low voice.

  “When?” Her voice was airless. She was desperate to hear, to feel that someone else understood how it felt to be caught endlessly in one moment of a horrific mistake.

  “Once...once in Iraq, I gave an order to investigate a town. I sent good men out to it, thinking it was just another village.” He exhaled heavily. “It was an enemy hideout.”

  Mavis drew in her breath.

  “If I’d kept the men back, ordered more caution, it would have been different. But I didn’t consider all the options, and men died because of that error.”

  She clenched her fists, feeling her fingernails prick her palms as she thought about the horror he must have felt when it all went wrong.

  “I spent a long time living inside of that moment,” he said. “I still feel that pain, that regret. But if I let it consume me, I wouldn’t be able to make any amends. I wouldn’t be able to do better the next time, because all of my judgment, my experience, would be lost inside of one event, and there would be no way to bring my full self to the next thing. And that would be dishonoring those men’s memory, more than anything else.”

  He took Mavis’ hand. His palm was warm, and big enough to engulf hers. “Do you see? No one is served by that much guilt. Not me, not you. Not Nina.”

  Mavis stared down at their joined hands. “I try,” she said. “I try to keep all of the guilt I feel, the shame, away from Nina. It’s not going to help her, if I’m beating myself up all the time. She doesn’t need to constantly reassure me that it’s all right, or try to calm me down when I’m upset. That’s not my job, as her mother. I need to be the best mother I can be for her, now, rather than living—like you said—living inside of that moment when I was at my worst.”

  Wilson twined their fingers together, and she shivered at the closeness, the intimacy of the moment. “That’s all we can ever do,” he said softly. “The best that we can. And if we fail, well, we have to get up and keep going and try for a better best.”

  Mavis blinked tears back. “Nina was gone for seven years,” she said in a rush, and Wilson’s hand tightened on hers as he sucked in a breath. “She went out that door and she never came back. I looked for her. I called shelters, I called hospitals, I put up posters, I searched on the Internet. I asked everyone she knew, all of her friends. But she left town, and I didn’t know where to find her.”

  “I can’t even imagine,” Wilson said. “Seven years of your daughter missing...it must have been the worst hell imaginable.”

  Mavis nodded. “It was.”

  Wilson frowned, his thumb stroking up and down her hand. “You said your divorce was only just being finalized now. Did you marry again, after that?”

  Mavis shook her head. “No. I stayed with Daryl. Because I knew that if I left him, he’d fight tooth and nail to keep the house. If I was going to leave, I’d have to leave. And Nina would have no way of finding me.”

  Understanding dawned in Wilson’s eyes, and his hand tightened on hers. “So you stayed, so she’d have her mother to come home to.”

  Mavis nodded. “I couldn’t let her come home to a house with only Daryl in it. And I couldn’t take any risk that she might come back, and I wouldn’t know about it. I had to stay.”

  “For seven years,” Wilson breathed. “With a man like that.” He shook his head. “You have a strength matching any Marine I’ve ever known. I’m amazed that you came out of that experience so...”

  “So what?” Mavis dared to ask. Fishing for compliments, maybe, but she desperately wanted to hear what he thought of her.

  “So kind,” he said. “So caring, so able to pay attention to all these people whose businesses you help. And so calm and poised. I think that most people, in a situation like that, would be on-edge for the rest of their lives. What you said about keeping your guilt away from your daughter, managing it yourself so that the burden of it isn’t on her...after that experience, it would be hard to even conceive of that, let alone put it into practice.” He lifted her hand and pressed a kiss to the back of it, slow and heartfelt. “You have an astonishing strength of character, Mavis.”

  Mavis felt dizzy. She pulled herself together to say, “I think you’re overestimating me. I don’t always succeed at keeping my fears away from Nina. I try, but it’s hard. And staying with Daryl...it was the only thing to do. I couldn’t do anything else. So I pulled myself inward. Like a turtle, or a snail. Put all the vulnerable parts of me inside a shell, and made sure that Daryl only saw the shell. Taking them out again, after Nina got in contact with us, was hard, and it hurt, but I’m so happy to be a whole person again, instead of just a—wall.”

  “I’m happy, too,” Wilson said. “I would have been disappointed not to be able to meet you as you are.”

  “You wouldn’t have known,” Mavis pointed out.

  “Oh,” he said, and his eyes were warm, “I think I would have known.”

  Mavis leaned forward, drawn in by those beautiful eyes, and he met her halfway in a kiss.

  It was the sweetest, softest kiss Mavis had ever experienced. His lips were gentle against hers, and he drew her carefully into his arms, so that she was held in a pure state of warmth as he kissed her like time had stopped.

