Entrusted To The SEAL: The Inheritance (The McRaes — Book 6)

by Hill, Teresa

  “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  “No, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Mace, she sounded so happy talking about riding and the things she could do in her new chair. I think she is happy.”

  “As happy as she can be, I guess.”

  Inside his condo, she tugged him over to the couch and sat. He sat, too, but with a whole seat cushion between them. She scooted over next to him, turned toward him so she could see his face. She didn’t want to upset or anger him. She wanted to help him, because he’d done so much for her.

  “She told me she really is happy. She loves her job. She loves the ranch. She and Rae want to start a horse therapy program for disabled kids. They’ve done a lot of research. Apparently it’s great for kids to be around the horses and to ride. Therapeutic, even. She’d find and train the horses. That’s something she dreamed of when she was a kid.”

  “That was before. Now she has a degree in clinical social work. She’s supposed to be a counselor, sitting behind a desk where she’s perfectly safe.”

  “She’s found a different kind of helping. A kind that includes horses. She didn’t want to tell you because she was sure you wouldn’t like it — ”

  “Damned right I don’t like it. She doesn’t realize how lucky she is to be alive.”

  “No, Mace. She’s living her life, the way she wants. She’s not letting being paralyzed limit what she can do — ”

  “It does limit what she can do. She can’t walk!”

  “But she can ride. She can do all sorts of things, and she said you … ”

  “That I what?”

  Dani put her arm around him. He looked so sad, and she was afraid that if she kept talking, he’d try to get up and walk away. “She said it’s like you think her life stopped when she had her accident. You only see the things she can’t do anymore, not what she can, and it breaks her heart.”

  He pulled back and stared at Dani. “I’m breaking her heart?”

  Dani nodded. “You think her life is ruined, and it’s not. She knows it’s not. Your other sisters know. Your parents especially know, because they’re there with her and see the life she’s built for herself. But you don’t. She thinks you suffer more because of her accident than she does.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I can fucking walk!”

  “She wants you back. Your whole family misses you and wants you back. And they want you to forgive yourself and to be happy.”

  “I’m fine.” He sounded anything but fine. “She’s never said anything like this to me — ”

  “She said she’s tried, but you won’t let her. I promised her I’d try. You’ve done so much for me — ”

  “Don’t do that. You don’t owe me anything.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I don’t want you doing anything because you think you owe me.”

  “How about because I care about you, and I think you’re an amazing man?”

  “God.” He leaned forward and buried his face in his hands for a moment, then sat back up. He could hardly look at Dani. “She told you about her accident? That I was supposed to be watching her that day?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “I obviously didn’t do a good enough job of that. She went out to the barn and got on her horse and went for a ride, all by herself, with a fucking thunderstorm coming, and she ended up paralyzed.”

  “Yes, she told me. And that your mother feels terrible that she ever left that day. Your father was off working somewhere on the ranch — ”

  “He works on the ranch every day. It’s his job — ”

  “Your sisters feel guilty about not letting her play with them that day. The ranch hands felt guilty that somehow no one was in the barn when she went to get on her horse. She feels guilty for sneaking out there and going for a ride alone when she knew she wasn’t supposed to.”

  “She was seven years old! She didn’t understand how dangerous it was. That’s why someone was supposed to watch her, so she wouldn’t get hurt, and that person was me!”

  Mace looked shocked when Dani touched her fingertips to his face and they came back wet with tears.

  “Shit,” he whispered.

  “It’s okay.”

  He got to his feet and walked into his bedroom. She was debating going in there and trying to talk to him again when he came back out with his running gear on. He went into the kitchen and grabbed his CamelBak pack, the kind athletes and soldiers used to carry water on long runs, and added a few protein bars to the outside pockets. “I’m going for a run. I might be a while.”

  “Okay.” He looked like he needed it.

  He hesitated. “You’ll be here when I get back?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  And then he was gone.

  * * *

  Mace

  He ran for hours. He ran until his whole body was numb.

  It wasn’t enough to keep the thoughts from racing through his mind.

  Annie, happy? Annie wanting to work with horses? It wasn’t enough to ride in her spare time and on a horse she knew, who knew her well. She wanted to train horses how to handle disabled riders? Everyone else in his family felt guilty?

  Fuck that. It had been his responsibility to watch her that day, and he hadn’t done it. If he’d just gotten on a damned horse and taken her for a ride, even a short one, she’d have been happy and never tried to go riding by herself. He could have done so many things differently, and she would have been fine. Her life would have been everything it should have been.

  She tried so hard to always look happy around him. He knew what she was doing. She didn’t want him to feel any worse than he already did. It was an act. How could Dani not see that?

  He remembered Annie coming home from the hospital after the accident, how tiny she’d been, how fragile she’d seemed. He’d hardly been able to look at her, to be in the same room with her and see all the difficulties she faced, ones that would never fucking end.

