Redeeming Her SEAL (ASSIGNMENT: Caribbean Nights Book 9)

Charlie had to let Audra go for her own good. Too bad she doesn't see it that way…

Former Lieutenant Commander Charlie St. Croix came home from Iraq with one final mission—build a Caribbean-based excursion company with select members of his former SEAL team. He's the guy everyone counts on to do the right thing, but when his business is threatened, the right thing means appealing to the woman whose heart he broke.

The Saint has fallen from grace, and Dr. Audra Reed is his ticket back into heaven.

ASSIGNMENT: Caribbean Nights

Duchess Island by Kat Cantrell

Claiming Her SEAL

Revealing Her SEAL

Commanding Her SEAL

Redeeming Her SEAL

Miralinda Island by Zoe York

Ruined By A SEAL

Bound By A SEAL (coming soon)

Angel Cay by Anne Marsh

Sweet For A SEAL

Her One Best SEAL

The Trouble With SEALs

Still Her SEAL

Visit us at
Navy SEAL Romance
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ASSIGNMENT: Caribbean Nights
series!

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This one is for Jennifer Hayward. Thanks for always taking my panicked calls and for reading Charlie's story a quadrillion times until I finally got it right.

C
harlie St. Croix was on a mission. Not the normal kind with a speedboat full of tourists, a bright and colorful coral reef stretching under the water for a mile, and thirty pounds of dive gear strapped to his back as he accompanied Duchess Island Resort guests on a snorkeling jaunt. He couldn’t go near the reef off the coast of Ilhota Rosa at the moment. The owner of the resort, Jared Anderson, had filed an ironclad injunction against commercial ventures, which rendered the coral reef off-limits—for now.

The area was currently under review as a potential wildlife sanctuary. Except everyone knew the billionaire hadn’t filed the injunction to protect the dolphins that frequented the reef but instead as a personal shot at Charlie.

His current mission? Figure out how to fix the problems Anderson’s crappy, juvenile vendetta had caused Aqueous Adventures, the Caribbean excursion company that Charlie and five of his former SEAL teammates had built from nothing.

He was done playing around. The billionaire needed his priorities reset, a reminder that having money did not give him the right to upend people’s lives, and maybe a black eye.

Charlie planned to throw in that last bit just because. When a guy you’d been friends with for twenty years screws a woman you care about and then screws your business, it’s an engraved invitation for a fight. Anderson had sure as hell found one. Though Charlie had every intention of letting him keep the woman, Anderson would destroy Aqueous Adventures over Charlie’s dead body.

The man had a good head start on ruining their company. And then refused to see Charlie when he’d gone looking for answers the first three times, so he’d have to come at the problem from another angle. As soon as the rest of Charlie’s team got their asses to his house so they could hash out the latest development, he could get busy with a plan to put this chaos in order.

One by one, they trooped into the tiny bungalow Charlie shared with Jace Custer. It was the largest one they could swing in the little dot on the map known as Town, as housing was scarce on Duchess Island. But it was steps from the beach and served its purpose, with a large enough dining area that six ex-SEALs could easily fit around an old pine table. Of course, Charlie hadn’t counted on women joining the crew, so seating had gotten a little cozy now that a couple of the guys had put jewelry on their ladies’ third fingers.

The lack of chairs didn’t slow the guys down. Evan Silva had pulled Rachel into his lap and Dex Riley widened his legs so his wife, Emma, could sit between them. Jack Hyland fiddled with the back of his phone, and it would surprise no one to learn it was because he planned to take it apart and make a time machine with the guts. Miles Lynch lounged in his chair without comment, mild to the core, a perennial quality that allowed him to have such a delicate touch with explosives.

“Where’s Custer?” Dex asked with a head jerk at the empty chair.

Jace materialized from the kitchen, several longnecks clutched in his fingers. “Bringing the favors, of course.”

Perma-grin in place, Jace handed them out to the takers before plopping into his own seat. It wasn’t a party until Jace showed up, and he reveled in his role as official morale booster, mostly because it gave him an excuse to buy beer.

With a chuckle, Miles flat-handed the lip of his bottle top against the edge of the table to pop off the cap. “Figured you were doing your hair again. I was about to send Jack to get you. You know, in case you had the door to the bathroom locked. He needs to practice his lockpicking.”

Jack scowled. “I do not. You’re high as a kite if you think I can’t pick any lock you put in front of me in under four seconds. Also, there’s more than one way to get into a locked room. Taking the door off the hinges. Window—”

“We get it.” Charlie interrupted before the entire meeting devolved. “You’re a badass even a year out of the teams. You get to keep your jack-of-all-trades status one more day.”

“I see your charming personality is well intact, old man,” Jace commented with a smart-ass grin and flipped too-long strands of hair out of his face with a practiced gesture that he must think women went gaga over but really made him look like a cockatiel having a seizure.

