Authors: Mary Margret Daughtridge

SEALed with a Ring (28 page)

"Spread 'em." She moved her feet apart. He looked her up and down. "Even though nothing is concealed, I'd better pat you down."

"I'll need both hands free so I'll restrain you this way." He leaned against her letting her feel his weight. He traced her outline, in light lingering caress not ne glecting any part.

"Now we do the cavity checks." He knelt in front of her.

"That's not how you do it."

He gripped her hips. "Who's had more experience here?"

"You."

"Then trust me when I say this is the only way to be thorough."

When her legs trembled, he inquired in his smooth voice, "Are you ready to cooperate now?"

He swept her up in his arms and carried her to a pad ded vinyl-covered bench. "What can I do to you?"

"Anything you want to."

"That's right." He positioned her so that her buttocks were at the end. He lifted one of her feet and then the other to his shoulders. "Now, I'm going to make you scream." Much later, they lay in JJ's bed, spooned together, one of David's beautiful, strong arms a comforting weight across her midsection—the way sleeping together had already begun to feel natural.

JJ waited until she felt his arm grow heavier as David gave in to complete relaxation. "I've been thinking," she announced. "Snatch isn't quite the right name. He needs something a little more dignified."

The arm tensed. "Dignified."

"Snatch doesn't give him enough to live up to, if you know what I mean."

"Did you have another name in mind?"

"What do you think of Pudendum? It means…"

"I know what it means."

JJ flipped herself over. She twisted her fingers in the hair of his chest. "Shame! And you're the one who should be ashamed."

"Oh, I am."

She gave a good yank. "You're not."

"Okay. I'm not."

The man was laughing. Not out loud maybe, but she could tell.

She flipped over on her back. "Bronwyn told me it's a bad word, really dirty. As bad as cu—I can't make myself say it."

He rose on one elbow to look into her face. "I look at you, and I can't think any of those words that refer to that part of you are dirty or ugly."

That was so
sweet.
She couldn't give in yet. She crossed her arms over her chest. Added a pout. "You're trying to butter me up."

"How am I doing?"

"Terrible. You're supposed to be contrite. You should have seen some of the looks I got today."

"Tell me who they were. I'll beat 'em up."

"You can't. I told people I chose it because it was macho-sounding!… Oh, my God! Macho-sounding." She giggled. "I name the dog—you know—and think it's macho!" She laughed harder. "No wonder they were
looking at me." Every time she thought of their faces
, she went off into more gales of laughter. She began to roll around on the bed. "Macho!"

David grabbed her and began to roll with her, both of them shouting with laughter. After a while they weren't laughing.

Spooned together again, JJ placed one of David's arms across her midsection. Comfortable now, JJ yawned and said, "His name is Brinkley."

"
Brinkley
?"

"Do. Not. Argue. I'm going to sleep now."

David squeezed her lightly. "Good night, Jane."

"Good night, David."

David dreamed.

It was the prettiest meadow he'd seen in Afghanistan. A fresh breeze rippled lush grass into satiny-looking waves. Overhead, the sky was so blue his heart lifted in joy just to look at it. Perfect, cot tony clouds sailed and trailed shadows from one side of the meadow to the other and across the encircling mountains.

It was the perfect place for horses, and sure enough there were two—a black one and a brown one, their coats gleaming in the sunlight, drinking from the shal low stream that gurgled through the grass.

"I need to get back." Garth stood and dusted off his camo. The desert gray and tan looked out of place in this verdant spot. "You coming?"

David leaned back against the grassy knoll that fit his shoulders and supported his head as if designed for him. "I don't think so. This spot is perfect. The sun is warm the air is cool… I smell flowers and pine trees. Pine trees! Can you believe it? This place looks more like a high meadow in the Rockies than Afghanistan."

"You can't stay here."

David laughed at the absurdity of that. "Why not? I like it here. I like it better than Afghanistan."

"You just can't."

Somewhere in the distance a bird called. "I don't have the energy to move right now, but when I do, I'm going to ride the horses."

"Doc. Davy. Listen, you've got to come back. They think you're dead."

"I am."

"No, you're not!"

"If I don't have a problem with it, Lieutenant, I don't see why you do."

"Get up. That's an order."

"Go to hell, Lieutenant." David smiled to show he meant no offense.
Go to hell.
It seemed like a really funny thing for somebody who was dead to say.

"They're searching for you right now, Doc. I don't know how long I can keep them searching. We're losing light."

"Tell them to go on without me."

"You know I can't do that. SEALs never abandon a fallen comrade. And nobody saw where you went after you flushed the bad guys from their position. Nobody saw you hit," Darth insisted. "You might be alive."

"I told you I'm not."

"How can you be so sure?"

"I never wanted anything but to be a SEAL. Never. I got to be a SEAL, and I got to be there for my buddies. I couldn't have gotten any luckier than that. I fulfilled my destiny."

"So you're letting yourself die."

"I think it was the Plan." Cool, sparkling joy welled up in him again. "You know, what I was born to do."

"Bullshit! There is no destiny except the destiny we make by making choices."

"Fine. I chose to die. I knew I wouldn't survive as soon as I took the first shot. You know how the instructors always used to say 'A man alone in battle will not survive.'"

"Isn't there anything you want to live for?"

"To be a SEAL."

"Then isn't there anything you regret?"

"Yeah. When I was a teenager, I gave my mom a hard time. I was so wild she had to send me to military school. I wish now I'd helped her instead. And I could be a prize jackass. I wish I could apologize."

"Isn't there anyone you hate to leave?"

"No one who needs me."

"How about a girl?"

"There was someone… but I totally screwed that up. Talk about a
dead
end. I didn't even get her name." All that seemed to have happened too long time ago to be worth worrying about now. "I'm real tired. I think I'll take a nap now."

