Revealing Her SEAL (ASSIGNMENT: Caribbean Nights Book 4) (8 page)

The indents were places where his flesh had torn, only to be unevenly sewn back together.

Until recently she’d never known anyone who’d seen combat, but it wasn’t difficult to put context to what her eyes were telling her. Evan had been shot. Many times by the look of it. And if he’d wanted to advertise that fact, he’d have paraded through the living area with his shirt off, pointing to the wounds.

He hadn’t because it was personal. Also incredibly painful, traumatic and… Well, she didn’t know what all, but it surely had sucked. And it was a safe bet she was staring at one of the events that had stolen Evan’s voice.

She shouldn’t be here. For a lot of reasons. But first and foremost because all at once she’d developed an intense desire to be the woman who soothed this deep, isolated man through his nightmares.

Rachel, who was really good at superficial, wanted to find a way to be what he needed. What the hell was she supposed to do with that?

When the dive boat drew up to the dock after a particularly challenging day of coral restoration, Rachel was pretty much the last person Evan wanted to see. But there she was, lounging against a wooden post, her hair up in a ponytail that should not have been as sexy as it was.

That alone pissed him off. Coupled with a day that had included a problem with Charlie’s dive equipment that had taken ten years off Evan’s life before it was sorted out, there was way too much Rachel on the dock for comfort.

The guys said hey to his roommate and shuffled their stuff off the boat with the speed of a sloth on Valium, presumably so they could hear every word of the exchange. Instead of humoring their voyeurism, he strode past her, and as expected, she dogged his steps, ignoring the fact that he was ignoring her.

“I thought you’d never get back,” she said. “Usually you guys wrap up at three, and it’s nearly four.”

Thanks for the recap
. He had an excellent handle on his schedule and was therefore well aware of the fact that the crimp in Charlie’s tank hose had cost them nearly an hour. Why it mattered to her was the mystery. Which would remain unanswered since all Evan wanted was a shower and a nap and not necessarily in that order. He’d slept like crap last night and fatigue had dogged him all day, made that much worse by the white-knuckle emergency at 250 feet when Charlie had signaled that he couldn’t breathe.

He’d label the day one big, long nightmare, but in Evan’s world, reality was always worse than anything his imagination could come up with.

“I was thinking of something simple like baked grouper and asparagus for dinner. Is that okay?” Rachel asked. “You know, assuming the market has both. I guess if they don’t, I’ll come up with something else on the fly. But I don’t know how far Abaco is. Do we have time to get there and back and still—”

Evan halted, and she crashed into him, which might have hurt without the layer of neoprene he still wore.

“We?” he repeated.

There wasn’t a blessed thing in his future that included Rachel. Unless it was a harmless fantasy about stripping off that clingy red dress from the other day and then dumping her bodily in the shower for his viewing and touching pleasure as he soaked away the awful day with the water on full blast.

The visual of Rachel, naked and quivering, boiled his blood in zero point four seconds. He nearly groaned aloud. What the hell made him think of
that
? Good thing he still had on his wetsuit. It almost hid his enormous woody.

“Yeah.” She skirted him and parked directly in his path, her eyes brown and limpid behind the lenses of her librarian glasses. “We. You promised to take me grocery shopping when you finished work for the day.”

He had?

“Yes, you did.” She shook her head with a little tsk noise. “You forgot, didn’t you? I swear, I’ve never heard of a man who wanted to eat less than you. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was the company you objected to.”

She winked, but it didn’t cover the shiny glint in her eyes like she probably thought it did. Why the hell was he watching her so closely anyway? It would have been much better to never realize he’d hurt her feelings. But it was too late.

“I’ll take you,” he growled. “Give me ten.”

Her smile didn’t help anything, especially not the heat still circulating in his lower half. And apparently he’d just signed up to spend the next hour or so in the company of a woman who alternately annoyed him and gave him a hard-on he couldn’t will away.

“How about I give you two?” she suggested with a saucy toss of her ponytail and held up both palms, fingers spread. “Two extra hands. I’ll help you get out of that suit, and then we can be on our way.”

His lungs strangled over a breath. Yeah, Rachel peeling away the wetsuit from his body, with her wandering hands and hot eyes—
that
sounded like a plan. A plan for driving him bonkers.

She followed him to the bungalow, still chattering about asparagus, baking dishes, and God knew what all, while Evan held on to his sanity by the skin of his teeth. Rachel tried to follow him into his bedroom as if his lack of response to her I’ll-help-you-get-naked offer had constituted agreement.

He shook his head and shut the door in her face. Somehow he managed to actually get his gear off without Rachel’s help, a small miracle considering he’d only done it a million times before.

While he yanked an Aqueous Adventures T-shirt over his damp hair and speared his legs into a pair of jeans, Rachel stood on the other side of the door, still talking.

Had the woman never heard of the silent game? She could learn it by example if she’d just close her mouth for a minute.

He clamped his teeth together and gave in to the inevitable, ushering Rachel to the speedboat. The roar of the motor gave him a reprieve as she opted to watch the passing scenery, a small smile of delight tipping up the corners of her mouth as the miles and miles of blue stretched out around them.

