Driving Her Crazy

NINE



Kent woke with a start in the middle of the night to a noise. The first thing he saw was Sadie’s concerned face looking down at him. He knew without having to ask that the noise must have come from him.

‘You okay?’ she asked. She’d gone to sleep with her head resting on Kent’s shoulder and his head thrashing had woken her a few seconds ago.

Kent raised his head, blinking a couple of times as he looked around, trying to clear the clinging debris of his recurrent bad dream.

He sometimes wondered if he’d ever be okay again.

‘Sorry.’ He grimaced, his head falling back down.

Sadie resumed her position, snuggling into his side, tucking her head into his shoulder. He smelled good—like wood smoke, soap and man. Her palm sat against his chest and she could feel the accelerated thump of his heart. She shivered as he traced his fingers up and down her bare arm.

She didn’t say anything for a while, content after their exhaustive rooftop session to lay snuggled against him under the stars.

‘You have bad dreams?’

Kent’s caress stilled momentarily before starting again. ‘Yes.’

Sadie wasn’t fooled by the evenness of his tone. His thudding heart told another story. ‘You had one that first night, too,’ she said. She waited for him to say something and when nothing was forthcoming she glanced at his profile. ‘Is it about the accident?’

‘Yes.’

Sadie gently rubbed her palm along the pillow of a sturdy pec. ‘I’m guessing you don’t talk about it much?’

‘Nope.’

‘Maybe you should talk to a professional?’ she suggested gently.

‘Nope.’

Sadie’s hand stilled on his chest and she rolled up onto her side, propping her head in her hand. ‘Oh, dear,’ she mused, watching his mouth in the moonlight. ‘Are we back to the beginning again?’

Kent dropped his hand from her shoulder and looked at her. ‘I’m not telling some strange shrink my problems.’

Sadie heard a world of pain and denial behind his vehement rejection of help. ‘So don’t,’ she said, finally giving into the urge to trace his mouth with her finger, pulling it away when he shook his head from side to side to displace it. ‘Talk to me about it instead.’

And before he could say no to her face she dropped down beside him again, placing her head on his shoulder, his hand automatically coming to rest there again.

Kent looked up at the stars, conscious of Sadie’s naked body draped all warm and pliant against his. Every breath he took was filled with a special mix of cool outback and her and immersed him in memories from their fun beneath the covers not that long ago.

There was something extraordinarily generous about Sadie Bliss. She was a giver. And that had obviously cost her in life. She’d been a very generous lover. Making him laugh, making him want, making him hope more than he had since the accident.

All he’d wanted for two years was to feel better and here on a rooftop in the middle of nowhere, under a canopy of stars, he doubted he’d ever felt better.

She had sat in front of his camera tonight and bared more than just her body to him. She’d been naked and vulnerable in the truest sense of the word.

Maybe he could reciprocate?

‘I hear Dwayne Johnson crying out for his mother.’

The words fell into the cold night air, stark and tinged with anguish, dragging Sadie out of a drowse. It had been quiet for so long, Sadie had assumed he’d drifted off or just wasn’t going to talk about it at all.

For a moment she wasn’t even sure what she should do or say. But then her hand automatically smoothed along his chest from one nipple to the other and she said, ‘That must be difficult.’

Kent was relieved when Sadie didn’t try to go all amateur psychologist on him. A few days ago he wouldn’t have even contemplated telling her, worried that an intrusive, chatty, stacked twenty-four-year-old would go all Freudian on him.

But he’d learned a lot about Sadie Bliss in the last couple of days. She was much more than an arachnophobic girly.

‘It’s not every night,’ he said. ‘But it’s...disturbing when it happens.’

Sadie pressed a kiss to his shoulder without conscious thought. She couldn’t even begin to imagine the trauma Kent had been through. ‘Tell me about Mortality.’

Kent tensed. ‘That bloody picture,’ he murmured.

‘You don’t like it?’

Kent shook his head. ‘You told me that when you saw it, in New York, you couldn’t look at it because it was too private.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s the way I feel about it too.’

