Rescued (Navy SEALS Romance Book 1) (4 page)

"
T
hat was
one hell of a hike!" Danny couldn't stop talking. He was on an adrenaline jag, tall, thin, sandy haired, and currently speed talking. He kept pacing round Taylor's tiny kitchen, talking.

Jason for a change was quiet, like something had impressed him during the day. There were times at work Taylor thought she'd pay good money for anything that would shut Jason up and now she just wished he'd be himself again. She didn't like seeing him brought down.

"Not your fault," she said quietly under the rumble of the remaining non-victims. Barb and Tess had already left, looking shaken, though for all Taylor knew that might have been because of the pilot. They'd all gotten a good look at him and helmet or not, he was fucking hot. Then again, that might be what was up with a quiet version of Jason, too – she was never sure which side he batted for. Jason and Robert stood out on her deck, which was bigger than the kitchen and faced into a bunch of palm trees and neighbor's yards. Taylor's place was tiny but cheap and not situated for views. She might as well not live anywhere near an ocean, but she'd been saying she was going to move and
This year is the year
and so on for so long no one even listened anymore.

Even Taylor herself.

Under cover of the vibrant conversation from her friends and from Monster who felt the need to be included in the general merriment because he'd been included in the general emergency, were all making more than enough noise to cover her silence – Taylor thought about her life.

She had parents. They were separated and both living in Arizona, which was apparently the west coast version of Florida for some retired folks. She might only be twenty-four but her parents were each on their second marriage when they had Taylor and her sister.

She had friends, too, important to her but --

But. There shouldn't be a but. Monster was the closest relationship she had and while he was the best, she couldn't quite ignore the fact he was a dog.

Face it,
she thought, as Danny waxed loud about something to do with Chinook helicopters and Special Forces,
if I'd died I would have left behind some debt, a beautiful dog that at least Jessie would take – if I left behind Jessie. She might not have made it out either. I'd have left an uninspiring career in IT and uninspiring career in various schools before that, an ex boyfriend I thought was serious and –

And nothing. She didn't even have any big intentions. No Things To Do Before the Final Before happens. She hated the term Bucket List, she didn't want to run a marathon or write or publish a novel, she hadn't trained for anything other than IT and she hadn't cared. She knitted but it wasn't a passion (or very good). She cooked and threw parties for her friends, but she wasn't passionate about those, either.

In college she'd been friends with a girl named Angela who worked for a computer software financials company even while taking classes. She was frequently gone on business trips over the weekends and during the week, making up her work when she got back because it was hard for the school to argue she wasn't getting an education from her work, too. When she'd come back from a hair-raising flight with lots of turbulence she never failed to recount the things that went through her mind – her novel, her semi-fiancé (they were probably going to get married some day, though they were currently polyamorous and didn't seem concerned about the number of people in their relationship or when they'd wed), what she really wanted to do with her life (write), where she really wanted to live (Seattle), when and how she'd get there (good question) –

"She had a
life
she was afraid of losing," Taylor said, so quietly no one heard her, not even Monster. "Me, I'm just afraid of not being alive anymore."

And that was a huge difference.

T
anner Davis had kissed
her on the helicopter. He'd kissed her one more time when everybody was onboard and he'd taken back the controls.

Nice kisses.

He hadn't said anything about seeing her again though.

I
t
had
been rather
confused and confusing when it came time for everyone to get off the chopper in San Diego. The vehicles would be taken to a Ranger Station once the fire was out and the danger passed.

In San Diego at the tiny beach house that passed for the offices of SEArch & Rescue.

She knew where he worked.

It wouldn't be that hard to find him again.

She wouldn't even have to put her life or anyone else's in danger.

Shut up.

H
e'd kissed her
.

Why the hell had he done that?

"Boss, you listening?" All five of them were sitting around the conference table, something they'd dragged out of an abandoned hotel before demolitions. Sunshine on his shoulders through the window and the Pacific out there, way too windy and sandy to want to go for a run but damn he was restless. Jake and Angel were talking about Vegas, the contract, the likelihood they'd get it and all he wanted to do was –

Call her.

