HOT SECRETS
Summerville, Washington
Early morning, December 24
Jack Prescott kissed his wife’s shoulder and watched as she smiled in her sleep. That smile came from the deepest part of her and was just for him.
It still dazzled him, a year into marriage. She still dazzled him.
Caroline. His wife. Caroline Lake, now Caroline Prescott. The woman who’d been in his head more than half his life and now was his.
He’d showed up exactly a year ago—in her bookstore in the middle of a snowstorm—after flying nonstop for forty-eight hours from Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone had been his last mission, an homage to his dead adoptive father.
On a pirogue from Abuja to Freetown, from Lungi Airport to Paris, Paris to Atlanta, Atlanta to Seattle—and onto a tiny puddle jumper that barely made it through the wild weather, straight to Summerville. Thinking of Caroline every second of the way, the woman he’d never been able to get out of his head. While he joined the army, earned his Ranger tab, fought in innumerable hellholes throughout the world—there she’d been. Beautiful, kind, smart. The woman of any man’s dreams and out of his reach throughout his twelve long, lonely years in hard and violent places.
She’d been in his head since he was a boy in a homeless shelter, bringing him books and food and a sense of the outside world, a world that didn’t mean living with filthy crazies and violent drunks.
She’d been there in his head when he’d run away, was adopted by his father of the heart, Colonel Eugene Prescott. She’d been there through his deployments to bad places, trying to lend some order to a violent world. She’d been there over long, lonely nights in faraway hellholes, reminding him there was something in the world worth fighting for.
She’d been there so long, was so deeply embedded in his very soul, that when his adoptive father died and he inherited a fortune, he went back to where he’d been a lost boy and expected to find a married woman with kids—because what sane man wouldn’t marry someone as beautiful and smart as Caroline?
But the world was made of wusses. Caroline had lost her parents, lost all her family money, and had looked after a badly injured younger brother for the better part of a decade—and not many men would put up with that.
He would have, no question. For Caroline he’d walk across lakes of fire, climb mountains of thorns, slay every dragon there was. Gladly. A sick brother was nothing. Plus, he had plenty of money of his own.
When he showed up on her doorstep, expecting to find a married Caroline and just wanting to see her one last time before starting the next stage of his life, it turned out she wasn’t married after all and she was the next stage.
And he—the man who’d never had a family, the man who had known in his bones he’d never have a family because families were for other people—well, now he had a family of his own. Caroline. And the children they’d make.
At the thought of Caroline pregnant, his cock—already hard—turned to stone. A wave of heat washed over him and his breathing sped up.
It was the hardest thing about being married to Caroline. Everything else about marriage to her was incredibly easy. Intensely pleasurable. Around-the-clock delight.
She was even-tempered, without those mood swings that drove him crazy with other women. She was wicked-smart, with a sharp sense of humor. She was kind-hearted. Their home was beautiful, she was a fantastic cook. He’d never been as physically comfortable as he was being her husband. Everything was absolutely perfect, except—
Except he desired her so very much. All the time. It never seemed to switch off, and Jack had to restrain himself—otherwise he’d have Caroline on her back, fucking her hard, more or less all the time—day and night—and that wasn’t good.
The desire was sometimes like a low-level ache, sometimes as sharp as a snakebite, but there,
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