Cindy Dees - Her Mission With A Seal

“Thanks for the beauty tip.”

“I’m serious. It can cause rashes and even burns.”

“I know. It’s not an uncommon form of torture to rub salt into a person’s skin.”

Eew. She might be a collector of seemingly useless trivia as part of her work as an intelligence analyst, but torture was not one of her fields of expertise.

“Warming up?” Cole murmured against her temple.

“Umm, yes. I’m toasty warm now.” He didn’t move, so she added, “Thanks for sharing some of your heat with me.”

It was a blatant invitation to leave her bed, but he didn’t accept it. Instead he remained spooned around her.

His hand, the one thrown across her body, slid up her arm toward her shoulder, dragging the quilt higher to tuck it in around her neck. At least his hand hadn’t headed toward her chest...which was throbbing disconcertingly at the moment.

She would love to pull her right arm out from between them, but she was vividly aware of how close her hand was resting to parts of his anatomy that could easily be encouraged to throb, also.

Cole didn’t move, and goodness knew, she wasn’t about to move. But they might as well have been crawling all over each other the way the electricity built between them. She was excruciatingly aware of every inch of his body against hers, and it didn’t help that she could picture his body encased in that insanely sexy sea-land suit of his.

She’d tried really hard yesterday to keep her mind solidly on business, but there’d been no missing the fact that he’d looked like a statue of a Greek god wearing a wet suit.

A particularly violent gust of wind slammed into the wall beside her, and even the light fixture overhead rattled. Terrified, she rolled against Cole and buried her face against his chest.

His arms swept around her, drawing her closer, creating a living bulwark of protection around her. “I’ve got you. Hang on to me,” he muttered.

The shaking around them diminished, but her insides still quaked like mad. “You must think I’m the biggest scaredy cat you’ve ever met.”

She felt the smile against her scalp. “I’ve met worse.”

“How much longer is this storm going to last?” she asked.

“The rest of the night, I should think.”

She groaned into his pectoral, which flexed in an impressive display of bulging muscle.

“Hungry?” he asked her.

“No. You?”

“I ate a little while ago.”

They lay together in silence for a moment, listening to the storm. Then he said quietly, “Try to get some sleep.”

She almost confessed that she didn’t want to go back to sleep because she was afraid of a repeat of her dream from before, but she bit it back.

“Do you need me to stay with you?”

“I’m a CIA analyst on a mission with a Navy SEAL team. I can survive my nightmares.”

He chuckled. “You don’t have to prove how tough you are to me.”

Another gust struck the cabin and she stared worriedly at the rafters overhead. “Is the roof going to stay on?”

“I think it is. This place may look like a dump, but it’s solid.”

“We’re going to have to find out who owns it and send a thank-you note.”

Cole grunted as if thank-you notes weren’t part of his job description. He shifted his weight, turning fully onto his back, and Nissa found herself rolling toward him as the mattress sagged beneath his greater weight. She braced herself to stop the roll and froze in dismay as she realized she’d planted her hand on his stomach. Ridges of carved marble formed beneath her palm before she managed to jerk it away from him. Good grief. Touching him was like sticking her hand into a volcano.

Sharp awareness of how much bigger than she he was, in every dimension, made lust shoot through her nether regions, hot and liquid, and nearly as disorienting as her dream.

Had they actually kissed, or had that been part of her dream, too? Nissa could swear she still felt him on her mouth, still tasted him on her tongue. And her face around her mouth definitely felt razor burned. Or maybe that was just chapped skin from the wind and salt water. Confused, she stared at the silhouette of his lips barely visible beside her.

He clicked his flashlight on and shined it up at the underside of the roof, exposed beyond the rafters. Methodically, he ran the light over every inch of the ceiling.

“How does it look?” she asked.

He turned toward her, turning the flashlight with him, abruptly blinding her in its brilliant LED beam. “So far, so good.”

“Could you get that light out of my eyes, please?” She threw her hand up to shield her face.

It clicked off and total blackness descended over them, making her lurch in alarm. Even as a kid, she’d been scared of the dark. She’d mostly grown out of it as an adult. Mostly.

“Easy, Nissa. I’ve got you.” He rolled toward her, and she was swept up against his delicious body, his arms firm and protective around her.

Oh. My. God. He felt every bit as amazing in real life as he did in her dream.

Out of the darkness, Cole murmured against Nissa’s temple, “I promise I’ll keep you safe. No harm will come to you on my watch. You don’t have to be afraid.” His low voice was raw silk, caressing her skin and sending cascades of shivers down her spine.

They lay like that for several minutes, neither one moving, Nissa barely daring to breathe. The sexual tension between them stretched tighter and tighter until she thought it had to snap. Terrified of what that would mean, she cast about in her mind for something to say. Something to distract both of them from this endless, insane moment of raging mutual lust.

“I had the strangest dream,” she blurted.

“How strange?”

“You and I were swimming underwater. And we could breathe the water. You were some sort of sea-god. Poseidon, maybe.”

“I like this dream. And I do have a trident. Although mine is only on my SEAL pin and not real.”

He’d been all real in the dream, that was for sure. Just remembering the way she’d burned for him made her forehead break into a sweat now.

“Tell me more about this dream.”

Hah. As if she would confess in a million years about them being naked and crawling all over each other.

“That’s all there was. We were underwater, but we weren’t drowning. The water was clear and warm and bright turquoise. It looked as if we were near a tropical shore, not the Gulf of Mexico in the middle of a hurricane.”

“Good choice. Yesterday, those were the roughest seas I’ve ever seen.”

“So I’m not crazy to have been scared out of my mind?”

“Not at all. That was a daunting ride, and climbing aboard the Anna Belle with her so close to capsizing would have scared the bravest soul.”

“Were you afraid?”

His features twitched into a frown. “We’re trained during a mission to set feelings like fear aside. They get in the way of the work. But I did register that it was a dangerous situation in which we all could easily have died.”

She turned his words over in her mind, applying the filters her years as a CIA analyst had honed to a fine edge. It was probably as close as she would ever come to hearing a SEAL admit to being scared. And she had heard that SEALs were taught techniques for fear and pain control.

Cole murmured, startling her out of her analysis, “There had to be more to your dream.”

“How do you know? It was my dream.”

His low voice was soft like suede caressing her skin. “I know because you all but tore my clothes off and had your wicked way with me.”

Hot shame flooded her face. He knew. Cole knew exactly what she’d dreamed. Every sordid, sexy detail of her unconscious fantasy. She was never going to be able to look him in the eye again. Ever. Humiliation tasted sour in the back of her mouth, and an urge roared through her to curl up in a little ball, pull the quilt over her head and never come out from under it.