Not that he was watching her on purpose. But the wind whipped through her ponytail, pulling strands loose that streamed out behind her, and her eyes squinted a little against the bright Caribbean sun, softening her face. It was a little fascinating to see her both silent and in the elements, both of which she accepted with grace. A lot of women would squeal about their hairdo when forced to take a trip to the store in a speedboat, but she took it all in stride. Just like she took him in stride, never faltering no matter what surliness he flung in her direction.

He could not get a handle on Rachel. It was a problem.
She
was a problem.

At the Lady of Saints Marina in Harbour Town, Evan tied up the boat at the Aqueous slip and jerked his head at the dock. Rachel stood, grabbed her purse, and missed her footing, all in one shot. As she stumbled, Evan instantly reacted, catching her by the arms to keep her off the teakwood.

Mistake
, his mind screamed as her body fell against his in all the right places. His own body heartily approved, welcoming her peaks and valleys easily, begging him to pull her closer, to revel in the sensation of woman.

It had been a long freaking time since he’d had one wrapped around him. An even longer time since he’d wanted to back one up against the railing of his boat and see exactly what she tasted like. As a bonus, Rachel seemed to have been rendered speechless as she blinked up at him, seemingly as frozen in the moment as he was.

“I haven’t got sea legs, I guess,” she murmured huskily after an eternity.

He glanced down automatically at the legs in question, which had a lot to recommend them, seaworthy or not. “You’re okay.”

Her gaze skittered over him, sparking something that pinwheeled across his skin, raising heat in its wake. The atmosphere shifted like a live thing, and awareness slithered through its very molecules. He should be letting her go, dropping his hands and walking away. That didn’t happen. Lust jackknifed through his gut and it was fifty-fifty whether he’d find the will to push her away before he did something he’d regret.

Except pushing her away sounded a lot like something he’d regret too.

His fingers tightened on her arms. She countered by palming the small of his back. Her hot hands warmed his flesh, and he instantly wished she’d find the hem of his shirt and do that on his bare skin. As if she’d read his mind, her eyelids drifted closed, then open, in a slumberous blink that took a year, and when her brown eyes focused on him again, something wholly hot and extremely arousing swam through them.

Desire
. The likes of which he had no context for. She wanted him, but not in the garden variety, run of the mill I-need-a-man-and-you’ll-do way as he’d often dismissed her interest as. She wanted
Evan
. Wanted to crawl inside
him
, connect via a conduit that could only be achieved in the most elemental kind of intimacy. Not because she had an itch, but because she was seeking something that she thought she’d found and wanted to explore it.

The knowledge shifted something inside. Boldly he let his gaze rove over hers, drinking in more information as she let him look his fill, opening herself up to his greediness.

Had something changed? Or had he never looked at her this closely because he’d always dismissed her blatant come-ons as that of a consummate flirt?

Her hands slid deeper across his back. “Have I mentioned how much I love your voice?”

That pulled a smile from God knew where. “No.”

“I think it’s because you don’t use it very often. It sounds like mescal and gravel in a blender, with a shot of maple syrup as a chaser.” She shivered, brushing the tips of her breasts across his shirt. “It does something to me.”

He’d recite the pledge of allegiance a hundred times in a row if it got more of her hard nipples against his chest. There was a lot of Rachel’s skin that he hadn’t touched, and he’d definitely be okay with it if they started there.

A line had appeared between her brows, and he had the strangest urge to smooth it with his fingertip. He didn’t mind starting there instead. But then he’d have to let go of her, and the longer they stood here in this pseudo-embrace, the less he wanted to.

“Trying to go back on your deal?” he asked.

She licked her lips. “Um, which deal was that?”

“The one where I don’t have to talk,” he reminded her, his gaze zeroing in on her lips because they still shone where she’d dragged her tongue across them, and he was thinking about nipping that lower one between his teeth.

“No.” She waited until his gaze drifted back up to her eyes to continue. “Keeping my word means something to me. I said you didn’t have to talk. I said I’d cook for you. And both are still true no matter what.”

With the reminder, a cloud drifted across her expression.

She stepped back, shattering the mood into a million unrecoverable pieces. His skin cooled, but his hard-on did not because that ponytail taunted him, begging for his fingers to undo it, letting her hair rain down around her shoulders.

Silently he watched her, searching in vain for a glint of the singular, focused desire he’d seen just a moment ago. But it was gone.

“Buy me some groceries, Sailor, and maybe you’ll get lucky later,” she said with a wink, falling back into the easy rhythm they’d had since day one.

No. She hadn’t fallen into it. She’d deliberately changed the tone, hiding behind her flirting once again. But why? Was there something about that raw, honest need that bothered her?

Probably because he kept denying the attraction between them, as if it didn’t exist. In reality flirty, come-hither Rachel was easy to resist. When she let her vulnerabilities show, she became the most intriguing woman on the planet.

He’d have to work on blowing away that smoke she threw up between them, because God above did he want her back in his arms.

T
he market teamed with people, mostly locals, but some tourists with large straw bags and wide-brimmed hats mixed with the islanders. Harbour Town wasn’t one of the premiere destinations of the Caribbean, but Abaco as a whole catered to boaters, so it wasn’t unusual to see a variety of faces shopping along the main strip that lay a short walk from the marina.