  Mavis sighed against his mouth, caught up in this feeling of bliss, like she’d come to a place where, at last, she could relax and enjoy this oasis of pleasurable calm. A place where she wasn’t being careful, wasn’t conscious of her own failures and worries, but could just let herself float away on the feeling of Wilson’s mouth, lean into the support of his arms around her, and tha
t was all.

  After a long, long time, he drew back. She smiled up at him. He was looking at her with an expression she couldn’t quite parse, but it had a hint of...wonder?

  “I wasn’t planning on doing that,” he said after a moment. “I thought I might offer to take you out tomorrow after the wedding, and perhaps I’d kiss you then. It seemed inappropriate to do it when you invited me up here to tell me something so private. But I feel for you so deeply already.”

  “I feel the same,” Mavis murmured. “I’m not sorry at all. I thought, when I invited you up...this isn’t the sort of thing I do very often, inviting men home.”

  “I didn’t think it was,” he assured her. “And I didn’t take it as anything other than an invitation to talk, I promise you.”

  “That’s what it was,” she said. “But I thought...I thought that it would be all right if something happened. I can’t explain it, but I feel such a connection with you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Like we’ve known each other for a long time, even as we’re just getting to know each other now.”

  Mavis nodded. “With you, I feel...” She hesitated. “I feel safe. As though I don’t have to guard myself. And if you knew how long it’s been since I felt that...”

  Wilson’s face contorted in some sympathetic pain, and he pulled her into his arms again. Not for a kiss this time, but just to hold her tightly. Mavis marveled once again at the feeling of safety. Like all of her guilt and pain just melted away at the feeling of him holding her.

  Maybe it was because he’d felt some of the same guilt and pain, in his own past. Mavis was always aware, as she got to know people, of this gaping hole in her past, seven years of suffering that no one could possibly understand.

  She talked around it. When people asked why she’d moved to northern Montana, she said she wanted to be close to her daughter, and people accepted that. If anyone pressed further, she mentioned she was going through a divorce, and that usually got a sympathetic face and no further questions.

  Even with Nina, she was on her guard, because like she’d said, she needed to keep her own problems inside her own skin, and not draw Nina into them. She needed to have the relationship that was best for Nina, and that meant paying attention to Nina’s needs over her own.

  She’d never wanted to tell someone else, someone outside the family. But with Wilson, she’d somehow needed him to know. And hearing that he’d gone through something similar...she could let go of that constant guardedness. She could just be Mavis, who’d lost her daughter because she couldn’t stand up to her husband. And that wasn’t all right, but there was nothing to be done about it now.

  Like Wilson had said, it was time to turn her face to the future.

  She wished the future could be with him. She wished he could stay here instead of going back to Washington.

  But she wasn’t going to think about that. She was just going to think about how wonderful his arms felt around her.

  Eventually, they parted in a way that felt completely natural; Mavis was happy to go from feeling Wilson’s arms to looking into his eyes.

  “You’re trembling,” he said softly. “How long has it been since someone held you?”

  Mavis felt sudden, unexpected tears prickling at her eyes. “A long, long time.” When was the last time she’d felt safe in anyone’s arms? The only person she’d hugged in the last several months was Nina, of course, and that was a different kind of happiness, tinged with a fierce protectiveness, a determination that nothing would ever take her daughter away again.

  Before that...had she ever felt safe in Daryl’s arms? She didn’t know. Before Nina had left, there hadn’t been much terrible fear in her life. She hadn’t had anything she needed to feel safe from.

  Daryl, of course, had never been the type of man to comfort others. He was too impatient, too caught up in his own view of the world. If he was all right, everyone else should be too, and anyone who wasn’t was just wasting his time.

  Back when she’d been graduating college, with lofty ambitions about how she was going to make a place for herself in the world of finance, Mavis had admired that. Once she’d started to understand what was really important—family, friends, connecting with people and making their lives a little bit better—she’d been less and less appreciative of Daryl’s attitudes.

  Even before Nina left, she and Daryl hadn’t spent much time holding each other, that was for sure.

  And what about Wilson? She looked at him, frowning. “I think the same is probably true for you. Isn’t it?”

  He looked startled. “Well—I suppose I hadn’t thought of it that way. A man doesn’t usually think he needs to be held.”

  “Everyone needs to be held sometimes,” Mavis said firmly.

  A slow smile spread across his face. “I guess I have to agree. Though the military doesn’t provide many opportunities. No mandatory hugging checks, or anything of the sort.”

  Mavis huffed a laugh at that mental image. “Wouldn’t that be something.”