"Okay, I'll carry you."

David looked at the blood that soaked Garth's camo pants from his hip to his knee. Funny that he hadn't no ticed it before. "You've lost a lot of blood."

"I'm losing more while I'm standing here talking to you."

David fought his lethargy. Garth needed him. "Where are you hit?"

"Hip, top of the thigh, something."

"How's the pain? Need something for the pain?" David felt for his field pack.

"It was bad at first," he heard Garth say while he searched frantically for his pack. "I don't feel it much now."

"Where the hell is my field pack?"

"I'm not leaving you. You wouldn't be alone if I hadn't sent you on that pointless errand of mercy."

"He's got a pulse," Davy heard someone say. "Tell the lieutenant we've found him."

Chapter 40

JJ SWAM UP THROUGH THE DARK WATERS OF PROFOUND sleep. She put layers of consciousness on, one at a time. She was in her bed. She was in her grandfather's house. The warm presence, the exquisite balance of male to her femaleness that she had grown used to sleeping beside in only five nights was gone.

She could hear David murmuring somewhere. She pushed herself up and finally found him in the shadowy room on his haunches beside Brinkley.

"Is Brinkley all right?"

"Yes."

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"Then come back to bed. It's the middle of the night."

After a long moment, he rose in one of those lithe movements full of strength and control so characteristic of him.

When he lifted the covers and got in beside her, she snuggled against him. As he always did, he folded her against him.

She gave in to the luxury of pressing her nose against his skin to inhale the wonderful masculine scent of him. "What woke you?"

He stroked her shoulder, looking at the ceiling. "A dream."

"A nightmare?"

"No."

"Tell me."

"One of those recurring dreams. I dream I'm in Afghanistan, but I'm also in the Rockies—you know how dreams are. Wherever it is, it's so beautiful. I'm arguing with Garth. He orders me to get up. I believe I'm dead."

"Oh! Scary."

"No. That's the thing. It isn't. It's good. Really good."

A deep shiver trickled cold down her spine. "Good that you're dead?"

"Yeah."

She comforted herself with the reassuring solid warmth of his arm, the curved corrugation of his ribs, the firmness of his stomach moving under her hand with his breath. "I'm listening," she prompted.

"The thing is, even though it's mixed up, the dream feels real—hyperreal. Then stuff happens. The dream gets all confused." JJ had a feeling "stuff" was things he chose to leave out of the telling. "Then I hear someone say, 'Tell the lieutenant we've found him.'" Under her hand, his belly contracted in a soundless laugh. "It's so shocking, it wakes me up. Wide awake."

"And that's all?"

"Yep."

"What do you think it means?"

"I don't try to figure out what dreams mean anymore. On the morning that this happened," he touched his cheek, "I dreamed about my mom. It was one of those dreams where you dream you wake up, you know? I dreamed I could hear her sobbing, so I looked for her, and when I found her, she was crying because I was dead. I knew the dream meant I was going to die that day."

Again an icy trickle shivered along her spine. No so much because he was again talking about death as be cause of the matter-of-fact way he spoke.

He wasn't like most people who stop to notice death only when it happens to someone they knew. He was a man who lived with death. His acceptance of his mortality wasn't the passive, grudging acquiescence of most people. The life of a SEAL could get him killed. Without fanfare, without chest beating, he was ready to
give up
his life to do what he did.

In a flash of intuition, she saw that his relationship to death had been the source of that incandescent merri ness she had first known in him. Being willing to die, he was also willing to live. The outlook had given him the willingness to ignore all boundaries, and to treat her with tenderness and respect while he did so.

JJ grinned inwardly. Respect was a funny word to use for some of what he did, and yet it was accurate. He had taken advantage of the moment, never of her. More than his overflowing animal vitality, more than his astounding masculine beauty, it had been his attraction.

The truth was, she hadn't asked him to marry her be cause his reappearance had been convenient—although, God knows, it had been. Seeing him again had shocked her into awareness that she could not live the way she had been going. No, the truth was she had been already close to being a facsimile of herself. She had buried the knowledge of what it felt like to be alive, called it some thing else for a year, but when she met him again, it had refused to stay buried.

Sometime in the last year, he had lost that merriness.

Oblivious to her wandering thoughts, he had con tinued down the path of his story. "I knew my mother was crying because I was going to die. Not a doubt in my mind."

"Well, you came close," JJ objected. "I'm sure she
would
have cried. In fact, I'll bet she did cry when she found out you were wounded."

"Yeah, she did. But I didn't die, and she did."

While they talked, the shadows of the room thinned in the barely perceptible lightening of the world that was first dawn. "JJ?"

"Hmm?"

"Tell me again about when we met—the first time."

It was eerily close to what she had just been thinking about moments ago. "What do you want to know?"

"Did we talk?"

"No. Not much."

"I'm really sorry I don't remember it. The thing is, I do remember, but it's like a slide projection. I know what it's a picture of, and yet I can't get it to come into focus. Of all the results of being blown thirty feet, that is the one I hate the most. That and the dream about a girl I probably shouldn't tell you about."

"What girl?"

"I dream I'm looking for a girl, but I can't see her face. I'm frustrated because I don't know her name."

"Have you had this dream only since you were injured?"

He thought for a minute. "No," he said in a tone of discovery, "I had it before—I'm almost sure."

He didn't remember her. She needed to remember that. She knew now he understood how temporary life and everything in it was. Which meant his feelings for her, such as they were, were genuine, but they were tem porary. He wanted to go back to his life.

Her feelings for him, she finally realized, were per manent. She would have to go back to her life eventu ally. In the meantime, she was going to use one piece of what she had learned this morning. She would live to the fullest today.

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