She grinned—a little too happily to his mind—and started rattling off every bleeding-heart, save-the-whales type of organization he could think of and some he’d never heard of.
But he held up his hand when she got to the political ones. “Stop. I can’t take it anymore. You had me at that last one.” He gave a dramatic shudder.
“They do a lot of important things—”
“Annie?”
She paused to look up at him. The brim of his hat had kept most of the rain off her face, but one or two drops had caught in her lashes. Her eyes were gorgeous—especially when they were sparkling with amusement. “I’ll keep the jacket if you promise to stop.”
She smiled as if that had been her intention all along. “Deal.” It was her turn to look at him sideways. “Let me guess. . . .”
He grinned. She didn’t even need to say it. “Cold, dead hands, baby.” He sobered. “‘Baby’ in the nonmisogynistic sense of the word.”
“Obviously,” she deadpanned back at him. “Although I’m surprised that they teach that word in caveman school.”
He gave a sharp bark of laughter. He’d never met a woman who gave him shit the way she did. “Yeah, it was in the words-over-four-letters class, right between Dragging by the Hair 101 and Patriarchal Society 200.”
She threw back her head and laughed, which stopped his jesting cold. It was replaced by a hard bolt of lust. Lust that despite the weather and their precarious situation made him hot and about a half second away from pulling her into his arms and putting his mouth on that very tempting, creamy-looking throat. Which would be a really bad idea.
That he could lose focus in a situation like this, even for a moment, was disconcerting enough to snap him back to attention. Situational awareness on an op was something he’d never lost sight of before.
He didn’t like it.
Having no idea of the effect she’d just had on him, she lifted her head to meet his gaze, still smiling. “Let me guess. You excelled in all your subjects?”
“Enough to teach you a few things if you are interested.”
“I think I’ll pass,” she said dryly.
“You don’t know what you are missing.”
She rolled her eyes. “I can guess.”
He wondered if they were talking about the same thing. If they were, she had no fucking idea. “Let me know if you want a rain check.”
“I’ll do that.”
He had to force himself to look away. She was so beautiful he was getting distracted again.
He lasted about a mile. That was the point when the drops of mist turned into full-fledged rain. Sexist pig or not, he wasn’t going to sit here with a coat on that was keeping him dry while she got soaked.
He thought about pulling her into his lap and not giving her a chance to argue, but as that might be seen as coming a little too close to the pig part of the equation, he decided to take a more subtle route. There was a first time for everything. “I need you to help me with something.”
She sat up. “Of course. Anything.”
“I can’t keep the compass steady, hold the map, and steer the boat with the waves like this.”
“What do you need me to do?”
He scooted back a little on the seat. “Come sit here.” Said the spider to the fly. He motioned in front of him. “You can hold the map and the compass where I can see it, while I steer.”
She frowned as if wondering whether she should be suspicious.
As MacDonald would say, smart lass.
Dean had to slow the speed, and it took a little jostling, but a few minutes later she was tucked against his chest, and his coat was discreetly pulled around her, shielding her from most of the rain.
There was one big problem—a problem that was getting bigger and bigger by the moment. The plastic seat in front of the helm could be adjusted, but not enough to give their bodies any space between them. Which essentially meant that her back was pressed against his chest, her head was tucked under his chin, and her firm, perfectly curved ass was nestled right into his crotch, and with every bump of the boat, that very incredible bottom was slamming against him. His dick—the brainless, too-long-ignored idiot that it was—was taking notice and standing hard at attention. Emphasis on hard.
There was too much of him and too little between them, namely a couple of layers of denim, for her not to notice.
She tried to sit stiffly for a while, keeping as much distance between them as possible. But as the weather grew worse, and the waves higher, it became impossible. She gave up, sinking into him fully.
It took everything he had not to groan. But she felt good. Really good. Body-on-fire, skin-too-tight, every-instinct-flared good.
For the next half hour, he had to fight to keep them on course while struggling to ignore the havoc the motion and rhythm of the boat were wreaking on his control.
The warmth and softness of her body didn’t help. Nor did the fact that she smelled incredible. Perfume? Shampoo? He didn’t know, but it was feminine, sweet, and made him want to bury his face in her neck and hair.
He was almost glad when the weather got worse and required his full attention.
Almost.
Twelve
They were getting pummeled by rain that was coming down in proverbial sheets with no intention of stopping, white-topped waves that were climbing higher by the minute, and sharp gusts of wind that blew it all together in great geysers of water leaping and spraying all around them.
Clearly this was the wrong time to think about how good Dan felt behind her or how close his arm was to her breast or that the erection hard against her bottom was every bit as impressive as it had felt in her hand. Yet despite the tumult swirling around her, the flush of desire—all right, lust—was hitting her hard. He was turning her on. Big-time.
In the cocoon of his coat and body heat, she was warm and soft and inexplicably relaxed for a castaway at sea in a leaky boat in a monsoon. Well, maybe the storm wasn’t quite that bad, but it was definitely not the time to be thinking about sex. Really raunchy sex. Really hot sex. Sex like what she’d only imagined.
