Claiming Her SEAL (ASSIGNMENT: Caribbean Nights Book 1) (16 page)

He had hurt her. She hated him. Stupid, clumsy boor that he was, even when he’d tried to be gentle, obviously—

A light snapped on, blinding him for a moment. When he’d blinked away the worst of the bright blob over his vision, Emma was sitting up in her bed, still wearing his shirt. Dear God. That was so sexy he couldn’t even articulate it.

She’d been wearing his shirt. All day. Since the moment she’d left him. And he wanted to strip it off her in the worst way, revealing that gorgeous body beneath. He wanted to reexperience the amazing thing that had happened between them not so long ago, but geez, it felt as if it had been a million years since he’d touched her.

Except she’d been hiding from him which kind of alluded to the fact that sex wasn’t in his future.

She clasped her hands around her knees, as if holding herself together by a slim thread. “Hiding in my room was the only way I could guarantee myself that I’d stay away from you.”

“S
tay away?” Dex’s expression mirrored the confusion in his tone. “You’ve been deliberately avoiding me?”

Emma shut her eyes. For fortification. For sanity. For God knew what reason because her brain had simply shut down the moment she’d heard his voice cutting through the darkness. How had she forgotten that was what he did? He was a light in the midst of so much black, and she wasn’t handling it—him—well.

Raw emotion spilled into her throat, and it was a wonder she could speak at all.

Dex was here. In her hotel room. The very last place he should be.

Everything inside ached, like a thousand bees had swarmed down her windpipe, stinging her internal organs millimeter by millimeter as they swept through her body. And Dex was the cure to her misery, as much as she might wish otherwise. Here he was… within touching distance. And she couldn’t reach out.

“Yeah,” she said, “You needed space. I was giving it to you.”

To prove she could. Because it was the last thing she’d wanted to do, and that meant she’d needed space too. She’d been trying to get closer to him, and then he’d gotten way too close and it was too much.

All she’d wanted was a simple fling that would help her get her life back on track. To demonstrate that she’d found her mojo again and regained all the strength that Chris had bled from her. Instead of liberation, things she’d had no business feeling for James Dexter Riley had exploded all over her the moment they’d fused bodies. God, what had she stumbled into here?

She’d spent one whole day of her vacation in bed because she’d been scared of running into Dex. Scared of what she’d feel if she saw him again. Scared of what he’d do when he saw her.

Emma could not be falling for him. The last thing she wanted was to wake up dependent on a man for her happiness.

Never in a million years had she thought he’d track her down. What was she going to do?

“Space.” His implacable expression didn’t change, but the vibe between them went south in a hurry. “Because of the bodies.”

“What? No!” Crap, he thought she’d been avoiding him because of his past. After all the work she’d done to get him to open up and share, she’d screwed up so bad. “Dex, that’s an issue we can deal with—that I can deal with. Later. But it has nothing to do with whether I wanted to see you again.”

“Sure.”

He didn’t believe her.

“Dex, I’ve been thinking, and we’re not really right for each other. We want different things, and I’m not in a good place to be this serious. I’d rather end things now, instead of later when it will be so much more complicated to disentangle our lives.” Without blinking, she stared him down. “That’s exactly what I said to Chris. Does it make you homicidal?”

His lips curled up in a smile that seemed to surprise him. “No. Does that mean I pass the test?”

“It means I care about the fact that you’ve killed a lot of people in your life, but only because it affects you. Not because I’m scared that you’re like him. I told you, when you’re with me, you’re not Dexter. I’m not afraid of you, and I wasn’t avoiding you because of that. It was because of… something else.”

Because she’d lied about being strong enough to take this man inside her and deal with it. She wasn’t.

A dozen different things skated through his gaze as he stared at her. “Just out of curiosity, have you eaten?”

She shook her head and then regretted it. Should she have admitted that? It was practically like saying, Hey Sailor, you rocked my world so hard, I can’t even put food in my mouth.

“Slept?” He raked a hand through his hair and sighed. “Never mind. Anything I might say about that would come off as a little too much pot calling the kettle black.”

Something pinged between them as his meaning crystalized. He was admitting he hadn’t eaten either. Or slept. Because of her? With a skeptical eye, she took in the fatigue around his eyes, the tension rolling off him in waves, which she could sense from here even though he hadn’t moved from his stance near the door.

What did that mean? That last night had tied him up in knots exactly the way it had her?

His gray eyes turned flinty and inscrutable, and she couldn’t look away as he crossed his arms. She had the distinct impression he was holding himself back as much as she was. But whether he was keeping himself from bolting toward the door or toward her, she couldn’t say.

Worse, she wasn’t sure which one she wanted. Wouldn’t it better all the way around if he just left?

Please, God. Don’t let him leave.

“You’ve been holed up in here all day?” He jerked his chin. “What would you have done if you weren’t giving me space?”

Crawled inside him and stayed there forever. Curled up next to him on the beach and slept. Spent every waking hour touching him. That was the problem—she wanted him too much. “You can’t ask me that.”

“Why not?” he challenged. “You’re the one who brought it up.”

That was so not the point. “You can’t ask me for the same reason I was giving you space in the first place.”

He didn’t move, but the hotel room grew ten sizes smaller as he swept her with a once-over that could not be misinterpreted. “Because last night blew your preconceptions about what’s happening between us into little tiny bits, and you have no idea how to put the pieces back together?”

Her lungs hitched so hard she struggled to drag in her next breath. She’d rocked his world too. How unexpected. “Something like that.”

“Maybe the problem is too much space.” The distance between them vanished and he loomed over her, so gorgeous and hard and impossible to fathom. “We should fix that.”

