Claiming Her SEAL (ASSIGNMENT: Caribbean Nights Book 1) (2 page)

Dex bit back a groan as he envisioned taking her up on the blatant invitation in her eyes. She had him built up in her head as something he wasn’t, and it killed him, but he had to pull free of their pseudo-handshake before he yanked her into his embrace and slid a finger inside her bikini bottom to acquaint himself with her secrets.

“You should go on back to your room now.”

He’d protected her from the meathead, but there was no one here to protect her from Dex. So he’d have to do it, as much as it hurt to destroy that hero worship in her gaze.

“Well, that’s the first time I’ve responded to a come-on and been shot down.” She quirked a brow. “Unless you intended to follow me?”

“Sweetheart, you don’t have a clue what you think you’re signing up for,” he growled. “I’m not the man for you.”

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” she suggested.

“Because your judgment is impaired, clearly.”

She didn’t so much as blink. “Is that a not-so-subtle reference to what happened with that guy? Because I didn’t invite him to put his paws all over me. I was just standing there thinking about…” And then her gaze shifted away, growing distant and shadowed. “…some stuff, and then there he was.”

This extraction process was not going according to standard operating procedure. Maybe because he’d already compromised himself by noticing her before the meathead had come on the scene. “I don’t do subtle. I’m flat out saying you think I’m worth your time because I stopped a jackass from assaulting you. I’m not. I’m a whole different kind of bad, one you’d best skip.”

“Maybe.” She cocked her head, and one shiny lock of hair fell over her eye. She left it there. “And maybe I’m bad news too.”

Oh, hell no. She was not under the misguided impression that whatever was troubling her could ever enter into the same realm as the twisted horrors of what lay just under Dex’s skin.

“Maybe…,” she continued. “We’d be good for each other.”

If only such a woman existed for him. But that was a fairy tale for another life. Another man. One whose nickname wasn’t Dexter—after the guy in that TV show about the serial killer.

Because at the end of the day, Dex had eliminated sixty-eight Iraqi targets while looking through the scope of a .300 Win Mag. And he could never erase the fact that he was a killer at heart.

Scuba diving took off
 some of the edge that had been dogging Dex since yesterday.
Some
. Not nearly enough. He blamed it on hunger and took off after what promised to be dinner if he got on it.

Grouper made the best fish tacos, but they sure bled a lot when you shot them. Not as much as people though. And Dex had definitely shot enough of both to make a fair comparison.

Dex tugged on his speargun line and hauled in the wriggling, silvery fish. Trails of crimson followed its path in a watery line that pointed straight to Dex like a neon sign.
Here’s food all you sharks! Come on down and have your pick of tasty humans.

Time to go. The sooner he got out of the water, the fewer predator fish he’d attract, and after the nasty encounter with a barracuda a couple of weeks ago, he’d rather not chance drawing attention to the rest of his dive team. Fresh fish for dinner was worth the risk as long as he played it cool.

He strung the grouper on his line with the other five he’d tagged and bagged in under twenty minutes. Dex was good at killing, especially with a gun in his hand, which came in handy when dropped in the middle of a terrorist hotbed
or
a coral reef.

The difference, of course, was that he didn’t wake up in a cold sweat, shivering through the remnants of vivid and horrific nightmares about the fish he’d killed.

Emma of the white bikini hadn’t a clue what he’d saved her from. Shame that he’d had to send her back to her hotel room crestfallen, but with her virtue intact, which was the important thing.

Dex left his fishing spot and kicked about a hundred yards to where his buddies were just finishing up work for the day. They’d transplanted a good number of coral to the reef they were restoring off the coast of Abaco Island on the west side of the Caribbean, where the coral depletion was the worst due to careless tourists and tropical storms—the two greatest scourges of the place Dex now called home.

Tourists should either stick to the sand or use the brain God gave them to figure out that soda cans tossed off the back of their fishing boats didn’t magically disintegrate.

A few curious crabs had ventured close enough to watch the goings-on, but none of the fish they’d scared away had returned yet. Tomorrow they’d move down the line of the reef a few feet and start all over again. As day jobs went, the scenery wasn’t bad, but Dex couldn’t call reef restoration a passion. More like a necessary evil until Aqueous Adventures, the Caribbean excursion company he’d started with some of his former SEAL team members, took off.

Dex pointed to the surface and waited until all five of the dark figures started kicking toward the surface, fins and tanks flashing in the crystal clear water, before he followed them. Since he had the live bait, it was only fair that he be last in line… and first in line to tangle with whatever might be interested in a free lunch.

Wouldn’t be the first time Dex had watched his teammates’ backs, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be the last.

All six of them broke the surface and waited for the dive boat captain to wave them onboard. Charlie clambered up the ladder first, as always; Charlie led, everyone else followed. Had been that way since Iraq. Charlie spit the tank valve from his mouth and cleared the ladder for the next guy. Evan, Jace, Miles and Jack emerged from the water. And then Dex.

Mask—off. Finally, blessed relief from the tight band. Dex’s tank hit the deck and, last but not least, he flipped off his fins and collapsed against the last empty seat.

“How many more times do we have to do that?” Jace groaned and scrubbed at his too-pretty face. Jace liked women, beer and fast boats, preferably together, and reef restoration wasn’t high on his list. It wasn’t high on any of their lists.

“What’s a matter?” Charlie elbowed his roommate in the ribs. “You afraid of a few little fish?”