‘So how’d it make the cover of Time?’

‘A journo friend of mine handed the camera over to my editor when I was in emergency surgery. I lost some days immediately after the crash. They operated four times in thirty-six hours and it was all a bit of a fog. The pictures were the least of my worries. When I finally came to my senses they were all over the media.’

‘Couldn’t you have them withdrawn?’

He nodded. ‘I tried, but Dwayne’s parents asked me if I would reconsider. They wanted the world to know that their son had died defending his country.’

‘Bit hard to say no to that,’ Sadie mused.

Kent chuckled at her understatement, surprised that he could laugh amidst it all. He gave her shoulder a squeeze. ‘Yes.’

Sadie lay there absorbing the information for a while. ‘At the risk of annoying you...’ she said tentatively, not wanting to kill the mood. Obviously Kent talking about this torrid time in his life was not an easy thing but something was bugging her. ‘I know you think I talk too much and—’

‘Just say it, Sadie,’ Kent interrupted on a sigh as tension crept into his belly muscles.

Sadie could feel the cosy mood evaporating but she’d come too far to back out, and if she was the only person he ever spoke to about this then maybe it was up to her to ask the difficult question. The question that had crowded into her brain when she’d first laid eyes on the photograph in that swanky New York gallery.

‘I don’t understand...how you even...took the photos in the first place?’ There was more silence from Kent so she pressed on. ‘I mean you were injured, right? Trapped in the body of a crashed helicopter, pinned by your ankle? Men you’d been embedded with for two months were dead and dying.’ She pushed herself up and looked down at him. ‘How do you stay on task when there’s chaos around you?’

Keeping his cool in a situation had never been an issue for Kent. He’d cut his teeth in war zones. It was hard for anyone who didn’t live that kind of life to understand.

He didn’t look at her as he answered.

‘It’s my job to snap pictures when all around me is going to hell.’

Sadie would have to have been deaf not to hear the defensive tone in his voice. ‘I’m not judging you, Kent. I’m just...curious.’

Kent grappled with telling her politely to mind her own damn business and the strange urge to talk to her. She’d been about the only person he’d ever met who hadn’t tried to blow smoke up his arse about Mortality. She’d told him how unsettling the image was and he had the feeling she might just understand.

‘I didn’t want to take the damn pictures,’ he finally muttered, looking at her. ‘I was trapped. I could smell jet fuel and smoke. I was pretty sure I was about to die in a fiery inferno or by a bullet in the head from the guys that had shot us down.’

Kent wasn’t sure if it was the last remnants of the campfire, but he swore he could still smell the smoke. How many times had he woken with the acrid stench in his nostrils?

‘My leg hurt like hell. The very last thing on my mind was to snap off some pictures.’

Sadie raised her hand and gently brushed it over his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth. ‘But you did?’

Kent nodded, remembering that day in all its Technicolor horror. ‘The pilot, Johnny Lieberman, he was also trapped up front. He asked me if I was taking pictures.’

Sadie remembered that the pilot had died a few days later in an ICU in Germany from the wounds inflicted by the crash.

‘I said no. No, I’m not taking bloody pictures. I couldn’t believe he was even asking. I wasn’t even sure where my camera was at and frankly I didn’t care.’

‘But you found it?’

‘Johnny was adamant that I should. In fact, he ordered me to do it. Not that he could but he did anyway. Said people should know about this part of war. That helicopters crashed, that good men died. That hearing about it on the news and seeing a burnt-out shell after everything was cleaned up was different from looking at pictures taken in the middle of hell.’

Sadie traced his lips with her finger. ‘So you took them.’

He nodded. ‘I couldn’t see a lot from my vantage point. Wreckage and desert and sky.’

‘And Dwayne Johnson.’

Kent nodded. ‘He’d been thrown clear so I had a...’ Kent shut his eyes as the young soldier’s cries played through his mind again. ‘A really clear shot of him. I could see the life ebbing from his eyes through the lens. He was calling for his mother. He was frightened and I didn’t want him to die alone. I tried to get out, to free myself.’

