“Damn straight,” he answered.
There was an electric moment of silence. Max let out his breath in a slow exhale. There was a lot of meaning behind her words. At one level, of course he wasn’t going to hurt her, kill her. But the deeper meaning was she felt he wasn’t a man to be feared.
Max could hardly remember not being big and strong. By the time he was twelve, he’d shot to six feet and looked sixteen. No one messed with him, and if they did, they were sorry.
The life he lived, particularly after joining the navy and passing BUD/S, had made him even bigger and stronger and meaner-looking. He was mean. Fuck with him and you’d regret it. But he chose his battles. He was not out of control and he resented it when a woman treated him like someone in an action movie or a violence addict.
“So,” Paige said softly. “Why don’t we not talk about our work and talk about something else? Like Max here.”
At her feet, Max’s tail thumped. There was something about the way the dog was sitting next to her, totally focussed . . .
Max shifted the tablecloth, and—yup. The dog had his head on Paige’s thigh. Something he could identify with. He’d like to have his head on Paige’s thigh, too.
He frowned at Paige. “Are you feeding him under the table?”
She winced. “Busted.”
“That’s not good,” he said primly, taking the moral high gizemoral hround, trying hard to keep a straight face as he watched her reaction.
Her skin was fascinating, it signalled every emotion. Right now she was slightly flushed with embarrassment as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
“I know,” she said earnestly. “Don’t think I don’t know it’s wrong, I do. After I got Max at the pound, I read up. I’m a researcher, I know how to gain expertise. I read thousands of pages on dog care, and everyone stressed that dogs shouldn’t eat from the table. It’s bad for them and fosters bad habits.” She thunked her forehead with the palm of her hand. “I know this. But—just look at him. He pulls at your heartstrings. How can I resist?”
Max leaned over. Doggy Max swivelled his muzzle to him, suddenly alert to the fact that maybe another chump was at the table. Someone else to scam.
His tail thumped more slowly now, as if his energy had been suddenly depleted. He whined and shivered, looking pathetic, whipped. He inched closer to Max, but cautiously, as if Max might have a hidden stick with which to beat him, and wasn’t the man he’d spent the entire day with, playing on the beach.
As Max watched, the dog slowly, tremblingly lowered himself to the floor, laying his muzzle on his front paws, as if too weak to hold up his head.
Max raised his head. Paige met his gaze then rolled her eyes.
“Don’t tell me, I know.” She sighed. “You’d think he just came out of some concentration camp where they whipped and starved him. Instead of having just been fed.”
“You fall for it, though,” he accused. “Hook, line and sinker.”
“Over and over again,” she agreed. “What can I say? I’m a total wuss.”
They met each other’s eyes again and burst out laughing.
It surprised Max. The laugh came straight up from his belly. Genuine, carefree, unstoppable. The first time he’d laughed, really laughed, in . . . in years.
And hard on the heels of that laughter, something else, something sharp and alive, moving fast, like a shark in the water. Dangerous. Subterranean.Irresistible.
Sexual desire, of a nature and intensity he’d never felt before, whooshing in like a tsunami onto a dry beach.
He watched her at the table—so pretty and alive, so whole, so easy to be with—with her golden-brown hair and eyes the color of the Pacific a few steps outside the door. Her light golden shoulders gleamed. They were covered by the thin straps of her dress with no signs of a bra. Was she wearing one? He didn’t dare lower his gaze but he had excellent peripheral vision. He didn’t think so.
Oh God.
Just a thin layer of cotton covering those breasts. Perfect, round breasts. His palms itched with the desire to touch them, run his fingers over that smooth, smooth skin.
Everything itched. Desire skittered under his skin like fire, so intense it was almost painful. It was as if he’d never had sex before, every molecule of his body turning around and aligning itself to hers, like iron filings to a magnet.
“Don’t tell anyone at work that I have no backbone when it comes to my dog,” Paige said, pouring some more wine into his glass. “I have a reputation as a hard-ass.”
