The SEAL’s Secret Lover (2 page)

Keenan’s face closed off. “Any of these yours?”

“They’ve all got rainbow straps around them,” she said. “Those two coming, and another one just came out of the chute.”

“I’ve got this,” Keenan said when she reached for the first bag. “How many bags each?”

“One,” Rose said, distracted by her lagging email download. She was down to thirty percent battery life. “They’re pretty experienced travelers.”

More and more bags slid down and were claimed. The number of people waiting dwindled. Rose stood on tiptoe and peered around the room.

“What are you looking for?”

“The lost baggage room,” she said.

“You don’t know your bag isn’t going to come out,” he pointed out reasonably.

“It’s best to be prepared,” she said, her brain spinning up hours-long delays while she attempted to fill out paperwork that was probably in the Cyrillic alphabet. “Do you speak Turkish?”

Keenan nudged her with his elbow, then pointed. A bag trundled toward them, black, bound with a rainbow strap. “That’s mine,” she said.

He heaved it off the carousel. “Don’t go borrowing trouble, Jetlag.”

She waited with the luggage and her charges while Keenan brought the Land Rover around from the parking garage. He left it idling while he loaded the rear compartment. Grannie and her friends climbed into the backseat and buckled up. Rose used the running board to lift herself into the passenger seat, and looked at the dash. A GPS device was affixed to the windshield, flashing a route to their hotel, while a cell phone was charging in the console. As the luggage thumped into the rear compartment, she dug out her charging cable and adapter. When the driver’s door opened, she turned expectantly to face him, the phone in one hand, the cable and adapter in the other.

Keenan slid into the seat, and it hit her. She was going to spend the next two weeks in a vehicle that seemed enormous when she rented it but with a Navy SEAL sitting next to her now seemed small. Intimate.

Grannie, Florence, and Marian were conscientiously buckled into the backseat, knees pressed primly together, booted feet lined up in a row, travel backpacks on their laps. Keenan’s dark blue gaze held a knowing amusement.

They were all staring at her, waiting for her to snap out of her starry-eyed daze. She cleared her throat. “Is there an outlet available for me to keep my phone charged?”

“Sure,” he said, and unplugged his phone. “We’ll just have to share.”

Keenan merged into traffic as she jammed the charger into the outlet and plugged in her phone. The WiFi signal disappeared, leaving her with no connection at all. “Damn,” she muttered.

“Did you reboot it?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m supposed to have international access, but it doesn’t seem to be working. I’ll just wait for WiFi at the hotel,” she said brightly, and turned her attention to the scenery passing by.

Silence of the politely disbelieving variety greeted this optimistic statement.

“You do know we’re driving straight to Cappadocia,” Keenan said.

“I designed the itinerary,” she replied.

“Yeah, and we need to talk about that once we’re at the hotel,” Keenan said, and turned onto the highway.

The drive would have been pleasant enough if Rose hadn’t felt compelled to check for a signal on her phone every thirty minutes. Keenan drove with a resolute silence and attention to traffic and roads that said this wasn’t his first time hauling ass across a country in a crowded off-road vehicle, a GPS navigation system suction-cupped to the windshield. They stopped along the way for a light supper and arrived in Cappadocia just as the sun was setting. Eons of wind and rain had carved ancient lava flows into sloping valleys, leaving behind jagged, protruding formations known as fairy chimneys. By the time Rose had Grannie settled in bed, reading, with Florence and Marian in a room across the hall, she was all but vibrating with tension.

Keenan lived in this country. He was a SEAL, and if she remembered correctly, Jack said he specialized in communications. Surely he could help get her phone working.

“I’m going to do some work,” she said to Grannie.

“You’re being ridiculous, but I know from past experience that won’t stop you,” Grannie said without looking up from her botany guide.

Keenan’s room was two down from hers. She knocked softly on the door, and listened. No sounds inside, no TV, no breathing, no nothing. Maybe he’d gone out for a run. She took the elevator to the lobby, where the night clerk managing the desk had just enough English to point at the sign giving the hotel’s WiFi network and password.

She thanked him and turned around, and saw Keenan sitting in the hotel bar, a glass by his right hand. His face and the book in his hand were lit by the lamp at his shoulder. The light washed out his beard, turned his mouth into a thin, almost cruel line. Heat welled inside her, slowly saturating nerves and flesh, although if someone had asked her to explain why, she couldn’t have put it into words. Her response came from deep inside, powerful, right, and a little scary.