Sadie could only imagine how frantic Kent must have felt. ‘But you couldn’t,’ she whispered.

The stars above him suddenly blurred, developing auras as if it had been raining in heaven, and it took him a moment to realise the moisture was in his eyes. He blinked rapidly. ‘All I could do was take pictures.’

Sadie looked down into his face. She could just make out a shimmer of moisture in their copper-brown recesses. She kissed him lightly. What else could she do? How was someone supposed to go through such a trauma and come out the same person at the end? For some things there were no words—just comfort and consolation.

‘I’m so, so sorry,’ she murmured against his mouth. Kissing him again.

Kent kissed her back, pushing his hands into her hair as he pulled her head down onto his mouth hard and fast, all the anguish and pain and frustration he’d felt over the last two years injected into the moment. Her lips tasted sweet and he wanted to get lost in her, in her mouth, her body, her moans and her sighs.

To not think for one night about Dwayne Johnson and a photo that still haunted him.

To affirm life.

He shifted, rolled towards her, rolled her under him as she opened her mouth to him, opened her legs to him.

He plundered her mouth as his hands moved lower, feeling her buck as he skimmed a breast and stayed to rub his thumb over the rapidly ruching nipple.

‘Condom,’ she muttered as she wrapped her legs around his waist, felt the thick hard bulk of him butting against her.

Kent blindly reached for the box inside her backpack that she’d brought up with her earlier and was stashed near their heads.

Where the hell was it, damn it?

‘Hurry,’ Sadie muttered in his ear as the temptation to have him drive into her then and there beat like insect wings inside her brain. She was ready, he was ready and she wanted to take him away somewhere far removed from an Afghan desert.

Kent finally located the box, grabbed a foil packet out and quickly donned the protection. Sadie reached for him and he settled back into the cradle of her pelvis, kissing her long and hard as he pushed deep inside her.

She cried out, the sound primal in their own rooftop Eden. Her fingertips bit into the flesh of his shoulders as he ground into her, each thrust driving higher and harder, pushing her closer. His mouth left hers, seeking a nipple, sucking it into his mouth as he rocked into her.

Kent lifted his head and groaned as his building climax dug fiery fingers deep into his buttocks, his arms anchored either side of her trembling as they held him up.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Sadie whispered as she too felt the bubble rising inside her.

He buried his face in her neck as everything spiralled out of control. He tried to hold it back, to hold them in the moment where things hung on a precipice between pleasure and completion, but the primal call was too strong for him and he let the wave sweep him away as she tightened around him and joined him in the maelstrom.

Sadie woke again as the sky was just starting to lighten. The stars were still out but waning as obsidian faded to velvet. Kent was sleeping, the first violet hues of dawn lying gently against his number-two stubble and beautiful mouth. She wanted to wake him but, between an insatiable sex drive and an obviously exhausting dream, his night had been disturbed enough.

She felt around her for his shirt which had been discarded somewhere in the bedding, finally locating it down by her foot. God alone knew where her thong was. She had a feeling Kent might have tossed it over the side.

The air still felt cool and she dragged the shirt on, doing up three buttons as she sat up, the sky too resplendent to miss. She reached behind her into her bag, pulling out the sketch pad and pastels she’d taken from Leo’s, inspired again as she had been the other night under the stars when she hadn’t had access to materials.

She sat with her back to Kent facing the road and the uninterrupted view in that direction. All that could be heard as the morning lightened to soft baby blues was the scratching of the pastels on the paper as Sadie sketched like a woman possessed, hurrying to capture the moment that night faded and dawn encroached before it was lost to her for ever.

She was so utterly absorbed in the process she didn’t even feel Kent stir until he was behind her, pressing a kiss into her neck, peering over her shoulder.

She shut her eyes as he rumbled, ‘Good morning,’ in her ear.

She sighed, snaking a hand behind her and anchoring it around his neck, her fingers stained with a multicoloured chalky residue. She settled against his broad naked chest as his arms encircled her waist.

