Fatal Heat: A Navy SEAL Novella (5 page)

Paige and her funny, hyperactive dog—hell, yes, they were worth fighting for. What he was watching was a scene that was unthinkable in certain parts of the world. A serene, successful, single woman who lived alone with a dog.

Where he’d spent the last years of his career, right now a woman like Paige would be lashed and then stoned, her dog whipped and despised.

He was really glad he’d worked so hard to create a world where that kind of horrific cruelty could be defeated. He didn’t regret anything. Particularly not now, in this light-filled room with a beautiful, smiling woman.

There was just something about her. The world needed women just like her. Needed women who could make things better just by being.

And right there, in Paige’s colorful kitchen—sipping a glass of excellent chilled white wine with Her dog dancing around her feet, watching her move so gracefully—something happened to Max.

He’d spent years in very bad places. Culminating in that last year in Afghanistan, which broke his heart and his body. And then the hospital, lashed to the bed by pain and weakness. Dark years, years with feral beings around him, years feeling that the world was hung together with fraying ropes and fraying hopes.

Right now, right this moment, watching the evening light flood the pretty apartment, something powerful moved through him, some force that was strong enough to shift the darkness in him that was heavy as iron, hard as rock. Something made of light, intangible yet very real, very strong.

Whatever it was, it was intimately connected with the beautiful woman humming to a tune on the radio, set to a soft rock station. Suddenly, he wanted to know all about her, find whatever it was in her that could lift those iron weights in his soul. Find out how she could fill a room with light.

“What’s it like, being a plant geneticist? What do you do? How does a plant geneticist fill her day?”

She turned to him in surprise, soft hair shifting on her shoulders. A fleeting expression crossed her face, one he was unable to decipher, the merest hint of darkness, as if a bird’s wing had come between her and the sun. Then it was gone.

But when she answered, her voice was light and amused, and he wondered if he’d imagined the darkness. It was almost impossible to connect this woman with any kind of darkness.

The full, luscious mouth turned up at the corners. “It’s sort of hard to explain, and boringly technical.”

“I went to school,” he said softly. Actually he had two master’s degrees. One in military history and one in political science. From the days in which he tried really hard to understand the world. Those days were gone. Now he just tried to defend his little corner of it and survive. “I could try to follow.”

She stirred something with a wooden spoon, tapped it against the pot, and put the spoon on a ceramic dish. Man, whatever it was she was cooking, it smelled heavenly.

She switched the burner off. “Okay, it’s done, but it will take about ten minutes to settle. Why don’t we sit at the table and enjoy our wine?”

“Sounds good.”

She’d set two places, at right angles instead of across from each other. They were so close he could smell that flowery something above whatever was cooking on the stove. So close he could touch her without any effort at all. He picked upn pHe pick his glass and took another big gulp.

Goddamn it. Even the fucking wine was perfect.

She sipped her wine, head tilted to one side as she studied him.

“Coming back to what we were talking about, I’m really sorry if I gave the wrong impression. I didn’t mean you
can’t
understand what I do, in the sense of being unable to. What I meant is that, like most jobs, what I do day to day is the tip of the iceberg, and you’d have to know what I did yesterday and what I plan to do tomorrow to get the full picture. The short version is I research how Mother Nature designed plant life, and then think of ways to improve on that. The big picture is really exciting because in a way we’re unlocking the secrets to life itself. But the day-to-day stuff is really tedious and boring. In the research lab we spend all our time peering into microscopes, checking cultures in petri dishes, and meticulously recording minute changes—punctuated by days in the field, checking crop rows, measuring growth by millimeters. Not exciting in any way unless you’re a botany nerd. I imagine your job is hard to describe too. If you could tell me without having to kill me afterwards.”

She smiled and Max tensed.

Here it was. The SEAL thing.

Women just couldn’t get past it. Some women treated SEALs like action figures with guns, men able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. The thing was, SEALs weren’t supermen. They weren’t a special breed of man with superhuman abilities. They were just determined, relentless men who developed specialized skills by working like fiends. What they could do they learned to do the hard way. They worked hard, fought hard, often bled and died.

They were warriors, but they also learned languages and orienteering and history, and had to know how to dig a well, apply a splint, and engineer a road.

Most people couldn’t get past the fighting thing.

He couldn’t count the women who’d watched his face avidly as they asked him how many men he’d killed. Sometimes they looked at him in disgust as they asked it, as if he were some hired gun. A barely domesticated animal.

Sometimes the avid curiosity morphed into a desire that had a sick taste to it, and that turned his stomach. Because clearly they liked the idea of fucking a killer.

Either way, there could be no explaining what he did.

“I wouldn’t kill you,” he said softly. “No matter what you’ve been told. It’s a myth.”

Oh man. He couldn’t kill her, he couldn’t hurt her in any way. Seeing Paige sitting next to him, with that soft, lightly-tanned, smooth skin, pretty face open and smiling, friendly and kind… she was everything he’d ever fought for. The idea of hurting a woman or a child had always made him physically sick. Paige, hurt…
God
.

Paige looked him straight in the eyes, watched him openly. He had no idea what she was seeing, but she suddenly nodded her head, as if confirming something. “No,” she said. “You wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Damn straight,” he answered.

There was an electric moment of silence. Max let out his breath in a slow exhale. There was a lot of meaning behind her words. At one level, of course he wasn’t going to hurt her, kill her. But the deeper meaning was she felt he wasn’t a man to be feared.

Max could hardly remember not being big and strong. By the time he was twelve, he’d shot to six feet and looked sixteen. No one messed with him, and if they did, they were sorry.

