***

HE KNEW THE minute he lost her, yet he couldn’t stop himself from finishing the tour he’d started. Every inch of her skin was silk, each measured breath she took was precious. What the ever-loving fuck, Marcus? Precious breaths? He looked at his hard cock. Nope, haven’t grown a pussy…yet. Sure, Julie Bell had fallen asleep on him—how’s that for payback? The devil on his shoulder teased—but Christ, the woman had rocked his world in the shower. Truth be told, she’d been shaking his foundation since the day they’d met.

Danny’s eyes raked over the naked form sleeping next to him. From her long strawberry-blonde hair, to the faint dusting of freckles that kissed the bridge of her nose, to the plump kissable lips that had been wrapped around his cock like a goddamn dream, down to the most perfect set of tits he’d ever had his hands on, the woman could have been created specifically for him. And that was based solely on the superficial. But there was more. She was more. Sex or not, he intended to get inside Julie’s mind, because she was already burrowing her way into his heart.

###

“MY PARENTS WERE amazing people.” Julie’s tight words hung in the dark room.

Danny was a light sleeper—something he’d learned in the army—so as soon as he realized that she was speaking to him and not in her sleep, he rubbed his eyes with one hand while pushing himself up to a sitting position with the other. He could make out the outline of Julie’s body, the white blankets tucked beneath her arms, but he couldn’t see her face, her eyes, or her mouth. A purposeful act, he assumed.

“They loved me like crazy, and they loved each other even more. I grew up knowing what it felt like to be surrounded by happiness,” she said. “Life wasn’t always perfect. We had our fair share of heartaches, and my parents dealt with issues that they thought I knew nothing about. But even when things were tough, they were…God, they were strong.”

Danny reached out. He wanted to touch her, wanted to offer an anchor for the pain he knew was sure to come.

“No.” The sheets rustled as she moved farther from him. “You can’t touch me. Not yet. I only got through what I did because I had no one else to lean on.”

He heard her swallow, and the pit of his stomach felt as though it filled with lead. He reluctantly placed his clenched fist on his lap and listened.

“Because I was an only child and we didn’t have extended family on either side, they never traveled unless we went together. The one time they did leave me with a family friend, I was four and I got a horrible ear infection and ended up in the emergency room. Needless to say, after that, we were a package deal traveling the country.” Her giggle sounded like it held years of good memories. “I turned eighteen in late fall of my senior year of high school, and we joked that my parents could finally travel without me because I was officially an adult. However, they still had an arm’s length of reasons why they couldn’t leave. They didn’t want to miss seeing me off to prom, they wanted to be around in case I stressed out during finals, and of course, they had to see me walk for graduation.”

Danny’s desire to comfort Julie was bordering on obsessive, but he reminded himself that her needs were important at the moment, not his own. So his fists stayed clamped in the sheets and his mind stayed focused on her story.

“I assured them that if they went in the spring, they would be back for all of the milestones they wanted to see and they’d be well-rested and ready to keep me calm and focused. That seemed to be the incentive that finally pushed them forward and led them to booking a two-week dream trip to Mexico.

“Their preparation became a running joke at the dinner table over the weeks leading up to their departure. It wasn’t the packing or their itinerary that kept them busy, but their concerns for my meals and my laundry in their absence. The whole thing was silly because they’d taught me to do those things years before, claiming it was a parent’s job to raise independent children. But my dad begged me to suck it up and allow my mom to worry about me. He said it would make her feel better about leaving, so I did as he asked and nodded a lot and smiled each night until we all broke out into laughter.” Julie took a deep breath. “The morning they left, Mom handed me pages of instructions, including numbers to the electric company, the gas company, old friends of my father’s from his time in the Marines, the family dentist just in case I somehow managed to lose a tooth—all bases were covered if there was an emergency and I didn’t know what to do.” Brittleness infused Julie’s voice. “She hugged me as if she’d never hugged me before and she never would again, and they left for their Mexican paradise.”

Quickly, Danny scrolled through his memories for what events had happened in the past couple of years, and within seconds, Mexico City blazed like a red flashing sign. “Shit, Jules, they were in Mexico City, weren’t they?” He wheezed as if the air had been knocked from his chest. The 1985 Mexico City earthquake was so huge, so completely devastating, it came with a foreshock in May 1985. The main event happened on September 19, 1985, and it had two major aftershocks, one on September 20, 1985 and the second seven months later on April 30, 1986. The magnitude of the final aftershock was 7.0, even though the event occurred more than two hundred twenty miles away. It caused major damage to Mexico City, and many more lives were lost.

The mattress trembled beneath him as her soft sobs filled the otherwise quiet room. His heart ached and his gut churned as he thought about the two devoted parents who’d reluctantly left their child but did so in the most strategic way in order to be back in time to witness the life events they’d coveted so deeply. In the end, they’d missed them all.

“All of that preparation,” she croaked, “all of those instructions, and none of them helped me during the emergency. Because I wasn’t the one who needed help. They were.”

He stared in her direction, silently begging his vision to sharpen in the darkness. Ultimately, he remained impaired to anything more than the muted image of her body twisted around itself.

She continued, urgency lacing her tone as her sentences came out in rushed huffs. “They were supposed to arrive home on May first. I waited for them. I knew they weren’t coming, but I waited anyway. I quickly learned how parents felt when they stayed up at night, waiting for their children to arrive home after missing curfew. That…that feeling of anger that gets swallowed up by prayers, prayers to any god who will listen, to please deliver your loved ones home safely. You promise you’ll bank the anger and just give hugs if only you see your loves again.” She hiccupped. “They didn’t come, and my anger swelled. After five days, when I got confirmation that amongst the tour of one hundred people my parents had been with that day, only three had survived and my parents weren’t in that tiny, lucky group, I had no prayers left. None.

“I went numb, completely anesthetized, but I needed to keep myself together and finish school—not for me but for them. Prom didn’t happen—there was no way I could have stomached that without Mom and Dad by my side—and I didn’t walk in the graduation procession, but I did graduate with honors. Finals were cake. I’d been granted immunity from taking them due to the tragedy I’d suffered, and since my grades were fantastic, not sitting for the exams wouldn’t have lowered my GPA too drastically, but I chose to take them. I needed to focus on my studies. I had to concentrate on the tests that were marked in green on my calendar, and I couldn’t let myself look past those dates because my whole life had changed. My plans for after graduation were gone, and after those circled green dates, I had…nothing.”