She felt stiff from sitting hunched over the sketch pad and she stretched a little as she said, ‘Morning.’

Kent looked down at the sketch pad, the drawing arresting him immediately. It had captured the essence of an outback dawn with the vivid colours and swirls around the fading stars similar to those used by Van Gogh in his famous starry night painting, and yet there was something uniquely contemporary Australian about it.

It was an incredible blend of old world charm and modern boldness. It was simply stunning.

‘Sadie...’ He shook his head. ‘That’s...amazing.’

Sadie blushed at the compliment. ‘It’s just a sketch,’ she dismissed, used to disregarding her work.

Kent shook his head. ‘No, it’s not. It’s...a work of art.’

Sadie gave a half-laugh. She liked what she saw, and creating it had felt incredible, but she could see its flaws and felt the old doubts return. Could hear Leo’s you’re not talented enough mantra in her head.

‘I couldn’t not,’ she said absently, looking down at the sketch. ‘When I woke up and saw the sky, I couldn’t not capture it. I had to do it.’

Kent heard the surprise in her voice. ‘Well, that says a lot, doesn’t it?’ he murmured.

Sadie frowned as she half turned to look at him. ‘What does it say?’

‘You’re an artist, Sadie Bliss. And whatever the hell you’re doing with this journalism gig is just wasting your time. You were obviously born to do this.’

Sadie shook her head as she turned back to the sketch. ‘No. I’m not good enough.’

Kent tightened his hand around her belly. ‘Says who? Leonard Pinto?’

Sadie shrugged. ‘The man does have an eye for art.’

Kent felt irrationally angry that one man could screw with a woman’s head so much. ‘Leonard paints women who look like boys. I think his eye is seriously off. I also think he knows exactly how talented you are but he didn’t want to let you go.’

Sadie wanted to deny it but hadn’t she come to the same conclusion yesterday? That he’d wanted his muse back and he was prepared to go to any lengths to get it?

Kent gentled his hands against her and lightly circled his thumbs over the curves of her hips. ‘Sadie, you are incredibly good. Don’t you think you owe it to yourself to explore that a little more?’

Sadie shut her eyes as his words of praise, aided and abetted by the brush of his thumbs against her skin and the scrape of stubble at her neck, seduced her.

A fledgling ray of possibility sparked to life inside her and she shied from it. Art had made her incredibly happy. And incredibly unhappy. Could she go back to that roller coaster again?

She pushed the illicit thought away, stamping on its lure. It wasn’t something she could decide on a whim. Certainly not on a car rooftop with a man who had already muddled her senses a little too much.

‘I think,’ she said, injecting playfulness into her tone, ‘you’re just saying that to get in my pants, Kent Nelson.’

Kent smiled as he nibbled at the place where her neck met her shoulder. She was obviously changing the subject but he had to give her points for her method.

‘Well, now, that’d be kind of hard considering I pitched them somewhere over the side last night.’

Sadie smiled, letting herself get lost in the sexiness of his voice, taking her away from the serious stuff for a while. ‘Kent Nelson,’ she murmured. ‘Are you suggesting I’m not wearing any underwear?’

Kent chuckled as he trailed his hand from her hip downwards. ‘Well, now, why don’t I check?’

Sadie shut her eyes as he confirmed what they both knew very quickly.

‘Mmm,’ he murmured, his other hand travelling north as his tongue traced patterns on her neck. ‘You feel good.’

Sadie bit her lip as his hand cupped a breast. She tried to turn but he tightened his arms around her.

‘Shh,’ he said. ‘Lean back and enjoy.’

Not an offer she could refuse.

The tow truck arrived at nine as promised and before they knew it they were sitting in the front of a poorly sprung truck next to an ancient local who chatted away merrily. A local who was thankfully oblivious to the fact that Sadie’s fingers kept brushing lightly against the firm bulge behind Kent’s zipper. And the way Kent’s fingers caressed the swell of her breast under the guise of a casual arm slung over her shoulder.