Not going to do that.

"Not the boss, Angel," he said, voice deceptively lazy. Angel was Latino. Was it a stereotype or a form of prejudice to say he liked to call people boss? Maybe it was just Angel. Beautiful Angel with his cocoa colored skin and perfect dark hair and elegantly sculpted limbs and the scar on his cheek from a run in on that last mission, a scar that girls found sexy.

Girls didn't find Tanner and his scars sexy.

They're afraid of you, bro,
Tanner's brother had said.
You're too fucking pretty.

Shut up,
he'd answered.

They were, after all, twins, even if Tucker had opted to stay in the Midwest and raise things and have a family. Girls weren't afraid of Tucker.

He'd kissed Taylor Adams. On the chopper.

Was it his imagination or had she kissed him back?

Imagination probably. Or heat of the moment. Even beautiful girls like Taylor Adams were bound to get caught up in the romance after being rescued from a wildfire.

Didn't matter. Even though he knew her name and where she worked and who her dog was and bunch of other important information, didn't matter. He wasn't going to see her again. She hadn't said anything or responded in any way other than thanking him for saving them, over and over, until he'd blushed.

He was a Navy SEAL reservist and a search and rescue technician and he was in med school and if that wasn't all enough to scare him away from trying to drag more into his life there was the simple fact that while he didn't understand why girls would be afraid of him.

He was slightly afraid of them.

"Call her, Boss," Angel said.

Shit. His brooding was showing. "Let's talk about blowing stuff up," he said, and not one of them believed the change of subject was authentic.

After the meeting he went running despite the wind, sand and crashing waves.

I
n the morning
Taylor took her laptop out onto the tiny deck and started playing with sites from Authentic Happiness to psych sites that rated the depth of depression, then for kicks took a profile on whether or not she was a multiple personality and, upon finding out she was, wondered how much she could trust the evaluations received from the other sites. She barely had enough personality for one person.

Going back inside, she made herself an omelet, remembered how much she hated omelets, fed it to Monster and went for a run. The day was windy and the sand kept blowing in her face and all the other runners on the beach including octogenarians and whoever it was that was older than that kept passing her like it was nothing while she slogged along getting nowhere.

She went home out of sorts and stopped looking at happiness and sadness ratings, stopped looking at dating sites, stopped looking at movie trailers (it had been a welcome distraction earlier) and went to volunteer opportunities.

One of the first things she found was a new company that used technology to train injured children in the use of artificial limbs. They gamed with them and by distracting the kids into the fantasy world of the game, taught them to use the new limb when they weren't concentrating on it and feeling frustrated or embarrassed.

The company was a start up, depending on grants and donations, which made Taylor grind her teeth since the tech giant people called The Devil routinely made enough money to finance this entire project and pay the volunteers.

Then again, perhaps the tech giant did good works elsewhere.

Maybe Taylor could do some good works here.

That led her to checking out volunteer opportunities in her community and drowning under the weight of them. Just about anything she might find herself interested in had some kind of component that lent itself to volunteerism. She could work with injured, abused, neglected, abandoned or sick children, and work with physical therapy, play therapy, horse therapy, cat, dog, pig, cow, cockatiel therapy. She could do arts, stage plays, teach singing (no, really she couldn't) and almost anything else she could dream of to help children who needed it. She could join community gardening projects and with her brown thumb, give the existing volunteers plenty to volunteer doing. There were enough choices out there.

But she kept going back to the first one she'd seen when she wasn't even thinking about volunteering, just thinking she needed to find meaning in her life before something threatened that life again.

The tech tie-in to physical therapy appealed. The others were good works no different than knowing nursing homes would love to have her read there and the food banks would always welcome donations, not just at Christmas.

This, though. This combined what she'd trained in with something she had an interest in because her sister was a physical therapist. Not that she wanted to go play in her sister's sandbox, but at least it would be a miniature bridge should they ever want to communicate again. As sisters.

