by Anne Marsh
“Get Maddie and bring her back down to the beach. We roll in an hour.”
“On it.” There must have been something in his eyes—something he didn’t want to examine too closely himself—because Gray nodded and let him go. Mason didn’t waste time, either, heading straight for Maddie’s villa at a dead run. Ashley would be undercover, eyes on Maddie, so Mason went around back. If Santiago showed up, she’d trigger the alarm.
Breaking in through the bathroom was too easy. The villa had one of those exotic outdoor bathrooms, and it took mere seconds to hoist himself over the wall and drop down into her shower. The damned door didn’t even lock—he just eased it to the side and he was in.
The bathroom looked as if it had been hit by a Category Three storm. Lingerie, dresses, flip-flops and a million teeny bottles of stuff were scattered everywhere. He paused. Listened. Clear. Cracking the door, he swept the room visually.
Maddie was asleep on the bed. Probably not on purpose, since she still had her laptop with its hot pink cover parked on her lap. Her head had fallen back, red hair fanning out over her pillow, a little whuff that was an almost snore escaping her. The sound would have been cute as hell if he hadn’t been scanning the room for possible intruders.
Holding the gun down at his side, he moved swiftly to the bed. Sleeping Beauty needed to wake up and get with the let’s-get-rescued program. Gently but firmly he covered her mouth with his hand, leaning down to whisper against her ear.
“Wake up, sweetheart.”
* * *
THE HAND OVER her mouth woke Maddie up, the unexpected contact followed by the shock of a body pressed against her startling her when she’d gone to bed alone. She lived through a moment of sickening, adrenaline-laced panic before she realized who exactly was holding her.
“It’s Mason,” he growled unnecessarily. “No noise, okay? Nod your head for me if you understand.”
Something wasn’t right. That was what she understood, but she nodded, because, hello? The whole hand-over-the-mouth thing wasn’t her kind of kink. And if it wasn’t kink, she had a bigger problem. Besides, while it was clearly Mason looming over her, Mason who’d come uninvited into her room, he wasn’t her Mason. He looked different, harder, and it wasn’t just the black and green paint streaking his face.
“Is this some kind of game?” She tossed her laptop to the side, rolling instinctively away from him. “Because I think we already said everything we needed to say.”
“We have to go,” he whispered, not looking at her. Instead, he scanned the corners of her villa as if he expected something. “We need to get you off the island.”
“I believe I said, ‘Let’s have a future together!’ And you said, ‘Over my dead body!’ Or something way too close to that. You may have dressed it up with the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ and the ‘I’m not looking for a relationship right now’ speeches, but that’s what I heard.”
“Look at me,” he demanded, his harsh gaze swinging back to her face.
Oh, she was looking, all right—and nothing added up. This wasn’t paintball attire, and something was seriously wrong. A noise outside the villa interrupted her crazy thoughts. She wasn’t sure what it was—housekeeping cart, falling coconut, demented parrot—but Mason pulled some ninja stealth move, rolling her off the bed and beneath him. His hand came back over her mouth, his body tensing as he raised his weapon at her door. His weapon. Holy shit. He had a gun. He braced his free hand above her head, his fingers curled around the stock, where she could see dirt and a smear of something red. Blood?
“Mason—” She jumped, suddenly afraid, her lungs closing up. Who was he?
“Shh,” he whispered roughly against her hair. “Breathe for me. Let’s see if we’ve got company.”
She hadn’t thought her heart could beat triple time, unless she was in heart-attack territory, but the sensation of his large, familiar-and-yet-not body pressing her down into the floor had her all but hyperventilating.
Dark brown eyes stared intently into hers. “Can you stay put for me? Do you need your inhaler?”
He had a gun. She’d agree to anything. When she nodded, he rolled off her and headed for the front of the villa. That worked for her. She lunged for the bedside phone. He froze, head swinging toward her, but the business end of the gun didn’t budge from her front door.