  He’d finished his senior year of high school and tried a year of community college, because it was cheap and he knew Annie’s medical bills had been huge, and then he hadn’t been able to stand being at home anymore. He’d gone off and joined the Navy. It had been so much easier to forget there, so much easier if he stayed away from home and his family.

  There weren’t enough people he could save in his job to ever make up for the way he’d failed his sister and their whole family, but it helped. It was something he could do, and he had to do something. It was the only way he could live with himself.

  Then, he ended up on that damned train, and the man Dani loved had died there.

  Aaron had loved her. Mace could prove it to her. He’d found what he needed to do that, had come back with a photo album full of prints he’d had made for her of her wedding and trip to Greece with the man she’d loved. He wanted her to be able to hold them and look through them and know it was all real. He hoped it helped her heal and be ready to move on.

  He hoped she’d want a future with him.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Mace

  He was such a coward.

  He ran until he was exhausted, then sat on the beach in front of his condo until all the lights went out in his unit and he thought it was safe to go inside, that he wouldn’t have to see Dani or talk to her.

  He stretched out on the couch, slept fitfully, and made sure he was up and out before she got up. He went to work and bit people’s heads off. At the end of the day, he wasn’t nearly calm enough to go home.

  He rounded up the Fucking New Guys who were still there and took them into the gym where the SEALs trained in close-quarter combat. Even after qualifying for the SEAL teams, after being selected to join one of the SEAL teams, new members trained intensely for a year with their team before going on a mission. If Mace wanted to beat up on someone, it might as well be productive for the FNGs.

  He put himself on the mat in the middle of six of them, all a helluva lot
younger than he was. He took them on one-by-one, saying simply, “Show me what you’ve got.”

  With a mixture of Judo, Aikido, Jiu Jitsu and Krav Maga — whatever worked — and using his hands, feet, knees, arms and his own body weight, he took them all down. Then he told them to get up and try again. They stopped only for critiques — what someone had done wrong, what he could have done differently — and for Mace to tell them about real-world situations he’d been in when close-quarter combat came into play.

  They went at each other hard for two and a half hours, until Mace decided he could go home. His muscles started to tighten up along the way. As his focus on fighting eased and his adrenaline levels fell, he became more aware of every ache. He was walking like a damned old man by the time he entered his condo.

  Dani gasped when she saw him and hurried over. “What happened?”

  “Just a little hand-to-hand training.” He walked into his bedroom and then his bathroom.

  She followed him. “It looks like someone beat you up.”

  He glanced at his image in the mirror over the sink. The reddish marks on his face and arms would turn into bruises, he knew. He had some scuff marks here and there and a little cut above his right eye leaking a trickle of blood.

  “The other guys look worse than I do,” he said. Her face, in the mirror as she stood behind him, looked worried. “Dani, I’m fine.”

  She opened her mouth to argue, but finally asked if he’d eaten. He admitted that he hadn’t. She took him by the hand and tugged. He let her lead him to the dining room table and sit him down. Within minutes she put a plate of food and a huge glass of water in front of him.

  “Eat,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, which seemed to piss her off even more. He shut up and ate.

  When he was done, he tried to get up and take his plate to the kitchen, but she wouldn’t let him.

  “Dani, I have some sore muscles. That’s it.”

  He knew he had been a dick by sounding annoyed at her when she hadn’t done anything wrong. He had been last night, too, by walking out on her. He should apologize, and dammit, he had to tell her about Aaron. That should make things easier, and then … He didn’t know what would happen then, but telling her what he found out was the next step, and he had to take it.

  Right after he hit the shower, he decided. He was still wet with sweat.

  He went to her, leaned down and kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Walking out on you last night.”

  “I was worried about you. I’ve never seen you like that before.”

  “Family. It does that to me. Give me a few minutes, and then we’ll talk.”

  The water stung, but it also felt good. He’d still feel worse tomorrow, when his muscles would be even more sore. He dried off, but he hadn’t brought anything clean to put on, so he wrapped the towel around his waist and walked into the bedroom.

  Dani was sitting in the big, comfy chair in the corner of the darkened room, waiting for him. He walked into his closet and pulled on a pair of loose cotton pajama pants he kept to sleep in when he couldn’t avoid a visit from his sisters.

  He felt more than heard Dani walk up behind him. He tensed as she slipped her arms around him and pressed the front of her body to the back of his. Her head rested on the back of his shoulder, and she placed a soft kiss on one of the aching spots on his back.

  “It seems like you’re trying to hurt yourself,” she said.

  Fuck.

  “It … Sometimes, I need to move, burn off some energy. That’s all.”

  Her hands splayed wide against his mid-section, and his muscles rippled in response. He didn’t think she intended it in a sexual way, but she’d never touched him like this, never had her hands on his body this way. But he’d thought about it a lot, and feeling it was so good.

  But he shouldn’t be letting her do this now. “There are some things we have to talk about.”

  “I know.” She nuzzled his back and drew in a long breath. “You smell so good.”

  That wasn’t what they needed to talk about, either, but he followed her when she tugged him over to the big chair in the corner. She stopped in front of it, pushed him down and surprised him by climbing onto his lap to face him.