  “It would,” he agreed. “I think some of these straight-laced, upright military men could use a good hug or two. Although I doubt they’d ever admit it.”

  “Probably not.” Mavis ran a hand up his arm, getting distracted at the curve of his bicep, before she traced over his shoulder to cup his neck. God, he was muscular. “What were you going to suggest?” she asked him.

  He seemed distracted by her hand. “Sorry?”

  “Before,” she said. “You said, ‘This can be all we do tonight.’” She raised her eyebrows. “As opposed to what? It sounded like there was another option in there.”

  She could hear the flirtatious tone in her voice. She knew what she was suggesting...and she wasn’t about to take it back.

  “Well.” His voice had gone deeper. “I could kiss you again.”

  “You could,” she agreed.

  Her hand was still cupping his neck. He turned his head, his lips brushing against her wrist. “Like that, perhaps.”

  “Or?” She sounded breathless. That was all right, she decided. She could use a little breathlessness in her life.

  “Or like this.” He reached out, his hand brushing her cheek, and drew her in.

  This kiss was deeper than the last one had been. His tongue flirted with her lips, and she opened her mouth to let him in, melting into his arms.

  But it was still so gentle, so soft, like she was something precious that he wanted to take the absolute best care of. Mavis held on tight and kissed him back, her heart aching with the feeling of him so close to her.

  “Mmm,” she said as he pulled back. “Exactly like that.”

  He kissed her again. This time, the kiss melted into more kisses, until they were twined together on Mavis’ couch like teenagers, kissing and kissing and kissing.

  Somewhere in there, the softness started transforming into heat. The kisses were still gentle, still full of a tender care that Mavis wanted to feel directed toward her every single day from now on. But the air between her and Wilson was starting to light up, to crackle with desire. Mavis could feel herself getting wet, heat building in her stomach and between her legs. Her breasts tingled with want, and she pulled Wilson closer, one hand on his bicep, the other starting to explore down his side toward his hip.

  He pulled back with a gasp. “What do you want?”

  “Hm?” she asked dizzily.

  He kissed her again, as though he couldn’t help himself. “What do you want?” he murmured. “Should we move this to the bedroom? If you’re—”

  “I am more than okay with moving it to the bedroom,” Mavis told him. “I would be delighted if we could move it to the bedroom. In fact—”

  “I think I understand,” he said, laughing. “Well, then—”

  Mavis made a startled noise as he swept her up into his arms, without exerting any sort of apparent effort.

  Shifter strength, she reminded herself. Although he was so muscular, she wouldn’t have been surprised if he could’
ve done it no matter what. And Mavis wasn’t a small woman; she had curves all over.

  “Just tell me the way,” he murmured to her.

  Mavis directed him down the hall to her bedroom door, and he opened it neatly without jostling her, closed it carefully behind him, and then deposited her right in the center of her bed. Then he kissed her deeply, one broad hand supporting her back as he laid her down onto the pillows.

  Mavis held on tight, luxuriating in the feeling of his large, strong body over hers. One of his hands cupped her breast, thumbing at her nipple through the cup of her bra, and even that muffled touch was enough to send a jolt of pleasure through her body.

  She shifted her hips underneath him, spreading her legs until she could feel the growing hardness of his erection pressing against her upper thigh. He moved up, kissing her deeply, and his cock settled directly between her legs.

  Urgency had definitely taken them over now, but somehow that earlier tenderness hadn’t disappeared. Wilson’s every movement was still gentle, still caressing and caring. As he moved his hips against her, pressing right up against her clit, he broke the kiss and studied her face, as if to check that she was all right, that this was what she wanted.

  “More,” Mavis breathed, and watched his eyes kindle with a silvery flame just before he bent down to kiss her again, more fiercely.

  And then they were moving together—the swell of his cock pressing up on her clit through their pants, pleasure starting to rock through her body as she tasted his mouth. She was amazed at how quickly she felt the crest of ecstasy rising inside her. It had been so, so long since anyone had touched her at all, and her body was thirsty for it; every kiss was a drink of water.

  She moaned into his mouth as his hips rolled, sending a wave of sensation through her. He did it again, and the wave went higher. She was soaking through her pants at this rate; she was going to leave a damp patch on his jeans, and she couldn't bring herself to care.

  "Oh God," she broke from his mouth to say. "Oh God, right there, right there, Wilson—"

  She came. She came without even getting her pants off, shuddering and pulsing with pleasure right there, fully clothed in his arms. He kissed her through it, fiercely at first, and then gentling, until she caught her breath and calmed down, lifting her chin for more soft, dragging kisses.