Seal of Honor(88)

Not. Going. To. Cry.

Instead, she forced herself to sound casual as she said, “Raffi mentioned word’s getting out about your team’s success.”

Gabe winced and nuzzled her leg. “I wouldn’t call it a success. We still don’t know who was pulling Jacinto’s strings. No way he came up with the abduction all on his own—he really was an idiot. But the EPC has publicly denied involvement and so have the other guerilla organizations.”

“But you got the bad guys and saved my brother and started making a good reputation for your team. I’d call that a success.”

“Yeah, guess so.” He didn’t sound convinced. “We’ve been flooded with contract offers. Mostly private security gigs, but I haven’t accepted any yet and won’t for a while. The guys are going through some serious training first. They’re all at SERE school right now, except for Quinn. He’s setting up our new office in D.C.”

“SERE school?” She lifted an eyebrow at the relish in his tone. “Do I even want to know?”

“Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training,” he explained.

“Oh, that sounds…horrible.”

“It is. The guys’ll hate every second of it, but it will make them stronger as individuals and a team.”

She poked his side with her index finger. “So why aren’t you there with them?”

“Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, and sure as hell don’t wanna do it again.”

“Says the oh great and fearless leader.”

He made a noncommittal sound and nuzzled her thigh again, kissing her through the skirt of her dress. “Besides, I have other things to do.”

“Hm.” She couldn’t wait to hear this. “Like?”

“Like comb through the flood of resumes I’ve gotten for new guys, figure out an easy-to-remember name for the team—I’m not going with HORNET—and set up an international office.”

“Oh.” Didn’t that just deflate her bubble? She’d thought for sure he was thinking more along the lines of taking her to bed for the next, oh, fifty years. “Well. I like HORNET.”

He lifted his head to give her a dark scowl. “You would.”

She bopped his forehead with her palm, intending to shove him back into the water, but with his arms still wrapped around her, the jerk dragged her in with him. She broke the surface sputtering, cursing him in English and Spanish. He laughed, and the man who didn’t know how to cut loose yanked her under again.

Having not taken a decent breath before going under, she struggled to get to the surface, but he held her tight and his mouth covered hers. He gave her his air, then licked the inside of her mouth, igniting sparks of pleasure in her belly. Hooking her legs around his waist, she found him fully erect. All it took was a shift of her dress and a wiggle of her hips and—oh, yes, he filled her up until she gasped into his mouth.

Gabe walked toward shore, careful not to break the contact of their mouths or bodies, and each step pushed him deeper, deeper, deeper. They broke the surface together, gulping air before their mouths fused again with urgency. He dropped to his knees in the surf and the skirt of her dress floated out around them in a pale yellow cloud.

“God, sweetheart,” he groaned and rolled his hips in a torturous sweet and slow rhythm that matched the beat of the waves. “I’ve missed you. You feel…so…good.”

Audrey nuzzled his neck, opened her mouth over the strong beat of his pulse. His skin tasted like salt and sand and her man, and she adored the way he shivered when she kissed him there. Unlike the other times they’d made love, the build to climax happened slowly, and the release, when it came, stretched out into oblivion, soft and lovely, like floating on a cloud. Gabe tangled his fingers in her hair to tilt her head up and kiss her forehead, her nose. Before taking her lips, he pressed deep one last time and moaned with his own climax. Audrey held him through it and laughed. Her heart felt so full it was either that or cry again.



LOS ANGELES, CA

“Danny? Honey, what are you still doing up?”

Danny Giancarelli looked up from his laptop and managed a smile for his sleepy-eyed wife despite the headache pounding directly in the center of his forehead. She wore a ratty USMC T-shirt from his military days, which he’d given her before his deployment after 9/11. Leah said she’d worn it to bed every night for the entire year that he was gone and even now, all these years later, it was still her favorite nightshirt. His, too. She’d been wearing it the day he’d arrived home when he, knowing without a doubt at the ripe old age of twenty that she was the woman for him, popped the question. She’d worn it on their wedding night, and it was sexier than any of the lingerie her girlfriends had bought her for her bridal shower. She’d also worn it the night they’d made their first baby, and every subsequent baby thereafter.