“This probably isn’t about you, but if it is, you should stay here. I’ll find you some clothes to sleep in and a toothbrush—”
Another knock at the door interrupted him, and he cursed. “Okay, so that’s, uhm…That’s a friend. I’m just going to explain to her that my plans have changed for the night—”
“Oh, god. No. I’ll go.”
The knocking resumed, this time in a playful pattern, and they jockeyed around each other to get to the door first. Drew won, and pressed his hand flat against Annie’s chest. “Seriously, stay.” He took a peek through the peephole. Shit. Dana was wearing a trench coat. That could only mean one thing.
He took a deep breath and opened the door. “Dana, before you open that coat, you should know I’ve got a guest.”
The bouncy blonde grinned and sashayed in. “Isn’t that the kind of thing you should ask a girl if she’s into first?”
“It’s not like that. We’ll—”
Annie cleared her throat and stepped into the open doorway. “I’ll head out so you can continue with your plans.”
Dana looked Annie up and down and spun back to Drew. “What’s going on here?”
Drew sighed. “It’s a long story. Annie, please don’t leave.” He braced his arm across the doorway, blocking her exit. “Dana, this is Annie, the sister of an old friend, and she’s going to be staying with me for a few days. Maybe I’ll call you next week.”
Dana pursed her lips. “Maybe?”
What the hell? Yes, maybe. That was their deal. In the three months they’d known each other, they’d hooked up seven or eight times. There was no guarantee of more sex. No dating. Just…easy. And if it wasn’t easy, he didn’t need any drama. “Or not. Up to you, okay?”
She hitched her shoulders and tightened her belt. “Or not sounds about right. Have fun on your sleepover, Drew.”
Annie stepped out of the way and Drew lifted his arm, and as quickly as Dana had swirled into their conversation she was gone again. He pressed the door shut and threw the deadbolt and safety latch. “Okay, so I’ll get you—”
“No.” Annie shook her head. She’d crossed her arms at some point, and from the firm set of her shoulders, wasn’t planning to uncross them any time soon. Shit. Was this a girl code thing?
“That was just a misunderstanding.”
“Like, where you misunderstood how to be a human being?”
Jesus Christ. “Pardon?”
“You really hurt her feelings!”
“So? Feelings weren’t supposed to enter into it! Not my problem she saw you and got catty. Maybe she was jealous.” Drew tamped down his annoyance. They had bigger things to worry about than Dana and her temper tantrum.
“That’s ridiculous. She didn’t get upset until you said,” Annie cleared her throat and dropped her voice a register. “Or not. Up to you, babe.”
“I didn’t say babe. She’s not my babe.” He rolled his eyes and stalked off to his bedroom. He yanked open his top drawer and pulled out a black t-shirt and the smallest, lightest pair of running shorts he owned. She’d still be swimming in them, but they had a drawstring waist. He’d changed his sheets earlier, in anticipation of the ill-fated hookup, so he tossed the clothes on the bed and stalked back to the living room.
Annie had shrugged out of her blazer and was laying her jewelry carefully on the raised kitchen counter. Chunky necklace, matching bracelet, sparkly earrings. It all looked good, but without it she looked nice in a different way. Pretty. Young. He searched his memory. She was ten years younger than Kevin, who was a year Drew’s junior. Twenty-five, and she dressed like a school principal. Acted like one, too.
She was going to make some guy’s life hell. Drew chuckled to himself. With good sparring might come angry sex, though, and that would be fun.
Dude, that’s my fucking sister.
He took a step back into the hallway and scrubbed his palm against his jaw. Shit. Where had that thought come from?
I don’t know, asshole, but lock it down.
Consider it locked, bro. Drew cleared his throat and moved forward to try again. “The bedroom is yours for the night, I’ll take the couch.”
She swung past him, avoiding his gaze. When she reached the doorway to his room, she paused, then glanced up. “I’m sorry about commenting on your private life. It’s none of my business.”
