“Depends.” He pointed to a slim aluminum shell bobbing up and down just a few yards offshore. “Right
there you’ve got your basic panga-type boat—aluminum sides, no cover, fifty horsepower motor.” He
shrugged. “Not bad for a casual fishing trip inside a harbor or near shore, but nothing I’d want to trust my life to out on the open water. A bad storm’s going to toss one of those right up on the beach here if the owner doesn’t yank it out first. Then you’ve got your bigger boats.” He touched her shoulder lightly,
directing her attention to a handful of larger vessels anchored farther away. “If the mooring’s good, those boats might ride it out. Bumpy as hell, but as long as they don’t get hit by debris, they’ll still be there in the morning. Then,” he said, smiling wide, “you’ve got your biggest boats.”
“Biggest?” She laughed, and he tried to ignore the urge to lean in and kiss her.
“Yeah, biggest. As in my boat’s the biggest. Perfect for your average midlife crisis or deep-sea fishing.
Those guys hire the likes of me to pull the boat and get her under cover. Or, if they’re too cheap to pull the boat before the storm hits, they hire me after the fact to go salvage the pieces. You like sailing?”
She pursed her lips. “No. I don’t really care for the water much. Are they safe?”
“Enough.” He pushed the memories back. “I’ve pulled more than one captain out of the water.”
When she tilted her head, the question was clear in her eyes, so he continued. “With spec ops,” he
explained. “After I left here, I did a couple tours with a helicopter sea-combat squadron as a rescue
swimmer. We worked the Middle East and then Guam. I was the guy who jumped out of the chopper.”
Was. He could still go back. He’d only been here three days and it wasn’t too late to re-up if he got his leg in fighting condition.
“It takes a brave person to do something like that.” She glanced at him up and down. He’d like to think she lingered on the good bits, but he wasn’t going to kid himself. “Are you all right?” she asked finally.
“Never better. This is just a little R & R.” The first day of spec ops training, he’d learned the “I am all right” signal. If you weren’t all right, you were off the job because otherwise you were a liability to the team. As long as a man could stay in the water, he was okay. He could keep on getting the job done.
He eyeballed their destination. The ice cream shack was coming up fast. Too fast.
“How about you? Is this trip all pleasure?” he asked, because he didn’t want to be done talking with her and couldn’t explain why. Stepping up to the order window, he bought two cones. The place only had the
one flavor—chocolate and vanilla twisted together in a little cone. Her fingers grazed his as he handed her the napkin-wrapped cone, brushing aside her thanks for the cone before dropping a large bill into the tip jar.
“I had a vacation planned.” She looked down and fiddled with the tie on her bikini. “But now I’m
helping my grandparents out, so business as well as pleasure. They’re on a cruise celebrating their fiftieth and I’m holding down the fort while they’re away. They were going to hire a temp from an agency, but I
was here so...why not do it myself?”
“You’re walking on the beach.” He grinned at her. “The summer’s not a total loss.”
He headed back toward the water’s edge and she went with him.
She swiped at the ice cream, and now he knew why the ice cream shack had stayed in business for so
long. That tongue of hers catching the creamy treat had him imagining carnal acts he had no business
imagining. He wanted to wind his fingers in her hair and coax her down on the erection straining his jeans.
Instead, he took a desperate bite of his own cone, welcoming the cold.
HER SEXY SPECIAL ops soldier was all rough and tumble. Blunt. Big and hard and tough. Odds were,
he was also honorable, straight to the core. A man like him not only had rules—he kept to them. He was
temptation personified—and Dani was a woman on a diet.
No more men for her.
After all, she’d already lost one fiancé. No, scratch that. You lost library books and socks and house
keys. You lost those things because you couldn’t remember where you’d left them. As for her ex, she knew precisely where he was. Back in San Francisco with his new girlfriend.
Discovery Island was stunning at sunset, only a short distance away from the California mainland and
surrounded by all that blue water. A beach walk with this man had seemed safe enough. Besides, who
didn’t accept an offer of ice cream? The vanilla-and-chocolate sweetness was better than any orgasm she’d ever had, anyhow.