Charlie refrained from pointing out that he was only ten years older than the kid he’d personally hauled out of more Iraqi hellholes than the month had days and nodded at Jace’s watered-down light beer, a typical choice for a kid with no idea what tasted good and a limited budget. “At least I don’t need alcoholic enhancement to be charming.”

Everyone chortled as Miles punched Jace in the arm with a snicker.

Guilt usually kept Charlie from drinking in front of Evan, who was a recovering alcoholic, and some days he wished the rest of the team would take a lesson. Evan was a good sport about it though.

“If all of you are through flapping your gums…” Charlie dropped into his own splintered wooden chair and nodded at Rachel. “You have news?”

“I do,” she said and pushed her horn-rimmed glasses up higher on the bridge of her nose. “Dr. Reed, Anderson’s dolphin expert, has filed her report.”

Everyone froze, and instantly silence fell. That was a major feat Charlie would like to replicate on occasion as he’d picked this team for their specific skill sets, none of which was the ability to keep their traps shut. The six of them were co-owners, but this excursion company was Charlie’s dream, which made it his responsibility to make sure his guys weren’t sorry he’d brought them along for the ride.

“You didn’t tell me,” Evan murmured.

“Seems like I had something better to do with my mouth,” Rachel countered pertly. “You can thank me later.”

Evan laughed, which Charlie could not hear often enough. Rachel Blume had given Evan his voice back, and Charlie owed her more than he could ever repay, and not just because she was acting as Aqueous Adventures’ stand-in lawyer. She’d cleaned up the mess inside Evan’s head, clearing out the worst of his lingering PTSD symptoms courtesy of a roadside bombing that had riddled his body with shrapnel.

Symptoms he’d been forced to face because of Charlie.

He shoved the guilt and the chaos inside that he’d carted home from Iraq back into the black box where he kept that kind of unpleasantness. Some days it was harder than others. “Tell us what the report says, Rachel.”

Might as well get the bad news over with so they could start figuring out how to counter the expert opinion that would allow Jared Anderson to buy the island Aqueous used as a snorkeling destination. If he was successful, half of their revenue would dry up. Permanently.

When the team had first landed in the Caribbean, they’d accepted jobs working for ReefCo, one of Jared Anderson’s ventures, doing restoration to the coral reef off the coast of Countess Cay. It paid for boats and gear as they learned the waters around Duchess Island Resort where they’d opened a parasailing and snorkeling excursion company to cater to the guests.

Little did Charlie know that Jared Anderson and Dr. Audra Reed had become an item in his absence.

Charlie still couldn’t figure out if he was more shocked, pissed, or broken by the news. Some days, it was all three at once, even a year later. Yeah, he’d been the one to end things. They’d said no promises, and she deserved better than a man who couldn’t even sleep through the night.

Cutting her loose had been the right thing to do. Instead of spilling out all the things in his heart and begging her to wait for him, to be there when he came home, he’d sent her a crappy text message with five words:
We’re not going to happen
. He couldn’t drag her down, couldn’t be the man she’d met two years ago on this very island, thanks to the IED that had ripped his team apart.

Sure, she’d had every right to go out with someone else. He’d hoped she’d find a great guy who could make her happy. But
Jared Anderson
?

He’d swallowed the bitter taste of betrayal and thrown himself into building Aqueous Adventures, avoiding both Jared and Audra expertly… until Anderson had declared war on Charlie for God knew what reason, forcing the team to quit doing coral restoration for ReefCo as a way to strike back. Charlie never would have set all of this up if he’d known he was dropping his team into a minefield of agendas he scarcely understood.

Not the least of which was Anderson hiring Dr. Reed to help him put Charlie out of business.

Rachel waited until she had everyone’s full attention in true dramatic lawyer fashion.

“Dr. Reed’s report supports the island of Ilhota Rosa as a wildlife sanctuary. She says, and I quote…” Rachel glanced at the page she took from a file folder on the table. “ ‘Both the construction project and the subsequent resort tourism would negatively disturb the dolphin pod that lives in the waters off the coast.’ She effectively killed Anderson’s bid to buy the island in one fell swoop.”

“Um… what?” Jace’s confusion mirrored everyone else’s.

Charlie crossed his arms over the giant meat hook through his chest at Rachel’s casual mention of Audra. That needed to go back in the box too, but nothing he’d tried would erase the pure physical reaction he still had anytime his former lover came up.

The torch he still carried for the dazzling, brilliant redhead still had the power to burn him when he least expected it. But no one else needed to know about that.

“That has to be wrong.” He cleared his throat, which had gone drier than dust as a million different implications zigzagged through his mind. Clearly Anderson had expected the woman he was sleeping with to help him, or he never would have asked her to write a report to support his land grab. The fact that she hadn’t sided with her boyfriend meant something, but hell if Charlie could figure out what.