The life he lived, particularly after joining the navy and passing BUD/S, had made him even bigger and stronger and meaner-looking. He
was
mean. Fuck with him and you’d regret it. But he chose his battles. He was not out of control and he resented it when a woman treated him like someone in an action movie or a violence addict.

“So,” Paige said softly. “Why don’t we not talk about our work and talk about something else? Like Max here.”

At her feet, Max’s tail thumped. There was something about the way the dog was sitting next to her, totally focussed…

Max shifted the tablecloth, and—yup. The dog had his head on Paige’s thigh. Something he could identify with. He’d like to have his head on Paige’s thigh, too.

He frowned at Paige. “Are you feeding him under the table?”

She winced. “Busted.”

“That’s not good,” he said primly, taking the moral high gizemoral hround, trying hard to keep a straight face as he watched her reaction.

Her skin was fascinating, it signalled every emotion. Right now she was slightly flushed with embarrassment as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

“I know,” she said earnestly. “Don’t think I don’t know it’s wrong, I do. After I got Max at the pound, I read up. I’m a researcher, I know how to gain expertise. I read thousands of pages on dog care, and everyone stressed that dogs shouldn’t eat from the table. It’s bad for them and fosters bad habits.” She thunked her forehead with the palm of her hand. “I
know
this. But—just look at him. He pulls at your heartstrings. How can I resist?”

Max leaned over. Doggy Max swivelled his muzzle to him, suddenly alert to the fact that maybe another chump was at the table. Someone else to scam.

His tail thumped more slowly now, as if his energy had been suddenly depleted. He whined and shivered, looking pathetic, whipped. He inched closer to Max, but cautiously, as if Max might have a hidden stick with which to beat him, and wasn’t the man he’d spent the entire day with, playing on the beach.

As Max watched, the dog slowly, tremblingly lowered himself to the floor, laying his muzzle on his front paws, as if too weak to hold up his head.

Max raised his head. Paige met his gaze then rolled her eyes.

“Don’t tell me, I know.” She sighed. “You’d think he just came out of some concentration camp where they whipped and starved him. Instead of having just been fed.”

“You fall for it, though,” he accused. “Hook, line and sinker.”

“Over and over again,” she agreed. “What can I say? I’m a total wuss.”

They met each other’s eyes again and burst out laughing.

It surprised Max. The laugh came straight up from his belly. Genuine, carefree, unstoppable. The first time he’d laughed, really laughed, in… in years.

And hard on the heels of that laughter, something else, something sharp and alive, moving fast, like a shark in the water. Dangerous. Subterranean.Irresistible.

Sexual desire, of a nature and intensity he’d never felt before, whooshing in like a tsunami onto a dry beach.

He watched her at the table—so pretty and alive, so whole, so easy to be with—with her golden-brown hair and eyes the color of the Pacific a few steps outside the door. Her light golden shoulders gleamed. They were covered by the thin straps of her dress with no signs of a bra. Was she wearing one? He didn’t dare lower his gaze but he had excellent peripheral vision. He didn’t think so.

Oh God.

Just a thin layer of cotton covering those breasts. Perfect, round breasts. His palms itched with the desire to touch them, run his fingers over that smooth, smooth skin.

Everything itched. Desire skittered under his skin like fire, so intense it was almost painful. It was as if he’d never had sex before, every molecule of his body turning around and aligning itself to hers, like iron filings to a magnet.

“Don’t tell anyone at work that I have no backbone when it comes to my dog,” Paige said, pouring some more wine into his glass. “I have a reputation as a hard-ass.”

She looked up at him and froze, her eyes widening, that pretty mouth rounding into an “O” at the expression on his face. It was the exact moment he imagined that mouth around his cock. He gritted his teeth against a groan at the image in his head.

Paige was no dummy and she was a woman. They seemed to have a whole slew of extrasensory perceptions that went into alleyways where men couldn’t follow and which allowed them to read men’s minds.

His mind wasn’t hard to read. What he wanted, fiercely, was right there on his face. He wanted
her
.

He was as hard as a rock, so hard it felt as if his dick were a separate thing, not part of his body. A stone cylinder glued to his belly, heavy and intractable.

He didn’t plan what happened next—it just surged up out of the moment, unstoppable, irresistible.

Reaching out, he covered her hand with his. Her skin was as soft as it looked, the hand warm and delicate. At the touch of her hand, he became even harder, more blood racing to his cock. It felt like his entire body simply went off-line as his dick came online.

Everything he’d0emthing h felt this past year—pain, anger, despair—vanished in a wash of incandescent heat blazing throughout his body, from his toes to the top of his head. Blasting away everything except pure, red-hot desire for this one woman.

He looked at his hand over hers and felt more heat wash over him. His hand was larger, darker, stronger, angled over hers. A mental image of the two of them exploded in his head. This is exactly what they’d look like in bed. His larger, darker, stronger body over hers, moving deeply in hers…

He closed his eyes at the image and breathed the intensity out.

He opened them again to find her watching him, looking slightly anxious. But she was also deep pink with some strong emotion he hoped to God was at least one millionth of the lust he felt, her mouth open as if she couldn’t pull in enough air.

God knows he couldn’t. There was no air in his lungs, just a burning sensation. Heat suffused him, inside and out.

They stared at each other. She had the most amazing eyes, a light blue with green streaks, shimmering as if the ocean were at her feet and reflected in her eyes.

He breathed in a gasp. Said words that were wrenched straight from his chest without any prior thought at all. “I want you.”

Oh, fuck. The words were out there, stark and simple, and he couldn’t call them back. He barely recognized his own voice—low and guttural, as if the words came from somewhere deep inside him. And they had. They came from his very core.