by Anne Marsh
“No vacancies,” she snapped before he said a word.
Instead of leaving, he rested his forearms on the counter and looked over at her computer monitor. The antiquated booking system at Sweet Moon’s had been the first thing Dani had tackled. In the week she’d been on the island so far, she’d researched and installed a new software package. She’d also worked through her grandparents’ highly personal style of bookkeeping and created an organizational system that would not only move Sweet Moon’s into a more current century but be something her grandparents could run. Keeping busy was good. Productive, even. It also kept her from thinking—too much—about her AWOL honeymoon. It also meant that her computer screen depicted, in a highly visual and easily understood graphic, just how many vacancies Sweet Moon currently had.
“Not a problem,” he told her. “I already have a reservation.”
“Go elsewhere.” She carefully pressed the keys to activate her screensaver.
“Paid in full,” he added cheerfully.
Daeg was another Mr. Wrong, she was sure of it. He was as eager to roam as her father, although Mr. Wrong had never seemed so sexy. Or so tempting. Still, since she’d already been burned once, she wasn’t looking for a ring from Daeg Ross, but she could have a few nights—or weeks—of really hot sex.
Maybe celibacy wasn’t the answer.
Maybe it was like if she gorged herself on sweet things, her brain—and her stomach—would get the message. Too much sugar made you sick. Although was it possible to even have too much sex?
Daeg’s presence took up the entire room. Those broad shoulders beneath the faded cotton T-shirt and powerful forearms did a number on her senses. He was tanned from spending time outdoors—in the water—and she wanted to explore him inch by inch and see just how far that sun-kissed goodness went.
A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. “You’re stuck with me, Dani. Face it.”
Being stuck with Daeg Ross was a fantasy come true, she had to admit. He was 100 percent sexual satisfaction and she should refund his money. Instead, she was calculating the odds of sharing some mind-blowing time with him.
Those were some heated odds.
“Sweet Moon runs the risk of being stuck with you,” she corrected, turning back to her computer to divert her wild imagination back to safer ground. “Very temporarily.”
* * *
DANI ANDREWS DIDN’T walk away from him this time.
She was direct. No games. Daeg liked that. He’d know exactly where he stood with her...on his way out of here, if she had her choice.
He also counted one, two...three laptops in addition to the outdated desktop model, bookended by a stack of computer manuals half as tall as Dani was. Precisely organized cans of mechanical pencils and stacks of Post-it notes marched down the right side of her workspace. She’d transformed Sweet Moon’s front desk into her own command center. Tag would love it. He’d kissed a computer nerd.
A computer nerd who believed she could get rid of him.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Yes.” She went right back to working on her computer as if their conversation was done. “You are.” Her index finger hit the return key with a particularly vicious downstroke. “There are multiple other places on Discovery, all with vacancies. Pick one and I’ll transfer your reservation.”
She pushed and he’d pull.
“No.” He leaned in closer. “I have a reservation already. Right here.”
“Canceled.” She pointed toward the door. “Your exit awaits.”
He snorted. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”
“Funny,” she said sweetly. “It’s never been difficult before.”
He wanted to kiss her again. To hold her in his arms and tuck her protectively in place. He wouldn’t give in to that urge, but it was hard. He liked her fiery, liked the snap in her eyes and the outrage pinking her cheeks. She noticed him when he made her mad and he could do something with that.
“Are you referring to earlier today—or to our last date, ten years ago?”
She didn’t answer his question. Instead, she just hit him with a fact. “That wasn’t a date.”
“Near enough. You, me, a romantic stroll on the beach. Our first kiss.”
That night was a lost opportunity. If he could have, he’d shake himself for letting her get away, even if she’d been so very young and the possibilities had scared him. He was older now. Fear had no place in his life. And he definitely wasn’t letting her get away again.
“I can stand here all afternoon. And let me repeat, you are not getting rid of me that easily.”
* * *
DAEG WAS LIKE a tidal wave that kept on coming. And he was right. He had a reservation, and Sweet Moon couldn’t afford to pass on a paying customer. Somehow she’d survive his—she checked the computer again—six-week stay. She grabbed a key off the hook on the wall and stood up.