Jace glowered at Charlie but took the elbowing good-naturedly. “The only thing I’m afraid of is your mama.”

Dex grinned because Jace was like a big goofy puppy half the time, not because his comeback had any particular humor.

Rolling his eyes, Charlie eased his fins off methodically and purposefully, the way he did everything. “If you’re tired of making money, go be a beach bum. See how many bikini bunnies you score when you tell them you’re unemployed.”

“Like that matters,” Jace scoffed and smoothed a flat hand down his jaw. “When you look like this.”

That had
everyone
rolling their eyes.

“What matters is that we’re in this together,” Miles interjected quietly, ever the peacemaker. “We work for ReefCo and do some good for the ocean. In exchange, they pay us well. We sock money away until we can run Aqueous full time. Same plan we’ve had since day one.”

“ReefCo.” Jack spat over the bow into the water. “ReefCo does nothing good for the ocean. Everything Jared Anderson does is for his own good.”

Evan nodded—they all shared the sentiment regarding ReefCo’s billionaire owner—but he didn’t contribute actual words. It took an act of congress to get the guy to speak. Evan and Dex had done three tours together, more than any of the other guys. They’d crawled under more barbed wire together, slung more mud on each other, and dressed more of each other’s battlefield wounds with chewing gum and sand than anyone else. Dex loved Evan more than any human on this earth in a way that only another brother-in-arms could fully understand. But the man had serious PTSD, and it wasn’t getting better.

Not that Dex would say that. You didn’t utter that nasty phrase out loud. Besides, Dex had his own crap to deal with, and his demons didn’t cotton to a lot of jibber-jabber. So the silence in the bungalow Dex shared with Evan suited them both to the ground.

When they got back to Duchess Island, the dive captain pulled up to the dock near the small village the locals just called Town and anchored, allowing the team to collect their gear and spill onto the wooden planking that led to land.

It was rare that all six of them went out to the reef they were restoring off the coast of Countess Cay. Only on days when they didn’t have any parasailing or snorkeling excursions planned—usually they tag-teamed it. The Duchess Island resort, also owned by billionaire Jared Anderson, was between cruise ships, which always put a crimp in their bookings.

Dex arranged his gear in the shed where they kept it under lock and key. Emma of the White Bikini had probably shipped out with high tide. Most of the resort guests came and went via the ships that arrived and sailed every couple of days. When he’d left her on the beach yesterday, he’d thought that would be the end of it. No more Emma.

Instead, he’d dreamed about her last night.

Since visions of the firm little body underneath those scraps of white had replaced his normal nightmares of lifeless corpses, he couldn’t find a downside. But this morning he’d had the strangest urge to tell Evan about the woman he’d met. Which was crazy. Emma had been nothing more than a small blip in his day. An easy target that had taken a considerable amount of will to avoid nailing.

But that didn’t stop Dex from wondering what had put those shadows in Emma’s eyes, as he and the guys set up a campfire on the beach to cook Dex’s catch. He had a feeling Emma was one woman he wouldn’t easily forget.

“E
mma Richardson!”

When Rachel squawked like that, Emma knew better than to interrupt. She glanced up from her e-reader to see the squawker in question at the end of Emma’s bed holding that cursed white bikini, one piece in each hand. The strings of the top dangled nearly to the floor of the hotel room they shared at the Duchess Island resort.

“Did you throw away this swimsuit?” Rachel asked, peering over the top of her dark-rimmed glasses.

A rhetorical question, no doubt, since her friend had clearly dug it out of the waste can near the minibar.

“I can’t wear it again.” Emma wrinkled her nose. “It’s ruined now.”

The creep on the beach had tainted it with his ham hands and stale breath in her face. She could never wear it again without thinking of him touching her without her permission. And she’d loved that swimsuit the moment she’d tried it on at the store near downtown Boston.

“That’s letting him win, honey.” Rachel threw the bikini down on the coverlet like a gauntlet, then plopped down next to Emma and curled her hands around her feet. “You should put that suit on and wear it proudly because you have nothing to apologize for. You showing some skin did not make him attack you.”

Emma had trashed the bikini the instant she’d torn it off yesterday, unable to even look at it because of the associations it had, even though it was the only swimsuit she’d packed. But now that Rachel had brought it up… good point. Emma had carried a tiny bit of guilt, like maybe if she hadn’t been wearing that sexy bikini, the cretin would never have noticed her. Like maybe she’d brought it on herself.

That was crap. She scooped up both pieces in one hand. “You’re so right. I paid a hundred and forty-seven dollars for this suit and it’s mine. No creep has the right to take away one second of my good time on this trip.”

An excellent mantra as a whole. That meant she had to stop letting bad memories of Chris interfere with the trip too. A bonus. The less she thought about her ex-fiancé, the better. In fact, that had been the whole point of jetting off to the Caribbean with Rachel—to celebrate narrowly escaping from the clutches of a disturbed man like Chris Cummings.

Of course they’d planned this trip before realizing that the panic attacks weren’t going away. Her stupid brain should be done spazzing out every time she even thought about dipping a toe in the ocean. Not done.

If she could just stop having nightmares about drowning,
that
, she was convinced, was the key to moving on from the horrific events of three months ago when Chris had tried to murder her in cold blood for breaking up with him. If only she could heal, she could rebuild her nice, stable life and get back to normal.