“You are a professional woman succeeding in a male-dominated industry. You can have a conversation with a man in a bar,” she said, shaking off the nerves. She straightened her shoulders and marched into the bar. The furniture was a charming shabby chic: red velvet rubbed worn, dark tables, lamps shrouded with red-fringed shades.

“You always talk to yourself like that, Jetlag?” he asked without looking up.

Fuck!
“Did you hear me?”

“No,” he said. “But I’d guess you were talking yourself into something.”

Out of something, actually. “I still can’t get cell service,” she said.

He looked at her phone, in her hand, then up at her face. “Did you get an international plan before you left home?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Talk to your carrier.”

“I would do that,” she said with what she thought was admirable patience, “except my phone doesn’t work.”

He sat back and linked his arms behind his head. “WiFi?”

“Yes, except trying to VPN into the network and into work is like swimming through molasses.”

He held out his hand for her phone. “Take a seat,” he said. She peered over his shoulder as he methodically looked through her settings. “Is it unlocked?”

“No. The I.T. department assured me it would work.”

That earned her a snort. “You rebooted it?”

“Yes,” she said. “Twice. Once at the airport, and once at dinner.”

“I’m out of ideas,” he said. “If you have an international plan, it should work. If it’s unlocked, you just swap out the SIM cards and buy minutes. Is this the first time you’ve taken it overseas?”

“This is the first time I’ve taken myself overseas, much less my phone.”

“Email your I.T. department tonight and maybe they’ll get it fixed while we’re on the road tomorrow.”

“You do
not
know our I.T. department,” she said. “It’s a ten-business-day request turnaround. I’ll be home before they get to it.”

“Ten days is for soft civilians. Try a couple of months.”

Elbows on the table, she blew out her breath and rested her head on her fingertips. “I am so fucked,” she said to the polished surface.

His glass, visible in her peripheral vision, disappeared for a moment. She heard him swallow, then he set the empty glass down. “You were planning to work on this trip?”

“Yes.” She saw his phone resting face down on the table beside the glass. “Can I use yours?”

“No. I’m sorry,” he added, softening the blunt refusal. “It’s locked down pretty tight. Security.”

Head still in her hands, she looked up at him. “I thought you didn’t reenlist.”

“I didn’t. I’m working for Grey Wolfe Security.”

The same company Jack had planned to work for when he was discharged. It means doing similarly dangerous work under a similar shroud of secrecy with similar levels of security clearance, for about five times the pay. Jack had planned to go into contractor work with Keenan, until he’d come home with the shakes. She wanted to make that right for Jack, the way she’d made right their parents’ divorce, their father’s abrupt departures, their mother’s drinking. But this was something a sister couldn’t fix. Whatever he’d survived in the Navy was so far beyond her ken, all she could do was just sit with him while he trembled.

And he still didn’t talk about it. She barely knew anything about Keenan, but he looked even less likely than Jack to talk about his feelings.

He mistook her silence for petulance. “If there’s an emergency, of course you can use it,” he said reluctantly. “A real emergency. Like someone dies, or something burns to the ground.”

“It really wouldn’t do me much good,” she admitted. “I need access to the network to do much of anything, and the I.T. department would skin me alive if I tried to VPN in over your phone. They’re beyond anal about data getting stolen.”

“Can we just buy you a phone tomorrow?”

“Same problem with the VPN,” she said. “I need my data, my security access, and the trip’s booked almost to the minute. I’m not going to ask Grannie to cool her heels while I try to deal with this when I know they’ll have my ass if I use an unsecured phone to work. I am so fucked.”

“Didn’t you tell your boss you were going to be out of the country for two weeks?”

She heaved an inhale, then immediately regretted it. The air smelled faintly of furniture polish and heavily of the scent of the skin of Keenan’s forearm, bared by his sleeves pushed to his elbows. The hair dusting the skin was golden brown, lightened by the sun as it tanned the skin, and did nothing to obscure the shift of muscles and veins as he stroked the condensation on his glass of beer. She’d always had a thing for hands. Workingman hands, elegant cellist hands, short, stubby fingers or long, deft, callused ones, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the way the delicate framework of bones and muscles worked together to convey competence. Even better was the sense that they could delicately twine wires together or clench into a fist hard enough to shatter a jaw.