The chances of having a satisfying orgasm had gone down to nil when her fiancé had ditched her,
although she was certain the chances hadn’t been that good before. She checked on the man keeping pace
with her and reminded herself that she didn’t do casual sex. Not to mention her ex-boyfriend’s remark that having sex with her was far too predictable.
She took another bite of her ice cream cone.
Making cones with the soft-serve machine had been wonderfully precise, three twists of chocolate and
vanilla, then the flick to finish the cone off. Exactly three point five ounces. She’d weighed her first cones, just to make sure, but she’d been a pro almost from the start. From the hard pull of the handle to start the flow to the sugary cardboard taste of the cone that was always soggy by the time she reached the bottom, she’d known what to expect.
Predictable.
The man eating up the sand in long, restless strides next to her was anything but predictable, however.
Which made him perfect.
A burst of orange and yellow shot over their heads. The wind was strong enough that the beach ball
was really flying. From the accompanying protest right before the ball hit the water with a sharp smack, the ball’s owner hadn’t expected it to go airborne quite so far or so fast. Small feet sprinted toward the surf, kicking up sand before the child came to a screeching halt at the water’s edge. He must have been told not to go in alone.
Her flip-flops hit the sand as Daeg shoved his cone into her hand. There was good-natured laughter in
his voice as he pulled off his faded T-shirt. “I think we need a rescue here.”
The sight of that shirt coming off woke something inside her. The thin cotton had clung to some pretty
impressive muscles, but bare chested he was spectacular, all thick ridges of muscles and sun-bronzed skin.
He sported a handful of scars, including a long one that wrapped around his chest beneath two pairs of dog
tags.
Still grinning, he plunged into the chilly water, jeans and all.
He dived effortlessly after the ball. Waterborne, the limp vanished and all she could see was the power of that body as he skimmed the waves.
“He your boyfriend?” The child by her side leaned into her, watching Daeg pop up to the surface,
shaking water from his face as he snagged the ball.
“No.” That whole sworn-off-men thing.
“Why not?” Out of the mouths of babes.
Waist deep in the water, Daeg lobbed the ball back one-handed. The boy caught it, calling out his
thanks as he scampered down the beach.
“Gallant,” she called. How many men did she know who would have been willing to soak themselves to
the bone to rescue a child’s ball?
“Cold,” he countered, wading toward the shore. “We rescuers jump in first and think next. Occupational
hazard.”
This was it.
This was her second chance.
The denim was molded to his powerful thighs as he left the surf. Wet, those jeans left nothing to the
imagination—and boy, was she imagining things now. Starting with that sexy trickle down his chest as the water sluiced off him. Despite the June weather, the water was cold. His nipples were hard, tight nubs, and her mouth went dry. The look in his eyes was pure heat, though—and he was looking right at her. Stormy
eyes. Dark green and framed by those ridiculously long lashes, still damp from his swim.
She could do this. Before she could second-guess herself, she carefully tucked his half-eaten cone on
the ground beside his shirt and stepped into his body, sliding her arms up around his neck. The sensation of her skin meeting his was an icy shock.
“Nice rescue, sailor.”
Try as she might, she couldn’t spot any hesitation in him as he lowered his head to hers. The beach was almost empty now, the place all theirs. His eyes watched her until she wanted those lashes to drift shut, wanted him to lose himself in her. What if he didn’t desire her or she didn’t do this right? She shoved the hurtful memories of her ex’s accusations to a remote corner of her mind. Chances were, this could be
different.
Better.
Then he groaned, not from pain, but from pleasure. His arms came up around her waist and back, one
large hand resting on the back of her neck. Who knew that innocent touch could set her on fire so fast?
“You’re killing me, you know that? I want you right now and we haven’t even finished our walk yet.”
Sweet relief and even sweeter arousal shot through her. She’d never been naughty, exactly, but now she
tilted her head back as if she’d been born to flirt, trusting the weight of her head to that hand. Deliberately, she smiled, really slow. She could do this. Was doing this. “Kiss me,” she whispered. “Kiss me right now. ”