He shrugged. “Sort of was, given it played out like that in front of you.”
“If you want me to talk to her, tell her there’s nothing to be jealous about…” She waved her hand. “Once all of this is sorted out, if you want her to be your babe after all. She seemed…” Annie cleared her throat. The obvious choice there would be nice, but Dana wasn’t really that. “Fun.”
Yeah, she was fun.
But as he turned off his PlayStation and grabbed a blanket from the hall closet, it wasn’t images of Dana sliding all over his body that he had to push away. And when he woke up to screams in the middle of the night, it wasn’t worry about Dana that made his heart leap into his throat.
Chapter Two
‡
Annie clawed her way to full consciousness, desperate to escape the awful noises in her dream. As she blinked awake, she realized she was the source, moaning and groaning under her breath. Drenched in sweat and shaking like a leaf, she gulped for air and took what little she could see in the strange room around her. Clean sheets, big bed. That belonged to Drew Castle. Douchebag extraordinaire and real-life hero.
And then he was in the doorway, his large body tense and at the ready. “Annie?” Light flooded into the room from the hall behind him, and instead of moving directly to her, he looped the long way around the bed and flicked on a lamp.
She opened her mouth but nothing came out. Fear squeezed around her neck and across her chest, and she couldn’t prevent tears from welling up and spilling down her cheeks.
“Jesus, Annie.” He came around to her side and crouched, his gaze darting from her face to her phone, which sat untouched on the bedside table, then back to her face and finally down her body. “Nightmare?”
Must have been, she thought silently. Holy fuck.
“You didn’t get another call? You aren’t hurt?”
She shook her head.
He glanced at the alarm clock next to the lamp. “It’s the middle of the night. Any chance you’re going to get more sleep?”
Another shake. Not a chance in hell. She cleared her throat, tentatively testing her vocal cords. “Is—” Her voice cracked. “Is there anything we could do about the message right now?”
“Most of the Intel guys won’t be in until 0800, but I think we should go grab some breakfast and then head to the base. If only to help you feel safe.” He hung his head. “We shouldn’t have stayed here last night.”
His regret was palpable, and she scrambled onto her knees, shaking her head. “I do feel safe with you.” The simple truth of the words made her feel better. She shook her head again, ridding herself of the creepy feeling she’d woken up with. “No, I wasn’t scared last night. I’m not sure what my dream was about, it was too abstract to explain, but that’s all I’m freaked out about.”
He lifted his head and cocked one eyebrow. “Would diner breakfast make it better?”
She couldn’t help but laugh. He was a grown man, but crouched beside the bed he looked like an eager kid, and his smile warmed her from the inside out. “Absolutely.”
It didn’t take her long to wash up and get dressed in yesterday’s clothes. What had she been thinking, hopping in her car and driving south from L.A. without a bag of stuff?
She hadn’t been thinking. Driven by adrenaline and fear, she’d tunnel-visioned on the fact that Drew Castle was the only person in the world she could trust when it came to her brother’s memory. And even now, knowing that he was an overgrown teenager, that didn’t change anything. Kevin had been the same way, chasing anything in a skirt and kicking back with boy toys at every opportunity.
And it didn�
��t matter what or who Drew did in his spare time if he could help her. A tremor of something suspiciously pride-like niggled at the back of mind as she reflected on the fact that he’d dropped both his video game and his booty call to help her, and she pushed that thought away. She wasn’t a teenager anymore, in awe of the sex-on-a-stick SEAL lounging in her family room after a big Easter dinner.
Ten years ago she’d have given anything for Kevin and Drew to look at her as more than a kid. But as it got dark, they’d gone out without a backwards glance, and Annie had drifted off to sleep wondering what it would be like to be sexy enough to capture the attention of a grown man.
Ha, she snickered. They were barely older than she was now. How much her perspective had changed in that near decade.
