The SEAL's Special Mission

by Rogenna Brewer

  “I took a desk job. For her,” he added, sounding defensive even to his own ears.

  “But you didn’t stick yourself behind it. She knew enough to know those training ops—” Mal used air quotes “—weren’t all training ops. And she just couldn’t live with the uncertainty of it.”

  He’d loved his wife and she’d loved him. Nothing Mal could say would change that, but these were the first negative thoughts he’d associated with Cara since her death.

  He had never lied to her, not even when he told her he was going on “training ops.” It was just the language used in his line of work where classified information couldn’t be shared. Cara knew that. And she’d hated it.

  Was it any wonder his wife had grown to hate him, too?

  He didn’t want to fight with Mal in some pseudorelationship squabble. He didn’t even know what they were fighting about anymore. “You’re right. I was a lousy husband and a lousy father—”

  “Do you have any idea what Ben and I have been through?” She adjusted the slipping towel. “I was twenty-three years old, Nash. My sister had been murdered. My mother had just committed suicide. My father couldn’t even remember how to tie his own shoes. And on top of all of that, I’m responsible for a newborn. All on my own.”

  “I was in prison.”

  “You figured a way out fast enough when it suited you.”

  “Mal!” He grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her to look at him. “I get it. I’m a lousy human being.”

  “I loved you,” she said again on a broken whisper.

  “I gave you and Ben everything I had left to give when I gave you each other.”

  Nash didn’t know how it had happened. Or who kissed who first. Or what he’d seen in her eyes that brought his mouth down on hers in a crushing kiss. But one minute they were arguing and the next Mal was ripping at his jacket as if she couldn’t tear it off him fast enough. He only knew that he demanded more, wanted more from her bruised and swollen lips that tasted of salty tears and longing.

  He helped her by shrugging out of his coat and when that was accomplished and she’d unzipped his hoodie, he shrugged out of that, too. He dropped his Glock to the top of the pile as he untucked his flannel shirt while she worked his buttons with a greedy need.

  Somewhere in the back of his brain, it registered that this was Mal. Cara’s sister. But he pushed those thoughts aside because the truth was there was no denying he wanted this. And with the towel pooled at her feet, there was nothing to stop him from exploring all that softness. He filled one greedy hand with a breast while his mouth moved down to meet the other.

  He sucked in rhythm to the low moans in the back of Mal’s throat.

  She fumbled with his belt and made fast work of his zipper.

  His breath caught on the intake as she wrapped her hand around him, straining his arousal by stroking his shaft up and down. When she teased his ball sac in her greedy little hand, he recaptured her mouth with his and drove his tongue deep, mimicking the naughty pleasure he’d like to bring her.

  Foreplay would have to wait. His fingers fumbled between her legs like a horny teenager’s. She was wet and ready for him, and when she wrapped a leg around his hip he drove in hard and deep. His need to be inside her trumped everything.

  He didn’t care that his pants were still around his ankles. Or that she’d only managed to unbutton his shirt. He wasn’t going to last long enough to get his clothes off anyway. Not when she was fully naked and spread before him with her back against the door.

  He held her hands above her head and then she wrapped both legs around him.

  The sounds they were making were primitive, primal—just like their mating.

  Base. Elemental.

  He pumped into her. Felt her tight muscle spasms join his earth-shattering release. He buried the sound of his guttural cries in her shoulder. In her hair. In her neck.

  First time fast. Second time slow.

  He took his time working his way back to her lips. This time he wanted to take things slow. She unwrapped her legs from around his waist and her feet touched down, though she stood on tiptoes. He didn’t move away from her or pull out, but moved closer instead.

  He looked deep into her dreamy eyes, unable to let go of this forbidden fantasy.

  “I’m just trying to figure out how to get my pants off and then get you to the bed.”

  Without waking up.

  In the end it was accomplished with a lot of kissing and tripping.

  Moonlight bathed the bedroom and Nash kept his promise to take it slow.

  It had been a long time since he’d made love to a woman without Cara intruding on his thoughts. Tonight was no exception. She was there in every kiss and touch. Reproving, disapproving—but he didn’t let her in enough to know which and he worked hard to push her aside. Gazing into Mallory’s eyes, he knew which sister he was with. His body knew, even though his mind kept wanting to split into two. To tell him this was wrong. When it felt right. Mallory felt right.

  He’d be reminded of some snippet of conversation with Cara. Or he’d hear Cara’s whispered words when he knew it was Mal whispering in his ear. Not about love. This wasn’t love. This was lust pure and simple.

  Mal whispered words that made him hot. Words that made their bodies move as one. Words that had them fighting for dominance as he rolled her beneath him.

  Words that would last through the night.

  He worshipped every inch of her in silence.

  This time when he reached his climax he reached for something deep inside and called out, “Cara,” at the exact wrong time.

  * * *

  NASH ROLLED OFF her and simply lay there in the dark. Mal rolled onto her side and away from him. She pulled up the covers and wanted to pretend that what had just happened hadn’t. Not the lovemaking part, but the part where he called out her sister’s name during climax.

