Rogue (SEAL Team: Disavowed Book 1) (3 page)

Maisey had stopped shivering. Wanting to keep her talking, to keep her mind from their less than ideal location and situation, Nash asked, “Why didn’t you see the same signs?”

“I wanted the fairy tale. For the first time in my life, I felt special. This man made me feel like I was the most amazing woman in the world.”

“Thanks.” Her comment struck like a sucker punch. Didn’t matter that it’d been almost a decade since their last kiss, or that he’d already found and lost his wife, Maisey’s long ago rejection still stung. “Good to know how much you cared.”

“Really?” she asked with a put upon sigh. “We hadn’t even graduated high school. Did you honestly, for one second, think I’d marry you? Signing on for a lonely life of living on some remote Navy base while you were off getting yourself killed? Or worse—behaving like my father? No, thanks.”

He forced a chuckle. “Let me get this straight, life with me would’ve been worse than a sham marriage to a drug lord?”

Covering her face with her hands, she shook her head. “That’s not at all what I mean, you’re mixing—”

“Don’t move . . .” A long, dark rope slithered from their tree.

“FREEZE . . .”

“What? Why?” She started to look over her shoulder, but Nash slowly reached for a mean-looking knife. Forehead furrowed, his narrowed eyes and pressed lips told her he wasn’t fooling.

“Don’t. Move. An inch.”

Palms sweating, pulse racing, Maisey wasn’t sure her heart could take much more.

“No matter what . . . stay still.”

Afraid to even nod, she swallowed hard, assuming Nash knew she understood.

Painstakingly slow, he raised his arm, menacing knife held at the ready. Drawing his lower lip into his mouth, he inched closer, and then lunged, swinging at whatever was behind her with such force she heard his knife’s swoosh alongside her ear.

When that
something
thumped against her back, she screamed, scrambling to her feet with newfound superhuman strength.

Writhing on the dirt were two halves of a cottonmouth.

Growing up in Florida, she’d been schooled on which snakes to steer clear of and this one topped the list.

Hands clutched to her chest, she couldn’t breathe past the wall of panic rising in her throat. Would this night ever end? The man she’d loved ordered thugs to shoot her, and now she faced venomous snakes?

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Nash had sliced off the snake’s head and was now stripping the skin. “Making breakfast.”

She retched.

“You might feel that way now,” he said with a chuckle, “but pardon the rhyme—the meat is sweet. It’d really be good deep-fried with beer batter, but we’ll have to make do.”

“You’re crazy. Get me out of here.”

“That’s the plan.” He used a small stick to spear the snake lengthwise like on a spit. “But last I checked my GPS, we’re off course by a good five miles.”

“So you
do
have somewhere specific in mind for us to be?”

“Yeah.” He gathered brush and small twigs, dropping them onto a pile. “And if you hadn’t fought me back at Hubby’s—sorry, Vicente’s—you’d have already been home in a nice, soft bed.”

Legs too rubbery from the snake incident to stand, Maisey crumpled to her former nest against the tree. Before leaning back, she glanced up and found the shadowy branches snake-free. Settled and as comfortable as she could be given her current location, she said, “I don’t have a home.”

“Trust me, your mom would like nothing better than for you and your baby to live with her.” Using a sparking device, Nash lit the small fire. On his knees, he blew on the struggling flame. “I shouldn’t be doing this, but you’re going to need protein for our morning hike.”

“I’m not eating that snake.”

“And you call me stubborn?” He made quick work of raising a stick rack on which to rest their meal.

“Who are you, MacGyver?” Was there anything the man couldn’t do?

“Close.” He dragged a log closer to the fire, then had a seat. “I’m a SEAL—at least, I used to be.”

“Like the ones in movies?”

He shrugged. “I guess.”

“How can you be so blasé? That’s a big deal. Your mom must be proud.”

Stoking the fire, he said, “Point of fact, she hated it. Now, I’m more like a bodyguard and she’s all the time asking when I plan to retire or take a safe job selling cars.”

For whatever reason, the fact that Nash’s mom wasn’t proud of her son’s achievements made Maisey sad. For as long as she’d known him, he’d wanted to be in the Navy—like his dad. “I assume your mom’s feelings have more to do with her already having spent a lifetime worrying about your father?”

“You remember?” Their gazes met and in the fire’s glow, she saw him for the man he’d become.

I remember everything
. “I was sorry to hear he’d passed.”

Most especially, she remembered how much it hurt letting Nash go. Growing up in a broken home had been at times a nightmare. There had been constant bickering and her mother’s tears. Nash’s house had been her haven. His dad served in the Navy, too. He’d never cheated, but was deployed a huge chunk of his time. When Nash announced he’d enlisted, then proposed, Maisey’s gut reaction had been that she wanted no part of being a military wife.

Like your drug lord was so much better
?

