This time, she was sporting dry clothes and bare feet as she ran a towel over her hair. He eyed her
cautiously. She looked more relaxed—but only slightly.
“I’ve been thinking,” she announced, her eyes widening when she spotted his fire.
“Uh-huh,” he said noncommittally.
“I want to try going back to town.”
Right. She was tenacious. Under other circumstances, that would be intriguing. And possibly a very,
very good thing if she brought that determination to bed, but right now, it made him want to growl. Loudly.
“You’ve been outside, you know what the conditions are like.” He said these words carefully. Play nice, he reminded himself.
“I have Mr. Ramsey’s medicine.” She pointed to her purse. “He needs it and, at some point, the storm is going to pass over us.”
He opted for show-and-tell, striding to the front door, unlocking and opening it. That gave her a
ringside seat for the rain and wind whipping around Sweet Moon’s driveway. The Jeep, parked not fifteen feet away, was almost invisible. “Exhibit A. You’ve got ten, maybe fifteen minutes of daylight left. Rain.
And wind. You’re in for the night. Get used to it.”
She stepped forward and had a long-distance look. He was fairly certain she cursed.
“I drove us here. I can drive us into town.” Her objection must have sounded weak to her own ears,
because she pursed her lips and glared at the rain.
He shrugged, shutting the door. “It’s safer to wait until tomorrow morning.”
And since her car was the one currently swimming in the ocean, he figured she was at his mercy as far
as transportation went. He flexed his knee. Even if he would make a crappy chauffeur at the moment, he
was still the person in possession of the car keys.
He’d let the facts speak for themselves, however. His Dani liked facts. “Listen to the radio.”
While he tuned the dial, she marched around the cabin picking up his wet things. He’d seen soldiers go
into battle with less fury. He was tempted to start dropping the odd sock just to tease her. Concentration furrowed her face as the radio cycled through a recorded message about weather conditions, the forecast and a warning to remain wherever you were.
“Fine,” she said and he grinned.
She disappeared into the bathroom. The slap of wet cotton said she was hanging up his things.
Forcefully. “Tomorrow morning?”
“More likely than tonight,” he called back. “So there’s nothing stopping you from sitting down in front of this fire.”
She entered the room and eyed the fireplace. Then her gaze went to the love seat parked in front of the flames. He sensed she was still making up her mind about him. “They teach you how to start fires in basic training?”
“Sure.” He pushed back the memories, watching with satisfaction as she moved toward the fireplace.
They’d taught him lots of things.
He’d trained hard. He trusted his mind and body—he knew precisely what he was capable of on a
number of levels. His instincts were honed. He reacted when he encountered a situation, but he rarely talked about it ever.
Actually, he didn’t talk much, period. He’d never been particularly smooth with women. Obviously, he
loved sex and a woman’s body. But before, it had always been only really good sex. If he were honest with himself, he didn’t know how to give anything else but pleasure to a woman, but his instincts screamed that Dani deserved more than that. Much, much more. So if he wanted this woman, he would have to figure out
how to give her whatever she needed.
Plus, he had her chart.
That was his ace in the hole.
Rummaging in his duffel, he came up with a pair of thick, navy-issue socks. Now was no time for bare
feet.
“Pull up a seat,” he invited her, and showed her the socks. “Get comfortable. It’s going to be a long
night.”
THE ODDS OF her heading back to town now were zero.
The emergency-broadcast channel was static-filled, but the message was clear. She still had hours until the storm passed.
Dani knew a sure thing when the numbers stared her in the face. Inches of rain and hurricane-force
winds said she stayed put. The question was: What were the odds she got her spec ops soldier into bed?
She was a reformed woman—confident, sexy. Sure of what she wanted. She might be less certain about her
sexual wish list, but she was sure about Daeg. He was certainly easy to look at. His hair was mussed, his eyes sparkling and intense. The ancient cotton T-shirt and sweats he was wearing only made him seem
more rugged and attractive. She shouldn’t be staring at him.
