It Must Be Christmas Read online

  “There’s not much to tell.” Chloe’s demeanor changed. Her gaze wandered, no longer focused on him and she picked at her sandwich as though looking for a distraction. “I started working for the Make-A-Wish Foundation right out of college. It was great, but I wanted more control. The work was rewarding, but hard. So much sadness. I wanted to make kids’ lives better, but I wanted to shift my focus to underprivileged and at-risk kids. Sports were always a really big part of my life growing up and I wanted to share that with kids who might not know how good it feels to be an athlete. So I rounded up a few donations and started my own organization. We’ve kept it local so far. It takes a lot of money to keep a charity afloat. I’d like to branch out eventually. Go national. Or global. This isn’t about recognition for me. I just want to make the kids’ lives better in any way that I can.”

  “Sounds like a sweet gig,” Nate remarked. “Doing what you love.”

  She gave him a soft smile. “The foundation means everything to me.”

  They ate in silence for a few minutes. Nate was too wrapped up in his own head—to preoccupied with Chloe—to talk. Unlike Nate, her passions ranged far and wide. Her intensity in the bedroom didn’t come from a need to quiet her mind and live strictly in the moment. She had a passion for life. For her job. And that fire translated into the way she kissed, touched, fucked. Nate envied that fire. On his best days all he felt was a gnawing desperation and numbness that he couldn’t escape. He hadn’t loved anything—or anyone—in a long damned time.

  “How about you, Nate?” Chloe’s soft voice pulled him from his thoughts. “What gets a soon-to-be non-billionaire fired up?”

  “You,” he replied without guile.

  Chloe’s cheeks flushed. Damn, he loved the way she looked. “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  “Did you love the Navy?”

  Nate’s gut knotted up. He’d started this. Drawn her into conversation to learn something about her. Now he was agitated that she wanted to know more about him? “I loved the challenge,” he said after a while. “The excitement. And the thought that I was serving a greater good and protecting people. The SEALs were my family for six years.”

  Chloe studied him. Her green eyes were round and wide. Her kind, caring expression damned near gutted him. “Why did you leave?”

  Nate swallowed against the golf-ball-sized lump that rose in his throat. “I could have reenlisted,” he said. “But I lost two team members and an asset during an extraction mission. Nothing was the same after that, so I got out.”

  “I’m so sorry, Nate.” He didn’t want her pity. Couldn’t stand the compassion shining in her beautiful eyes.

  “Don’t be.” He immediately regretted the harshness of his response. “It comes with the job.”

  The last time someone asked about his time with the SEALs, Nate had answered with a resounding, “Fuck off.” Chloe wasn’t just some curious asshole who thought the job was one big action movie. He sensed her sincerity. The lump in his throat grew bigger. Goddamn it.

  “I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose someone in that situation. You prepare for it, sure. But when it happens, it still blindsides you.”

  Exactly. Jesus, she understood him like very few people did. “It does.”

  “I used to see it a lot. The families that came to Make-A-Wish—they were at the end of the line. They knew what to expect. They’d spent months, sometimes years preparing but when they lost their child, it was always a shock. It still hurt.”

  Nick rubbed at his sternum. The familiar anxiety slowly crept up on him, tightening his chest and constricting his airway. His ears rang and his heart pounded. If he didn’t get some air, he was going to throw up. Or pass the hell out.

  He shot up out of his chair with enough force to send it toppling to the floor behind him. He didn’t look at Chloe—couldn’t—as he rushed past her and threw open the sliding glass door that led to the balcony. He gripped the back of his neck and laced his fingers together as he took several deep, cleansing breaths. There wasn’t enough fucking oxygen in the world to clear his head. His world was slowly unraveling.

  “Nate?” Chloe’s voice caressed his ears, so gentle it speared his heart.

  “I need a second.” What a way to make an impression.

  “It’s an anxiety attack. It’ll pass.”

  “I know it will.” Snapping at her wasn’t going to help anything. She was trying to help, for shit’s sake.

  “Come inside. I’ll help you take your mind off of it.”

  Nate let his head drop between his shoulders. She could see right through him, couldn’t she? Two nights together and Chloe had his number. Knew why she was here and what he was using her for. Shame welled hot in Nate’s throat. He was a son of a bitch for allowing this to happen in the first place. And he was a low-life bastard because he was going to go back in that room and fuck her again. Fuck her until his brain and body were too spent for anything else. In letting Chloe distract him from his past, Nate feared that he was developing a far more debilitating addiction. Because after tonight, he didn’t think he’d be able to let her go.

  * * *

  Chloe should have never broached the subject of his enlistment. She knew better than to open festering wounds. Had dealt with countless families who lived with grief, loss, and helplessness on a daily basis. The more they talked, the wilder Nate’s expression had become. Like an animal caught in a snare with no other choice but to chew its own leg off or die. She’d pushed him too far.

  She reached up and wrapped her fingers around his elbow. He wouldn’t let her coax him to relax his grip. His hands were locked behind his neck, the knuckles turning white. Tense didn’t begin to describe the way his muscles bunched at his back, fanning out from the solid wings at either side of his torso and tapering down to his narrow waist. He wouldn’t budge and so Chloe changed her tactics, stepping behind him to lay her palms to the muscles she’d just been studying.

  She’d ease his anxiety and tension whether he wanted her to or not. It was going to take more than a pit bull expression and a few barked words to scare her off.

  Chloe reached out and gripped the mounds of muscle that rounded his shoulders. She massaged in slow circles with the pads of her thumbs, kneading every individual knot until she felt them loosen. Nate let out a slow breath and his hands relaxed their grip a fraction of an inch. Downward, she traced each vertebra until she got to the small of his back where it met the gentle swoop of his ass. So much power in his body. He exuded strength. The man could have been cut from marble.

  Outward to his torso, Chloe focused her efforts on his laterals, pressing with the pad of her thumb and allowing her fingertips to splay out over his ribs. Nate’s breathing grew deeper, more even, though he refused to release his grip on the back of his neck. For almost a half hour, Chloe continued. Over his shoulders, down his spine, up the sides of his torso, and then she started again. When he finally unlaced his fingers and let his arms drop, Chloe knew he’d finally calmed down.

  She rose up on her tiptoes and spoke close to his ear, “Let’s go inside, Nate.”

  Without a word he turned and followed her back into the room. She grabbed his hand and led him to the bed. “Lie down.”

  Again, as though he had no choice but to do as she said, he eased himself down onto the mattress. Chloe knelt down beside him and began to massage the solid muscles of his arms and across his chest. “It’s okay to freak out, Nate.” He let his eyes drift shut but she knew he was listening. “No one could go through that and just brush it off. You can’t beat yourself up for it, either. It’s okay to feel. And you don’t ever have to be embarrassed about it. Especially with me.”

  His body relaxed into the mattress and Chloe soothed him with gentle touches and smooth passes of her palms, interspersed with harder concentrations of her thumbs and fingertips. His breathing grew more even and the deep furrow that marred his brow eased until he no longer appeared distressed. She thought that maybe Nat