Revealing Her SEAL (ASSIGNMENT: Caribbean Nights Book 4) (9 page)

It had been a while since Evan had made the trip to Abaco. Mostly because of the liquor store. The sign for Zippos sat in his peripheral vision, silent and huge, as he guided Rachel toward the lone store that sold fresh food. With her by his side, it wasn’t so difficult to train his mind toward the task at hand. Though every fiber of his being strained to obey the slightest command to change direction.

“This is the best date you’ve ever taken me on.” Rachel hooked a hand at the crook of his elbow, presumably so they weren’t separated in the crowd.

He let her. It was a physical anchor that he would never admit he appreciated. His constant hyperawareness of her had only increased after the heavily laced encounter on the boat that hadn’t amounted to more than a woman unused to a sea vessel nearly tripping. He’d steadied her. That was the extent of it. Except it wasn’t, and they both knew it.

Even her flirting had taken on a different flavor. Or maybe he saw it for what it was—a distraction from her real feelings, which he had yet to uncover. But wanted to, more than he should.

Rachel smiled at the woman behind the fish counter, discussed the merits of the fresh catch of the day, and finally settled on the grouper she’d come for. After picking out a few more items—no asparagus apparently, but she seemed to be happy with the potatoes—she paid, and before long they were back on the boat.

He’d have bet money that shopping would have taken hours. Carrie had never been able to make up her mind about anything, dragging Evan to store after store after store, especially when she’d been pregnant. He’d been home from Iraq, with a very short two weeks’ leave, and she’d wanted to spend it dithering over whether to buy the white crib or the brown one.

She’d never once asked him to just spend time with her. To hang out and reconnect after a brutal deployment. It was almost as if she’d been gearing up for separating even then. They hadn’t had sex once during that whole two weeks. Too tired she’d claimed. Too pregnant, too used to sleeping by herself, too something other than interested in Evan’s paws on her.

That should have been enough of an indicator that something was up. But stupidly he’d taken her at her word, because what the hell did he know about pregnant women?

So he’d spent his leave blitzed and frustrated. Which wasn’t so different than how he spent all his days, especially after coming home to realize that in the end, white crib or brown, Carrie hadn’t planned to keep it in the little house on base where she’d lived with Evan.

Because she wanted a divorce not an alcoholic husband. He didn’t blame her. He didn’t want her to have an alcoholic husband either.

When they got back to the bungalow, Evan started to head for the shower he’d never gotten to take when Rachel stopped him with a hand on his arm. Pointedly he glanced down at the place where their flesh connected and then back up at her.

He waited for the familiar annoyance with her to surface, but somewhere along the way, she’d lost the edge that had always crawled across his last nerve. Or it had never been there and he’d manufactured it because Rachel made him feel things he didn’t know what to do with, so he pretended that she irritated him.

“I know.” She shot him a small smile, full of a different kind of awareness that made him feel as if she’d clued in on his very thoughts. “You just want to be alone for a while. Give me a second, and then you can take a shower. You didn’t want to take me to the market. I appreciate it.”

Genuine Rachel tripped him up even worse than Flirty Rachel. He stared at her, conscious of her earlier comments about how much she liked his voice. Which yesterday he’d have said was a thinly veiled mechanism to get him to do something outside of his comfort zone.

Today he could take it at face value. “No problem.”

“I like having an actual conversation with you.” She gave him a little push toward the bathroom that had zero effect because the day had not yet come when a woman who clocked in at half his weight could move him. “But you smell like dead seaweed. Off you go.”

Since that was likely true, he took the reprieve and washed the ocean from his skin. But he didn’t indulge in his normal shower fantasy of naked, quivering Rachel. Instead, he had the weirdest image of pulling her into his arms and letting their gazes meet in a tangible, breathing connection as the water sluiced down over them both, blanketing them in steam.

Something was definitely wrong with him. More so than usual.

The smell of fresh herbs drew him to the kitchen when he’d have sworn his feet had been pointed in the direction of his bedroom. That’s where he should have been headed. But the sound of Rachel humming was irresistible, especially since the little voice in his head poked at him with a pointed comment that she was cooking strictly for him.

She glanced up as he came into the kitchen, her ponytail swinging against her bare neck. “Hey. If you wanted to hang out with me while I finish these potatoes au gratin, I’d be okay with that. No pressure to serenade me. Unless of course you want to.”

Ha, his singing voice sounded exactly like what she’d likened his speaking voice to earlier—gravel in a blender. Instead of proving it, he crossed his arms and leaned against the counter. Because she’d asked him to stay, and that settled in his chest nicely. He watched with unveiled fascination as she sliced potatoes into a shallow dish he’d never seen before.

“I brought dishes with me from home,” she explained as if he’d spoken aloud. “I don’t know why. It’s not like there’s anything special about a Pyrex baking dish. But these are mine. I’ve made a lot of stuff in them over the years, and I don’t know… They have memories, you know?”

He shook his head. He’d taken nothing from the house in Coronado that he’d shared with Carrie, except some clothes, and that had only been because he’d be arrested if he walked around naked. Though jail might have been preferable to wearing T-shirts that his ex-wife had bought.

When he’d ended up in the Caribbean after that fateful visit from Charlie, he’d dug a hole in the sand and burned every stitch he’d brought from California. Dex had supplied the matches and helped Evan dispose of the ashes without a word.

“Yeah, you’re probably right. I’m overly sentimental.” She laughed as she laid the sliced potatoes into layers across the bottom of the dish. “If I’d have known I’d be using cookware to seduce a man, I’d have found something sexier than Pyrex.”

His brow quirked automatically, and she glanced at him.