She could stare at the fire.... Oh, right, he’d built her a fire. She wanted to curl up in front of it and never move. And if she avoided him, that would be the safer option.
“Marshmallow?” He waved the plastic bag at her and she bit back a moan of pleasure. Sugary, sticky
goodness. He’d guessed her weakness with stealth-like precision.
She eyed him suspiciously and nodded toward the fireplace. “I thought you were worried about fires.”
He smiled and shrugged. “A fireplace isn’t a candle. Let’s give it a shot. Worst-case scenario, the storm dumps a load of water down the chimney and leaves us sitting in total darkness again. I’ll take that chance if you will.”
For the next two hours, while the storm winds picked up and the rain came down hard and then harder,
he shared stories about his stint in the military and asked questions about her life on the mainland. The more he talked, the more Dani could feel herself warming up in every way possible. She wanted to kick
being cautious to the curb, just once. And she wanted to enjoy. Daeg Ross could guarantee that before the night was over.
“So you’re part of the mission once you’re on the ground, is that right?”
His warm gaze met hers as he dropped an arm around her shoulders. “Uh-huh. Though I can fly the
helicopter as well as swim.”
“Handy,” she said solemnly. “You clearly gave up a lot to come back here to Discovery.”
“I’m only here on loan.” Laughter filled his voice. “Can’t see me being a teacher for that advance diving class, but hey, I always help out when called.”
He was dependable...reliable...
The fire was dying down now, but she didn’t want to move or risk losing the magic of his strong
fingers stroking her skin.
“The Black Hawk we usually fly is a big bird,” he continued, “but she has to be. She carries two
hundred gallons of fuel. Tag puts her up and we can cover more than four hundred nautical miles before
we have to turn around and refuel. She’s strong enough to take the hoist that was the lifeblood of our ops, too. We don’t land the chopper on a job. Hell, you don’t even have to land to refuel—just put her over the stern of a Coast Guard ship and let the boys toss us a line.”
“You love it. What you do,” she explained when he looked at her.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t worry about the danger? Never mind,” she said quickly. “That’s a stupid question.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Sometimes I worry,” he admitted, “but most of the time, I’m acting on
instinct. And that’s why I train. I do my thinking and worrying before I fly, but as soon as I’m out over the water, I just do. You want to get in, get out with whoever is in the water. That’s the only thing that matters.”
Okay, so she never went on instinct. He clearly led a very different life. And yet, no matter how
adventurous or heroic it sounded, she sensed she was missing something. She laid her head on his chest
and tucked her arms around his waist, feeling the tension in the muscles of his arms. She couldn’t fix what he wouldn’t share, but her instincts screamed to for her to hold on to him. To let him know that he didn’t have to be alone.
“YOU THINKING ABOUT your man down? The one in the Indian Ocean?” She whispered the
question, turning her head to see his face. Her expression betrayed a fear that possibly he’d be lost one day.
He wanted to assure her, but that was the thing about fighting for your country. Sometimes good men did go out and never came back.
“You do what you can, you do everything you can and then sometimes it turns out that’s just not
enough.” He tried to shake the melancholy. Here they were, sitting in a decked-out romantic suite that she’d planned to share with someone else. Someone she’d believed was special, even if the man had clearly
turned out to be the biggest jerk of them all. If Daeg had been the one with that invite, he realized, nothing would have kept him away.
She was still watching him. “It can’t all be happy endings. I’ve seen the stats.”
Of course she had.
“The thing is, Lars put me in the basket and I went up. He could have gone first.”
“You were injured.”
“Not that badly,” he said fiercely. “That should have been a routine evac and it wasn’t.”
She rested her hand on his leg and stroked gently. “I’ve seen the scar,” she said. “That was no scratch.”
“I went up, safe and sound. When the basket got to the edge of the bird, I turned my head, looked
down.”
“And you saw him drown.”