Keenan’s hands looked like his mouth. Delicate and brutal, all at once. The thought set off a slow burn low in her belly.

I did not know that about myself.

They say travel opens you up to new places, faces, cultures, ideas. She’d been in Turkey less than twelve hours and her entire nervous system was being rewired.

“I told him,” she said. “But I also told them I’d be available.”

He just huffed out a soft laugh that told her he knew all about making promises and breaking them. “You want a drink?”

That wasn’t a good idea. “Are you having another?” she equivocated.

The laugh softened into a smile, patiently waiting for her to make up her own mind.

“Red wine,” she said.

He got up and went to the bar, returning with a bottle of beer for himself and a small bottle of red wine for her. “Jack told me you’d be like this,” he said as he twisted the top off the bottle.

She didn’t even pretend to not know what he meant. She’d taken on their alcoholic mother’s job to ensure Jack had a reasonable facsimile of a normal childhood. If he found it amusing, not a source of guilt because he got to be the carefree younger sibling, then she’d done well. But the truth of the matter was, Jack was different now, and she had no idea how to help him. In fact, she’d planned on using this trip to spend time with Grannie,
and
with her radically altered younger brother. “Jack told me all kinds of things about you,” she said, watching him over the rim of her glass.

“What did he say?”

That Keenan was the best badass on a team of badasses. Rose smiled. “He said you’d take good care of us.”

Keenan’s smile tightened imperceptibly. “I will,” he said. “So what’s with the obsession about work?”

No one ever asked a man that. No one. But she had to spend the next ten days in a Land Rover with this man. She was already attracted to him, already thinking about how long it had been since she’d had sex, let alone the kind of sex her chemistry with Keenan promised. The only way to make it worse was to get into an increasingly heated verbal sparring match. “I’m thirty,” she said mildly, “on a leadership team comprised of men who are all at least ten years older than I am. I’m a woman in a male-dominated industry. I can’t fail. I can’t even make a mistake. If something goes wrong while I’m gone, all I’ll hear for the rest of eternity is ‘remember that time Rose took her granny to Turkey and the pricing system went down?’”

He laughed again, a low, soft chuckle that wove with the wine heating her veins. “Anything’s funny when it involves the word “Turkey.” We’ll figure something out, Jetlag,” he said. “Tomorrow.”

She automatically woke up her phone to check the itinerary. “We’ve got the dawn hot air balloon ride, then Goreme and Derinkuyu.”

“We will figure something out,” he said again.

“It will be fine. It will be just fine. We’re eight hours ahead of them. I’ll check in before we leave for the day and see what happened at the end of their day, then again when we get to the next hotel, which will be early morning for them. Or something like that,” she said, because she was confusing herself. She swallowed the last of her wine and reached for the bottle. “It’s going to be
fine
.”

Keenan’s hand closed around hers. “You probably know this, but drinking that much red wine after twenty-four hours of travel isn’t the best idea.”

Goose bumps shivered up her arm to her nape. “Making sure my phone worked before I left North America was the best idea,” she said. She tilted her wrist, still in his grip. The wine sloshed into the neck as she held it just below level, over her glass. “This is second best,” she said, and started to pour.

His fingers tightened around her wrist, heat and pressure, strength and threat. She flicked her gaze from the glass to his eyes, hot and dark with promise. “I can’t make your phone work, but I can do better than second best.”

Chapter Two

Keenan was going to kill Jack.

Or Jack was going to kill him. Either was possible, at this very moment, Rose staring at him, the bottle suspended over her wine glass, empty enough that only a thin sliver of liquid sloshed up the neck toward the opening. Still clasping her wrist, he stared right back, using the ticking seconds to memorize her face, partly out of habit, partly because he was captivated. Her hair and her eyes were the same shade of rich chestnut brown, a color he’d never seen in anyone’s eyes before. Her pale skin testified to a life lived indoors, slender fingers poised over a keyboard, razor-sharp mind slicing problems into neat ribbons. If she’d started the day in Lancaster with any makeup on her face it was long gone by now, leaving her with a pale rose mouth. The color in her cheeks he attributed to the wine, or maybe to the fact that he’d just baldly propositioned Jack Powell’s sister.