Home Front, page 7
ten
“Where are you again?”
Kyle smiled at his grandmother’s muffled question. “In the city. I told you. I got a job. And you’re covering the mouthpiece with your hand again, Grandma. I can hardly hear you.”
There was a lot of shuffling noises. Amid that, he heard her mumble something about stupid cell phones needing a handle.
He’d heard the complaint before. She wanted a cell phone with a handset like her old phone that used to hang on the wall in the kitchen. The wall phone that had what must have been a twenty-foot-long cord that seemed to always be tangled.
Finally, she said, “Oh, dear. Kyle, did you get fired from the military? Is that why you needed a new job?”
“No, Grams. I didn’t get fired.”
Yet. His future in the military had yet to be determined.
At that reminder, he rotated his ankle like the doctor said he should multiple times a day while it healed. “This is just a short-term assignment for while I’m on leave.”
“Well, that’s good to hear. You know your great-grandfather, rest his soul, retired after thirty years in the Navy.”
“I know.” His great-grandfather’s World War II combat boots were big shoes to fill.
Even though he’d been gone for years, the man’s legacy was still a looming presence in Kyle’s world.
“Do you know when you’ll be home?” she asked.
“End of the month.”
As soon as Luna recovered from her boob job and could fly home to Miami. Then he’d be dismissed and she’d hire someone local down there.
The surgery baffled him though. She had nice enough tits. Big enough for him to be happy at least. Not that he’d touch Miss Diva, not even with someone else’s dick, no matter how hot she was.
Why she thought she needed implants was beyond him. He supposed she wanted them bigger or perkier or whatever. Bigger is better in Hollywood. Or wherever the hell she was going to be working next.
Ridiculous.
He glanced around the hospital waiting room. It was empty except for him and Luna’s manager Daniel.
Two men, waiting around for hours so one spoiled girl could have bigger boobs.
Why was it taking so long anyway? He’d always been under the impression it was a simple and quick surgery. A couple of slits. Shove a pouch of silicone inside each one. Stitch up the incisions. Done. Big boobs, ready to go.
He shook his head at the whole concept as his grandmother said, “Oh, I gotta go, sweetie. It’s time for my story.”
Kyle smiled, a little sad at the sound of the television turning on and Pedro screeching in the background, “Nobody cares, Chad!”
Believe it or not, he missed their time together watching her favorite shows. Grams in the recliner. Him with his foot up on a pillow on the coffee table. The house quiet since everyone else was at work or school.
Quiet except for Pedro. He even missed that damn noisy, foul-mouthed parrot whose only words were insults hurled at the anonymous Chad.
“Okay, Gram. Go watch your show. I love you.”
“Love you too. Bye-bye, sweetie.”
He disconnected and then glanced up. Daniel’s eyes were focused on him, an amused expression on his face.
Kyle cocked up a brow and met his stare, employing his scariest big bad don’t fuck with a SEAL look.
It worked. Daniel broke eye contact first and went back to pretending to read a magazine.
Victory, albeit a small one.
Kyle drew in a breath big enough it expanded his chest, before he huffed it out. Daniel lifted his gaze again, his brow cocked high this time.
“Any clue how long this is supposed to take?” Kyle asked.
Daniel lifted a shoulder. “No idea.”
Kyle went back to his cell phone, this time, hitting to open the browser. He punched into the search bar, how long do breast enlargements take—
He hesitated.
Was the word enhancement instead of enlargement? He hit the delete button and changed the question to, how long does the surgery take to get breast implants?
Then he hit search.
The returned results filled the screen just as a female wearing surgical scrubs walked into the room.
Phone forgotten, Kyle raised his gaze as she said, “She’s in recovery. You can go sit with her and be there when she wakes up. Only one at a time though.”
“Thanks.” Kyle thanked the nurse, or doctor, or whoever she was, then turned to Daniel. “You going?”
Of course, it should be Daniel. He at least knew Luna, unlike Kyle. And also unlike Kyle, Daniel hopefully actually liked her. Although, they did bicker a lot from what he’d seen.
Daniel shook his head. “Nuh-uh. You should go.”
“Me?” Kyle frowned. “Why me?”
He was the last one who should be at Luna’s bedside when she woke. Actually, Daniel wasn’t the best one to be there either. Angel should be. Wasn’t he her fiancé?
Where the hell was he anyway? Kyle hadn’t seen or heard Angel mentioned in the twenty-four hours he’d been on the job. Not a phone call. Nothing.
“You’re the hired security. It’s what we’re paying you for, right?” Daniel continued in the debate of who got bedside privileges.
This guy sure liked to rub it in how he was paying Kyle to be there. When, as Luna had pointed out, she was the one paying all the bills.
She was the boss, as she’d made so plainly clear yesterday in the suite when he’d arrived. And as boss she, Kyle was sure, would classify him as the dead last person she’d want to see when she opened her eyes in the recovery room immediately after a boob job.
“Don’t you think she’ll want you there instead of me?” he asked.
Daniel shook his head. “No. You’re the guard. So go guard.”