“Cal booked the bungalow,” he offered, backing away from the counter so she could step around it without crashing into him. Now that he’d won this battle, his words sounded like some sort of consolation prize. Too bad she wasn’t feeling conciliatory.
“I’ll do my best to get over it,” she said drily. She pushed open the door, stepping outside, and he followed. Too close. Too large. Heat radiated off that powerful body. She needed to establish who was in charge here. This was her motel. Her space. Not his.
His boots crunched over the gravel as he walked beside her, and she practiced the fine art of denial by busying herself with the room key. Number eight. Good. Six cabins between herself and temptation.
Stepping up onto the porch, she slid the key into the lock with a practiced flick of her wrist. “Here you go. Number eight. Well, good luck with everything. It was nice seeing you again.”
Duty done, she tried to back away, but she came into contact with a hard male chest. That kernel of anger she’d been nursing since he’d shown up at Sweet Moon’s office grew. He didn’t get to come here and do as he pleased.
He’d had his chance ten years ago and he hadn’t taken it.
“Show me the room.” That husky rumble in her ear made her think about kissing him again—and more. He wasn’t touching her, not really, but he could. The question was, did she want him to?
Temptation beckoned.
She stepped into the room and glanced around. “Meet your cabin,” she announced. “One bed, one bathroom. Housekeeping comes in daily. If you need anything, you’re welcome to try the front desk.”
The bed dominated the room. Someone—likely her grandmother—had draped the huge four-poster with an obscene quantity of white gauze and piled the headboard with fussy pillows. All that fragility made Daeg look impossibly large and masculine. As he examined the space, the playful tease disappeared. “You don’t have something simpler?”
“Nope,” she said, enjoying the edge of discomfort in his voice. “And the offer still stands. I’ll find you another hotel. One more to your taste.”
“This will do.” He tossed his duffel onto the bed. The bag was military issue, an olive-green canvas as rough and tough and frayed as he was.
She forced her attention away from the bed, unable to hide her surprise. “You’re really going to stay? Here?”
“Sure.” There was no missing the gleam in his eye as he turned to face her. “You want to tell me why you kissed me today and ran?” His eyes held a whole lot of curiosity and desire, and remembering how he’d kissed her had her dreaming of a repeat performance. Time certainly hadn’t made Daeg Ross any less of a man’s man. That was plenty of spec ops soldier.
Daeg watched her, waiting for his answer.
She was here for the summer. He was here for the summer. Her hormones were saying that there was no reason for them not to be together—at least for the next
few weeks. Rebound sex, her mind whispered. Think about it.
“Turn about is fair play?” she suggested.
He frowned as he connected the dots. “Kissing me was about your prom night?”
“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.
They’d all given up and flown away. Knowing Daeg had left a man behind, who wouldn’t be coming home, crushed him.
Hell. No.
He forced his eyes open. Having Dani in his sights was better than rehashing the past, and he wasn’t going there again. Not toda
y. Instead, he stood up, holding out a hand to tug her up. She hesitated, then accepted it, wrapping her fingers around his.
He glanced down to where they were temporarily joined and damn if he didn’t find that small bit of contact sexier than any of the dates he’d had in recent years. She was trusting him not to let go.
“Rescues don’t always succeed,” he admitted when the silence stretched out between them for too long. “When I got this souvenir for my leg, that was one of those times everything went wrong. I jumped with a partner and we got the survivor in the basket.”
Her fingers tightened on his, but she didn’t move.
“No swimmer gets in the basket before the survivor.” Flashbacks aside, he’d replayed that afternoon a hundred times in his head. “That was the one thing that went right. We were in the Indian Ocean, got there fourteen hours after a tsunami hit. The water was a mess, still churning with destroyed boats and other crafts, but we’d set the basket down where she seemed clear.”
“But the water wasn’t clear?”
“Not even close.” The current had picked up, that first bump against his legs a nauseating wake-up call. He hadn’t known if he’d struck something, or a living and breathing something that would surface and take a chunk out of him. “The circumstances made it impossible to see. A piece of some kind of strong metal fence tore through my leg and there I was, bleeding all over the place. My partner signaled for the basket, put me in and I got out alive. Less than a minute later, he went under.”