He made a noncommittal sound and nuzzled her thigh again, kissing her through the skirt of her dress. “Besides, I have other things to do.”
“Hm.” She couldn’t wait to hear this. “Like?”
“Like comb through the flood of resumes I’ve gotten for new guys, figure out an easy-to-remember name for the team—I’m
not
going with HORNET—and set up an international office.”
“Oh.” Didn’t that just deflate her bubble? She’d thought for sure he was thinking more along the lines of taking her to bed for the next, oh, fifty years. “Well. I like HORNET.”
He lifted his head to give her a dark scowl. “You would.”
She bopped his forehead with her palm, intending to shove him back into the water, but with his arms still wrapped around her, the jerk dragged her in with him. She broke the surface sputtering, cursing him in English and Spanish. He laughed, and the man who didn’t know how to cut loose yanked her under again.
Having not taken a decent breath before going under, she struggled to get to the surface, but he held her tight and his mouth covered hers. He gave her his air, then licked the inside of her mouth, igniting sparks of pleasure in her belly. Hooking her legs around his waist, she found him fully erect. All it took was a shift of her dress and a wiggle of her hips and—oh, yes, he filled her up until she gasped into his mouth.
Gabe walked toward shore, careful not to break the contact of their mouths or bodies, and each step pushed him deeper, deeper, deeper. They broke the surface together, gulping air before their mouths fused again with urgency. He dropped to his knees in the surf and the skirt of her dress floated out around them in a pale yellow cloud.
“God, sweetheart,” he groaned and rolled his hips in a torturous sweet and slow rhythm that matched the beat of the waves. “I’ve missed you. You feel…so…good.”
Audrey nuzzled his neck, opened her mouth over the strong beat of his pulse. His skin tasted like salt and sand and her man, and she adored the way he shivered when she kissed him there. Unlike the other times they’d made love, the build to climax happened slowly, and the release, when it came, stretched out into oblivion, soft and lovely, like floating on a cloud. Gabe tangled his fingers in her hair to tilt her head up and kiss her forehead, her nose. Before taking her lips, he pressed deep one last time and moaned with his own climax. Audrey held him through it and laughed. Her heart felt so full it was either that or cry again.
LOS ANGELES, CA
“Danny? Honey, what are you still doing up?”
Danny Giancarelli looked up from his laptop and managed a smile for his sleepy-eyed wife despite the headache pounding directly in the center of his forehead. She wore a ratty USMC T-shirt from his military days, which he’d given her before his deployment after 9/11. Leah said she’d worn it to bed every night for the entire year that he was gone and even now, all these years later, it was still her favorite nightshirt. His, too. She’d been wearing it the day he’d arrived home when he, knowing without a doubt at the ripe old age of twenty that she was the woman for him, popped the question. She’d worn it on their wedding night, and it was sexier than any of the lingerie her girlfriends had bought her for her bridal shower. She’d also worn it the night they’d made their first baby, and every subsequent baby thereafter.
And it still looked sexy as sin on her.
“Come here.” He held out a hand, his wedding band glinting in the soft glow of his desk lamp. When she set her hand in his and he pulled her onto his lap for a kiss, he thought, not for the first time, that he was the luckiest S.O.B. alive.
Leah drew back and soothed her thumb down the crease between his brows. He’d been noticing more and more of those creases in the mornings when he gazed into the mirror to shave. Around his eyes. His mouth. His forehead. He looked more like his father every freakin’ day. Luckily, he hadn’t started losing his hair yet like Pop, but it still made him feel old, especially when his wife was as hot at twenty-nine as she’d been at eighteen.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is the Patterson case bothering you?”
“No.”
One brow arched the way it did when the kids told a lie, and she gave him a dubious expression.
“Yeah, okay,” he admitted, “it’s bugging me.”
His last case, a local hostage situation involving a girl named Sylvia Patterson and her ex-boyfriend, hadn’t had the same happy-ever-after as the Van Amee case, ending in a murder-suicide.
“But not how you’re thinking,” he added. “I did everything in my power to save that girl. It wasn’t enough, but that’s part of the job. You accept it and move on. You have to or you’d drive yourself insane with guilt.”
“Like Marcus did,” Leah said.
