Romancing the Alpha: An Action-Adventure Romance Boxed Set (79 page)

“So why are you crying?”

Her hand did the jitterbug and her voice shook. “I’m all mixed up.”

No kidding. He was, too. The chase. The gun aimed at her back earlier in the day. Sitting through dinner with a thousand questions and no answers. Being this close to her again.

The next thing he knew, he’d closed the distance and folded her in his arms. Pulled her back into his chest and felt her take a long, deep breath then settle against him with a sigh.

God, it felt good to hold a woman who didn’t need much holding. To smell Julie’s special scent again, a blend of rain forest-fresh skin and coconut-shampoo hair. To feel her heat. To wipe away the tears and put his cheek against hers.

Absolutely perfect. Even the tears, because he knew Julie wasn’t one to open up often. And she was doing it for him.

Trusting. Relaxing. With him.

She sniffed a little and wrapped her arms over his, making the hug tighter. Even when she shook her head and muttered at herself, she stayed close.

“What?” he whispered.

“Seth, I barely even know you.”

He turned her slowly so he could look her in the eyes. “You know me better than anyone I’ve ever known.”

It was true. Sometimes he thought she knew him better than he knew himself. Because for years, he hadn’t been living so much as filling a role. The responsible older brother. The good son. The business jock. Fresh air and salt water had slowly scoured those superficial layers off, and even he was surprised what was showing underneath. A guy who could spend an hour watching the clouds move overhead. Who could look at the horizon and not need to know exactly where he’d go next.

A guy who could fall in love in the space of one week. Not just with anyone. With her.

She lowered her head to his chest but didn’t let go of him. “I don’t even know where you’re from.”

“Boston,” he shot right out, ready to do anything to convince her. “Lexington. Next?” He waved an impatient hand. What was it going to take to convince her he was serious? “Ask me. Ask me anything.”

Her face lifted and said,
That’s not the point
.

He stepped back and set his feet wide like he was about to push a big boulder up a very steep hill. “I like coffee black and tea white. I like soccer over football. Thrillers over nonfiction. I hate skim milk.”

She stared, so he went on.

“I grew up with my brother and a basset hound named Cleo. We always went sailing with my grandfather in the summers — us and our cousins. On
Serendipity—
” he pointed across the water “—which is why he left it to us. Me, Tobin, and our other cousins. And you know what? He was totally right. We were getting out of touch with each other. And with everything else.” He waved a hand at the night sky, the inky horizon, the ocean. Back home he never even knew what phase the moon was in; out here, he could feel the pull of the tide, smell the slightest shift in the wind.

“We were supposed to have a little sister, but she was stillborn.” It hurt a little to say it out loud, but it felt good, too. His family never talked about it, and that was wrong. It had taken him years to understand why his parents came home from the hospital looking so hollow, why they’d clutched him that tightly. Why he and Tobin had each reacted the way they had: Seth becoming the dutiful older son, trying to make things better for parents who would never be consoled, while Tobin became a rebel without a cause, insisting on living large and loud just to spite death.

On the other hand, maybe it hadn’t taken him years to figure that out. The sea had unwrapped those mysteries for him within the space of a couple of weeks. Funny how time and space could clean out the mess of a man’s head.

“Her name was Linda. And no, my parents never got over it.”

Julie’s jaw dropped.

He went straight on before his throat closed up on the choke building in the back. “In eleventh grade I got caught smoking behind the gym and was suspended for a week. My closest brush with the law — until now.” He tried a little smile. “The first woman I ever slept with was my best friend’s older sister, the summer she was back from college. Brenda. She had a snake tattoo around her belly button no one was supposed to know about.”

Julie’s eyebrow shot up.

He was building momentum now, so why not roll on with this out-of-control train? “I’ve never been outside the US or Mexico. Never done it in the back seat of a car. Never had the guts to break out of the mold until I did this trip. And I never met anyone like you.”

He gulped. Silence closed in as the sea breeze fluttered his hair. His fingers plucked at the hem of his shorts. Damn, where had all that come from? He closed his eyes and wondered how soon Julie would demand that he take her back to the boat, back to solid land, and kick him out of her life once and for all.