But her big brother had taken his job seriously, and his family as well. More than one holiday had been spent perfecting “What to do in a Zombie Apocalypse” plans. Annie understood Kevin was making sure she knew how to protect herself. He’d taught her to shoot, to fight dirty, what to yell at the top of her lungs to grab maximum attention and how to be stealthy.
The last tips came in very handy in her last year of high school.
The first time she got drunk with Kevin, on the Christmas Eve of her twentieth year, she shared how helpful he’d been to her teenage social life. And he told her about some epic drives down the Eastern Seaboard with Drew for crazy weekend leaves. It had been a rare moment of sibling bonding, almost as equals. The following year, their parents were gone, killed in a head-on collision with a minivan. No more Christmas Eves with her brother.
He’d offered to come home, but she had friends with large families. With no shortage of holiday feasts for her to attend, it didn’t make sense for him to travel at peak time when it was just the two of them. They’d have time for that in the future when they had families of their own.
Annie blinked back unexpected tears and shook off the melancholy memories. No time to get lost in what might have been. Some asshole was messing with her brother’s memory, and that couldn’t stand. She straightened her shirt and joined Drew in the living room, just in time to see him tuck a handgun into a concealed holster at his hip.
“Is that really necessary?”
He turned and smirked as she reached for the jewelry she’d left on the counter the night before. “I could ask you the same about that stuff.”
“My stuff can’t kill someone.” She kept her tone playful, because she had no doubt that his was the safest concealed carry around, but did people really just do that?
Had Kevin? Due to their age difference and his career choice, she hadn’t known her brother as well as she’d have liked. There was supposed to have been time for that later as well.
Of course, that meant she didn’t really know Drew, either. How much of her opinion of him was colored by her memories of a brash older brother who played hard and resisted taming?
As if he could read her mind, he patted the gun. “I don’t wear it all the time. I just…”
Yeah. There was something about having a stranger show up on your doorstep worried about boogeymen that brought out the paranoia. “No worries.”
“Besides,” he muttered as he pulled on a sweater over his snug black t-shirt. “Your stuff is pointy. I’m surprised Kevin didn’t teach you a thing or two about using whatever’s on hand.”
She laughed. “He did.” She took a sobering deep breath. “I was just thinking about that, actually.”
He opened the door and gestured for her to move into the hall. As they made their way to the elevator, Drew regarded her with quiet curiosity, but he refrained from asking just which Kevin memory she’d gotten lost in. She was just about to offer something to keep the conversation going when he made a gruff noise in his throat and changed the subject. “We can take my car. I park underground.”
She bobbed her head in agreement, and before too long they were buckled into a sports car that seemed way too small for his oversized frame. But he drove it with ease, his long, lean fingers dancing around on the gear shift, his right knee bopping against the center console panel whenever he wasn’t accelerating. She found herself following the long curve of his arm up to his shoulders, round with working muscles, and then down the front of his body. She wondered idly if he looked larger than life when naked as well, and as that thought twirled around in her head, she turned and looked out the window, afraid the pink of embarrassment would give her away. What was wrong with her? From panic to pervert in less than five minutes.
Her friends would protest that looking was just fine, but it really wasn’t when it was your dead brother’s best friend who was trying to help you figure out why you’d been creep-stalked. Besides, looking at Drew probably got women in trouble. Women like Dana. God, he might be the world’s nicest friend, but Drew Castle had shown the night before that he could be a first-class dog when it came to women, and no good would come of imagining him in his underwear.
Or out of it.
He drove northeast out of downtown, and before too long they pulled up in front of an old-school diner lit up with blue neon lights. They seated themselves in a booth and a waitress showed up a moment later with a steaming pot of coffee and two menus.
“Hey, honey.” She smiled at Drew, a friendly middle-of-the-night grin. “Where are your friends?”
“Pushed ’em off the boat.” He slid his mug forward and turned to Annie. “Coffee?”
“God, yes.” She offered them both a weak smile. Breakfast at four in the morning, in the middle of drama…sure, everyone just act like it’s just another day at the office. But for Drew and Sarah, if her nametag could be trusted, it was exactly that.