She looked up at him and froze, her eyes widening, that pretty mouth rounding into an “O” at the expression on his face. It was the exact moment he imagined that mouth around his cock. He gritted his teeth against a groan at the image in his head.
Paige was no dummy and she was a woman. They seemed to have a whole slew of extrasensory perceptions that went into alleyways where men couldn’t follow and which allowed them to read men’s minds.
His mind wasn’t hard to read. What he wanted, fiercely, was right there on his face. He wanted her.
He was as hard as a rock, so hard it felt as if his dick were a separate thing, not part of his body. A stone cylinder glued to his belly, heavy and intractable.
He didn’t plan what happened next—it just surged up out of the moment, unstoppable, irresistible.
Reaching out, he covered her hand with his. Her skin was as soft as it looked, the hand warm and delicate. At the touch of her hand, he became even harder, more blood racing to his cock. It felt like his entire body simply went off-line as his dick came online.
Everything he’d0emthing h felt this past year—pain, anger, despair—vanished in a wash of incandescent heat blazing throughout his body, from his toes to the top of his head. Blasting away everything except pure, red-hot desire for this one woman.
He looked at his hand over hers and felt more heat wash over him. His hand was larger, darker, stronger, angled over hers. A mental image of the two of them exploded in his head. This is exactly what they’d look like in bed. His larger, darker, stronger body over hers, moving deeply in hers . . .
He closed his eyes at the image and breathed the intensity out.
He opened them again to find her watching him, looking slightly anxious. But she was also deep pink with some strong emotion he hoped to God was at least one millionth of the lust he felt, her mouth open as if she couldn’t pull in enough air.
God knows he couldn’t. There was no air in his lungs, just a burning sensation. Heat suffused him, inside and out.
They stared at each other. She had the most amazing eyes, a light blue with green streaks, shimmering as if the ocean were at her feet and reflected in her eyes.
He breathed in a gasp. Said words that were wrenched straight from his chest without any prior thought at all. “I want you.”
Oh, fuck. The words were out there, stark and simple, and he couldn’t call them back. He barely recognized his own voice—low and guttural, as if the words came from somewhere deep inside him. And they had. They came from his very core.
He’d played the sex game all his life. He liked women and he liked sex, and though he wasn’t as slick as some, he knew how to say enough sweet honeyed words to get a woman into his bed. Some wanted romantic words, some wanted sexy talk. Some didn’t require much talking at all.
He’d never just come out with it like that. Crude and simple. I want you.
He scrabbled for more words, better words, but they just weren’t coming. In his head was heat and the image of them tangled together, skin to skin, so close they could feel each other’s heartbeat. He had a sensory hallucination for a second where he could feel what it would be like entering her, parting her lower lips with his cock . . .
He tightened all the muscles in his stomach and groin because he was a second away from coming.
He opened his mouth and all that came out was air.
Since there weren’t any more words he could say, he simply sat there, try
ing to control his breathing. Trying to give the impression of a man who was in control, who had control, when it was slipping through his fingers.
There’d been a flicker of something in her eyes. God, what?
Her small hand flexed under his. For a terrible moment, he thought she was going to refuse. Slide her hand out from under his and say no.
At the thought, it was if his chest filled with barbed wire. He was a strategic thinker—in the battlefield, under fire, he could always see the next step and the one after that.
Right now? He had no sense of what he’d do if she said no. None. He wanted her so much, it felt unthinkable that they weren’t going straight to bed to start having sex just as quickly as their legs could carry them.
Shit, if she said no, he couldn’t even drop to his knees and beg her. His fucking leg would crumple. He’d fall over flat on his ass.
But the god of wounded warriors smiled on him, after a whole year of fucking with him.
“I know,” she said softly. “I can see that you want me.”
He froze. She could see it? How? He felt as big as a house, but she couldn’t see him below the waist. Obviously his face showed his ballooning need. He hoped whatever she saw didn’t scare her.
