Claiming Her SEAL (ASSIGNMENT: Caribbean Nights Book 1) (15 page)

Dex threw himself back into bed and nursed his temper until dawn, at which point he gave up and stomped into the kitchen to find some coffee before he bit someone’s head off. He had to report for duty at the reef in a couple of hours, and the last thing he wanted was a bunch of grief from his so-called friends. They’d clue in on his bad attitude instantly.

But when he got to the dock, Charlie gave him a wide berth without question, and Jace and Miles withheld every last smartass remark, which only pissed him off further. What, was it that obvious that Emma had messed him up? So much so that he needed to be treated with kid gloves? Those idiots could suck it.

Dex suited up without ripping apart his oxygen tank with his bare hands—a minor miracle—and splashed backward into the water. The ocean absorbed his mood like a sponge. Salt water seeped under his wetsuit, calming him, and the darting fish mesmerized him into smiling. Okay, so maybe the water did have some magic to it. Would he have ever realized that if Emma hadn’t forced him to?

He supplanted coral with renewed energy and didn’t even hate it as much as he normally did. Evan and Jack had taken the morning parasailing bookings, and while Dex would ten times rather be doing that, they had to share the drudge work.

By the time the team called it quits for the day, Dex felt almost human. Enough so that an hour later when Charlie texted everyone to meet at his house to talk business, Dex didn’t even cuss. Emma was just a woman. What was he so worked up over?

Dex waited for Evan, and they walked over together. Dex pushed open Charlie’s back door without knocking, and when he saw the metal washtub full of ice and beer gripped in Jace’s hands, his day improved drastically. Though, refreshments of the adult variety meant it was a serious meeting.

“Exactly what the doctor ordered.” Dex snagged two cold bottles, one for each hand and straddled a backward chair at the splintered table. Miles helped himself to one with a snicker about Dex’s inability to handle his booze, which was such a lie, but whatever. The tub was full, and the night was young.

The other guys settled in with a fair amount of grumbling about the lack of food to go with their beer, except Evan, obviously, who didn’t drink.

Charlie cut through the chatter with a terse, “Eat later.”

Uh, oh. When an even-tempered guy like the boss got snippy, something was up.

“ReefCo has put in a bid to buy Ilhota Rosa. Jared Anderson will very likely be the new owner of the island as soon as he can make it happen,” Charlie said without preamble. Everyone started talking at once, except Evan, who watched with his keen brown eyes slightly narrowed.

“Hey!” Charlie cut through the babble easily and they all shut up. “That’s not going to accomplish anything. Let’s hash out what this means for us and our business. Ilhota Rosa is a key part of our excursion experience.”

Dex banged the table with his fist, which didn’t improve his mood. “There’s nothing to hash out. It’s a problem, period end of story. Anderson wants the island all to himself, obviously.”

This was a crimp in their plans, no doubt. They’d hoped to be in the black with their company by now, but two tropical storms in a row had hit them where it hurt last month. Ilhota Rosa was an ace in the hole, something they could offer that the hundreds of other excursion companies in the Caribbean couldn’t offer. The reef itself wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but it was too far away from other resorts for anyone else to use besides Aqueous Adventures.

Jared Anderson was not going to swoop in with his money and power and disrupt everything.

“He can’t do that.” Jace scowled, wrinkling up his pretty face. “Can he?”

“I don’t know,” Charlie admitted, and that was when he sat down.

Jack broke in. “He must have offered a crapload of money to the Bahamian Wildlife Foundation for them to even consider selling it. What can he do to block us from using it for excursions? Anything?”

“Anderson can try to block us all he wants, but he will not succeed.” Dex downed the last of his beer to keep the rest of the choice words he had to say in relation to Jared Anderson unspoken.

“I don’t want to think this is personal,” Charlie mused. “But Anderson has to know the reef off the coast of Ilhota Rosa is where we take snorkelers. And everyone in this area is aware that’s where the dolphins hang out. It’s what makes it so popular of an excursion for us. I’m as surprised as you that they would agree to sell it.”

“If he buys the island, does he own the reef too?” Miles asked calmly, cutting to the heart of the matter like he typically did in his self-appointed role as referee to the other hotheads in their group. They needed someone to keep them sane, and Miles’s special brand of dead calm, which had made him such a great explosives expert, served them all well.