She filed away the idea, finished living through her Sunday and went back to work at Boring World on Monday, running promptly into Jason.

"
S
ome weekend
."

"Your idea of a good time?" Taylor asked Jason. The break room was as low tech as the company was supposed to be high tech. Everything in it was worn, soft, tired and probably out of order. It was restful after all the screen time and client time in the rest of Boring World.

"Yes, I'm planning not get caught in a tidal wave this coming weekend. Care to join?"

Even as Taylor was smirking at him he said, "Is that politically incorrect?"

"Only if there's been one recently, I think. Besides, when have you ever cared?"

"True." He pounced into a chair, looking like a tan and sandy cat leaping to curl up, put his chin on his hand and said, "So!
The pilot
."

Taylor groaned. "Not going there," she singsonged.

"I saw him kiss you." He looked like an imp, watching her, grinning.

"Not talking about it."

Jason cocked his head in the other direction. "Saw you kiss him back."

Taylor was momentarily speechless. "Did not."

A huge smile overtook Jason's face as her stutter proved him right. "So did," he said, and flitted out of the break room.

D
id I
?

Doesn't matter. He didn't ask for anything. Not a phone number, not an email.

…but you could. Twenty-first century and all.

Don't even know how to reach him.

Of course not. Because SEArch & Rescue isn't a clue. Or the beach-house-come-office.

…shut up.

"
I
'm looking
for some information on the volunteer program with tech and children." Taylor paced through her lunch hour, hovering behind Boring World, the slat-roofed gazebo picnic tables area employees never, ever used. Still didn't – she had privacy back here.

"Ooh, good," said the girl's voice on the phone. "What can I tell you?"

Good question. She'd called to find out more because she always did but other than when they wanted to schedule her and whether or not there was training involved, there wasn't anything else. So she asked those questions – was there training required? How much, how long, what times? And what hours could she schedule volunteering? Because she worked, often more than the 40 hours a week full time.

The girl on the phone, Gemma, gave her directions, emailed her a link to a video, emailed her links to the games, explained training in such detail Taylor thought she could skip the training and still do just fine, and explained everything with such loving detail Taylor vacillated between feeling this was a good decision and fearing she'd simply somehow gotten the founder on the phone.

Founders were bound to be happy about volunteers. Right?

"Can you come down on Friday?" the girl asked. "There's training late afternoon, starting at 4:30, over by 6:00."

"On a Friday night?" Not that she had other plans, but it seemed presumptuous of whoever scheduled it.

"I know, right? But it's over early. Can I schedule you?"

Of course she could.

Wasn't like Taylor had other plans.

Maybe this was the first step in changing them.

T
he week following
the Palomar National Forest fire Tanner overhauled the chopper, cleaning and oiling and checking every last detail. Military had their own specialists for helicopter care, but now that they were civilians, the DIY aspect meant not relying on any outsiders.

He hit the gym consistently, struggling to get his bench press back up to where it had been, then working his shoulder until instead of feeling more fluid and more like his old shoulder it began to ache and burn with a sullen intensity that made him expect to see steam curling up for it. He began favoring the damn thing while he worked with Jake on the Vegas demolitions contract, Knox with a building fire and Mike, when he reappeared, with a water rescue. Mike made diving look more natural than walking. He was like an otter or something, more at home in the water than on land.

Mike was the one who called Tanner on his shoulder.

"It's loosening up," Tanner said, ignoring the four Advil that had yet to detonate in his stomach – they were probably all still pill shaped.

"It's not loosening up, and you know it. It's stiff and unresponsive and still injured."

"I've got it handled, bro," he said, starting to walk away and Mike shot a hand out and grabbed him by the shoulder.

That
shoulder.

