Revealing Her SEAL (ASSIGNMENT: Caribbean Nights Book 4) (13 page)

R
achel was mad at him. Evan didn’t blame her. But as he stood in the shower not picking up the soap and not doing the thing he was in the blasted shower for, he wished he had a way to make things right between them.

And what the hell did
that
look like? She’d pushed him away in the kitchen—rightly so—because she didn’t want him touching her. Why would she? He’d kissed her and then flipped out when she asked a perfectly reasonable question about impossible-to-hide shrapnel wounds, which he should have realized she’d discover. It wasn’t her fault he had zero social niceties.

Still. He’d been trying to be civil after she’d spilled the oil then gotten all upset about it. Hadn’t that meant anything to her? All day long as he’d painstakingly planted little coral growths in the prescribed spot, he’d run through practice speeches, imagined uttering the words, restructuring the sentences in his head until they conveyed what he meant to say. And then he changed his mind, selecting different words and testing those out.

In the end
I’m sorry
had spilled out and not much else. Because he sucked at this kind of thing. Or rather alcohol had always been his social lubrication of choice, even before it had become a problem. That’s why it was better to stick with his team and pretend he didn’t like the idea of coming home to Rachel, knowing she was there waiting for him, cooking something amazing for him to eat, and if he didn’t want to talk, he didn’t have to.

And then he’d planned to get out of the kitchen, which he absolutely should have done, but then she’d looked at him with all that vulnerability he could not resist. Maybe he’d reacted to it a little too strongly, and he definitely shouldn’t have touched her, but God, how could he not? She’d been right to send him away.

He finished his shower with no real memory of the soap actually hitting his skin, toweled off his hair and put on clean clothes, ordering himself to stay in his room. What could possibly come from hanging out with Rachel in the kitchen while she cooked, other than a continued dance with no end to the music in sight? They needed some boundaries.
He
needed boundaries. She wasn’t the one who had been unable to resist the draw between them. That kiss on the beach never should have happened.

He didn’t stay in his room.

Rachel glanced up as he reentered the kitchen. She’d put her hair up in a ponytail in the thirty minutes he’d been gone, and her expression was decidedly less agitated. His apology had apparently gone a long way, as clumsy as it had been.

“Oh, good. You’re just in time to chop the lettuce.” She handed him a flat green plastic thing shaped like a knife, with a laughable serrated edge.

When he cocked an eyebrow at it, she giggled. “Plastic. Because metal knives cause lettuce to turn brown where you cut it. Be sure you slice in strips instead of dicing.”

“Um, what?” If he’d known not staying in his room meant he’d be given cooking duties, he’d have reconsidered.

Abandoning her post, she brushed past him and pulled a large bowl from the cabinet beyond his left shoulder. The size of the kitchen had never mattered to him before, but he developed a new appreciation for exactly how tiny it was as Rachel’s coconutty hair drifted too close to his nose.

He inhaled the scent and went hard instantly. She’d smelled like that on the beach. Coconut haunted his dreams, and he had a feeling it would be making another appearance in his shower fantasies. Maybe he’d be taking another one in about five seconds. A cold one.

She put the bowl on the counter near a rectangle the color of orange sherbet, which she pointed to. “Stand here. Put the lettuce on the cutting board. Then you slice it. When you’re done, it goes in the bowl. Easy, right?”

“Yeah,” he muttered.

As he slid the plastic serrated edge through the lettuce leaves, she watched from a spot way too close to his arm, practically touching it. The muscles in his forearm twitched, straining to move those few centimeters to connect their flesh.

Easy
. He’d done twenty-mile hikes with a wounded guy on his back that had been easier than being around a woman he wanted to sink into more than he wanted to breathe. But couldn’t.

Rachel was looking for something Evan had no ability to give her. Quick and dirty up against the wall followed by see you later wasn’t and never would be his style, but neither did he have any business romancing a woman right, forging a connection and drawing out the anticipation until they finally came together in a blaze of heat. And it wasn’t fair to lead her on in any way, shape, or form.

“See? You’ve got it,” she encouraged. “Dicing is when you flip it ninety degrees and slice again. It’s a finer chop, and you do that when you’re making, say tacos.”

He nodded as if he cared because it was better than admitting all he could think about was the taste of her on his tongue and how badly he burned to sweep every leaf of lettuce into the garbage to make room for her on the counter. He’d boost her up and step right in that valley between her long, luscious legs. Exactly the right height to hit her sweet spot with his aching shaft, rubbing against her until she begged him to fill her.

He went hard. So hard he saw stars.

Rachel went back to her original spot, still chatting about the different types of lettuce and what you used them for.

“What are you making?” he interjected before she jumped off on a discourse about salad dressing. If she did, his head might actually explode from the iron will required to keep from shutting her up a second time.

Because unlike the first time, he wouldn’t stop with a kiss. Rachel’s diesel-powered mouth clearly needed something a little bigger than his tongue in it in order to silence her.

“Chicken cacciatore. Is that okay?”

He shrugged. If he knew what that was, he might have a better idea how to answer the question. Carrie had never cooked like this and would have laughed herself silly if he’d suggested it.

“What, you’ve never had it? That’s criminal. Also they serve it at the resort. You’d think you’d veer from hamburgers occasionally.” She glanced over her shoulder, her hot-eyed gaze appreciative. “You won’t look like that forever, and too much red meat is not healthy.”

The once-over she treated him to should have been easy to ignore. She did things like that all the time, complementing him on his body, talking about getting him naked. He never let her comments stroke his ego because she was a flirt and meant nothing by it.