“That’s the million dollar question.” Charlie nodded once. “We need to find out, otherwise, we might be out of business.”

It wasn’t personal. Probably. Felt personal. They were all personally affected and Dex, for one, wasn’t planning to take it lying down.

“We’ve got to stop him,” Dex growled. “Guys like that only understand a fist to their face.”

Jack slammed his empty beer on the table, nearly cracking his bottle in half with his bare hands. “Give me five minutes alone with Anderson. He’ll withdraw his bid for Ilhota Rosa.”

Which was no idle threat. He’d earned his nickname—Jack of All Trades—because there was very little Jaxon Hyland didn’t excel at. Getting people to do what he wanted ranked as his number one skill, which made him very unpopular with ISIS prisoners of war. Women seemed to like his inventiveness pretty well though.

With a dark chuckle that held no trace of humor, Charlie held up his hand. “That won’t be necessary. But trust me, if we get to a point where we need you to go all MacGyver on his ass, I’ll let you know.”

“What can we do?” Evan asked, and a pall settled over the group. If it was bad enough for Evan to talk, things were bad indeed.

“We can put our heads together and figure it out. Each one of us has our strengths, and we’ve kept each other alive in a much more hostile place than this.” Charlie glanced around the table, meeting each guy’s gaze briefly because that was how he did things. They were a team. “The sale hasn’t happened yet. Let’s focus our considerable talents on keeping our business alive.”

“So, that’s it?” Dex shot to his feet. “We just sit around and jaw about this and everyone’s okay with that? Well, I’m not. Can’t we file some kind of paperwork deal to prevent Anderson from buying the island?”

Barring that, maybe he could take his mood out on Anderson’s face. A little violence might do well to remind Dex what kind of tendencies lurked in his soul. How he was a crappy human being and didn’t even deserve to lay down over sewage so someone like Emma could walk over him.

Then maybe he could stop thinking about her and how he’d like to repeat last night every night for the foreseeable future. That wasn’t what should happen. Emma was a one-night deal. Besides, she’d made it clear she couldn’t get away fast enough. How many more clues did he need to be handed to get over himself already?

“What, like an injunction?” Charlie pursed his lip, clearly intrigued. “Maybe. I don’t know enough about Bahamian law to know if that even exists. Our bank account doesn’t have the luxury of paying for a lawyer to advise us.”

It was a testament to everyone’s respect for Charlie that no one made a crack about whether he’d considered calling his dad. He wouldn’t, so it was a moot point. Montgomery St. Croix could buy and sell Jared Anderson and his piddling ReefCo enterprise ten times over without blinking, but Charlie didn’t get along with his father. It wasn’t their business why their leader didn’t want to have anything to do with the St. Croix billions.

A few extra zeroes would sure come in handy right about now though.

They talked for another thirty minutes and came up with exactly squat for their trouble. Dex left the meeting in an even worse mood than before.

“I need food,” Dex grumbled to Evan as the solemn group trooped out of Charlie’s place. “Wanna go to the resort with me?”

Bad idea, in hindsight. If Emma saw him, she’d think he was looking for her. He wasn’t. He didn’t know what he’d even say if he did see her. But he had to eat.

Evan nodded and followed him to the dock on the far side of the village where they kept their speedboat. The other guys must have been too depressed to seek out dinner, but Dex didn’t see any point in starving himself. Maybe if he ate, he could shed his temper for good.

They motored around the island to the resort, where the girls in the kitchen slipped them burgers and fries when the restaurant manager wasn’t paying attention. Dex motioned to an empty table near the pool, which was far enough away from the kitchen to avoid detection for the filched food. If it happened to be right in the path from the beach to the hotel tower, so? It wasn’t like he was keeping an eye out for Emma or anything.

She didn’t materialize.

Morosely, he and Evan ate in silence. Or rather Evan ate. Dex picked at his suddenly unappetizing food until he couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’m done. I’ll walk back to the village.”

Evan glanced up, his dark eyes unreadable, as always. “Why don’t you talk to her?”

“What?” Scowling at his roommate, Dex took in the other man’s composed face, but Evan didn’t elaborate. Likely because he’d made his point and made it well. “What makes you think I need to talk to her? That’s ridiculous. There’s nothing to say. It was one night. Now it’s over.”

