Wicked Sexy

“No,” she corrected him. “It was about your kissing me on the beach ten years ago and then taking off.”

He was completely focused on her, and she’d bet he knew exactly how many feet separated them—and how long it would take him to close the distance. “I didn’t realize one kiss was an invitation to stay.”

“You didn’t want to stay,” she pointed out. In fact, he’d left the island the very next day. Their kiss had been amazing and the only good part of her evening, but she wasn’t telling him that now.

“You were a girl.” He made a move toward her and she threw up a hand.

“Stop right there,” she ordered and he paused. He should have looked silly, surrounded by the cabin’s kitschy romantic trappings. He wasn’t the sort of man a woman associated with tulle, and yet he’d never looked more male. Yep. He was getting to her again.

And he wasn’t done talking yet.

“Where did you think that kiss could go? And I had no business kissing you in the first place.”

“But you did.”

He ran a hand over his head. “Yeah. I did.”

“And then you hightailed it off the island. Never called. Never wrote.” She tossed him the keys and he caught them reflexively, his fingers closing over the metal. “I got the message. You need anything else, you call the front desk.”

“I had commitments,” he said, ignoring her invitation to wrap things up. “I’d enlisted. My recruiter would have been all over me and rightfully so if I’d missed my dates.”

“So you had no business kissing me?”

“Agreed,” he snapped.

“Fine. But it’s not happening again.” She turned on her heel, laying a course for the door. She was done here.

4

THE SANDY TRAIL leading to the beach was steep, and Daeg heard Dani coming before he saw her. Long, tanned legs in a pair of denim shorts followed a shower of gravel and a feminine voice. The summer heat was still lingering despite the forecast calling for rain. Swimming weather—as Dani with the towel slung over her shoulder clearly agreed.

One lap to go, he drove himself forward through the water. When he reached the far edge of the bay, right before the open water started, he dived for as long as he could. The week since he’d checked into Sweet Moon was one more week of training and strengthening his knee, though it still bothered him far more than he liked.

Dani was waiting for him when he pulled himself out of the water and dropped onto the sand beside her. Crossing his arms over his chest, he began a series of fast sit-ups. Flexing his stomach muscles until his elbows hit his knees, he sank into the familiar burn of the descent as he let gravity do the work, dropping his shoulder blades to the sand. Then up again. He had to do more than fifty-two in two minutes, yet, in fact, a hundred was barely average. He’d do better.

She was quiet as he completed his two minutes, and then she asked, “You always work this hard?”

He liked how her eyes lingered on his stomach as she spoke. He stopped and rolled onto his side.

“I need to fix this.” He gestured toward his leg. There was no hiding the scar, anyhow. Not that he wanted to. No, what he wanted to do was use the leg like he once had.

“In one week?”

One summer. One chance to make the team again. “My guys are out there, seeing action, so that’s where I go.”

“So that’s a definite on re-upping?”

Triceps bouncing, he pushed up fast and hard on his arms for his first push-up. One. He lowered himself, a fist’s distance from the sand then surged upward. Two. “That’s the plan,” he said finally, when he’d done the set. “Although Tag and Cal aren’t.”

Deep Dive was Cal’s dream, not his, but there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for his friend. Coming back to help him get his business off the ground was a given. Cal had had his back since their first dive together.

“They opened that new shop, Deep Dive.”

Deep Dive was far more than a dive shop. “They specialize in advance training for divers and do rescue and salvage jobs. They also offer the usual set of bread-and-butter dives to local hotspots.”

“Where do you fit in?”

That was the question. His teammates had decided to call Discovery Island home. He’d made a cash contribution and the temporary commitment to leading a training course or two when he was on leave, but he wasn’t ready to settle down. Not yet.

“I’m lending a hand,” he replied finally. “I’ll take experienced groups out on open-water dives and push the hell out of them to make sure they know what they’re doing. And I’ll wrap the current course and head back to San Diego and my unit.”

He’d ship out and life would resume its routine.

Switching onto his back, he looked up at her. Carpe diem.

“Come with me. We’ll go find more of that ice cream. Take another walk.”

“You eat ice cream on a regular basis?” Her eyes examined his body again and parts of him liked her attention just fine.

“I like sweet things.” His imagination worked overtime coming up with all the ways she’d be sweet. What would she let him taste and how far could he go? “I always have.”

She stood up, snatching her towel from the sand. She must have decided against the swim. Or picked up on the sexual tension humming through his body because, yeah, she was bolting on him. “No ice cream.”

“Why not?”

She smiled at him and, yes, that was one mean smile. He liked that spunk in her. She wasn’t going to make this easy. “Our dating wouldn’t go anywhere.”

“Ice cream,” he stated plainly. “I’m asking for one cone—not the next fifty years of your life.”

Dani looked skeptical. He was fairly certain she was running scenarios in her head, counting the possible outcomes and risks. He knew that sharing a second cone would be more than a quick, sweet treat. The question was, did she?

“Going for ice cream counts as a date. Are we dating? Because I was under the distinct impression that we’d already covered that—and ruled it out.”

“It would be fun,” he countered. “Take a chance. Jump on in.”

“Do you like doing it?” Her teeth worried the full lower lip. “Jumping?”

“Sometimes jumping is the only way to get the job done.” It had never occurred to him to not jump.

“That’s a hard way to live.”

Nothing worth doing came easy, and he always loved a challenge. He had a feeling the woman sharing the beach with him understood that—she just found her challenges somewhere else.

She continued. “So what happens if—when—you jump in and you can’t pull the other person out?”

The memory flickered to life. He’d already had his backside hoisted into the chopper and the mission had been a routine rescue. He and Lars had put the survivor in the basket and sent him up. Daeg had gone next because of the hit he’d taken in the water, making him incapable of a climb he’d done hundreds of times before.

And then the ocean had sucked Lars under as their spotter barked curses and directions to Tag. Too late. Lars had disappeared beneath the tsunami’s deadly debris-filled water. Cal had signaled he was going back in and dived. Dived and dived again, until Cal hadn’t had the air in his tank to keep going. The chopper, too, had been dangerously low on fuel.