Read Disarm for Free Online Page B

yet
knowing there was a very real chance of crashing to the concrete below.
    But I knew, as I
traced my finger gently down his forehead, along the bridge of his nose, that
this was one risk I was willing to take. When my finger reached his lips, he
opened his mouth and bit my finger.
    “Good morning,”
he said with a sleepy smile. He touched my shoulder and ran a palm along the
contours of my waist and hip. “I’m a little sad to wake up to you touching my
nose instead of… other things.”
    I reached down to
straighten out the situation when I spied the clock on my bedside table. I sat
up with a heavy sigh. “I have to get ready for work.”
    He buried his
face in the pillow and grumbled. “No, no, no.” He then waved a hand across my
face and said, “You will take a sick day today.”
    “If only I could,
Henry Wan Kenobi, but I have important clients coming in,” I said, giving him
one last, lingering kiss. “To be continued.”

 
    Work was
excruciating. My meeting with The Oklahoman about their website redesign took a
long time as we hammered out the concept. To be honest, it probably took longer
because my mind was not in that conference room but far off at Tinker Air Force
Base, where Henry was trying to complete his pre-deployment checklist. We only
had a week left together, it seemed such a shame to waste it apart—but
what could we do? We were adults with responsibilities, even if we were acting
like lovesick teenagers.
    Right before lunch,
a client’s website crashed and, since it was my project, I was forced to ditch
my idea of taking a long lunch to visit Henry and fix the problem instead. So I
put my head down and got to work, hoping to be able to skip out of work early
at least.
    Around
twelve-thirty, there was some commotion outside my cubicle, but I wanted
nothing to do with it. Gideon, my gay hipster cubicle neighbor, popped up over
the wall and gave me a rare smile. “You have a visitor,” he said and jabbed a
thumb towards the reception desk.
    I looked up to
find a handsome Captain in his ABUs—short for Airman Battle
Uniform—walking towards me, a beret and a single red
rose in his hand . My heart did a happy little jig at the sight of him, looking so dashing in the uniform I’d seen him wear a
hundred times before. He slipped his beret in a leg pocket and held out the
rose.
    My co-workers’
heads popped up from their cubicles one by one, like little prairie dogs,
flashing knowing smiles and popping back down again. I pulled Henry inside my
cubicle and forced him down onto my chair, hoping a member of management
wouldn’t decide to walk by at that moment.
    “Well hello,” he
said and pulled me onto his lap.
    I wrapped my arms
around his neck and took his gorgeous face in hungrily.   “Do you want to go to the conference
room upstairs?” I whispered in his ear. “It should be empty at this time of
day.”
    Henry looked
extremely tempted, but he shook his head. “I really want to, but I have to head
back to work. I just came here to deliver this,” he said, tipped me back, and
planted a searing kiss on my lips.
    We surfaced a few
minutes later, utterly turned on without any way to deal with it. With a sigh,
I pulled him up and we emerged from our own little world.
    He gave me a
courteous nod. “Ma’am,” he said formally then leaned down and blew in my ear,
“to be continued.”
    After he left, a
few people walked by my cubicle to ask about the rose and the handsome airman
who’d brought it. The inevitable question, “So is he your boyfriend?” was
asked, but for once, when it came to my relationship with Henry, I didn’t know
what to say.

 
    ~

 
    On my way home I
got stuck behind every slow car or truck in Oklahoma. It was a conspiracy;
that’s the only way I could explain why everyone seemed to be in on some big
plan to keep me from getting home. But as soon as I opened that front door, I
ran to my man—yes, in my mind I’d claimed him already—and leapt
into