But if the sensations turning her liquid every time her bottom rode up against him were any indication, she’d definitely been missing out in the doggy-style category. She could too easily imagine him bending her forward against the wheel, lifting her hips to him, and sinking that thick column inside her. And the thrusts. She could definitely imagine the thrusts. Every time the boat lurched over a wave and came down hard, she felt the slam of him behind her, sending a reverberation of need through her bones. She was hot and achy and more turned on than she’d ever been in her life. Which given their circumstances was pure crazy sauce.
Maybe she was imagining it all a little too well, because as they rode over the next wave, and the motion carried her hips back, she might have arched her back a little and made a sound that was suspiciously like a moan.
He stiffened behind her, growing so taut the muscles in his chest and arms seemed to turn to steel. Hello, Mr. Six-Pack—or Eight-Pack. Unless she wanted to turn around and count them—which she kind of did—the exact number of rigid bands would remain a mystery. Her back felt even hotter—like sitting in front of a furnace that had just been stoked. Which admittedly she might have just done.
What was she doing? Grinding against a guy she barely knew like a teenager when they were in danger of disappearing under the next wave or sinking in a deflated boat?
Cheeks aflame with mortified heat, she tried to pull away, but he caught her with one of those rock-hard arms and pulled her back in tight. “Don’t. I want you right here.”
His voice so close to her ear sent shivers down her spine. Sure, that was it. It wasn’t the sensual promise in his words. He was feeling it, too. He liked it. He wanted her.
Was that what she wanted? Sex with a stranger? Even if he
was a really hot stranger?
Suddenly she realized what this must look like. She was acting like a sex-starved porn star in a really bad movie—Perfect Sex Storm, maybe? She didn’t even know who he was. A half hour ago she thought he could be a serial killer.
No, she’d never thought that. There was something about this guy that she’d trusted from the beginning, and that was making her come up with ridiculous scenarios to try to talk herself out of doing so. Her mind was telling her not to be an idiot again—that she had no reason to trust him—but her gut was telling her something else.
“Listen to your gut,” her father had always said. But how could she do that when that gut had just been so wrong?
Naive. Of all the things Dan had said to her earlier in his no-sugarcoat, cut-right-to-the-heart-of-it lambasting, that had probably been the most stinging.
Because it was true. But it was also because naive seemed to be used too often as a synonym for “stupid.” Which it shouldn’t be. She just didn’t think like that. She didn’t look for treachery behind every corner. She didn’t see bad people; she saw good. Did that sometimes get her in trouble? Yes. But she didn’t want to see the world as the dark place that he obviously did.
Maybe she should have asked Julien a few more questions, and certainly gotten to know him a little better before embarking on an adventure like this, but there hadn’t been any sign that he’d been involved with a terrorist organization like OPF. He’d been acting strangely, and she hadn’t liked Jean Paul, but she hadn’t missed something. He’d deceived her plain and simple.
But hard-eyed cynics like Dan—or her father—had a way of making her feel bad for not assuming the worst of people and treating everyone as if they were a suspect.
She didn’t see how they could live their lives like that. Or didn’t live in her father’s case, when the anger, unhappiness, and ugliness got to be too much, even for a superhero.
She didn’t want that kind of dark in her life. She’d stayed away from men like Dan her whole life. Why now was she forgetting that?
He must have sensed the change in her. “You all right?”
His voice brought her back from the memories. She nodded.
“Good. I’m going to need your help. The swell is getting worse. I don’t want to take my eyes off the waves for too long, so you’re going to have to use the compass and keep us headed in the right direction.”
Her father had tried to teach her the basics of navigating with a map and compass, but she’d never really gotten the hang of it—and she certainly had never tried on the ocean. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t try. If he needed her to do this, she would. “All right.”
“Good girl.”
She’d get annoyed with him later for that little bit of paternalistic sexism. “Dan?”
He paused a moment before responding. “Yep?”
“Is it really bad?”
If she hadn’t been sitting so close to him, she wouldn’t have felt the slight hesitation that answered her question. Yes, it was bad.
“You don’t need to be scared, Annie. I got this, okay?”
Strangely she believed him. If anyone was capable of getting them out of this, she’d put her money on him. “Okay.”
“Just keep us pointed southeast at a hundred and seventy degrees.”
The next twenty minutes were perhaps the most harrowing of her life, which was saying a lot, as not all that long before she’d had a gun pointed at her head. The storm whipped around them like a hurricane. At least it felt like a hurricane when she was in an inflatable that was being held together by duct tape in seven- or eight-foot swirling seas.
It felt even worse when the duct tape came off.
• • •
Whether it was too much water or the pressure building underneath, Annie didn’t know, but one minute the tape was holding the seam and the next it was flapping against the side.
“The tape!”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dan said.
She turned back to look at him to see if he was as confident as he sounded. There wasn’t a crack or a chip of uncertainty in that granite facade.