“Oh, yeah. Make no mistake. Cookware is definitely sexy. Haven’t you seen all those commercials on TV where they deck out a hot, double D blonde in a tiny bikini and drape her over a set of kitchen knives? Oh, wait.” She touched her lip in mock dismay. “I might be confusing my objectification ad campaigns.”

Evan laughed because, well, he couldn’t help it. The way her eyes lit up at the sound made him wish for a repeat, though he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d laughed. The crappy day melted away by simple virtue of being around his roommate.

“I like your laugh too,” she informed him as she slid the baking dish in the oven and set a timer on the microwave. “I like that I can get you to.”

“I like it too,” he admitted and immediately regretted giving away so much intel.

But it didn’t change facts; there was a lot he liked about Rachel. When had that happened? It was a sobering enough realization to put a damper on the mood she’d unwittingly created, and he felt his good humor slipping away.

They were treading on dangerous ground, sliding toward a place he’d fight tooth and nail to stay out of. There was no room for anyone in his life to get comfortable—least of all him. No room for leggy brunettes masquerading as roommates, when no one was confused about what she ultimately wanted from him. Because it was the same thing he wanted, but he lacked the capacity to give it to her. All at once he mourned the big gaping hole where his soul should be.

It wasn’t fair to Rachel to even pretend they could act on all the sparks wheeling between them on a regular basis.

“Want to turn on some music? The dancey-er the better,” she suggested as her gaze wandered over his, apparently zeroing in on his abrupt mood swing. When he scowled, she held up her hand. “You’d rather poke your eye out with a stick than listen to dance music. I get it. I’m sure you prefer angsty jazz with no lyrics, right?”

He didn’t bother to respond in the affirmative since she’d already demonstrated a pretty good ability to read his mind. She did that a lot lately, holding a one-sided conversation that he somehow participated in despite never uttering a blessed word.

His mood soured further. Was he that transparent? Or had he invited the one woman into his home that he couldn’t stonewall?

The next morning Rachel filed the injunction against ReefCo, requesting the court to block the sale of Ilhota Rosa pending a separate filing to name the area a wildlife preserve. She’d recommended listing a shell corporation as the plaintiff, which could be loosely tied to Aqueous Adventures through a series of backdoor legalities, but Charlie had insisted on his name being front and center. No reason to hide, he’d claimed, especially not when Jared Anderson had more lawyer puppets on a string than a marionette factory. He’d unearth the culprit in a New York minute regardless.

By lunchtime Rachel had ducked four phone calls from Anderson’s “people” and fielded a dozen or more e-mails.

To say the billionaire was pissed would be an understatement.

But it wasn’t until the last phone call—from Anderson himself, which she took because she couldn’t resist—that she started to get a little worried she’d miscalculated. Charlie and Evan had taken an early group of resort guests on a snorkeling excursion to Ilhota Rosa, and she’d already texted them both to come straight to the house when they docked.

Finally, a full nail-biting hour later, she heard the front door open and close. Charlie’s sex-on-a-stick baritone called out, but she was already halfway to the living area, laptop in hand. She set it on the coffee table in case she needed to refer to anything.

“We have a problem,” she said without preamble as both Charlie and Evan swung around to face her.

Evan’s shadowed expression wrung her heart, choking off its blood supply. Why else would the stupid organ suddenly hurt so badly unless she was going into cardiac arrest?

The worst part was that he didn’t even know what she was going to say. That dark veil that had dropped over his demeanor was only going to get darker once he realized how badly she’d screwed up.

“Come in and sit down. Can I get you something to drink?” she asked Charlie, because she was a hostess with the mostess in the middle of a crisis, like all good Jewish women. “This might take a while.”

“Nah. Lay it on me.” Wearily Charlie ran a hand through his spiky, sun-kissed blond hair, biceps rolling with the motion below the cuff of his Aqueous Adventures T-shirt. He flung himself onto the couch as he often did, his long, solid body taking up a good bit of real estate.

Evan settled into the other end of the couch, leaving her the choice to either remain standing or plop down in the middle of the testosterone-fest going on in her living room.

She didn’t like either choice, so she wedged herself onto the arm of the couch—on Evan’s end of course because it was easier to face Charlie from that angle. Or at least that was her story and she was sticking to it, even when Evan glanced up her with a half-mast eyebrow that clearly indicated the proximity of her leg to his forearm. Which was too close for his comfort apparently.

Tough cookies. This was an emergency, and she liked the feel of his body heat.

“Anderson has countered the injunction with one of his own,” she admitted without sugar coating it because the only way to deal with this was head on. “If Ilhota Rosa is being considered for wildlife preserve status, ReefCo would like to protect it from harm by blocking its use from commercial ventures.”

Charlie’s gaze narrowed instantly, taking on a pure lethal edge. “Including Aqueous Adventures I gather?”

“Yeah, exactly.” She glanced at Evan as his hands fisted against his thighs.

He made a noise in his chest that she’d never heard before, and it wrenched through her painfully. He was far more pissed than she would have expected. Far more pissed than she’d ever seen him, and it slithered through her with slick tendrils that crept into unlikely places.

She didn’t like it when his aura went so black it bled over into hers, which was a little frightening, frankly.

When had she begun empathizing with him to
that
degree? She didn’t do empathy, and she sure as hell didn’t do this wave of raw emotion that had splashed through her. She cut it off. Ruthlessly.

“Can he do that?” Evan growled as his arm slid tight against her leg, though it was surely an accident. But then he didn’t move it, and it was almost possible he’d subconsciously sought her heat as well.

She nodded, though Evan was so subdued she almost wished she’d had some ability to lie. But this was her miss, and she had to pull on her big-girl panties like any professional who had made an error. “He has as much right to file an injunction as we do.”