  They lay there in the aftermath of that awkward silence for a long time. Neither of them saying anything. Neither of them finding sleep.

  “Mal,” he said after a while.

  She didn’t answer. Didn’t care if he knew she wasn’t asleep.

  The mattress dipped as Nash sat up. The weight shifted again as he stood. She could hear him moving around in the dark. Gathering his clothes. Dressing.

  She rolled over just as he was leaving.

  He must have heard her, because he turned to look at her. “I’m going to go sleep on the couch. I don’t think Ben should find us together like this.”

  Together? She wouldn’t exactly call this together.

  “Don’t worry about it, Nash,” she said in her best I sleep with all my dead sister’s widowed husbands voice. “I know I’m a poor substitute for Cara.”

  “Mal,” he said in that reproachful you’re not to blame it’s all my fault, big brother-in-law voice.

  She waited for him to deny it. Shouldn’t he at least be gentleman enough to deny it?

  But he simply left. Closing the door with a quiet click on all her schoolgirl fantasies about him forever. Except as she lay there in the dark, still unable to sleep, she went through a play-by-play of the night’s activities in her head.

  She’d done a very bad thing. Sleeping with her sister’s husband. A man she knew was still in love with her sister.

  And the only person she wanted to talk about it with was her sister.

  * * *

  NASH WOKE WITH a start. He wasn’t going to get any sleep tonight.

  He banked the fire in the fireplace, put on his jacket and grabbed his rifle to head out on his security rounds. He had a couple of traps set. Nothing that would hurt anybody, just something that would let him know if anyone came snooping. He crouched down to check on one of the wires that had been tripped. The cougar tracks made him
think the cat had tripped it but he figured it wouldn’t hurt to take his time and be extra cautious on his rounds. So he moved slowly, deliberately, taking in every part of the surroundings. The activity not only served to make sure the perimeter was secure, but also gave him little time to think about Mal.

  Significantly weary after an hour of traipsing around outdoors, Nash headed back to the cabin. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs to kick the snow off his boots.

  “Put your hands where I can see ’em,” the voice behind him said. “Slowly, turn around.”

  Nash turned to find an elderly man with a shotgun pointed straight at him.

  “Are you the culprit who broke into my clinic and stole some meds?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Seven years earlier

  “HE JUST WANTS to talk to you.” Mal stood in her sister’s kitchen with her back to the Formica countertop.

  “I do not want to talk to him,” Cara said, pushing herself belly up first from her seat at the kitchen table. “You can’t possibly understand, Mal.”

  “What, that you’re eight months pregnant and hormonal?” Mal folded her arms. She could be just as stubborn as her big sister when she wanted to be. Maybe more so.

  “Because you’re not married to a Navy SEAL. And if he persists on using you as a go-between, I’m going to file a restraining order against the both of you.”

  Mal ignored the part about the restraining order. “Yeah, well, I’m not married period, but that’s beside the point. You can’t hold the man’s job against him, Cara.”

  “It’s not just his job.”

  “You can’t hold the man’s religion against him, either.”

  “I’m not having my son circumcised.” She put a protective hand on her belly. “We agreed we’re not raising this child in any singular religion. So I don’t see why he’s so insistent.”

  “A lot of men are circumcised. Dad’s probably even circumcised. You should ask him.”

  “Ew. Mal, put away your phone.”

  Mal tapped out a text to their father.

  Too late Cara tried to take the phone away from her. Mal just held it high above her sister’s head. Cara hated that Mal was a good six inches taller than her puny five foot two. And Mal used to hate that Cara was very pretty and petite until she’d grown into her own. Now she kind of liked being able to look most men in the eye.

  Although she wouldn’t hold a guy’s lack of height against him if the right man came along, secretly she liked a man better when she had to look up to him.

  Like her dad. Or Nash.

  Mal held up the return text from their father.

  “Drive safe?” Cara added the question mark as she read.

  “Just told him I was leaving here tomorrow and that I’ll see him soon.” She stuck her tongue out at her sister, who rolled her eyes. “Look, I know what the American Pediatrics Whatever says, but maybe you should let Nash have his say in this. It’s a guy thing. They have really strong feelings about their penis. Penises? You know what I mean.”

  Cara and Nash had known the sex of the baby for a while now and apparently had been arguing ever since. Mal had been away at the FBI Academy and blissfully unaware of the domestic strife between her sister and brother-in-law until a few days ago.

  “It’s not just the job and the baby. You just don’t understand,” Cara repeated for the hundredth time that evening. “It’s everything.”

  “How can it be everything?” And how could a seemingly great marriage turn upside down in just twenty weeks? That’s what Mal wanted to know.

  “We married too young, Mal. I never should have dropped out of college.”

  “So go back to school.”

  “It’s an expensive waste of time. We have enough student loan debt already. Babies are so expensive, you know,” she wailed mournfully.

  “What? Cara, you have free health care. And Nash just got that promotion to lieutenant commander. That comes with a raise. Don’t make it about money.”