“Don’t,” he warned, as if he was used to giving orders and being obeyed. Too bad for him that requests from madmen didn’t count. Lifting the receiver off the base, she punched the button for security. Nothing. Nada. Not a dial tone, not a friendly voice.
He strode toward her, his face hard and closed off as he took in her panic and her finger banging away on the button for security. “Grab your purse. Your passport. Anything critical that you need that fits in a small bag.”
Hell. No.
“Who are you?” she asked in a strangled voice. Did the bathroom door have a lock? Could she beat him there? “And don’t give me the line about the chef again. If you’re a chef, you’re bat-shit crazy.”
“I’m a US Navy SEAL,” he growled. “Cut me some slack here. I can’t go into details, but I’m here on an op and there’s a credible threat against you. We need to move you somewhere safe.”
“If you’re going to sell me a bridge next, I’m not buying.”
Naturally, he advanced. Back down wasn’t part of Mason Whoever-He-Was’s vocabulary, any more than concede was in hers. She flung up a hand.
“Stop right there,” she ordered.
He laughed. A harsh, guttural, grunting sound, but the bastard laughed at her.
* * *
“MADDIE—”
She snarled at him and he actually backed up a step. “Yesterday I apparently proposed marriage to a total stranger. I’d like to recover from my humiliation alone, please.”
“I’m not the guy for you, and we don’t have time for this.”
She met his gaze head-on. That was his Maddie. Leap first, look later and live large. “Believe me, we’re in complete agreement there.”
“I had a job to do,” he stressed. “A covert job. I’m under orders not to tell anyone why I’m here.”
“Uh-huh.” She gestured toward him. “Let’s say I agree to believe you about the whole secret-SEAL-mission thing, since your show-and-tell exhibit is fairly convincing. Does that mean you were under orders to sleep with me, too? As part of the whole ‘undercover’ deal?”
His face must have given him away, because she looked stunned. Being Maddie, however, it was only a temporary condition and she sprang into action.
“Oh, my God.” She smacked him against the chest. “You were. What kind of military do we have these days? Does Uncle Sam pimp out his boys?”
“It wasn’t like that.” Not exactly. “You shot footage of our mission. I needed to make sure you didn’t have any other videos or photos.”
“So you’re not Mr. Perfect. You’re an undercover SEAL. And you...slept with me so you could check out my photos? Was it worth it?”
“I can explain,” Mason said, even though he was pretty certain there was no way he could. Being the perfect boyfriend definitely didn’t include lies of omission.
“Whoa. Stop right there.” She held up a hand. “You’re a US Navy SEAL. You’re here on a job.” She folded down two fingers on her other hand. “You had designs on my data.” She folded down her pinkie. “And you let me think you wanted to date me because it was part of some supersecret military plan to make the world a better place?” She folded down her fourth finger and flashed him the bird. “That’s what I think of that plan, soldier.”
Her body vibrated with anger, but she wasn’t an angel in this scenario, either. She’d come on to him first, even if he hadn’t resisted. So they weren’t done. He wasn’t done. She could damn well listen to the rest of what he had to say.
“Now that you’ve gone all judge and jury on my ass, let’s get a couple of things clear.”
He leaned into her, bracing his arms on either side of her so that she had nowhere to go. Not that that stopped Maddie. She tried to duck under his arm, eyeing the door as though she thought running would solve her problems. “I’m done talking with you.”
He shifted, keeping her caged. “You’re not talking with me. You’re talking at me. Now it’s my turn.” She opened her mouth, clearly ready to argue some more with him. Too bad. “Nope.” He laid the palm of his hand over her mouth. “My turn, not yours.”
When her eyes narrowed, he added, “Bite me and it will be my turn for the next week.”
“You suck,” she mumbled. “I want to make that very clear.”
True, but he still had something to say and she was going to listen.