But there was nothing but the sound of his own near-panting breath and the swish of the waves on the beach. Then a gentle hand on his cheek and a soft, moist touch on his lips, and Julie was in his arms, hugging him tight. He clamped his arms around her and went limp with relief.

The kiss got wider, deeper, hungrier, and then she pulled back, her hands fisted in his shirt. “Some speech, sailor.”

He put his hands over hers and smoothed them flat against his chest, relishing the connection. “I never wanted to hurt you. Never wanted to leave you.”

She leaned her forehead on his shoulder and stroked his back in silence.

“So what happened?” she whispered at last. “That Friday?”

What happened? Seth ground his teeth together. They’d nearly lost the boat because of Tobin’s mistake. Even now, he could flay his brother’s hide. Then again, as captain, he was just as much to blame for not being more tuned in.

“The weather,” he started.

Julie snapped back and slapped his arm, her face taking on an angry hue he could see even in the moonlight. “Don’t give me some story about the weather. It was perfect. Blue sky, no wind.”

He put his hands up. “No, not that!” His voice was too loud, too sharp, though, so he started again. “Listen, it’s true. There’s a thing called a north swell.”

She stuck her hands on her hips and drew her lips into a thin line, but at least she hadn’t turned her back and stomped away. Yet.

“North swell,” she said with a scary lack of intonation in her voice.

“Yes, a north swell. Look, the ocean is always moving, right?”

She made a face that said he had ten seconds to get to the point.

“Wind pushes the sea into waves, and big storms make big waves. So big that even when the storm dies out, the waves roll on.” His hand undulated in the air to demonstrate, which was good, because her focus went there and away from his chin, which she looked about to clobber. He swung his left hand toward his right in little scooping motions, like the wind stoking the waves. “And if you keep some wind direction acting on those waves — that swell can travel thousands of miles and eventually come up in a totally different place.”

“Like here? Santa Marta?” she asked dubiously.

“Like Santa Marta.” He nodded. “I was coming to meet you, just like I said I would — Jesus, I wouldn’t have missed it! — but that’s when we noticed the boats leaving the harbor. Not one or two boats, but all of them. Even the local fishing boats were hauling ass. Jim from
Dreamtime
motored past us on his way out, saying ‘When are you getting the hell out?’ We had no idea what was going on until then.” Seth dared to reach out to her shoulder then — the uninjured one. “I was supposed to be watching the weather, but I was…” He groped for the right word, because
distracted
would never fly. “Busy with you,” he finished. “Not thinking about anything else.”

He paused, because shit, did that sound like he was only thinking of sex? He rushed on, willing her to understand. “Stupidly, I let it slide. Tobin said he’d check the weather, but he didn’t. And all of a sudden we had eight hours’ notice to get to the next spot with decent shelter from the waves coming in from the north.”

She cocked her head at him, and he pointed west. “Cayo Largo, over there.” Funny how a couple of months of sailing could give a guy an internal compass. “Which was seven hours away and filling up fast with boats.” His heart beat faster, just remembering the race to get to shelter in time. To save his grandfather’s boat before it could be dashed against the shore by that killer swell.

“So what happened?” She looked anxious, like she’d lived the moment with him. In a way, he wished that she could have, because it would have helped to have her around. Someone with a good head on her shoulders — unlike his brother. Someone whose presence always managed to calm him, the way her touch always did.

He exhaled, both in reliving the moment and from the rush of his words. “We got in after everyone else and barely got the anchor down before it went from a not-so-bad eight-foot swell to a crazy fifteen-feet — and counting. We were way at the back of the pack in deep water. Stood anchor watch, the both of us, for twenty-four hours, with the engine running in case things went bad.” His eyelid twitched just at the memory. “Outside the anchorage, the swell built to twenty-five feet in a couple of hours, and it worked its way in. In the end, we did okay. A couple of the other boats dragged and went aground. The rest of us pitched in to help them, but that took two days.” Two long days in which all he’d wanted to do was get the hell back to Julie before she left. And then it got worse.

