Free Sins of the Storm by Jenna Mills

her it wasn’t his place. He’d turned then and walked away, gone back to Gabe’s room, leaving Camille sitting on the edge of her bed…humiliated.
    Over the years, she’d forgotten. She’d forgotten the way her body had burned, wanted. She’d forgotten how crushed she’d been the next day when she’d climbed up into the tree fort and found Jack and Lauralee sprawled on the floor, rolling around, kissing.
    But here in this room, kneeling on the floor, the years had fallen away, and she’d wanted again. When he touched her, when he put a hand to her face and wiped away her tears…Like the naive sixteen-year-old she’d been, she’d leaned into him.
    But this time he didn’t pull away.
    His mouth moved against hers, soft and seeking, tentative kisses giving way to harder, deeper. In some foggy corner of her mind she was aware of the way he shifted and pulled her into his lap, the way his hand cradled her face, holding her, tenderly, gently, despite the urgency of his kiss.
    Sensation swirled in a dizzying rush. Her breasts ached. Inside…she burned. She opened to him, went willingly as he lowered her to the ground and hovered over her. From the moment she’d walked into the old house, there’d been only cold. But now heat seeped from his body into hers. She could feel the strength of him, not refined and contained as she’d observed since coming home, but…broken, driven, needy in a way she’d never expected from the isolated man she’d come home to.
    This, a little voice reminded. This was what she’d tried to blot from her mind. To erase. The way he’d kissed her that long-ago night before he’d left for active duty. She’d been…devastated. He was going away. He wouldn’t be home for a long time, if ever. He was ending his life in Bayou d’Espere, finally getting away from the demons, the whispers that followed him everywhere.
    Finally being the man his own father never was.
    Camille had understood, and she’d tried to be happy for him. But she’d been unable to imagine life without him. She hadn’t meant to seduce him that night. That’s not why she’d brought the wine and the candles. She’d just wanted…
    She didn’t know what she’d wanted. She never had. But Jack had come to Whispering Oaks as she’d asked. He’d found her, found the candles, had tried to leave.
    To this day, she didn’t know why he’d changed his mind. And to this day she didn’t know how it had started, how the roles they’d always known had…shattered, leaving only the two of them and a clawing need that had carried them into the night.
    It was the same desperation she tasted now, as if he wanted to absorb her. As if he needed to…
    “Jacques…” She shifted against him, drinking in the feel of every hard line, the strength of his hands as they moved down her arms, his legs against hers, the ridge pressed against her thigh. She could feel—and she wanted. “Jacques.”
    And then it…stopped.
    He ripped away with a violence that rocked her. His flashlight had fallen to the floor, leaving shadows to play against his face. His eyes were remote, shuttered, the line of his mouth hard, the whiskers at his jaw dark, the ones that had scraped so gently against the side of her face.
    He might as well have driven a fist into her solar plexus.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, the way he had that morning, and part of her wanted to shove against him, to scream, to do something, anything, to destroy that wall of icy control that fell down around him. “Those aren’t the memories you came home for.”
    Oh, but maybe they were. Sometimes memories destroyed, but sometimes they taught. And sometimes they strengthened.
    With a quiet dignity she hadn’t possessed when he’d left her kneeling on the floor, naked except for the quilt wrapped around her, she pushed to her feet and reached out a hand.
    “No,” she said, not the least bit surprised when he ignored her gesture and stood on his own. “They’re not.”
    He