Her Firefighter SEAL (7 page)

She was lonely. Kade was right there, his butt planted on a seat a foot from hers. He wanted to help, so...

Why not kiss
him
?

––––––––

Chapter Five

M
aybe it was Christmas. His birthday. Ode to Returning SEAL Day. Fuck if Kade understood the reason, but he suddenly had a lapful of woman. Ordinarily, that was a good thing, but this was Abbie.

Apparently her hate was selective, and it was
less
at the moment.

A lot less.

She wriggled her butt against his front, sending a hundred erotic possibilities rampaging through his mind, and she yanked his head toward her. “No talking,” she ordered. “Kissing only.”

That was an order he could get behind. “Abbie—”

“Breaking the rules,” she muttered and sealed her mouth to his. He had no idea if her words were an order or a complaint or just a simple statement of fact, and he didn’t care. He’d had more than one fantasy about kissing Abbie, but the reality was better than any dream. Her lips were soft and determined, as sweet as the woman herself. The rough groan was his, almost drowning out her soft whimper. She held onto him, her fingers digging into his shoulders like she thought he might try to get away. Not a chance in hell. He threaded his fingers through her hair—he
did
like to make things even—and returned her kiss.

And she more than met him halfway, no hesitation, no holding back. She took his mouth, and if she wasn’t practicing self-restraint, why should he? She tasted like all his favorite things, which right now were Abbie, Abbie, and more Abbie. She set him on fire, swept away his resistance and his mental list of all the reasons why kissing was off-limits. He’d been thinking about this for days. Weeks.

Forever.

She whimpered again and swung herself up and over his lap, planting her knees on either side of him. The move settled her right over his erection, making him a very happy man. She wiggled, and he pressed up. He deepened the kiss, opening his mouth wider as his tongue made forays into her mouth, and she rewarded him with another husky moan. He hoped desperately that was shorthand for
more please.
Because, yeah, right now he had zero interest in breaking their kiss.

The boat rocked, Abbie shrieked, and the world turned upside down.

He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her into his chest as they hit the water. A dark cocoon of water and space surrounded them. He shot up, panicking at the lack of space, the too-familiar sense of being closed in sweeping over him. The top of his head hit something hard. Wood. Had his captors put him back in the hole? Would they take him out this time?

His shoulder struck the edge of the boat.
Not Khost.
Just cold California lake water. Abbie popped up beside him. “Oh, shit,” she giggled.

“Deep breath,” he ordered, more to himself than her. He felt her nod, heard her sharp inhalation, and then he dove, wrapping his arms around her and taking her down and away from the boat.

Jesus. Could she swim? He hadn’t asked, and life jackets didn’t prevent every boating drowning. The lake wasn’t much more than twelve feet deep in the center, but that was six and a half feet she didn’t have. One more hard kick, and they punched through the surface.

“Oh my God.” She threw her arms around his neck, laughing, and let her head fall back.
Fine
his heart beat out.
She’s fine, fine, fine.
He, on the other hand, was about two breaths away from a heart attack. “We capsized the boat.”

Stan paddled toward them, barking happily. Crazy mutt.

“
You
capsized the boat,” he said, feeling the smile growing on his face. “I’m the innocent party here.”

“How do you figure that?” She wrapped her legs around his middle, months of Baby between them.

“I was sitting there, minding my own business.
You
sat on
me
.”

“I’m doing it again,” she pointed out, plastering her body up against his. Thank God for cold lake water, because he liked everything about their current situation.

“Do I need to apologize?” He rested his forehead against hers. She was recently widowed. He wouldn’t be a dick and make her feel uncomfortable, even if they had been intimate once upon a time. Fairy-tale language, he mocked internally, but those months had been fucking special and he wouldn’t lie about it.

“I’m the one who rocked the boat,” she admitted.

“I’m not complaining,” he said. “But—”

~*~

“I
’m lonely.” There. She’d said it.

He stared at her, incomprehension written all over his handsome face. “You have friends. The smoke jumpers.” He patted her belly. “You’ve got Baby twenty-four seven. How can you be lonely?”

“I’m lonely, not alone.”

He grunted something, probably male for
rescue me. Now.
At least he wasn’t stroking for shore.