  “Just forget it, Mal. I can’t talk to you about this anymore. You just don’t understand because you’re the fifth wheel in this relationship and you always take his side.”

  “I do not always take his side.” She crossed her arms. “And I’m certainly no fifth wheel. I see the two of you, what, twice a year?”

  “You have more in common with my husband than I do. He respects you more than he does me. I know it.”

  “Do not even go there.” Mal threw her hand up in frustration. “Nash treats you like a princess—”

  “You idolize him, Mal. But you don’t really know him and you do not know what it’s like being married to him. He’s gone all the time—three hundred days a year. I may as well be a single parent, because I’m going to be raising this child alone.”

  Mal heard real fear behind her sister’s rant and suspected they had finally circled back to the heart of the matter. Cara was so afraid of losing Nash that she’d rather push him aside than risk losing him someday in an OJT incident.

  “I just want a different life,” her sister wailed.

  “Come here,” Mal said, pulling her sister into a hug—at least as far as her sister’s baby bump would allow. “I may not be married to the man, but I do know him. Nash loves you. And you’ve got to love him enough not to make him choose between you and the baby and his job. Because he’d choose to make you happy.” Mal wasn’t one for emotional displays. Letting go of her sister she tried to lighten the mood. “Then he’d be miserable. You’d be miserable. And you’d really hate each other then. Cara, you do not want a different life. You have a perfect life. With a perfect man. And you’re about to have a perfect baby....”

  Cara looked a little weepy. Maybe Mal had finally gotten through to her.

  “You know if anything did happen I’d be here for you and this little tyke.” She rubbed her sister’s belly. She decided not to add that Cara could take comfort in the fact that if anything did happen to Nash on the job, he’d die doing what he loved, and few people could say that. She didn’t think her sister was ready to hear it. “Maybe you should drop by a synagogue and speak with a rabbi. Find out what the big deal is about circumcision from the Jewish perspective. If you still don’t agree, at least you’ll be able to argue with Nash from an educated standpoint. That’s what I would do anyway.”

  They spent the rest of the evening eating ice cream and watching romantic comedies. Mal slept on the couch because the guest room had been turned into a nursery since her last visit. A crash outside woke her from a sound sleep around two in the morning. She reached for her firearm.

  Funny how that had become second nature in just a few short weeks.

  Something, probably the wind, had knocked over the trash cans outside.

  Mal went to investigate, but it wasn’t the wind trying to set the trash cans right. She stood at the back door watching her brother-in-law fumble with trying to put the lids back on. “Nash, are you drunk?”

  Clearly, he’d been drinking.

  “Shh.” He pressed his finger to his lips in an exaggerated whisper. “I just came to give you your graduation present.”

  “At two in the morning?”

  The kitchen light flipped on.

  “What’s going on?” Cara entered the kitchen. “Nash, what are you doing here? Are you drunk?”

  “I just stopped by to give Mal her graduation present.”

  “You came here drunk and armed? I’m calling the police,” Cara threatened, picking up the phone.

  Mal took the phone from her sister’s hand before she could dial 911. “No. You don’t have to do that. I’ll get dressed and drive him back to the base.” The last thing they needed was to get the police involved. “Stay,” she ordered Nash. “The SIG is still in the box,” she said to her sister as she dragged
Cara with her back toward the master bedroom.

  Mal made Cara get back in bed before her sister blew this whole thing out of proportion. And then Mal threw on a hoodie over her tank top and pajama pants and grabbed her purse and keys to the rental car out front.

  “Seriously, Nash,” Mal said as she loaded him into the rental car. “You couldn’t have picked a worse time or a worse excuse. Next time try showing up sober and in broad daylight. With a better excuse then dropping off a gun.”

  “Is she mad at me?” he asked miserably.

  “I don’t know, but I’m pretty pissed.” Mal shoved the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. After a few minutes driving toward the base with Nash snoring beside her, she realized she didn’t know where on base he was staying.

  So she drove to the only other destination she could think of.

  She helped Nash out of the car and up the steps. The porch light was on, and a motion-sensor light at the side of the duplex came on as they approached the house.

  There were no lights on inside and she hadn’t gotten the chance to fire off a warning text. But she rang the doorbell of the bachelor pad anyway, hoping someone was home who could help her.

  “Mal?” Kip Nouri opened the door, looking as sleep tousled and gorgeous as the day she’d met him. Too bad this wasn’t a booty call.

  “Hey, Kip.” Well, at least he didn’t glance over his shoulder—which was probably a good sign that he didn’t have a woman warming his bed.

  “Can we come in?” She nodded toward Nash, who was leaning heavily on her shoulder.

  “Sure, come on in.” He shook his head, likely to clear it from the shock of seeing her again, and stepped aside. Or perhaps it was the shock of seeing his executive officer drunk. Come to think of it, she’d never seen Nash drunk. He was much too serious for that.

  Nouri slipped in under Nash’s other arm and helped her get him to the couch. Then he disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a lined wastebasket. “In case he feels like, you know, doing the backward bungee.”