“But even when the swell went down, a storm hit. That was Tuesday. We upped anchor and got to another anchorage with better wind shelter and sat out fifty-knot winds there. Three days of that crap.” He wrung his hands in the air. “Believe me, if I could have gotten back, I would have. But first the storm, then the sea was still a mess, then—”

“Seth.” She squeezed his arm.

He froze. This was where she’d slap him and say goodbye.

”Seth.”

He squeezed his eyes closed, because he deserved whatever she had to scream at him.

“I get it, Seth. I believe you.”

“You do?”

Her lips pulled into a tight smile. “I do.”

All the air pooled in his lungs fled in a huge rush.

“Really?”

She nodded. “Really.”

He pulled her in for a hug and took a couple of deep breaths before going on. “We got back a week later, but…”

“But I was gone.” Her voice cracked on the last syllable.

He nodded, lost in memories. He’d made a hundred rounds of the town, looking for her, asking after her, wondering how to get in touch.

“You were gone, and I had no way to contact you — no email, no phone, nothing. I tried. I looked up every damn archaeological dig I could, trying to find one starting with Xtla… Xtle… Xt…”

“Xtlemacán,” she filled in, the awkward Mayan syllables flowing off her tongue.

“But I couldn’t find it. Couldn’t find you. I didn’t even know your last name.” He tightened his hug to hide the shudder going through his body. “We tried everything for two weeks, and then…” He trailed off just short of saying,
I gave up
, even though it was true.

She was swaying gently in his arms now, and all he wanted was to stand there and hold her all night. All week. Hell, a month would be good. The citrus-salt scent of her hair, the light curves of her body pressed into his — yeah, that was good. Better than good.

“So where did you go?” she murmured at last.

He told her the rest, quickly, because it didn’t matter any more, not now.

“Tobin promised to meet his friends in Mexico, so we sailed all the way up the coast, then all the way back here. “We’re heading south now, to Panama for hurricane season.” He couldn’t resist a stop in Santa Marta to try to find her one more time, even though he knew she’d be long gone by then. And even though Tobin complained the whole way about him mooning over some chick.

He’d just about punched his brother. Julie was not just
some chick.

So what is she?
Tobin had asked.

Damned if Seth didn’t get stuck on the answer. He stood there, shaking his head, gesturing vaguely in the air. What was Julie to him, exactly?

A hell of a lot more than some chick
, was the best he could eventually sputter. Then he’d pulled seniority and insisted they stop in the beach town. And there she’d been, at the Coco Loco Café. Bronzed and beautiful as ever.

And now she was here, on this tiny spit of an island, those sky-blue eyes studying his.

“The whole time, all I wanted was you.” He hesitated on the cusp of his confession then let the dam break. What did he have to lose now? “Julie, I still want you. And not just for a week. Not for a month. I want…” He caught himself there, sounding like the self-centered bastard he probably was.
I want, I want, I want.

“What do you want?” she prompted, so softly he barely caught the words.

“I want a chance. With you. To give us a try.”

There. He’d said it. Even if she shot him down with every weapon in her arsenal until he was limp and bleeding in a pathetic heap, at least he’d have tried. He didn’t want a fling. He wanted a shot at more. Maybe even forever.

If he hadn’t already blown it, that is.

She was awfully quiet for a minute. Watching him, looking more tired and lost than she’d looked all day. She opened her mouth, and he wanted to coax the words out. Words like
I want that, too, Seth. I want to give us a try.

Her shoulders drooped and her chin dropped to her chest. “I can’t think straight, Seth. I have people chasing me. Men with guns—”

“I’ll help you,” he blurted.

“You already have.”

He shook his head. “No, right through to the end. ‘Til we figure this out. Do whatever it takes to get them off your back, or to get you out of Belize. Whatever it takes.”

She glanced up, eyes shiny with…hope? Tears? He couldn’t tell which.

“We?”

“We.” He hammered the word out to make sure she believed, then sealed his lips, because if he said one more word, he’d probably screw everything up.

He gulped and listened to his heart kick madly inside his chest, waiting…until she slid into his arms and pulled herself close. He knotted his hands behind her and let his eyes shut in a silent promise. Somehow, he’d get her out of her mess. Somehow, he’d keep her safe.