It was a long, sexy, three-hour journey back to Katherine.

When they got into town Sadie opted for a café to do some work on her laptop whilst Kent saw to the vehicle. But not before he’d dragged her into the deserted toilets at the garage, pushed her against the wall and kissed her senseless, promising retribution for the torture she’d put him through.

Which made it difficult to concentrate on the story for Tabitha. So instead she spent her time in the café madly journalling the last few days with Kent. Words, like the strokes of the pastels this morning, flowed freely and she wasn’t sure how much time had passed when a pair of worn jeans came into her line of vision.

She looked up from her screen and Kent smiled at her.

‘I called your name twice. The story’s shaping up nicely, then?’

Sadie tried not to look guilty as she smiled back at him. ‘I think Tabitha will be happy,’ she lied. ‘Is the Land Rover ready?’

He nodded. ‘Have you eaten?’

‘Three cappuccinos, a muffin and a burger with the lot.’

Kent laughed at the sparkle in her doe eyes. ‘Good. I’ll order something to go and then we can hit the track.’

They were heading north to Darwin fifteen minutes later.

‘Let’s play I Spy,’ Sadie said as she opened the packet of Twisties Kent had purchased back at the café.

Kent rolled his head to look at her briefly before looking back at the road. ‘You think because we bonked like bunnies last night that I’ll do anything for a repeat performance?’

Sadie grinned as she bit down on the cheesy snack, flavour exploding in her mouth. ‘Yep.’

He laughed. She was right. ‘You think I’m that easy?’

Sadie shrugged, examining a fat orange finger of pure carbohydrate. She brushed it against her mouth and sucked it slowly in. ‘I could make it worth your while.’

Kent’s gaze snagged on the orange dust clinging to her mouth. ‘We’re not talking about hand feeding me Twisties here, are we?’

She smiled as she plucked another out of the bag and licked it before she popped it into her mouth. ‘Nope.’

‘You’re talking trading sexual favours?’

‘Yep.’

‘I love your dirty mind.’

Sadie laughed. She loved how he looked at her—as if he’d already stripped her naked.

Leo had looked at her as if he could fix her.

Kent looked at her as if she was already perfect.

‘I spy with my little eye, something beginning with...’ she pulled another Twistie out of the packet and poked it into her cleavage ‘...T,’ she said, looking up when she was satisfied with the placement.

Kent’s breath hitched in his chest as saliva coated his mouth. He was reminded of how he’d thought about eating Twisties off her body last night and he was hard in under ten seconds. ‘How about we play truth and dare instead?’ he suggested, his voice rough and low.

‘Truth and dare,’ Sadie mused as she placed a second in her cleavage.

‘I dare you to strip down to your underwear and stay that way until we get to Darwin.’

He held his breath as he waited for her reply. The Sadie from a couple of days ago would have flayed him alive at the suggestion. Hell, the Kent from a couple of days ago would never have suggested it. But this Sadie, hell-bent on decorating herself in snack food, looked as if she was up for something totally spontaneous.

He certainly was.

Sadie felt her breath thicken in her throat and her nipples bead at his indecent proposal. ‘Sure. But I dare you not to touch. Think you could manage that?’

Kent’s pulse wooshed through his ears. She looked so damn sure of herself and he was torn between being the dare-taking kid of old who’d do anything to win and knowing that, if she really did get down to her underwear, it would only be a matter of time before he folded.

He nodded. ‘Absolutely.’

Sadie smiled at the bob of his throat. ‘Okay, then.’

Kent tried really hard to concentrate on the road, but it was difficult with Sadie shimmying out of her clothes in his peripheral vision. In under a minute she was sitting in some hot-looking red and black matching underwear—Twisties protruding from her cleavage.

Sadie tossed her clothing on the floor and smiled at him. ‘I give you—’ she looked at the clock ‘—five minutes.’

Kent kept his eyes firmly trained on the road. ‘Easy,’ he scoffed.