They ordered—two eggs with ham for Annie, three with steak for Drew—and after Sarah whirled away with a pop of her gum, Drew leaned back in the booth and notched his head to the side, regarding her with unvarnished curiosity.
“What?”
“You’re handling this well.”
“Doesn’t feel like it on the inside, trust me. I’m a fish out of water.”
He lifted his mug and sipped slowly, his eyes trained on her the whole time. “So what is your water?”
“UCLA. I’m a graduate student there.”
He stilled for a moment, his mug in mid-air, then he set it down and eased forward over the table. “Really? That’s great.”
She laughed. “I’m not sure how great it will be when I’m looking for a job at the end of my studies. I’m in the History Department.”
“Ancient History?”
“Nope. The exact opposite actually. Modern American History.”
“Fascinating.” From the way his eyes had lit up, and the keen interest all over his face, she actually believed him. A warm flush started in the middle of her chest and radiated up and out. “Kevin said that you were smart, but he never—” He cut himself off and reached across the table to touch her hand. “I’m sorry. He talked about you all the time. I just wasn’t the greatest listener.”
It wouldn’t have occurred to Annie that Drew, or anyone else, would find her studies anything other than boring. But with his warm, strong fingers branding themselves on her skin, she was having trouble thinking of a way to reassure him it was fine. “Uhm…”
He shifted his grip, slipping down and around her hand so his fingers cupped hers and his thumb traced over the round pad of flesh on her palm. “I’m listening now, Annie. I’m glad you came to me last night. I’m going to help you.” She glanced up, reluctant to look away from the hypnotic pattern he was tracing on her skin, but something in his voice snapped through her silliness. She looked at him, and he looked at her, something heady and tempting on his face, but then he licked his lips and shuttered his gaze. “I’m going to be there for you because Kevin can’t. Think of me as his surrogate, okay?”
No, she wanted to shout. You can’t sit there like sex-on-a-stick and ask me to think of you like a brother! There was no way she’d be stupid enough to actually sleep with the man, but
if he kept invoking her brother’s name, it would make her future filthy fantasies incredibly awkward. “Sure.”
They both retreated to coffee and private thoughts until Sarah returned with plates piled high with food. As the scent of buttered sourdough bread, perfectly cooked ham and heavily seasoned hash browns filled her nose, Annie’s mouth started watering and her stomach growled loud enough to grab Drew’s attention. He glanced up from his plate with a smirk and she blushed. “I didn’t eat dinner last night.”
“This is dinner and breakfast all rolled into one.” He pointed with the back end of his fork. “Dig in. You’re not going to offend me.”
That hadn’t been on her mind. She wrinkled her brow and shook her head.
“What?” He washed down his mouthful of food with a big gulp of coffee.
“Do women usually eat like dainty flowers around you?”
“No.” He laughed. “I don’t usually eat with the women I…hang out with.”
Wow. That was even less sexy than the surrogate brother comment. “That’s…nice.”
He cocked one eyebrow, but didn’t respond again.
She started to slow down as her plate emptied, and when he looked up again, his smirky tone had shifted back to the keen interest of before. “So, history. What’s your specific area of interest?”
“Economics. One of my advisors specializes in modern world capitalism, the other in American political history. My interest is the financing of grassroots political activism, but it’ll be a while before I get to my own research. For now I’m taking classes and working as a research assistant on other projects.”
“Shoot, that’s pretty cool. And your dad was a professor, right?”
She nodded. “Yep. Public Policy at USC. That’s where I did my undergraduate studies. I had to have a special course schedule in my third year because his class was a required component.” She knew her voice was wistful, but this was Drew. She might not know him very well, but instinctively she understood she didn’t need to hide her pain from him. “Him teaching me would have been a conflict of interest, so I took an equivalent course online. That was probably harder, having him grill me to see if I was learning everything I needed to know from some other teacher.”
SEALs of Summer: Military Romance Superbundle - Navy SEAL Style Page 51