  Her arms came around him, his around her. Seated as she was, she looked down at him for a change. She pulled his head against her neck, which was a very nice place to be. A hand in his hair held him close. Her breasts rose and fell against him with each breath, and he was getting hard with her ass pressed against his thighs.

  Again, not what she intended, he suspected. Her touch still felt more comforting than anything else, but he was a guy. Of course he was thinking about all the places he wanted his mouth and his hands and how great she smelled.

  Plus, he really didn’t know a lot about allowing a woman to comfort him. He was fine comforting them. With all those sisters, he didn’t freak out at woman’s tears, at emotions running high. But his own were different. He was supposed to take care of Dani, not the other way around.

  The tenderness and care she seemed to be offering him felt foreign. He’d never accepted such things, never let himself admit he might need them. He hated that his sisters had left upset, that him being on an ICE train again had stirred things up.

  So, for him, had seeing the photos he now had of Dani and Aaron.

  He’d never imagined that she could look so young and carefree, and it had been not quite a year ago. The anniversary was coming up. Losing Aaron, feeling betrayed by him, had taken such a toll on her.

  Mace wanted her happy again. He wanted her happy with him and not still mourning a man she’d lost.

  He was probably going to hurt her by bringing up all those memories again and wished so much they could start fresh, just the two of them and whatever that brought.

  But they had to go through this, not around it.

  Her arms squeezed more tightly. He thought at first that the shaking he felt was coming from her. No, he was shaking.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered, her mouth soft against his forehead.

  No, it wasn’t.

  Wanting her in his life meant needing to know he could keep her safe, and he wasn’t sure he could. All his training, all the experience of the missions he’d been, wouldn’t ensure that he’d always be able to protect her. Stupid, crazy, wildly unfair things happened in this world. They came out of nowhere. A man could never be vigilant enough.

  He’d already let her down in the worst way. He’d watched the man she loved die, and he might have been able to stop it. He did not deserve her comfort.

  He started trying to pull away, but his shaking hands couldn’t fight her refusal to let him go.

  “Dani.” His voice sounded unsteady. What was happening to him?

  “It’s okay.” She kissed his cheek, his mouth.

  This was definitely not okay.

  She felt so good in his arms, her body so soft and warm and welcoming. One of his hands held her high on her thigh and the other spread out on her back as she leaned into him and kissed him so gently, so sweetly.

  He wanted to fall into that kiss, to slip his hands beneath her clothes and feel all her pretty curves, strip her bare and lay her down on his bed and get inside her. He wanted to forget everything but her, stay in this place, just the two of them. They could make their own world. She’d be safe there.

  He kissed her hungrily, needing that connection, needing to take when he always tried to be the one who gave.

  “Mmm.” She moaned into his mouth.

  His hand slid up her thigh, found its way beneath her t-shirt, inside her bra and cupped her breast. It felt perfect, the shape, the weight, the soft skin..

  “Dani,” he managed to say. “This is not what we need to be doing. There are things I have to tell you.”

  “We need this, too.”

  His thumb found the hard nub of her nipple. He shuddered as his cock swelled
and she pressed her bottom down against it. Just like the other night, he was ready to blow. Fuck if he’d let that happen again.

  She leaned sideways in his arms and pulled his head down to her breasts. He sucked on one, then the other, through her shirt and bra while she held his head to keep him there and arched her back to press her breasts against him.

  He wanted bare skin, and his mouth on her. He groaned when she peeled off her shirt and bra in one move and he saw her pretty breasts for the first time.

  His hands held the sides of each one, and his mouth slowly worked its way over one, then the other, as she rocked her hips against his cock. It felt so good.

  Mace had wanted so many things for their first time together, to take his time, to make her feel as special as she was to him, to see and touch and kiss every inch of her body. But this was going to be nothing like that. It was going to be hot and needy and way too fast. She did crazy things to him.

  She kissed his neck and wriggled her hips until they fit snugly against his cock. He sucked her breasts a little bit hard, and she liked it, and he could not get enough of them.

  She slipped off his lap and to the floor. She knelt between his legs, so pretty with her breasts nestled against his thighs. Her hands slid up his body, over his abs to his chest, as she pressed her cheek to the thin cotton covering his cock.

  He sucked in air as she nuzzled him, then put her mouth on him. It shouldn’t feel nearly that good through clothes.

  She nibbled gently up the length of him, the little tease, while her soft breasts and hard nipples rubbed along his thighs. She was smiling, too, smiling up at him, staring, watching his face to see how much he liked what she was doing.

  He leaned over and tried to grab her and pull her back up onto his lap. He didn’t have the patience for this, no matter how good it felt. But she wouldn’t let him. She pressed her hand firmly against his chest until his back was against the chair again.

  She pulled his pajamas down and nuzzled his cock, with her cheek and with her nose, this time skin to skin. Finally, her mouth, with little kisses up and down the length of him, her lips impossibly soft, her breath hot, her tongue warm and wet.