“Yeah, like Marcus.” He sighed. “I am sad the girl died, but dwelling on it won’t change that, so I’ve put it out of my mind.”
“Then why are you sitting here in the middle of the night, looking up”—she leaned over to get a peek at his computer screen—“whatever it is you’re looking up. Is that in Spanish?”
“Yeah.”
She blinked. “When did you learn to speak Spanish?”
“I can’t speak it,” he said. “I can read it okay, enough to get the gist, anyway.”
“Huh. Just when I think you can’t surprise me anymore. What are you reading about?”
He hesitated for a heartbeat before answering, “The EPC.”
She huffed out a breath. “
That’s
what you’re still hung up on? I thought the Van Amee case was one of your success stories.”
Not really his. It was Gabe’s, Marcus’s, and the rest of their team’s. If it wasn’t for them, he had no doubt Bryson Van Amee would be dead and Jacinto Rivera and Rorro Salazar would be in the wind somewhere, millions of dollars richer. Okay, technically Rorro was still in the wind, but the little shit wasn’t considered much of a threat since the supposed brains of the operation, Jacinto, was dead.
Except, Jacinto wasn’t known to have brains, was he?
Man, his head hurt. Danny shut the laptop with a slap of his palm and rubbed his temple.
“Honey,” his wife soothed and laid her head on his shoulder. She smelled good, like the raspberry body wash she used. “Let it go. That case was a win. I don’t understand why you’re still obsessing over it a month later. This isn’t like you.”
“God, Lee, I know. But the whole thing stinks and I can’t figure out where the smell is coming from.”
“Okay.” She scooted off his lap, grabbed the ottoman from in front of his easy chair across the room, and sat on it cross-legged so that she faced him. “Maybe you need a fresh nose.”
Danny smiled. “Have I shown you lately how much I love you?”
“No, but we can get to that later.” She gestured a c’mon motion with her hand. “Lay it out for me, G-man.”
“All right.” He opened the laptop and called up the Word file he’d been keeping since the end of the hostage situation. Then he laid it all out for her. Everything from the abduction of Bryson Van Amee in front of his apartment right on through to the rescue by Gabe and his men.
“Everything we know about Jacinto Rivera says he was a thug, plain and simple,” he told her. “He couldn’t have masterminded something as sophisticated as rigging a limo with ether gas to knock Bryson unconscious. Someone had to have been pulling his strings, but according to the website I was reading, the EPC has denounced Jacinto for the ransom attempt and claims no responsibility.”
Which was not their modus operandi. And
that
was bugging him.
“They
like
people to know they are capable of snatching anybody from anywhere,” he continued. “Angel Rivera
likes
propagating that reputation, but yesterday, again according to that site, he publicly disowned his remaining family.”
“Wait, wait.” Leah raised her hands to stop him. “‘His remaining family.’ Are you sure that’s what it said? You didn’t mistranslate?”
He opened the laptop, called up the website from the browser’s history, and reread the paragraph. “No, that’s exactly what it says.”
“Well, that’s an odd word choice, don’t you think? I mean, wasn’t Jacinto his only brother?”
“Yeah, he was. Maybe it’s a cultural thing?” Danny mulled it over for a second, spinning his wedding band around on his finger. “No, wait, I think there was a sister…” He called up another file and scanned over the information. “Claudia Rivera. She’s been missing since August of ’05, presumed dead.”
Leah opened her mouth, but froze before uttering a sound and her eyes went huge behind her glasses. She scrambled off the ottoman and out of the room.
“Um, Lee?”
She came back, flipping through an old baby name book they’d bought five years ago when they discovered they were expecting the twins.
“Jesus, Lee. You still have that thing?”
“It’s fun to look at. Besides,” she said and sent him a sly sideways smile. “You never know when we might need it again.”
“Oh, no.” He held up his hands. “We agreed to stop at three.”
“Actually it was two, and the third was a surprise. I’m not entirely against a fourth, but it’ll have to be before I turn thirty-five.” With that, she turned her full attention to the book, leaving him sitting there catching flies with his mouth.
“Lee, c’mon, I’m getting too old to do the whole newborn thing again. The twins practically killed us, remember? You can’t drop that bomb on me and expect—”
She slapped the book down in front of him and pointed to a name. “Look. I found your bad smell.”