He smelled like ocean and man, the same scent that clung to his shirt. It wrapped around her anew like an opiate, weakening her and bringing with it images of his flesh on hers in the moonlight. What would be the harm in flinging her body backward on the bed in equal parts abandon and invitation?

The harm would be later when she was drowning in her real life again. He was supposed to be the cure to her floundering, not a whole brand new reason to feel all off-kilter.

“Dex.” She’d meant it as a warning but when her voice came out all breathy and full of promise like that? Yeah. Not so much.

His gaze darkened. “Emma.”

“What are you doing here?” she burst out. “This is not… I mean, last night was fine and all, but—”

“Fine?” One knee hit the mattress, caving it in as he leaned forward. “Well, I’m just insulted now. I’ll have to try again and see if we can’t improve my rating.”

Wide-eyed, she watched him crawl toward her, and it was a bit predatory. Thrilling. The man had wicked intent painted all over his expression, and God, she wanted him to touch her, to drive her to the brink of the wide abyss and fling her off with his hard body under hers—

Desperately, she cast about for a way to stop his advance because if he got his hands on her, she’d be lost again. “Dex, this is a hotel room. There’s no water here. Isn’t that part of the deal?”

“I suppose it is.” Without warning, he hauled her up in his arms and carried her to the bathroom as if she weighed no more than a sack of flour.

“What are you doing?”

Dumb question, and the answer made itself quite obvious when he nudged open the door of the shower with one knee, pierced her with his flinty eyes, and grinned with so much carnal heat that her bones melted.

“Water. As ordered.”

Dex set her down on the cool tile and in seconds had the shower going and his shirt off her body.

She fought the urge to run because there was nothing magic about water. Dex was devastating, no matter what, but never for the reasons he thought. No, she was deathly afraid he’d cut a path right through her heart, which had barely knit back together from the damage it had sustained last night.

“Dex.”

She swallowed whatever else she’d been about to say as he stripped off his own shirt, threw it over his shoulder, and went to work on his shorts, the muscles in his arms bunching and sliding, and oh, my God, then he was naked and magnificent.

His hot, heavy-lidded gaze locked onto hers. “I like it when you call me James. By the way.”

She liked it too. That was part of the problem. She could handle Dex, but James? That man had thoroughly unhinged her. Was still doing it all over again.

And that was precisely what she’d been trying to avoid all day.

“Last night,” she croaked. “I was trying to prove something. That I was strong enough for whatever you could throw at me. I’m… not so sure I did that.”

“Emma.” He tipped up her head and laid a sweet, never ending kiss on her lips, murmuring her name against them. His stubble grazed her skin with rough, delicious intent, and her insides went liquid.

He lifted his head a fraction, and both hands came up around her jaw to cup it as he looked at her. “You proved that and more. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. I thought we were through, that we were a onetime thing, happy to go our separate ways, but I couldn’t. Because you are amazing and strong and last night was not about a vacation fling.”

No. But it was a bit of a shock to hear him admit it. Last night should have been an exercise in helping Dex work through his darkness, and she’d been so focused on herself and her own freak-out that she hadn’t even checked in with him to see how he was doing. “You didn’t think I was enough for you. Did you change your mind?”

“Emma.” He groaned and touched his forehead to hers. “I never thought that. Everything I’ve done thus far has been to protect you, because I… have a history of hurting people. I didn’t want to do that to you.”

She smoothed a hand down his back, intending to comfort, but he felt so good under her fingertips she kept going, touching whatever she came across at her leisure. “You didn’t. You couldn’t.”

And that was the bottom line. He wasn’t going to hurt her. What was she afraid of? That he’d be impossible to walk away from at the end? That was already true. Was she really going to try to stop a bullet train that had already left the station or enjoy the ride as long as possible?

Nuzzling her mouth, he sucked in a breath as she spread her fingers across his beautiful butt.
One more time
. That was it. Then she’d have to cut herself off before… something bad happened that suddenly didn’t seem to matter so much. Maybe she should just fall into the moment and shut the hell up.

“Last night, you slayed me,” he murmured. “Tonight it’s my turn to prove I’m strong enough to be with you.”

Without further elaboration, he yanked her down a rabbit hole with a simple kiss. But then there was nothing simple about this man, and when he took her mouth with his, her whole body flared.

“James,” she breathed as he gathered her close, aligning their bodies for maximum possible contact. Her knee slid between his legs and oh, my, all his gorgeous flesh was there within her reach.

He was strong enough, all right. Commanding, charismatic—nothing she’d have said she wanted in a man, but this one had captured her from the first, challenging her, provoking her, forcing her to reevaluate how she defined herself.

“Right here, sweetheart.” His chest rumbled against hers, and then there was no more talking as he hustled her backward into the shower.

Steam had risen in the glass cubicle, turning it into a mystical otherworld. Or maybe that was due to the presence of the larger than life man joining her in the small space.

Hot water pelted her skin, sensitizing it. Or maybe that was because of the man too, because when he looked at her like that, as if he planned to devour her whole, it raced through her veins, leaving pure sensation in its wake. And then his hands were on her, touching her, exploring at will. Exciting her. That was way better than just having his eyes on her.

“So beautiful,” he murmured and mouthed the hollow of her throat. “You taste like the ocean.”

“I, uh, haven’t exactly washed since last night,” she confessed.

Nice. Now he’d think she was a slovenly frump. That was not sexy. But then she hadn’t expected to end up naked with Dex, or she’d have prepared better. She reached for the soap because hello there was no better place to remove day-old salt water from her body than the shower, was there?

He swatted her hand away, and the soap slipped from her grip to bounce across the Mexican title lining the shower floor.