God, was he even human? How could anyone be that calm?
“‘Don’t worry about it’?” she repeated incredulously. “It’s deflating!”
Blue eyes held hers. Ice-cool and steady. “There’s nothing we can do about it right now. It’s one air tube. We’ll stay afloat, but you might have to bail. Just keep us on course.” She must not have responded fast enough. He took her chin. “Annie, I need you to trust me, all right?”
She thought about it for a moment and nodded. It was crazy, but she did. The last thing she should be doing was trusting a stranger. Except this one had saved her life. And what other choice did she have? She had to trust him. She didn’t have anyone else.
“That’s my girl.”
My girl. Why didn’t that sound as bad as it should? Before she could process that, he leaned down and put his mouth on hers in a kiss that was so fast and fierce she was too stunned to object or respond. She felt the warmth, the surprising softness of his lips, and the firm pressure in a hard blast of awareness that flooded her senses and instantly engulfed her with heat.
He tasted of wind and rain and the faintest hint of coffee. She felt the tickle of his beard against her skin—it was softer than she realized—and then it was gone, leaving her spinning. Reeling. Dumbfounded.
Wanting more.
But the kiss had served its purpose. Though brief, it had forged a connection between them. They were in this together, and he would keep her safe. He had this.
It had also discombobulated her, which she was pretty sure had been his intention as well. She was too busy thinking about the kiss to be scared. Too busy wondering why he’d done that—and whether he would try to do it again—to panic.
Somehow Annie stayed calm, even when one side of the boat grew so deflated they began to take on water. Even when he told her a few minutes later to start bailing. She didn’t panic. The solid strength of the body next to hers was reassuring. Anchoring. A tether in a storm.
He never lost his cool. Never once showed even the barest flicker of worry or anxiety—even when one side of the boat began to sink visibly in the water. He was focused. In command. Poseidon and the other sea gods could throw their worst at him, and he would keep on fighting back.
He seemed to know exactly what to do. How to maneuver the boat over the vicious swells. When to increase and decrease the throttle. How to ensure that the small boat didn’t flip or take on too much water from the crashing waves. How to keep them heading steady toward their destination even without her holding the map and compass. She was too busy bailing.
His confidence, determination, and skill told her that she was in good hands.
Still, she’d never been so happy to hear the words “there they are” when the series of small islands finally appeared on the horizon. She was even happier after they circled and found a place to land and her feet touched solid ground.
Dan dragged the inflatable up the rocky beach of the biggest island—although the other four “islands” of the archipelago hardly qualified. They were more like big volcanic rocks shooting out of the sea covered in white guano from the thousands of seabirds that nested on their cliff sides. This was the only island of size—probably a half mile by a quarter mile—and the only one with a bay. She didn’t want to think about that for too long. They were safe. What-ifs didn’t matter.
The island was shaped like a crescent. Ahead of her, up a little from the shore, was a flat, grassy, relatively sheltered area that looked as though it might have been used for pasture at one time—if, as she suspected, the strange round stone huts that littered the hillsides had served as shelter for animals. Once they were beyond the small flat area, the grassy hills rose steeply to the top of the cliffs that she’d s
een on the other side as they came around.
While she looked around, Dan had secured the boat by tying it to a rusty steel post and putting a few heavy-looking boulders in its hull to prevent it from blowing away if the winds reached the bay. But the storm didn’t feel as powerful here. The natural shelter had taken the edge off its fury.
“Let’s see if we can find someplace dry. If those cleats”—the cleats must be the stone huts—“and this pole mean anything, this place was inhabited once.”
Annie gave him a horrified look. Who would want to live way the heck out here?
He smiled at her expression. “They probably wouldn’t have lived here year-round. Some of the smaller islands in the Hebrides are used to graze sheep in the summer. I suspect this one would have also been used for the birds.”
Annie’s nose wrinkled with distaste. She’d heard of the traditional Lewisian “Gana Hunt” for young gannets. Every year a small group of men traveled to a remote island off the north coast of Lewis to kill thousands of birds for the meat, which was considered a delicacy. It was the method of killing—by blows to the head—that provoked outrage from some groups. She knew it was part of the Lewis history and tradition, but that didn’t mean she didn’t find it distasteful and wish they would find a new one.
Dan was looking at her with amusement, clearly guessing her thoughts.
“What?” she demanded, hearing the “bleeding-heart” even without him saying anything.
He gave her a “back off, angry woman” hand. “I didn’t say anything.”
“But you were thinking it.”
“You aren’t exactly hard to read.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Pot. Kettle.”
He laughed. She was a little scared how much she was growing to like that sound. “Maybe so. But I for one am hoping there were hunters here who were nice enough to leave some kind of shelter behind. You look frozen.”
Secretly she hoped so, too. She hadn’t noticed how cold and wet she was on the boat when she was fighting for her life, but now that she was safe—and no longer had his body next to hers—she couldn’t stop shivering.