Anne Marsh - Pleasing Her Seal

Mason snorted. “Not my type, sweetheart.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “Well, Mr. Guzman clearly appeals to the future Mrs. Guzman, and that’s all that counts.”

“They here on the island already?” He returned the photo and she stuck it back in her planner.

“Not yet.” Which was both surprising and not. “Julieta’s dress is here—that’s the bride-to-be—but I haven’t actually seen them check in yet. Mr. Guzman runs some kind of import-export business and has stuff come up at the last minute all the time. Maybe he had a business thing. It must be nice to have a private plane and go where you want, when you want.”

“Maybe.” Mason gestured at her tripod. “You done here? Want a hand bringing this back to your villa?”

“A hand down the hill would be great,” she said, still thinking about her missing bride and groom. She’d been counting on shooting their wedding for her blog; if they were no-shows, she’d need to make alternative arrangements. “Maybe I’ll see if his brother has arrived yet. Ask him if Mr. Guzman’s plans have changed.”

Mason started breaking down her tripod. “He’s bringing family to his wedding?”

She shrugged. “Just his brother, Santiago, according to Julieta. He was planning to get to the island a few days before her, so she was hoping to pawn some of the prewedding tasks off on him. He should have arrived yesterday or today.”

She let him help her fold up the tripod, and then they headed toward the path that led back to the resort. Since the sun had risen, the lighting was no longer ideal, and she now had a date with her bed. A date that would be even better if Mason followed her home. No. He wasn’t a stray puppy. She didn’t get to bring him home.

He strode ahead of her, so she followed along, admiring the way his cargo pants bunched over his butt as he walked. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him—and she’d definitely take a rain check on those pancakes.

2

WHEN THEY REACHED the base of the hill, Mason called squad halt on the operation. Maddie had given him permission to lead her down the hill, and down the hill only, so he handed over the tripod and flashed her a quick salute.

She blinked at him, taking the tripod automatically. “Uh. Thanks.” Her gaze dipped to the coffee stain on his shirt, her face radiating embarrassment. “Sorry about that. And about scalding you.”

She turned pink as if he were actually bothered by a few ounces of hot coffee. He’d been shot at, pinned down and ambushed more times than he could count. Coffee was the least of his worries, although her blush was cute.

“No worries, sweetheart. See you around?”

“Pancakes,” she answered, sounding slightly breathless, and he couldn’t hold back his grin. God, she was fun. When she went left, he hung back. Partly just to watch her go because, hell yeah, he enjoyed the sassy swing of her hips. Maybe she was trying to drive him crazy. It was a possibility.

Mr. Guzman, his ass.

The groom-to-be in Maddie’s photo was Diego Marcos and he would be arriving precisely never. His reservation had been canceled, courtesy of SEAL Team Sigma. The possibility of Marcos’s brother showing up on Fantasy Island, however, was an unpleasant wrinkle that he’d need to alert the rest of the SEAL team to. If they didn’t have intel on where the brother was, they needed to get it stat.

And added bonus... If Maddie ever found out what Mason had done, he’d be on her shit list for more reasons than scaring the bejesus out of her.

He opened his hand and looked down. He’d taken advantage of her panic to pop the memory card out of her very expensive camera. He’d always used an inexpensive point-and-shoot himself, but then his usual model was a dead enemy target that needed documenting. Sunrises clearly required better technology.

Unfortunately, boosting her memory card might not have been enough. If she’d transferred pictures via the resort’s Wi-Fi, he had a bigger problem than the square of plastic in his hand.

By the time he’d made it back to their base camp, the prisoners were long gone on the Zodiacs, and the rest of the SEAL team was waiting for him. He’d take camping over five-star luxury resorts any day. The entire team, minus Remy, who was now somewhere between here and Belize, was present.

Gray nodded acknowledgment when Mason stepped into the campsite. Gray was one of the biggest SEALs Mason had ever met. The team’s standing joke was that Gray didn’t parachute out of the plane so much as he plummeted. Like a rock. Although he sprawled at ease on a pile of backpacks, there was nothing casual about the glance he raked over Mason. Blood stained his camo. He’d stayed with the injured Remy until the medevac lifted off.

Mason was last to arrive at the debriefing about to start. It was standard operating protocol to review every mission, identifying areas of concern where they could improve next time. The team sat in a semicircle, their attention focused on Gray. As soon as Mason dropped to the ground next to Levi, Gray reviewed the mission that they had just completed, beginning with their target’s arrival on Fantasy Island and ending with Remy’s medevac to Belize for emergency surgery. Since Gray’s maybe-girlfriend Laney Parker was a surgeon and she’d accompanied Remy on the flight, Mason figured his teammate had a fighting chance.

When Gray finished the medical update and Levi had confirmed Marcos’s handoff to the US Navy, Gray dropped a new bombshell. “We’re not done here,” he said.

“We get to vacation for real? Hooyah.” Levi leaned forward. “I’m borrowing your black AmEx, Mason.”

“Dumbass,” Sam said. Their field medic was a laidback Alabama boy, but his lean build and easy smile were deceptively mellow. He could kick butt with the best of them, and no one on the team swam faster or blew more stuff up. “He means you get to work overtime.”

Gray shook his head. “Real mature, Sam. And accurate. Our mission parameters have changed. We were charged with bringing in Diego Marcos, but now we’ve got a second target. Marcos has a brother, who operates as his right-hand man.”

“Would that be Santiago Marcos?” Maybe Maddie had it wrong. Maybe she wasn’t planning to shoot the wedding of a notorious drug dealer who, according to her, had invited his equally notorious younger brother to the celebration.

Gray eyed him. “Are you psychic? Or is there something else we need to know about? Levi already mentioned that you hit a snag earlier today.”

Maddie was definitely a complication. A beautiful, very alluring complication.

“We had a resort guest up on the hillside lookout spot.” The place had some froufrou name like Lovers Lookout. He didn’t think Gray needed to know that, or that the spot apparently starred front and center in Maddie’s bridal portfolio. “She had a camera.”

Gray scrubbed a hand over his head. “How long was she up there? Did she shoot the Zodiacs coming in?”

Yeah, but that was only the first problem in a long list. “The guest is Madeline Holmes. She’s a blogger, one of those girls who hangs with Ashley.”

Ashley waved a hand. “Maddie runs Kiss and Tulle. She covers destination weddings, wedding favors, wedding cakes, wedding dresses. Last month her blog had over two hundred thousand unique visitors.”

“In other words, any noun that can be modified by the adjective wedding,” Levi interrupted. Mason was willing to bet that Levi wouldn’t recognize a wedding blog—or a wedding anything—if it bit him on the ass.

Ashley made a face. “Pretty much.”

“Well, today she was covering sunrises.” He had no idea why a bride would want to hike up a hill at dawn in her dress for a few photos, but far be it from him to judge. “And she set up her camera yesterday to do time-lapse photography.”