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She snorted, sarcasm dripping from her tone. "Oh my fucking god, Jax Badd. Please spare me the toxic male machismo bullshit. You're better than that." She cupped my face, tilted my head so I was looking up at her again. "Women do not have the market cornered on emotional trauma, you know."

Her thumb slid delicately beneath one eye and the other. And then she kissed beneath my eyes, her lips tender and warm and soft. My heart and stomach did calisthenics at the way she kissed me, like that.

"You expressing your feelings doesn't turn me off. You know what does turn me off, though? Toxic male machismo bullshit." Her mouth drifted to mine, her lips moving on mine as she whispered. "You feel deeply. That's nothing to be ashamed of."

"Same for you, then."

"Women in positions of authority cannot be seen to be overly emotional. Our culture at large views it as weakness. We have to be stoic and calm and in control at all times. The same toxic machismo that says you men can't feel or express your feelings means we women can't either, yet we're also viewed as being naturally more emotional, which you yourself just pointed out. It's unspoken but real, especially in the military." She shook her head. "I'm fighting that, Jax. I swear I am, but I was indoctrinated in that bullshit my whole life."

"You weren't allowed to cry as a little girl, I imagine?"

"Definitely not. Especially after Mom died, Dad just couldn't handle tears. I think it would’ve triggered his own, and there was no fucking way Commander Tom Tiernan was about to cry for any-goddamn-thing."

"Jesus."

She rolled a shoulder. "He raised me to be a hell of a pilot and a hell of a Naval officer, but I kinda got gypped a little on how to be a functional human female in non-military society."

"Gypped is a slur," I muttered.

"It is?"

"Yup. Comes from gyp, meaning gypsy, which is a derogatory slur for the Romani, who tend to have a communal sense of property, meaning a vague sense of individual ownership that other, more traditional cultures interpreted as theft.”

"Oh. Well…I got short-changed, then." A pause. “How'd you come by this information, anyway? You do a paper on them or something?”

"My dad did some off-book operator work with some private security folks out in Las Vegas a few years ago, and one of the people he worked with was a Romani fella named Lash. Picked up a few things. Such as don’t ever refer to a Romani as a gypsy.”

Tea nodded. "I see."

"I never got an explanation as to how he got connected with them, though. It's just not like him to do mercenary work. After he retired from the teams, he pretty much put that side of himself away for good. It definitely wasn't about money, because he's not a mercenary and our family does well enough with the bar and our other businesses that didn’t, doesn’t and wouldn’t need to take mercenary jobs for the money.”

Tea smiled, touching my lips with a finger. "Jax?"

"Hmmm?"

"I don't care if your dad did a mercenary gig or not. Nothing personal. I just have other interests than that, at the moment."

"Oh?"

Her left arm slipped under my chin so her left hand cupped my right cheek, putting my chin in the crook of her elbow. Her right hand roamed my chest, my diaphragm, my stomach in a slow southward migration.

"Tea?" I whispered. "Much as I want, even need, to be with you, I don't know if I physically can. Maybe I'm just not as tough as I thought, but—"

She silenced me with a thumb drifting across my lips, sealing the rest of my statement behind my teeth. "Sssshhhh," she shushed. "Just…shush."

As her hand caressed in slow circles over my belly on its southward journey, my heart began to palpitate madly behind my ribs, and the closer her hand drifted to my fly, the more my zipper tightened.

"But I want—" I started.

Her breasts settled against my face and throat as she bent over me, kissed me quietly. "I know. I do too. I want everything with you. But not everything is going to be possible until you've gotten some medical attention." She reached for my waistband, and her finger and thumb fiddled the button fly open. "Until then, I thought maybe you could help me explore certain feelings I'm having. Certain…desires that I haven’t felt in a very long time."

"Whatever I can do to help," I said. "Anything. Just tell me what I can do, how I can help."

She slid my zipper down so my erection pushed against the fabric of my underwear so it bulged into the V.

"What you can do," she breathed, teasing my lips with her nipple, "is just lay there and be sexy and let me do stuff."

"Do stuff. Mmmm. Talk dirty to me, baby," I teased.