Except she never said stuff like that to the other guys, and at least half of them weren’t too ugly to look at. If her flirting didn’t mean anything, you’d think she might hand out X-rated suggestions like candy.

He finished slicing—not dicing—the lettuce and tossed it into the bowl. “How did you know I’ve never had chicken cacciatore?”

Instantly he regretted opening his mouth. What did it matter? Lucky guess, that’s all. Who ran around eating stuff like that unless they frequented fancy restaurants or had a wife that watched cooking shows?

“Oh, um… I don’t know. Your expression, I guess.”

“You weren’t looking at me.”

Shut up.
There was nothing good that was going to come out of this conversation. But geez. The woman practically read his mind on a regular basis, and it should probably freak him out a lot more than it actually did. It was actually kind of… awesome.

Rachel put down the pan in her hands and faced him, crossing her arms as she contemplated him. “Evan. I pay attention to you. How else can we communicate when ninety percent of the time you don’t talk? I have to pick up on your subtle cues or I’m lost.”

He blinked, but the truth of it bled through him anyway. She’d learned how to read him. On purpose. “Why?”

The kitchen grew even smaller as the ever-present draw between them grew claws, digging into his gut.

“Because you intrigue me,” she murmured, and he’d have sworn she couldn’t get any closer without touching him, but somehow she was a hair’s breadth from his body, carefully maintaining the distance. Her gaze danced over his, daring him to eliminate that space. If he wanted to. But she wouldn’t, not after he’d shut down on Ilhota Rosa.

This was his woman to take. She wouldn’t cross that line he’d drawn, and it stuck in his craw. Which was crazy. She was respecting the barrier he’d erected, like she should. It was there for her protection. Why did it piss him off so much that she was forcing him to make the first move?

Some mind reader
she
was. Didn’t she know he couldn’t do that? That he was in a bad place, with no room for a woman who studied him so carefully and so expertly, that there was no need for him to talk. She understood him even when he clammed up.

None of this should be happening.

But it was, because he couldn’t stay away from her.

“You can deny it all you want,” she said with a small smile. “We’re not at the beach on Ilhota Rosa, and I won’t go back on our deal. But it doesn’t change facts. You say more with your face than most people can in a hundred words.”

Panic pounded at the base of his throat.
Shooting stars. Louis Armstrong. Sand.
His happy place did not materialize but neither did the panic attack. He could still breathe, much to his annoyance. Passing out might be better.

Avoidance would not solve this problem, no matter how much he wanted to try it just to make sure. Rachel had slid under his walls, climbed over them, knocked them down with a jackhammer, all the above.

He couldn’t stay away because he craved human contact, despite hating the requirements to get it. A push-pull, exactly like she described.

“You’re just as bad,” he threw out before he’d figured out exactly how he meant to follow that up. Or how it was supposed to deflect from the truth she’d uncovered despite claiming he was allowed to lie about it.

“Oh, do tell.”

“You flirt to cover up your feelings.”

The second it left his mouth, he wished he could take it back. He should not be pushing those buttons. But he couldn’t help it. He wanted to know why she hid behind her big personality.

Her mouth opened. And closed. Something flickered in her gaze, darkening it, and then she tilted her head so the light caught the lenses of her glasses, obscuring that small window into her soul.

So he took them off.

She blinked. “What did you do that for? Now I can’t see.”

“I can,” he murmured and folded her glasses with a
click
, placing them on the counter behind her. “You don’t like the tables being turned, do you?”

Her expression turned crafty. “Depends on what you’re about to throw down on top of that table, Evan.”

You
. It was right there on the tip of his tongue. But he had a lot of practice at not blurting out the first thing that crossed his mind. “Flirt and distract. It’s like a game. How outrageous can I be?”

The first wave of unease filtered through her exposed eyes, and she shut them.

“No.” He ran the pads of his thumbs across her eyelashes until they swept upward and then kept his hands at her temples, gently holding her in place. “You see me. Let me see you.”

“And then what?” she whispered. “When you look at me like that, it strips me bare. On the inside where I can’t cover it.”

Yes. That’s exactly how he felt when she held those one-sided conversations, as if she’d cut him open and read the things written inside him. But it was freeing in a twisted sort of way that he’d never expected. No secrets. No lies. It appealed to him to be transparent when he’d spent so much energy covering his addiction. Covering up his own weaknesses.

Rachel saw him at his most elemental level. And she was still here.

“Why do you want to hide?” He didn’t. There was a part of him that yearned to let all his walls crumble to dust, to be open with Rachel in a way he’d never been before. With anyone.

“Because! This is not…” Shiny moisture sprang up in her eyes, and he had the strangest urge to put his lips against her eyelids to kiss away her distress. “I can’t do this with you.”

Of course she couldn’t. She didn’t have any interest in an alcoholic. And shouldn’t, not after the way he’d disillusioned Carrie over and over with promises he had no intention of keeping. She’d taken Jordan away for the same reason—if she couldn’t trust him as a husband, then she sure as hell couldn’t trust him with a baby. And neither should Rachel imagine that she could trust Evan with anything, especially not the truths inside her that she’d fought to keep from him.

He released her and stepped back, silently handing over her glasses.

He’d spun a fantasy out of thin air, where he could be with a woman like Rachel simply because he wanted to. Life didn’t work like that. Bad choices came with brutal consequences, which he’d learned the hard way.

It hurt. So much so that he craved the sweet burn of eighty proof anything as it spread through his blood, numbing all the pain in its wake.

And that was the reason Evan couldn’t do this with her either. His foundation was far too rocky and likely always would be.

The moment the front door clicked shut behind Evan, the tears began falling as if Rachel had flipped a faucet.