Kyle opened his mouth to argue, then closed it again. Meanwhile the nurse waited for their decision.
“All right. I guess it’s me.” He pushed out of the chair and held still.
There were always a few seconds upon getting up where he waited to see how painful bearing weight would be on his ankle. Especially today, after all those hours of sitting.
He felt the ever present ache with just a slight added twinge of pain in the vicinity of the screws holding his damn bone together. Definitely bearable. Still, he wished he’d brought his bottle of Tylenol with him.
Finally, he took a step forward and forced a smile for the woman’s benefit. “Lead the way.”
She hustled ahead and Kyle limped slightly behind. He wasn’t in any hurry to get where they were going anyway.
Hopefully, Luna would be woozy from the anesthesia and not care who she woke up to. Otherwise, he was going to have to be quick in his explanation of why he was there instead of Daniel. Before she laid into him with a rant and another lecture.
Walking into the recovery room brought back too many memories of his own surgery. Although the clinically sparce décor and that undeniable hospital odor was where the similarity ended. It was pretty obvious that money changed everything.
Luna was in a private and spacious room. Like an actual room, with walls.
Kyle had woken up in a curtained space barely wider than the gurney on which he’d reclined.
Enormous amounts of money aside, he supposed he couldn’t compare the military hospital in Landstuhl Germany to a facility like New York Presbyterian.
He glanced around. There was a chair. That was good. He gripped the arms and eased his ass into the seat before stretching out his bad leg.
Glancing over, he saw Luna was still out cold.
Damn. The woman even managed to look good unconscious while rocking a hospital gown…and that was not a thought he could allow in his head.
She was one—a client and therefore off-limits. Two—engaged to be married to some superstar asshole. And three—a self-centered, vain diva.
Feeling like a perv for watching her while she was unconscious, he yanked his gaze off her and back to his phone, the only source of entertainment he had.
He navigated to check his text messages and found nothing new. That was both good and bad.
Good that there was nothing more from his cheating ex to annoy him, which was a nice surprise actually. But there was also nothing from his team.
That was not a surprise considering where they’d been when he’d broken himself and had to leave them. Too risky to get on comms just to say hey.
The low-level panic from the fear he’d never be on an op with them again caused a sick feeling in his gut.
Fuck. He needed a distraction. Maybe he could get good enough signal to stream something on Netflix.
Before he dove into his next binge-watch, he lowered the phone and glanced up… and found Luna’s eyes focused on him.
“You’re awake.” He twisted in the chair to look out the door.
Where were all the nurses and doctors? He could use one of them in here.
Turning back, he saw her struggling to sit up.
“Oh. Hey. Hang on. I’m not sure you should be sitting up just yet.” He pushed out of the chair and stood, glancing again at the door.
“Thirsty.” The rasp in her voice attested to that fact. And damned if it didn’t make her sound sexy as fuck.
He glanced at the door again. Still no one. He could and had saved a man’s life during the heat of battle. Had tightened a tourniquet with one hand while laying down cover fire to keep the enemy at bay with the other hand.
But this bedside shit? Yeah, not his area of expertise or his comfort zone.
A cup filled with ice chips on the table next to her bed caught his eye.
Was she allowed the ice chips? She must be. Why else would they be there otherwise? And why didn’t they give him instructions on what to do—and not do—when she woke up?
Poor planning on their part had created a bad situation for him to be in.
Fuck it. He was going to make the best decision he could and give her the damn ice chips.
The hospital staff shouldn’t have put ice in the room if she wasn’t allowed to have any. And they also should be here when she woke up.
He was sure she had paid a butt load of money for this room. You wouldn’t know it by the lack of personal attention.
Annoyed and hoping he wasn’t going to cause her harm, he took a couple of stilted steps toward the table, then reached to hand the cup of ice to her.
One look told him she was too out of it and weak to hold the cup herself.
There was a plastic spoon stuck in the ice. For lack of any better ideas, he scooped up some chips and brought them to her mouth.
She parted her plump pink lips and he slipped the spoon inside.
Fuck. Why did spoon-feeding this woman feel so intimate?
This was bad.
He glanced toward the door. Still no help there.
Maybe he should summon help. Get a nurse in here to do this so he could get a hold of himself and his whacky libido.
He glanced around for the call button that must be there somewhere.
“More.” Her single weak word had him feeling guilty.
He was a big boy. He could do this. It was no big deal. He was just helping her eat some ice…while trying to avoid sporting a full-blown hard-on.
One more time he slipped the spoon between her lips…and imagined sliding something else into her hot, wet mouth.
Christ. He was a horrible person.
The tip of her tongue came out as she licked her dry lips and he nearly groaned.
“Fuck.”
Her eyes turned toward him.
Uh-oh. He’d said the word aloud. And now he had to explain why—without letting her know he was turned on by feeding her. “I, uh, don’t know where your doctors are. I don’t even know if you’re allowed to have this ice.”
“I am,” she said, sounding slightly less raspy.
“And how do you know that? You have a medical degree I don’t know about?” he asked, trying to make a joke.