He took in another breath in a gasp. Tried to get all the words out before speech was beyond him, because they needed to be said.
“I don’t know what you’ll decide, but if I do get lucky, then I need to give full disclosure. I haven’t had sex in two years. I was deployed in—well, a bad, sandy place for a year, and I spent the year after that in hospitals and rehab clinics trying to put myself together. I don’t have any condoms with me at all. Coming here it never even occurred to me because until about two minutes ago, sex wasn’t part of my life anymore. And now I can’t think of anything else but sex with you. But this no-condom thing has to be taken into account. I do know I don’t have any diseases. None. Bloodsuckers at the hospital drained me of half my blood, taking tests, and I’m clean.”
“Oh!” She gave a faint smile. “I—ahm. Me, too. I had a checkup just a couple of months ago. I haven’t had sex for a year—too busy, really. And . . . the work I do, it sometimes takes me to test fields and research stations in remote parts of the world. Some in countries that are not, ahm, always completely stable. So my company offers its female researchers birth control. We get monthly shots. I’ve just had mine.”
Max scowled, sex wiped instantly from his mind. “Your company sends you to dangerous places?” he breathed, the thought driving him slightly insane for a second.
Max had close-up intimate knowledge of what bad places were like. He knew hellholes the way a suburban dad knows the potholes on his street. The idea of smiling, delicate, pretty Paige in some of the places he’d been horrified him.
“What the hell are your bosses thinking, sending you—”
She shut him up by placing her mouth over his, swamping him with heat. Her mouth tasted exactly as he thought it would—sweet and hot. Fresh and exciting.
It was a brief kiss, two mouths meeting, but he broke away gasping as if burned. He looked at her narrow-eyed as she watched him, head cocked to one side as if he were a puzzle.
She was the goddamned puzzle. Max knew kisses, he knew sex, he knew women, and he knew his reaction to women. This was all completely new.
Fuck.
He’d nearly come in his pants with a mere kiss. A kiss that lasted two seconds, tops.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Max was The Man. Cool and in control, in bed and out. Not a man so excited that a touch to the mouth damn near set him off.
Probably it was two years of abstinence. Yeah, that was it. Two long years with only his fist in the Sandbox, and in the hospital nothing at all because his dick was a dead piece of meat between his legs. It had been painful to breathe. Sex just hadn’t been on his radar.
Maybe what he’d just felt was some . . . some anomaly in the space-time continuum. A one-off.
Try it again.n>
His touched his mouth to hers and again felt that electric shock.
She’d closed her eyes. They slowly opened when he lifted his mouth. The pupils were a little dilated and she looked dazed. Good, maybe he wasn’t completely alone in this, whatever this was. Because it wasn’t sex. Or at least it wasn’t sex as he knew it.
Again.
She watched him, watched as he moved his face closer to hers, closing her eyes at the last second. This time the kiss was longer, deeper, nerve endings concentrated in his mouth as he tasted her—one long, slow stroke of the tongue, her mouth silky soft and delicious. She tasted of wine and sunshine and woman.
When he lifted his mouth, she made a soft sound. “Max?”
Under the table, a scrabbling of furry limbs and a soft woof. He snapped his fingers and patted the air. “Not you, boy. Me.”
Paige smiled.
“I’m right here,” he whispered, reaching out a hand to cup her neck and bring her back to him. Another kiss, deeper, longer, sweeter, hotter.
When he pulled back she searched his eyes. “Where are we going with this?”
For the first time, he chanced a smile. He no longer felt as if his head were going to explode any second now. The smile felt odd, unused facial muscles working. “To bed,” he whispered. “I hope.”
Hand still cupped around her neck, he bent forward until their foreheads touched. “I think I remember how it’s done. But I have to warn you, I don’t have smooth moves and smooth words.” They’d been blasted right out of him.
Her lips curled up. “Maybe not smooth words, but those are the right words. I don’t like players.”
Nail it down. Get it right. For all he knew, in the two years he’d been out of the scene, the rules had changed.