“I had a job to do, a job that mattered. I can’t give you details about why we’re here. We have a credible threat on your person and we’re moving you for your own safety.” He felt her inhale. Teeth were coming. Or a knee to the balls. He deserved both, but didn’t he also deserve some kind of understanding?
“Maybe you feel I should have been up front with you from the beginning,” he continued. “I would have liked that, but it wasn’t my call. I had three options. Option one—I just take your laptop and your stuff. You don’t get it back. I have my team go through it and to hell with what happens to your data or your own job here on Fantasy Island. I find out what I need while you run around the island trying to figure out who stole your gear.
“Option two—I let US Customs do the same thing when you head back to the mainland, except they eventually give you back your gear after they’ve gone through it and wiped it. Option three—I borrow the laptop and we go through it. Carefully,” he emphasized. “We remove what we need to remove, but you’ve still got ninety-five percent of what you had before and everything’s in working order. In fact, in that scenario, you likely don’t even know I’d been through your stuff.”
He removed his hand from her mouth. “Now it’s your turn.”
“That covers my computer.” She glared at him. “But I don’t recall bringing my computer along on any of our dates. How about you explain that to me?”
He exhaled roughly. “Let’s just say our original target has a brother who is really not happy with what happened to his family member. In fact, he’s so unhappy that we had concerns about your personal safety, since it turns out you posted some of your lagoon photos before we could shut you down.”
She blinked, the hurt and anger still simmering in her eyes. “I took photos of your operation?”
“That morning when I surprised you at the lookout point,” he confirmed. “You got off a couple of shots of the Zodiacs coming in. There’s enough detail there to make out our target’s face. Fortunately, you didn’t get any of my team. My team does a lot of covert ops.” He cleared his throat. “It helps if the world doesn’t know our faces. We go in, we blend in. That’s why we were working as staff here on the island. It gave us a credible reason to be here, and most people don’t look too closely at the staff.”
“I don’t even know you.” She looked horrified. “Is Mason Black even your real name?”
This wasn’t the woman who had been the most adventurous lover he’d ever had, who had opened her arms and her heart to him. He wanted that woman back, because he was fairly certain she did know him in all the ways that mattered.
“That’s me.”
She wasn’t done, though. “We don’t really know any of the important details about each other. We know what each other likes in bed, but that’s really it, isn’t it?”
She steamed on ahead. “I don’t know if you’re a Republican or a Democrat. If you like quilted toilet paper or plain. Where your family lives, where you went to school, who your last girlfriend was and if your mom liked her.”
Not sure how any of those things connected, he blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “My last girlfriend married me.”
Her eyes widened. “So you are married.”
“Not anymore. I was a kid, Maddie. I was eighteen when I got married and I was divorced by twenty.”
Yeah. There was no missing the disgust written on her face, and he didn’t think it was because she was worried about having committed adultery with him. “Do you have kids?”
“No.” He leaned in. “No kids. No wife. Being a SEAL isn’t a family-friendly activity. I’m gone for months at a time and there’s always a chance that I’m not coming back.” Meeting her gaze head-on, he added roughly, “Shit happens, Maddie, even on training runs. We push hard, live on the edge. There’s a price tag on that kind of living, and it wasn’t one my wife was willing to pay. I wasn’t much better. I was still a kid. I hadn’t figured out how to give her what she needed, and I thought a steady paycheck would be enough.”
She thought about that for a moment. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.” Although right now he felt as though he was pushing eighty. Or eight hundred.
“One last question.”
Crap. Her voice caught on the last word as she moved to the closet and grabbed a bag. She needed more than he could give her right now, but he had no way of manufacturing more time.
“Shoot,” he said, moving closer. Maybe if he could see her face, he could figure out the right thing to say. Find the words that would fix everything.
She swept her passport into her bag and turned around to face him. “Did I ever truly matter to you, or was I just convenient?”
There was absolutely nothing convenient about how he felt for her. Her face radiated pain and he...had a timeline.