Tanner dropped nearly all the way to his knees. "Look, ass hat – "

"Nah uh," Mike said. "I get you don't want to deal with it. Just imagine it froze up on you mid-rescue. You want to do that to someone who thinks they're on the verge of getting out of some disaster alive? How 'bout your former team members, now your business partners and friends?"

Well, fuck.

Mike met his gaze head on. Tall, sandy haired and blue eyed, he had deceptively lanky limbs that were actually more muscled than the rest of them combined, he came from a career military family where everyone seemed to learn how to ask the hard questions without blinking and then wait for an answer.

"All right, all right. What do you think I should do. Another surgery?"

Mikey seriously considered the question, then said, "I think you go back to PT, boss." He held his hands up without bothering to learn if Tanner was objecting to the content of his speech or to the word "boss." "I know, you tried it. Results not good. Progress slow. I get it. Frustrating. I've been there too. All I'm saying's you're not getting over it on your own. Maybe you're hurting it with the weights. Six weeks of – " and here he got a glint in his ocean blue eyes, and looked devilish with his carefully groomed goatee framing his smile – "Desk jockeying is preferable to being out of the game permanently."

"Six weeks on the desk. You're killing me."

"Yeah, I know. Better me than some desperate client who scales you like a sequoia and takes you down with her."

Tanner was still trying to figure out the analogy when Mike fired up his Harley and was out of there, MIA again for a week.

At the end of the week he came back and looked pointedly at Tanner, who said instantly, "I made an appointment with a new PT." And then waited until Mike and his thumbs up went away before locating and scheduling with a new PT.

T
he medical building
was situated on a low foothill with a view of the city. Several years old, it had survived the Great Recession by forgoing maintenance and paint. Tanner found it depressing. In the last two weeks he'd found a lot of things depressing, like his own solitary nature and his inability to do much with his shoulder the way it was. He went on working out, went on studying the thing in mirrors, as if he could see beneath the skin and root out the ongoing problem.

The new PT came into the outer office to collect him herself. Tall, freckled, dark hair back in a ponytail and in hard body shape, she offered her hand.

"Kaylie Jones. You're Tanner Davis?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Come on back." She led him through the doors out of the waiting room and into a torture chamber. There were exam rooms on the edges of the big space but most of the back office and exam room area had been gutted to create a gym and spa. "We'll just head into this room and you can tell me about your injury."

Tanner shook his head, confused. "You should have my medical charts."

She was busily pulling them up on a computer terminal as he spoke. She nodded, ponytail bobbing. "We do. But what I want is to hear from you what you think the injury is all about."

Tanner didn't bother trying to disguise the groan. "You're kidding, right?" The word
psychobabble
was on his lips.

She took no offense, just looked up from the screen and smiled at him where he still stood beside the chair she'd indicated. "Too new age for you?"

He shrugged. "I just don't think my opinion of my injury has anything to do with how it's healing. Or not healing." But the shrug sent a bolt of white hot pain through his shoulder and it couldn't hurt to find out what the PT had in mind, could it?

Kaylie Jones looked away from the computer when he managed to force himself to sit down. Folding her hands, she batted her screen away so it wasn't in her line of sight, then rested her chin on her hands, her elbows on her desk. Where other PT's had asked, "How did you sustain the injury?" and often referred to his shoulder by some complicated anatomical reference, Kaylie Jones said, "How did you hurt your shoulder?"

Tanner liked that. "My team led a mission to Syria. We were going inland, civilian hostage rescue only the insurgents were ready for us. No one knows if we had a spy or a hacker or what, and it doesn't matter. We were a sixteen-man crew and only half of us walked away."

"I'm sorry," she said simply, and didn't keep talking to make herself feel more comfortable. She just waited.

He found her easier to talk to than either of the shrinks. "We lost too many good men that day. Nobody did anything wrong. We had contingency plans for if we lost the element of surprise. We were just outmanned and outgunned and we lost people."

Quietly, she said, "Did you rescue the hostages?"