The best he could do was retreat to his comfort zone. And that was with him clearly on one side of the battle line and her on the other, separated by smart-ass comments.
“I read the post-op instructions,” she said, sounding a tad bit stronger.
Of course, she had. As much as he’d wanted his knee-jerk assumption that she was as vapid and brainless as she was beautiful to be valid, he didn’t think she was.
During the twenty-four hours they’d been together, nearly every waking moment she’d had her nose in her notebook furiously writing something.
He’d expected her to be a party girl. That she was the studious type meant he was a jerk for making assumptions.
She frowned. “Where’s Dan?”
“They only allowed one of us in here.”
Her frown deepened and he knew why.
He didn’t make her ask the obvious question. “I told him it should be him. But he said he wanted me in here to guard you.”
She drew in a shallow breath. “He’s an ass.”
Her comment took him by surprise. A laugh escaped him and he ran a hand over his mouth to erase the smile there. “Sorry.”
She shook her head and barely lifted one shoulder in a shrug.
That drew her attention to the masses of bandages and gauze that swaddled her chest beneath the hospital gown.
She tipped her head to stare down. When her gaze came back up, he saw the tears glistening in them.
“Hey. You okay? Are you in pain? I can get somebody.”
He was half turned toward the door when she said, “No. I’m fine.”
“No offense, but you don’t look fine. I mean actually, you look great, considering. But emotionally you look kind of… upset.”
What the hell was wrong with him? Apparently, his bedside manners sucked.
Thank goodness SEALs usually didn’t have to worry too much about holding up their end of a conversation. But it was a good thing he hadn’t chosen to become a doctor.
A teary laugh escaped her. “It’s just… a lot.”
“Yeah. I mean I never knew getting breast implants was so involved. Who knew it was major surgery, right?” Shit. He was babbling.
At that moment, her actual doctor walked through the door. “Luna’s surgery was a little more involved than most, but I think it was a smart choice to have the reconstruction done at the same time as the double mastectomy. How are you feeling, Luna?”
Double mastectomy.
That bombshell blew Kyle’s mind, as well as blowing his obviously incorrect assumptions about her operation completely out of the water.
The female surgeon asked a few questions. Luna answered. Then the doctor was gone.
After she had left, Kyle sat and leaned forward in the chair.
Now that he knew this was not a simple boob job, not her grasping at some insane ideal of perfection, he had an apology to make.
“Luna. I wanted to say I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had cancer.”
“I don’t.”
He frowned. “But—”
“It was preemptive surgery.” She drew in a breath and winced before continuing, “Breast cancer killed my mom. Now her sister has it. I got tested. I have the cancer gene mutation. I wasn’t going to wait around for it to hit me too. So, I had the surgery.”
“Wow.” That was all he could come up with to say in response to this woman who had just made probably the hardest decision of her life.
She’d taken control of her future. And that took guts.
It was clear he was going to have to reevaluate all of his opinions about Luna Blue. He supposed the days and nights he’d be camped out by her bedside in the hospital was as good a time as any to do that.
“You think I was stupid, don’t you?” she asked.
“No.” His gaze met hers. “I think you might be the bravest person I know.”
He could tell what he’d said had shocked her. She watched him for a second looking baffled before she said, “Thanks.”
eleven
Muscles bulged and flexed beneath the shirt’s short sleeves as Kyle swiped the screen of the cell phone in his hand.
Luna swallowed hard and forced her focus off him and back to her notebook. The lyrics weren’t coming today. And for that she blamed Kyle Jones, barely ten feet from her, looking like any woman’s dream.
And why was that? Why was he so distractingly attractive?
He wasn’t shirtless or anything.
His khaki cargo pants and black collared shirt were perfectly respectable for a man in his profession—a bodyguard for a home bound woman who had no intention of seeing anyone. That included deliverymen.
Kyle insisted on her remaining out of sight when he answered the door to retrieve any packages or food.
Maybe she just needed sex. She hadn’t had any of that in such a long time she couldn’t even count her dry spell in months anymore because, sadly, it had been well over a year. Maybe closer to two.
She’d been so uncomfortable since the surgery, both physically and emotionally, it was kind of shocking that thoughts of sex had even occurred her. She was definitely going to lay the blame for her lurid thoughts on Kyle’s broad, strong shoulders.
Maybe it had been a mistake to send Daniel home to Miami while she recuperated—or more like hid—at the rental house.
But Daniel had hated everything about the off-season ski house she’d chosen. He insisted he had work to do and meetings to attend. Had said the upstate New York location was too remote.
Duh. That was the whole idea.
It was a knee-jerk reaction to remove Daniel—and all the little annoyances that seemed to come with him lately—from her immediate vicinity as soon as she was released from the hospital and had moved to the house.
After the surgery, when she’d been so sore and in pain and wondering if she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life, her first thought had been to cut as much stress from her life as possible. Sadly, that meant Daniel.
It had seemed like a good decision at the time. But that decision had left her alone with the man who had been a complete stranger to her just weeks ago.