He picked up the book. Read the passage once. Twice. And—holy shit—suddenly saw the whole case in a new light. “Yeah, baby, I think you did.”
DOMINICAL, COSTA RICA
For a man who didn’t know how to cut loose, Gabe was doing a very good job of it. She’d never seen him so laid-back, so relaxed, so…content. He lay stretched out beside her, his scarred leg draped over both of hers, his eyes closed. If it wasn’t for his fingers combing idly through her hair, she’d think he was asleep, he was so utterly limp.
She propped herself up on one elbow to gaze down at him. He looked like a happy, well-satisfied man, and it gave her a little thrill that she’d had a hand in putting that expression on his face. She wanted to paint him like this with the moonlight spilling through the windows, sparking off his dog tags.
Her wounded warrior. Her strong SEAL. Her muse. Her love.
God, did she love him.
She smiled and poked him in the ribs until he groaned and opened one eye. “What is it, woman? I want sleep. You wore me out.”
“Earlier, you mentioned an international office. Where?” She hoped not on the other side of the world, or else she’d never see him.
Both eyes open now, his expression turned serious. “Well.” He moistened his lips. “I was thinking here in Costa Rica.”
“Not Europe?”
“We might open one there eventually, but no. Not Europe.”
“Because of me?”
“There were several reasons. Pricing, location, local laws… But you were the biggest factor in my decision,” he admitted and rolled over so that they were nose to nose. He curled one arm up underneath his pillow and traced a finger down her cheek with his free hand. “I know you love it here and couldn’t ask you to move. So I’m coming to you. I, uh, hoped—I was going to ask you—”
Gabe stopped short, drew a breath. She’d never seen him look so nervous, and a little thrill jittered around her belly.
Was he going to…?
No, she wouldn’t even think it yet, too afraid she’d jinx herself.
“Audrey,” he said softly, “will you move in with me?”
Okay, as far as proposals went, it wasn’t quite what she’d been hoping for. But it was a start. A very good start. She’d have to warm him up to the idea of marriage, because she fully intended to be his wife before the year’s end.
She leaned in to kiss him. “Technically, you’ll be moving in with me.”
Relief filled his beautiful golden eyes. “Is that a yes?”
Silly man. Had he honestly thought she’d turn him down? “Of course it’s a yes.”
With a hoot of triumph, he rolled her underneath his body and kissed her dizzy. His hand stroked the curve of her waist to her hip and dipped between her thighs, nudging her legs apart as his knuckles brushed her most sensitive spot. She was tempted—oh, wow, especially when he did
that
with his fingers—to let him keep going, but a knock sounded at the front door.
She slapped her hands against his chest. “Hold up, bub. Someone’s here.”
“Ignore it,” he murmured and scooted down her body until his lips grazed her inner thigh, his tongue snaking out to tantalize the sensitive flesh there. “I have plans for you.”
Her belly muscles clenched at the thought. Maybe…
The knock sounded again, more persistent than polite this time. Damn. She squirmed out from underneath him. “They’re not going to leave.”
“Audrey…” Left balancing on his hands and knees on the mattress, he hung his head and heaved a long-suffering sigh.
“Oh, poor baby got his favorite toy taken away.” She smacked his very fine butt. “We’ll play later. Get dressed.”
“Naked’s more fun.”
“Also inappropriate for company.” She found her discarded sundress wrinkled and still a little damp from their earlier swim, but it’d do. She pulled it over her head and started toward the bedroom door.
“Audrey, wait.”
She turned at the odd note in his voice. “What’s wrong?”
Back was the tension the day had bled out of him. Very slowly, moving like a cat stalking its prey in the moonlight, he slid out of bed. “Look at the clock. Who would be visiting at this time of night?”
She shrugged. “Maybe it’s a neighbor. I do have them, you know.” Except the closest one was a mile down the road, and Gabe was right, midnight wasn’t a normal time for an old-fashioned neighborly visit.
“Stay here.” He leaned in and kissed her soundly before she could protest. “Please. This doesn’t feel right. Let me check it out first.”
She swallowed hard and nodded, her own anxiety spiking at the worry she saw in his eyes as he pulled on a pair of cargo shorts. “Be careful.”
“Always.” After another quick, reassuring kiss, he disappeared down the hall with his gun in hand.