Cara Colter - Passionate Calanettis - Soldier, Hero...Husband?

CHAPTER TWELVE

Soldier, Hero…Husband?

Cara Colter

To the team of editors and writers who worked so tirelessly on this series:

I am proud to have been a part of it.

I stand in awe of your creative brilliance.

CHAPTER ONE

CONNOR BENSON AWOKE with a start. It was dark. And it was hot. Where was he? Somalia? Iraq? Afghanistan? Wherever he was, it was so secret, even his mother didn’t know.

That feeling tickled along his spine, a sense of imminent danger. It brought him to red alert. Still not knowing exactly where he was, he was suddenly extremely focused, on nothing and everything. Each of his senses was so wide-open it was almost painful.

The tick of a clock somewhere in the room seemed explosively loud. Connor could feel the faint prickliness of the bedclothes against his naked skin, and he could feel a single bead of sweat slide down his temple. He could smell the residue of his own sweat and aftershave, and farther away, coffee.

Another sound rose above the ticking of the clock and the deliberate steadiness of his own breathing. It was a whispery noise just beyond this room, and as unobtrusive as it was, Connor knew it was that sound that had woken him. It was the sneaky sound of someone trying to be very quiet.

Connor tossed off the thin blanket and was out of the bed in one smooth movement, from dead asleep to warrior alert in the time it took to draw a single breath. The floor was stone under his bare feet and he moved across it soundlessly. His nickname on his SEAL team had been “the Cat.”

At six foot five, every inch of that honed muscle, his comrades didn’t mean a friendly house cat, either.

They meant the kind of cat that lived like a shadow on the edge of the mountains, or in the deepest forests and the darkest jungles, where men were afraid to go. They meant the kind of cat that was big and strong and silent. They meant the kind of cat that could go from relaxed to ready to pounce in the blink of an eye. They meant the kind of cat that had deadly and killing instincts.

Those instincts guided Connor across the room on silent feet to the door that had a faint sliver of light slipping under it. His movement was seemingly unhurried, but his muscles were tensing with lethal purpose.

Though most people would have detected no scent at all, when he paused on his side of the door, just under the aroma of coffee, Connor could taste the air. He knew someone was on the other side of that door. He also knew they were not directly in front of it—a hint of a shadow told him someone was to the left of the door. It was not a guess. His muscles tautened even more. His heart began to pick up the tempo. Not with fear. No, there was no fear at all. What he felt was anticipation.

Adrenaline coursed through his veins as Connor flung open the door.

He was nearly blinded by sunlight in the hallway, but it didn’t stop his momentum. He hurled himself left, at the figure, back to him, rising from a crouch beside his door well. His hands closed around slender shoulders.

Slender?

A scent he had not noticed before tickled his nostrils.

Perfume?

His mind screamed, Abort! It was too late not to touch, but not too late to temper his considerable strength. Instead of taking the culprit to the ground, he used the existing momentum to spin the person skulking outside his door toward him. The force of the spin caused a stumble, and as luscious curves came in full contact with him, Connor recognized the truth.

Her.

Connor stared down into the eyes of the woman he had just attacked, stunned. It wasn’t that women couldn’t be bad guys, but this woman so obviously was not. He cursed under his breath, and her eyes, already wide, widened more.

She seemed to realize she was still pressed, full length, against him, and she pushed herself away.

“Ma sei pazzo!” she said. Her voice was gorgeous, husky and rich, a note of astonishment in it that matched the astonishment in her huge, wide eyes. She definitely had the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen.

Eyes that, at the moment, were wide with shock. Now that she had pushed away from him, her hand went to the sweet swell of her breast, and he could see where her pulse beat wildly in the delicate column of her throat.

Connor, ever the soldier, and still in that place of heightened awareness, took in every exquisite detail of her. She had long, dark hair, luxuriously thick and straight, that was capturing the incredible morning light that poured in through the arched windows of the hallway they were in. Her hair fell in a shimmering waterfall of dark chocolate past slender bare shoulders.

At least a foot shorter than he was, the woman had on a bright, flower-patterned dress. It was sleeveless and accentuated the lovely litheness of her figure. The dress was pinched by a narrow belt at a tiny waist and then the skirt flared out in a way that made him able to picture her dancing, that skirt flying around her. She had sandals on her delicate feet, her toenails painted a soft shade of pink.

Her coloring looked as if it was naturally pale, but golden from the sun. Her skin was flawless. Ma sei pazzo. It occurred to Connor he was not in Iraq. Or Somalia. Not Afghanistan, either.

He cringed inwardly at his mistake. “Jeez,” he said, out loud. “I’m in Italy.”

It all came back to him. He was in a small town in Tuscany on a puffball mission for Itus Security, the company he and his friend Justin had started after Justin’s injury had made them both leave the US Navy SEALs, though for different reasons.

“Sì, Italia.”

Yes, he was in Italy. And it was not a secret. Everyone in his world, including his mother, knew exactly where he was. In fact, his mother had been thrilled for him when he had told her the Tuscan village of Monte Calanetti was on his itinerary.

Italy? she had said breathlessly. She had looked at him with ridiculously hope-filled eyes and said softly, The land of amore.

If anybody had a right to be soured by love, it was his mom, who’d had him when she was barely sixteen and had suffered through all it meant to be a single mother at that age.

In addition, Connor knew exactly what his years of service in the world’s trouble spots and danger zones had made him. He knew only a mother could look at a battle-hardened and emotionally bereft specimen like Connor and hope love was in his future.

“Do you speak English?” he asked the young woman. He kept his voice deliberately quiet, threading it with calm. The woman was still watching him silently, with those doe-like eyes, and just like a doe, was ready to bolt at one more wrong move from him.

She nodded warily.

He deserved her wariness. “Sorry, ma’am,” he muttered. “I seem to have a bit of jet lag. I was disoriented.”

“You came out of that room as if you expected an assassin!” she said accusingly, finding her voice.

No point sharing with her that was exactly what he had been expecting. There was something sweetly angelic in her face that suggested that would be entirely foreign to her world.

Looking at her, it did occur to Connor that if a man was not completely hardened to life, the woman in front of him—beautiful and angelic, yet still sensual in an understated way—might have made his thoughts go to amore .

“I said I was sorry. I hope I didn’t hurt you.” Connor had tempered his strength, but even so, she was right. He had come out of that room expecting trouble of one variety or another, and his force had been substantial.

“No. No, I’m not hurt,” she insisted hastily, but then she folded her hands over her shoulders and rubbed them.

He stepped in close to her again, aware of her scent intensifying. He carefully pried her hands off her shoulders. She stopped breathing, staring up at him, her hands drifting to her sides.