Free Soak (A Navy SEAL Mormon Taboo Romance) by Celia Loren

day? Or
family dinner?” Her tone strained to communicate a joke, but Ryder couldn’t
help it: his feelings were hurt. He felt the door that was usually between
them, swinging back into place.
    “I don’t get it. Did I do something wrong?”
    “No!” Chloe turned to him, and gathered his hands in her
own. She looked into his eyes, though it seemed like this took effort. “No. I
just think...well, maybe we should just lay low. Keep this between us until we
figure things out.”
    It didn’t exactly make sense. Experience had taught him that
when women got clingy after sex, he tended to run for the hills, emotionally.
But Chloe’s sudden coolness left Ryder feeling like a pitiful loser. He wanted
her to be the one falling against him, begging for further contact. He wanted
her to be the one who wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight.
    “Sure,” he heard himself say, coolly. “Mellow works for me.”
    Chloe turned quickly away, satisfied with his answer. She
took one final sweep of the room, then turned her gaze to the stairs. Her
movements had become guarded and awkward again. It was like the earth-shaking
orgasm he’d given her moments before had never even taken place.
    “Well. Good night,” she said, professionally, from the
landing. He wouldn’t meet her steely gaze.
    “Good night,” he muttered. She snapped off the light, and he
was left alone in the living room with the callow gaze of the moon.

 
    Chapter Ten
     
    “You WHAT?” Gwen actually did a spit-take with her
strawberry milkshake. The other patrons at Nelly’s Diner, likewise fresh from
church, shot scowls in the direction of the two noisy twentysomethings.
    “Will you please lower your voice?”
    “Umm, I’m sorry. Will you please lower your panties? JK
betch—you already did!”
    “Gwen! I am serious!” Chloe thumped her hand against today’s
paperback, which sat on the table between them like a challenge. Appropriately
enough, today’s novel was E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, about the
dangerous love affair blooming between a straitlaced Englishwoman and a rogue
weirdo in Italy.As if she didn’t already have one rogue too manyin her life.
    “What do you want me to say, babe? ‘Congratulations?’”
    “I’m not convinced this is something we’re happy about.”
    “Are you kidding?” her friend’s eyes bugged out just a bit
further than normal. “A devastatingly handsome, smart, courageous war hero
wants to eat you out. Where’s the ‘not happy?’”
    Chloe had come to her best girlfriend hoping for a moral
compass: think about God , your brother , etc. Now, she realized
the error of her ways. Gwen was never going to condemn a woman for disobeying
this particular slice of doctrine, no matter how much fellowship and support
the Mormon church had provided her. Or maybe Chloe was fooling herself. Maybe
she craved the encouragement, even more than the wrist-slap.
    Damnit. What was it with men? They managed to complicate
otherwise tidy emotions. They ruined everything.
    “What’s the matter? Was it not fun?” Gwen’s eyebrows joined
in the center of her forehead, suddenly playing the Defensive Mama Bear.
    “It’s not that it wasn’t fun. ” It was the best
effing thing that’s ever happened to me, she didn’t say. “But there’s so
many reasons why this is bad. Like, very, very, very bad.”
    They sat in this truth for a moment. Chloe was disappointed
when Gwen didn’t immediately crack back with a comforting word, but not
entirely surprised. Her friend had certainly wormed her way around the
pre-marital sex ban in a dozen ways, but she’d never done so with a man staying
in her house, who was a friend to the community. She’d also never done it with
a man who wasn’t Mormon. And as far as Chloe knew, she’d never had a man do to
her what Ryder had done to her, orally. It was unfamiliar terrain, having a
sexual one-up on Ms. Lilly.
    “It’s definitely a tricky situation,” Gwen said, finally.
“But