Her Mission With A Seal

Oh. My. God. He felt every bit as amazing in real life as he did in her dream.

Out of the darkness, Cole murmured against Nissa’s temple, “I promise I’ll keep you safe. No harm will come to you on my watch. You don’t have to be afraid.” His low voice was raw silk, caressing her skin and sending cascades of shivers down her spine.

They lay like that for several minutes, neither one moving, Nissa barely daring to breathe. The sexual tension between them stretched tighter and tighter until she thought it had to snap. Terrified of what that would mean, she cast about in her mind for something to say. Something to distract both of them from this endless, insane moment of raging mutual lust.

“I had the strangest dream,” she blurted.

“How strange?”

“You and I were swimming underwater. And we could breathe the water. You were some sort of sea-god. Poseidon, maybe.”

“I like this dream. And I do have a trident. Although mine is only on my SEAL pin and not real.”

He’d been all real in the dream, that was for sure. Just remembering the way she’d burned for him made her forehead break into a sweat now.

“Tell me more about this dream.”

Hah. As if she would confess in a million years about them being naked and crawling all over each other.

“That’s all there was. We were underwater, but we weren’t drowning. The water was clear and warm and bright turquoise. It looked as if we were near a tropical shore, not the Gulf of Mexico in the middle of a hurricane.”

“Good choice. Yesterday, those were the roughest seas I’ve ever seen.”

“So I’m not crazy to have been scared out of my mind?”

“Not at all. That was a daunting ride, and climbing aboard the Anna Belle with her so close to capsizing would have scared the bravest soul.”

“Were you afraid?”

His features twitched into a frown. “We’re trained during a mission to set feelings like fear aside. They get in the way of the work. But I did register that it was a dangerous situation in which we all could easily have died.”

She turned his words over in her mind, applying the filters her years as a CIA analyst had honed to a fine edge. It was probably as close as she would ever come to hearing a SEAL admit to being scared. And she had heard that SEALs were taught techniques for fear and pain control.

Cole murmured, startling her out of her analysis, “There had to be more to your dream.”

“How do you know? It was my dream.”

His low voice was soft like suede caressing her skin. “I know because you all but tore my clothes off and had your wicked way with me.”

Hot shame flooded her face. He knew. Cole knew exactly what she’d dreamed. Every sordid, sexy detail of her unconscious fantasy. She was never going to be able to look him in the eye again. Ever. Humiliation tasted sour in the back of her mouth, and an urge roared through her to curl up in a little ball, pull the quilt over her head and never come out from under it.

Without warning he rolled off the bed and the quilt lifted off of her abruptly, letting in a rush of cold air. She squeaked, but just as suddenly, the quilt was tossed back over her. She yanked it up around her neck, not that it would shield her from what he knew about her now.

“Where are you going?” she choked out.

“Back to the main room to check the water level outside. It’s my turn on the watch. I only came in here because I heard you making...sounds.” He added in a rush, “I wanted to make sure you were all right. That’s all.”

What kind of sounds had she been making? The way his voice had hitched over the word had suspicions leaping to mind that heaped embarrassment on top of her humiliation. Horror poured over her, her own personal ice bucket over the head. Some of that smoking-hot embrace had been real? Oh, God. How much of it? “What did I...what did we...”

“Do?” Cole murmured down at her. “Enough to seriously consider doing it again someday but not so much that you need to go looking for a shotgun just yet.”

She pulled the quilt up over her head then. But it didn’t stop her from hearing Cole’s quiet laughter as the bedroom door opened and he slipped out of the room, leaving her alone with her new best friends Shame and Self-recrimination.

Chapter 4 (#ud86239f5-24dc-5f1e-bd60-7c365878d708)

Cole made it out to the living room before he let go of the breath he’d been holding. Damn, that had been a near miss with total disaster. When he’d tried to wake up Nissa and she’d grabbed him, pulled him down on top of her and then all but crawled down his throat, he’d been in grave danger of succumbing to his attraction to her.

He abruptly understood the saying about a person’s world tilting on its axis. He felt off-balance, physically and emotionally, but also on some deeper, more fundamental level. As if his world would never be quite the same again. Which was doubly strange given that he considered himself to be the most thoroughly grounded of men, stable, unshakable and sure of who and what he was.

But that woman...throwing herself at him like that...the way she’d felt in his arms...the things she’d made him feel... This was uncharted territory for him.

Hell, any living, breathing man couldn’t fail to notice how fantastic she’d looked in that curve-hugging wet suit. Even with the hood up, she’d still been beautiful, and not many people could claim that. It wasn’t just the delicacy of her facial bones, either. It was those eyes. Huge and sapphire blue, they were impossible to look away from.