“We need to move.” And screw the mission. Leaning forward, he gently cupped her cheek. God, she was soft. And vulnerable. All your fault, sailor. “Yes, you did. You still do. But things are complicated right now.”
She stiffened, the hollow expression on her face replaced by anger. “You’re the security expert here, Mason, but I feel I need to make one thing perfectly clear.”
Uh-huh. As long as she moved, she could say whatever she wanted. He owed her that and more. Cracking the door, he scanned their surroundings. So far, so good. It was a long shot that Santiago had made it back from the Belizean mainland only to ambush Maddie, but Mason wasn’t taking chances.
“First, those words? Are the biggest cop-out ever. Second, I agree with you. We need to move on,” she said, allowing him to pull her out and onto the porch. “I need to move on. After you get me wherever it is we’re going—”
“Naval cruiser about a mile off Fantasy Island,” he responded, tucking her into his side and pulling her into the jungle. They’d cut through the trees to get to the beach, which would give them better cover.
“As soon as we set foot on deck,” she spat, “we’re done. Over. Kaput. Finito. Got it, soldier? Whatever game you’ve been playing with me is finished. I’m not part of your war games, and if there ever was an us, there isn’t anymore.”
“Understood,” he said, because he did. He’d had his chance. He’d blown it. He and Maddie being anything more than a quick vacation hookup had been a fantasy, and fantasies stayed on Fantasy Island.
14
TONIGHT’S MISSION HAD been the SEAL version of ringing the doorbell and running. Mason’s unit had been tapped to bring in one of the Marcos brothers’ higher-profile lieutenants. The lieutenant, being neither stupid nor possessing a death wish, had gone to ground inside a compound just outside Belize City. The guy had played possum for so long that the higher-ups had started to wonder if he’d had another escape route planned and backdoored it out of the compound unseen. Mason and Levi had been charged with spooking the guy. Catch a ride on the Black Hawk, drop in and make a little noise. See if anyone startled and ran.
The chop
per set down, hovering over the ground and kicking up a cloud of dust. The rotors chewed up the air, announcing their arrival with a loud whap-whap-whap only a dead man could have missed. He and Levi jumped down and started a quick run toward the compound walls.
“Maybe next time the CO will issue us cowbells,” Levi quipped, stroking a hand down the barrel of his cut-down grenade launcher. The man liked things that went boom a little too much sometimes.
“Or get us some instruments and we could lead the parade.” Behind them, the Black Hawk lifted off. The pilot would make a few circles and be back to extract them in ten minutes, unless they discovered their target hiding inside.
Mason doubted it, though. The place was terminally sleepy, a small collection of run-down houses that didn’t even qualify as a town. In addition to one small square that was little more than hard-packed dirt, there was a sorry-looking tree, a dilapidated church and one street. Set back two hundred yards from all that exciting action, the lieutenant’s compound was the biggest, the windows covered with iron bars. It needed a paint job, though.
He got on the radio. “We got any signs of movement?”
“Negative” came the spotter’s voice.
Okay, then.
He took a knee against the wall and looked at Levi. “You ready to ring the bell?”
“Hooyah.” Levi flashed him a thumbs-up and then took aim, firing a stun grenade over the compound wall.
Lights flew on at the other houses. There were plenty of folks home there. Mason watched as the metal grille covering the nearest house slammed open, Mrs. Homeowner storming out to give someone a piece of her mind. She skidded to a halt four steps outside her door when the Black Hawk started to descend. A guy who was likely her husband came barreling out the door behind her, pulling on her arm to get her to back up.
“True love.” Levi sighed as the couple retreated inside. “A woman like that would be perfect for us. Too bad we can’t invite her along.”
Mason did his job. He went in, he kicked ass, he pulled out. It was a nice, simple formula that worked for him. He’d never considered getting married again. His marriage with Bethany was proof enough that he wasn’t husband material. He didn’t check any of the boxes on those magazine quizzes about the perfect guy and the perfect husband.