“That’s a yes?”
Paige pulled away, angled her head, observed him for a full minute. He let her. If he passed muster, he was just about to become the luckiest guy in the universe.
“Yes.”
Yes!
Chapter Four
This was so unlike her, Paige marvelled at herself. She was really picky and fussy when it came to men. How did she end up saying yes to a man she hadn’t even known for twenty-four hours?
Because of all those muscles? Even if he was very lean it was obvious he was a big man. Give him another couple of months and she was sure he’d bulk back up. Muscles were good, though she’d never really thought of herself as a Jersey Shore kind of gal.
She wasn’t. She was cerebral. True, his size was a plus, and that macho air—which she usually disliked—surprisingly worked for her. But macho wasn’t enough. He was an officer, he was a SEAL. Presumably he had smarts, and so far he seemed bright enough, but they’d barely conversed much beyond generalities.
So—not so much the muscles or the macho or the mind.
Nope.
He’d been kind to her dog.
She’d have berated herself for her stupidity if it weren’t for the fact that her entire body was tingling as he brought her hand to his mouth, eyes never leaving hers.
His mouth was warm, but she knew that. When he’d kissed her, the warmth of his mouth had spread all through her. There was a tiny bite of beard around his lips. He’d recently shaved but he looked like he’d had a heavy beard.
He kept her hand in his and rose. She rose with him, and into his arms, the most natural thing in the world. He was very tall. She was so close to him she had to tilt her head back.
He had that grim look again, only maybe it wasn’t grimness. Maybe it was just his default expression—the expression of a hard man who’d seen bad things. And though he didn’t seem like the type of man to tnt alk about it, she imagined his leg was hurting.
“I’d give anything to pick you up and carry you to the bedroom,” he said. A long finger was tracing the contours of her face. Just the merest touch, but it felt exciting and tender at the same time. “It would be romantic and it would get us there faster. A twofer.”
&nbs
p; She laughed. “Well, I’ve never been carried anywhere, so I guess I don’t know what I’m missing.”
“And I don’t know where your bedroom is,” he pointed out. “So I couldn’t carry you there anyway.”
One hand was still in his, the other had gone around his back. She didn’t have any spare hands so she indicated with her chin toward the back of the house. “Second room to the right. The first is my study.”
He kissed the tip of her nose, kept his face close to hers. “Well then, Paige Waring. Why don’t you lead us to it?” His wine-scented breath washed over her.
So. She was going to do this. Amazing. She watched his face for another long moment. Not making up her mind, because it wasn’t her mind that was involved here. Just checking her body that this was what it wanted.
Oh, yeah.
His face was so interesting. Hard planes, weather-beaten skin that made him look older than he probably was; dark, observant eyes; hard-looking mouth that had been surprisingly soft when kissing her.
And there was . . . something. What? What made this man out of all the men she’d ever met the one man she’d go to bed with after the shortest acquaintance in her social history?
Whatever it was, it was potent, because now that the decision had been made—and her body, having been duly consulted, enthusiastically shouted Yes!—she couldn’t wait.
“Come with me then, soldier.”
He smiled. “That would be sailor, but you bet I’m coming with you.”
He limped. If Paige hadn’t had her arm around his waist she wouldn’t have noticed, but there was a slight hesitation every time he put his weight on his left leg.
Max trotted right behind them, tongue lolling out of his mouth, wondering if this was a new game.
“We’re being followed,” she whispered.
He glanced down at her. “I noticed. I think the kid needs to stay outside, don’t you?”
She nodded. “Wouldn’t want him to lose his innocence. He’s only eight months old.”
“Yeah, too young for this.”
They reached her room and he gently closed the door in Max’s muzzle. There was a puzzled bark from the other side of the door. “Sorry, big guy,” Max called out. “Wait till you’re old enough to have a beer. Now.” He put his hands on her hips and looked her up and down. “Oh God,” he whispered. “I don’t know where to start.”