For the first time since Nash had blown back into her life like a category five storm, she appraised him. He was classically handsome. Square-jawed with a nose crooked from when he’d been hit with a baseball the summer between their junior and senior year. When he was mad, his gray eyes sometimes took on the color of clouds on a stormy day. He used to wear his dark hair on the long side, but he now sported a messy military buzz. After all these years apart, he still took her breath away.

“Mais?” She barely heard him over the fire’s crackle and a tree frog determined to steal the show. “What are you thinking?”

“About the night my mom found out about Dad’s first affair. I was so upset, that you came over to sleep on our sofa. Mom made us Rice Krispies Treats and we watched the
Wizard of Oz
. We were in fifth grade and quizzed each other on spelling words during commercials.”

His laugh flip-flopped her tummy in a way she hadn’t felt since she’d first met Vicente. “
Mmm
. . . Your mom truly has a way with Rice Krispies Treats. She made me a batch while we talked about bringing you home.”

“She always liked you.”

“Feeling’s mutual.” He rotated his snake and despite her misgivings, she had to admit the delicious scent had her mouth watering.

“How strange is it that here we are, all these years later, about to share a cottonmouth meal in the middle of a swamp?”

“You’re going to eat?” His half-smile filled her with the oddest sense that maybe, just maybe, they would be okay.

Then she heard gunshots.

“I KNOW THERE’S a gator eyeing us for a snack.”

“No chance. You’re too salty.”

“Ha ha.”

It had been hours since they’d heard shots. Dawn streaked the sky with slashes of orange and purple, yet Nash wasn’t taking chances. To hide their heat signatures in the event Vicente’s men had thermal scopes, Nash doused the fire and took Maisey into the black water alongside their camp. Her teeth hadn’t stopped chattering since. He wouldn’t tell her, but though he wasn’t too concerned about biting creatures sharing their patch of watery real estate, what spooked him was the prospect of Maisey’s core temp getting too low. A while back he’d read about four Army Ranger candidates dying during training in a Florida panhandle swamp. The water then had been in the low fifties. Lucky for Maisey and him, August water temps in the Everglades pushed ninety, meaning they shouldn’t be in immediate danger from the elements.

She squashed a whiny mosquito on her cheek. “Is this the worst jam you’ve ever been in?”

“Not even close.” Striving for a casual tone, he said, “One time, my team and I were dropped off by Bandar Beyla along the Indian Ocean coast. High winds killed our jump plan. We ended up twenty miles out to sea in a storm so bad I could hardly see my hand in front of my face. Oh—and let’s not forget the live nuke we were chasing.”

“What happened?” she asked with rapt interest.

“Fifteen hours later, we made shore and completed our mission.”

“Which w-was?”

He winked. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you. Ready to get out of here?”

“Think it’s s-safe?”

“Come on . . .”
I’ll make it safe
. He took her hand, leading her back to their previous camp. Again came the sensation that for once in a very long time he was needed. “But try sloshing as little as possible on the way out.”

“O-okay . . .”

With her seated at the base of her cypress, Nash made quick work of restarting the fire. Maisey was soaked and no doubt dehydrated. After cleaning a tin can he’d found along their trek, he rigged it to set over the fire to use for boiling water. The CamelBak vest he wore that had held more than enough water to last for days had been shot. Another fact he preferred to keep to himself.

Her shivering slowed and she held her hands in front of the crackling fire. “A while back, your mom told me you were married and your wife was pregnant. She also told me you . . . lost them.”

Not sure what to say—preferring not to discuss his family at all, Nash turned the snake he’d set aside when they’d been interrupted.

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.” More than she’d ever know.

“I always like to think there’s a reason for everything, but with your family, and now Vicente, it’s hard.”

Tensed, he said, “With all due respect, there is no fathomable reason I can see for my beautiful wife and baby to have been taken. For you to suggest there was . . .” A muscle ticked in his jaw. He squeezed his hands into fists, trying to work through the grief her probing raised.

Give him gunfire. Snakes. Bombs. None of it came close to making bile rise in his throat the way talk of his past did.

“Sorry, Nash.” He’d crouched in front of the fire and when she placed her hand on his bare forearm, he jolted as if her touch had stung. “Really. In time, you’ll—”

“Enough, okay?” The snake meat had turned white, signifying it was fully cooked. He took a third for himself, handing the rest on the spit to her. “Eat. Once you get past what it is, you’ll find the taste good.”

“You take more.”

“Maisey . . .” Never again would he accept a mission involving a female.

“All right. Thanks.”

He nodded.

Once she’d finished her portion, he made her drink. Satisfied she and her baby were as adequately nourished as he could manage, he said, “Get some sleep. I’ll keep watch.”

She opened her mouth—to argue? As if guessing bickering about the request would get her nowhere, she turned to her side, settling in for a rest.

“Here . . .” He gave her a folded rain poncho. Lots of times in less than ideal places, he’d used it as a pillow. Kneeling, he placed it between her head and the tree’s rough outer surface. The feel of her soft curls beneath his rough fingertips knotted his throat. Stupid, but how long had it been since he’d performed such a seemingly insignificant act as touching a woman’s hair?