Evan chewed his hamburger and nodded. The guy was half Spanish, and sometimes Dex got the distinct impression he cultivated his mysterious, broody persona on purpose, just to confuse people. Dex had grown up in Houston, where he’d known his share of Mexicans, but Evan Silva was a whole different breed.

Dex didn’t feel all that charitable about it all at once.

“You think it’s not over.” Dex clenched his teeth and then cursed. What did Emma think? “Well, what do you know about it? Nothing.”

Except for the marathon shower. Evan was a guy and had probably taken a long shower after a date a time or two. But that didn’t mean what Evan obviously thought it did. “For your information, I had sand in… places last night. And it wasn’t a date!”

This one-sided conversation was over. Dex’s mood veered into the realm of dark and dangerous, which was not helped when he spun to stomp away from the table, only to be confronted by Rachel.

“Hey, Dex.” She glanced over his shoulder at Evan, and her brows lifted a touch in pure female appreciation. “Who’s your friend?”

With a strangled sigh, Dex turned back to the table. “Rachel, Evan. Good luck with that.”

Rachel immediately plopped down in Dex’s vacated seat. “Nice to meet you, Evan. I saw you earlier. At the dock? I was thinking about parasailing but it seems so dangerous. I was impressed with how patient you were with that lady who changed her mind.”

Abruptly, Rachel cut herself off to glance up at Dex, who was still standing there like an idiot, but come on. This was too good to miss. The dynamic at the table had shifted instantly as Evan’s face took on a panicked edge the longer Rachel babbled.

Not that Dex spent a lot of time thinking about it, but Evan didn’t suck in the looks department. But he rarely spoke to anyone, let alone women, and he definitely didn’t encourage them. Occasionally a particularly tenacious one would latch onto his enigmatic routine, and the challenge was on. Dex was kind of curious what a high-energy, unflinching woman like Rachel would do with him.

“You don’t have to stick around, Dex,” she said firmly. “I think you’ll find that you’re desperately needed in room 2319.”

Dex backed up a step. “I’m not looking for Emma.”

What, was everyone reading his mind today?

Though he did wonder why Rachel was at the pool by herself, dressed in a red bikini and sarong like she’d been here awhile.

“No one said you were. But she’s been curled up in a ball in the center of her bed since she got in last night and hasn’t moved.” A card key appeared in Rachel’s outstretched fingers. “Since I’m pretty sure you’re the only one who can fix that, off you go.”

“Is she okay? Is she sick?” Before he’d registered his muscles moving, his arm shot out to take the room key.

Fix Emma? Like it was his fault she had something wrong with her?

“By the way, I have other sleeping arrangements for tonight,” Rachel commented without taking her gaze off Evan. “So, don’t worry about me.”

“I… won’t.” And now his own face probably looked a lot like Evan’s. Dumbstruck with a side of panic.

What if something was really wrong with Emma? Had he hurt her? She’d said she could handle it. He hadn’t believed her, but she’d taken everything he’d given her and more. He’d thought she was okay, or he never would have ignored her all day.

Since Rachel was off and running with her quest to get a rise out of her silent companion, Dex strode toward the elevator.

Fix it? Ha. He was the cause, not the solution. He’d check on Emma and leave.

Room 2319 loomed, and he hesitated. Yeah, Rachel had given him a key, but that didn’t mean Emma was expecting him. He knocked on the door lightly. In case she was asleep. “Emma?”

She didn’t answer. Maybe she was in the shower and hadn’t heard him. And now he was a double dog because the image of Emma naked in the shower rocketed through him with the force of an atom bomb. She could be hurt or sick, and all he could think about was nailing her again? Moron.

Cautiously, he slid the key into the reader and eased the door open. The dark interior nearly swallowed him. “Emma? Are you okay?”

“What are you doing here?” Her muffled voice bled through him, soothing his ruffled nerves. And riling him up but good, all at the same time.

At least she was alive. That was good. “Rachel sent me to check on you.”

“She did, huh?” Emma’s brief laugh struck him oddly, and he pushed into the room a couple more steps. “Figures. I hide out in the one place I’m sure you have no access to and yet… here you are.”

“Wait, you’re hiding? From me?” The door slipped out of his suddenly clammy hand and shut with a bang. “Why?”