And when she’d wrapped her entire, slender body around him, drawing him into her, opening all of herself to him—

Stop it, he commanded himself. She was a job. Correction, a colleague. He would tear a new one in any of his guys who messed with her on the job. He had to hold himself to the same standard. He prowled around Bass, sprawled out on a bedroll in front of the stove, and went over to the window beside the front door to peer out a crack between the boards.

The water was coming up far too close for comfort. Hour by hour, the floodwaters had been swallowing the steps up to the raised platform. Only two steps were left. Jessamine had better pass on by soon, or they were going to be swimming in here.

He’d thought Bass’s suggestion to put a bunch of long planks up in the rafters had been overkill, but now he saw the logic. If the cabin flooded, they could climb up on the makeshift perch and pick up another six feet of protection from the storm surge.

Bass had also insisted they stow the ax up there, too. Apparently, it wasn’t uncommon for people to drown in their attics when they didn’t have the tools to break through their roofs. Lord, he would hate to have to go out in the storm, though. The wind had howled like a banshee for most of the day.

Cole glanced at his watch. Almost time for another update from the weather service on the storm. He went to the kitchen table where Ashe had set up the field radio and put on the headphones. He powered up the unit and listened in relief as the hourly report indicated that the eye of the storm had passed just west of New Orleans and Jessamine was beginning to weaken as it moved inland. They should get heavy rain and wind through the night, but sometime tomorrow, the worst of the hurricane should spin itself out and move on.

Praise the Lord and pass the potatoes. It had been no joke to get caught out in a major storm like this. Had they not found this sturdy cabin, they would likely have died, if not from drowning or exposure, then from flying debris.

The report went on to say that the eye wall had spared the city the worst of the wind damage, but unleashed a deluge of rain upon the hapless city. The new and improved levees, post-Katrina, were holding, and the city’s pumping system was dealing with the worst of the floodwater so far, but the city was without power and expected to be that way for days. Civilians and evacuees would not be allowed to return to their homes for at least another seventy-two hours.

He moved back to his post peering out the window. His flashlight beam turned the rain into a sheet of crystal particles flying past him horizontally. Everything beyond the porch was swirling, angry water. In the past hour or two, he’d started imagining that he felt the cypress pilings swaying slightly in the killer currents.

The foundation of the home only had to hold a little while longer. High tide was due in another hour, and then hopefully the water would start back down. Hopefully.

His lonely vigil gave him way too much time to think about his sexy encounter with the hot CIA analyst. He couldn’t shake the feel of her lithe body beneath his, her arms wrapped round him like she never wanted to let go, her mouth moving restlessly against his as if she couldn’t get enough of the taste of him.

He was by no means a monk. But he never had found a woman who was intelligent enough to hold his interest for the long term and who also was mellow enough to deal with his more autocratic tendencies. It was hard to break old habits, and he’d been a team leader for a long time. He was used to giving orders and having them followed. Even he knew that made him rotten husband material.

So over the years he’d settled for occasional friends with benefits, women he saw between missions and who wouldn’t question him about when he might leave or might return. He’d closed off the part of himself that would have enjoyed a family and a home, and he had become the job.

Which was all well and good as long as he had the job. But he was coming up on twenty years of active duty service and eligibility for retirement. In the current environment of budget cuts and force restructuring, he had no reason to believe he would be allowed to serve more than twenty years. This was his last year, and he’d decided to spend it in the field with his brothers and the missions he loved so much.

Midnight came and went, and he let Bass and Ashe sleep through their shifts on watch. They were both excellent operators and fine men. Asher Konig had found the woman for him and was deliriously happy with her, and Bass loved the cars he restored as much as any woman. Neither of them seemed to feel a hole in their lives.

And neither had he until Nissa Beck wrapped herself around him and all but begged him to take her in every sexy, dirty way he could think of. All of a sudden, he was vividly aware of the sacrifices he’d made for his work over the years, the loneliness, the coldness of the life he’d chosen. Sure, he had all the camaraderie he wanted with his fellow SEALs. But they didn’t comfort a guy in the dark when the nightmares came calling, and they didn’t make a home.

More disturbed than he cared to admit to himself, he watched the storm pass by. It was just outside, inches away, on the other side of a thin pane of glass and a few boards, but it didn’t touch him. It raged all round him, but he stayed safe inside this shell of a cabin, isolated and alone.

The rest of his life yawned before him, as lonely and isolated as this, and for once, he couldn’t push his fear of it away with an admonition to himself that he had years left before the end of life as a SEAL.