So she wanted Will back. She wanted her life back. The baby and the new home had been
their
dream, but now it was just her. Not that she’d give up Baby, but the peanut didn’t seem real. Even when it somersaulted and poked her stomach out with its teeny tiny butt and fists, she felt disconnected. It was something that was happening to her, the same way the fire had happened. Death had happened. The smoke-jumping and hotshot teams had happened. She heard a whole lot of passive verbs when she started describing her life and that needed to change.

“I’m in charge of my life.” She braced herself on Kade’s shoulders and kicked, pushing her body up and out of the water until she looked down on him. She wasn’t entirely sure how taking charge of her life had ended up with her capsizing a boat and going for a swim in a lake that was slightly warmer than a glass of ice water, but she’d work with it.

“Okay.” He braced his hands around her waist, supporting her as he treaded water. Since he was a trained SEAL, she figured her odds of accidentally drowning him were slim to none. “Can we discuss this on shore?”

“I kissed you because I wanted to kiss someone,” she said, not letting go of his shoulders. Partly because he was so warm and partly just to make her point. “You were there. I wanted to do it. I did it.”

“Shore,” he repeated. “Now. Then you can talk at me all you want. My balls are freezing, and Baby must be a Popsicle.”

He lowered her down into the water. The lake wasn’t big, and it was only five minutes until her feet touched bottom. Unfortunately, she’d lost his boots when they’d flipped, which meant her feet curled in the mud, disgusting things squishing between her toes. The water was also dark and less than warm.

“Next time you take me fishing, make it Bora Bora or the Bahamas. Someplace with white sand and turquoise water.”

“Consider the murky water a bonus in this particular situation. You might not want to see what you’re standing on.” He waded toward the beach, towing her behind him.

“That bad?”

“Muck,” he said cheerfully. “Milfoil. Pond weeds. Lots of mud, rotting stuff, and fish shit.”

Now she wanted a shower.

Of course, Kade being Kade, he had towels and more extra clothes in the back of his truck. The man apparently believed in being prepared for all eventualities, up to and including getting stuck in the woods overnight. He handed her new clothes, turned the heat on in the truck, and pointed toward the cab.

“In you get. One super-deluxe changing cabana.”

She eyed him. “Are you the pool boy in this scenario?”

Because that worked for her.

“I could be, but right now I’m the boat-retrieval service. When I come back, we can discuss expanding my job description.”

He squeezed her shoulder, the rough pads of his fingers briefly tracing the hollow there, and loped back toward the lake. The overturned boat floated in a halo of their stuff. She’d made a first-class mess. He did stop to kick off his boots. She was amazed he hadn’t sunk under their weight, but maybe that was part of the secret SEAL training regime. She wondered if he would have stripped down to his skivvies if she hadn’t been there. Not that it mattered, because their unexpected swim in the lake had his jeans and T-shirt plastered to him.

She’d kissed him.

She thought about that while he dove into the lake and kicked hard for the boat, treating her to a perfectly executed combat sidestroke. He pulled himself through the water with his arms and kicked, moving quickly. Apparently his knee didn’t bother him nearly as much in the water. That was good.

He’d kissed her back, which was more than good.

So the question really was: If she was in charge, what did she want? Because no amount of wishing would bring Will back, and here she was and Kade was, and there were several things she could do about that. And just possibly, getting him out of those wet clothes topped her to-do list.

~*~

R
ighting the boat hadn’t been particularly difficult. It had a thin aluminum shell and weighed less than three hundred pounds. He’d rocked it a couple of times and then flipped it. Most of their stuff had floated. The sandwiches were fish food, but the fish they’d caught had been in the cooler, so he’d been able to snag that. He could still execute the
make dinner
part of his master plan.

He put the stuff in the boat, then pushed it to shore, Stan happily swimming alongside him. He’d deal with the waterlogged motor later, because right now he was trying desperately to not imagine Abbie getting naked in the front seat of his truck.

Holy crap,
she’d
kissed
him
.

There was no way he’d misunderstood that. Maybe it had been an impulse or a spur-of-the-moment thing. Maybe
she
wouldn’t want to do it again, but he definitely did. On the other hand, she’d flipped the boat in her enthusiasm. The lake was cold enough to mitigate the physical evidence of what
that
did for him, even if he couldn’t stop replaying the kiss in his mind.