His gaze didn't quite sharpen on her. She remained a curiously cloudy and out of focus shape. He was letting himself remember. "Yes, ma'am, we did. All present and accounted for. But the Chinook chopper I was on went down in the gun fight. I ended up with wreckage from the wreck in my shoulder. Call it garbage." Catching her eye he said, "Not the shoulder. The metal in it. That's still there. It moves around. Some day we'll get it out. During the first surgeries it was in the wrong place. If they'd gone in, they'd risk me losing use of one or the other arms. Or both. Now the metal moves. Someday they'll pinpoint and retrieve it."

He stopped and just looked at her, feeling lost.

She said, "You're Ironman."

He laughed without expecting to and said, "I wish. Even I'm not arrogant enough to be Tony Stark."

She didn't point out that Stark was fiction. Instead, she said, "Let's get started finding out what you
can
do before we worry about your perceptions of what you
can't
do." She stopped when he didn't follow her and looked back. Then she grinned. "I know. Too new age. Give it a chance." Then she gestured at him as if he were a recalcitrant dog refusing to come when called. "Come on. Come on!" with big enthusiastic gestures.

He followed her. Smiling. Just a little.

T
he intake interview
was in the office of the therapist working with the children. Dr. Andrew Case was young and optimistic and attractive and very obviously married – his wife worked with him, wrote about his findings, took photos of the children, and basically was part of everything he did.

Taylor thought that kind of closeness just might make her crazy in short order but she shook hands with the doctor and hoped his wife would leave the conversation shortly. The doctor's questions were cut and dried, unimaginative, as if he wanted to hire someone equally unimaginative who wouldn't challenge him for his place in the limelight.

Her first thought was she couldn't possibly work with the man. The second was that of course not, she wouldn't – she'd be working with the people he'd hired to run his clinic.

The next was that she wasn't going to do it forever. She could give it a shot and see if the volunteering made her life feel more valuable.

Taylor made herself smile when she suggested, "Tell me more." She wasn't prepared for how much more he told her. By the time he finished she was convinced she could run the program herself. She ended up backing out of the office, a loud interior monolog promising she wouldn't be working with the good but loquacious doctor but with people who could use her help.

The doctor didn't need her help. He had staff to corner and deafen.

The catty thought made her grin to herself. She wanted to go home, call Jessie, talk out the silly that was her life and get started with curing it.

Volunteering should be strictly about the other person or persons or organization.

But she didn't believe the inner voice. Standing waiting for the elevator because the stairs were locked in the old building, she tried to believe that if she happened to be volunteering at something she got satisfaction from, didn't the organization and people still benefit? Even more, if she liked what she was doing, then she could get behind doing whatever a volunteer did to help. If she was doing good works and just happened to improve her life –

--or meet someone –

--or –

"They still benefit," she said aloud at the same time the elevator doors opened.

She ran smack into a chest.

A big, strong, cotton-t-shirt-smelling chest.

Oh.

Strong arms caught her by the shoulders, drew her inside the elevator as the doors were already closing. A voice said, "I'm sorry, I was on the wrong floor anyway. Hey, it's Taylor Adams!"

Taylor was still staring at the chest, not quite looking up yet, blinking and trying to overcome the surprise. At the sound of her name, she looked up into the ice blue eyes of the helicopter pilot.

She blinked and took a step back. "Hello!" It kind of exploded out of her, a blurting of sound that was less greeting than verbalized shock. "What are you doing here?"

"Blundering into people in elevators. It's good to see you again. Did you get home all right?"

Taylor cringed. First she ran into him. Then she stared, stupefied, at his chest, unable to speak in complete sentences when she did start to talk.

Just fantastic.

…he was every bit as amazing as she remembered.

T
anner Davis blew
out a mental breath. He'd been through BUD/S training for Navy SEALs, had been on covert ops missions in terrorist countries, had been put on reserve with an injury sustained in a helicopter crash and had preformed how many rescues in the scant 10 months SEArch & Rescue had been open?

And now he was felled and brought to incoherence by a girl who stood a full head shorter than him.

Smooth.