‘Yes.’ She smiled as she shoved another lurid orange finger into her bra. ‘I know.’

Kent tapped his foot as the minutes slowly ticked by and Sadie shoved more Twisties everywhere. Her hair, her bra straps, snuggled against her nipples, her belly button.

At four minutes and thirty seconds she pulled the band of her knickers out and dropped one down the front, closing it with a snap.

‘Right!’ Kent said, indicating abruptly as he took the car cross country, right off the road. ‘You win.’

The three-hour trip took about double that by the time he’d relieved her of all the hidden food and licked all the Twistie dust off her and she’d eaten a few off him. It was early evening when they drove into the outskirts of Darwin.

Kent looked at Sadie as she stared out of the window. She’d been curiously quiet the last hour or so. ‘Cat got your tongue, Sadie Bliss?’

Sadie turned and smiled at him. She’d been conscious of their time running out and it was making her wistful. ‘I didn’t think you liked me chattering?’

‘Since when did that stop you?’

Sadie ignored him. Since their relationship, or whatever the hell it was now, had moved to another level, since they’d both got to know each other a little better, she didn’t feel a blinding need to fill up the silence.

The silence was companionable. Maybe that was the sex. Whatever—it wasn’t awkward for her any more.

‘Airport?’ Kent asked a moment later. ‘Or night in a swanky hotel and airport in the morning?’

Sadie felt her heart rate pick up a little. One last night with Kent. She wasn’t foolish enough to believe this was the start of something. As addictive as Kent could be, he had issues to get sorted. So did she. She needed to sort out what she wanted to do with her life and she didn’t need the distraction of him.

She didn’t want to trade one addiction for another.

‘What, no spiders? No scorpions?’

Kent grinned. ‘How will we manage?’

‘Lead the way.’

Half an hour later they were opening the door to the executive suite at the Esplanade Central. Sadie brushed past Kent and threw herself on the cloudlike, king-sized bed, flapping about as if she were making a snow angel on the stark white bedding.

‘Ah-h-h, bliss,’ she murmured.

Kent looked at Sadie all stretched out and shook his head. ‘Not yet.’

Sadie sucked in a breath at the undiluted lust she saw in the copper flecks of his eyes. She lifted her foot and placed it on his thigh. ‘I need a shower first. I smell like Twisties.’

Kent’s pulse tripped at getting Sadie wet all over. ‘Good idea.’ He pulled his T-shirt over his head. ‘Get naked,’ he said.

Sadie laughed even as the sight of his chest did funny things inside hers. ‘I just need to put my laptop on charge,’ she said.

He unzipped his jeans. ‘Hurry.’

Sadie watched him as he headed to the shower until he disappeared from sight. Maybe getting on a plane tomorrow was going to be a little harder than she thought.

She vaulted off the bed at the unsettling thought. She grabbed her laptop out of her bag and set it up on the desk in the room, plugging it into the nearby power point. She opened the lid and pulled up the document from earlier. She took her memory stick out of the pouch in the laptop bag and was about to insert it when Kent called, ‘Sadie Bliss, get your delectable butt in here now or I’m coming to get you.’

Sadie turned around to find a naked Kent standing in the doorway to the bathroom. She hadn’t seen him naked and vertical and he really was a sight to behold. Even his deformed ankle didn’t detract from his overwhelming masculinity. Her belly flopped and her heart did a painful squeeze.

She dropped the memory stick on the table and swallowed against her suddenly parched throat.

‘Well, when you put it like that,’ she said, mission forgotten as she kicked out of her shoes and lifted her T-shirt off as she walked towards him.

Kent grinned as he took three paces into the running shower, feeling the warmth hit the back of his neck, watching as Sadie entered the bathroom in just a tiny scrap of red and black fabric at the apex of her thighs, a foil packet between her teeth. His semi-arousal turned to full blown as she looked him straight in the eyes whilst she stripped the scrap away.

And when she stepped into the shower cubicle and sank straight to her knees he knew Sadie Bliss was going to be very hard to forget.