By the time he beached the boat and waded out, Abbie had a fire going in the fire pit, bless her. She’d spread her wet clothes out over the bushes in the sunshine. It was June. It was California. She actually had a decent chance of drip-drying in the next forty minutes or so. Her laundry skills weren’t the issue. No, the problem was his eyes, because
they
went straight to her panties. Her panties were teeny tiny, a see-through scrap of pink nylon and mesh.

Pretty.

Sexy.

Hers.
It wouldn’t have mattered if she wore granny panties. She’d been wearing them minutes ago. He was in so much trouble here, because his next thought was to wonder what she was wearing now. If he was a lucky man (and he was fairly certain he’d used up all his luck escaping his Afghani captors), she was naked beneath his sweatpants.

“You have a french press.” She sighed happily, unaware of his panties dilemma.

Yeah. He liked his coffee, and apparently she did too. He bit back a smile as she grabbed for the pot and his second cup.

“I’m going to change,” he said, his voice sounding gruff even to his own ears.

“Go for it,” she agreed, her eyes moving over him.

Permission granted. Hiding his grin, he grabbed the last set of spare clothes from the truck bed and then changed on the other side of the truck. They were alone out here, and he didn’t mind if she snuck a peek.  He did take advantage of the privacy to stretch his knee. The damned thing not only looked like a field where a meteor had cratered, jagged scars running up and down both side of the kneecap, but it ached. Swimming in cold water was not, apparently, on his knee’s list of acceptable activities. It was high maintenance and voting strongly in favor of its next swim taking place in a heated Jacuzzi or a tropical lagoon. His knee would have to suck it up and get with the program.

He pulled on an ancient pair of jeans and a fire department T-shirt. Leaving the sweatshirt unzipped, he shoved his feet into an old pair of running shoes, added his clothes to the bush, grabbed the fish, and got started on the cleaning.

Abbie wandered over and watched him work. “We’re eating now?”

“Unless you prefer sushi, we’re eating in about twenty minutes.” He dropped the fish into a frying pan, added a little oil, and headed for the fire. She wasn’t out here with Emeril, so hopefully she liked fried fish.

“I drowned the muffins.” She gazed wistfully at the center of the lake.

Yeah. She had.

“We could have dessert first,” he suggested. “I’m a Boy Scout and I brought two colors. You only drowned half the food.”

She grinned at him. “You’d earn major bonus points with the pregnant woman.”

See, that was the part he needed to remember. She was
pregnant.
And widowed. He looked at her though, and he saw Abbie. He’d brought s’more fixings with him, along with baked beans and a macaroni salad. Not a green vegetable in sight, but who wanted to barbecue fresh-caught fish and crunch leaves at the same time?

He fished the fixings out and spread them on top of the cooler in order. When he turned around, she’d already found two sticks, so even if they weren’t on the same page kissing-wise, they agreed about the dessert first thing. Abbie stabbed her first marshmallow with a stick and shoved it into the flames, turning it into a black, blistering ball of goo. He winced.

“That’s not how you roast a marshmallow.” His own was slowly turning an even shade of gold-brown. After thirty seconds on the southern side, he rotated it.

She slapped her desecrated marshmallow onto a graham cracker, and eyed his. “If I happened to jostle your elbow and knock your marshmallow into the flames, would there be retaliation?”

He nodded solemnly. “Marshmallows are serious business.”

“Bummer.” She didn’t look entirely convinced, so he braced his elbow, just in case she decided to make a run for his marshmallow. He wasn’t eating charcoal.

He passed her the open slab of Hershey’s and she was silent for another moment as she assembled a ridiculously disproportionate s’more. Recipes were obviously guidelines as far as Abbie was concerned. Then she took her first bite and he lost all interest in dessert unless it involved Abbie and marshmallow cream. She moaned as she chewed, a delighted, husky sound that made him think about sex. With her.
Again.
Unfortunately, it seemed like everything Abbie said and did made him think about sex, which was a problem. He was supposed to be dragging her back to the land of the living—and not off to bed.