What was the cause of his foul temper you ask?
It was twofold.
First, after months of fruitless searching, he and his salvage partners hadfinallylocated the sunken remains of the legendarySanta Cristina,Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. They’d pulled up a few religious artifacts—some ceremonial cups and crosses and rosaries. They’d stumbled upon a handful of weapons—a sword, two daggers, and one coral-encrusted musket. But the mother lode? The millions of dollars in coins and gold bars? The silver ingots and uncut emeralds clearly reported on the ghost galleon’s manifest?
Nothing. Nada. Zippo. Zilch.
Which meant it was looking highly unlikely they’d recoup their life savings—which they’d invested in starting their Deep Six Salvage business—much less strike it rich.
Should’ve stayed in the Navy, he mused bitterly.
Then again, he and his former SEAL team members had all been getting long in the tooth. And every spec ops guy worth his salt knew what that meant.
Doesn’t matter how good we were—and they’d been better than most—if we’d kept spinnin’ that chamber, all of us would’ve eventually checked into the Horizontal Hilton.
In fact, it was already too late for one of them.
Rusty Lawrence had been a tough, stubborn sonofabitch. His body had been riddled with bullets the day they dragged him out of a dusty compound in Aleppo after an op that’d gone tits up. But he hadn’t succumbed to the horror of his wounds before making all of them promise to wave goodbye to the lives of Frogmen.
Rusty had known he would be the first to go, and the bastard had done the one thing he could to make certain he was the last.
Which meant when their contracts expired, none of the remaining seven members of The Great Eight had re-upped. Instead, Michael “Mad Dog” Wainwright had returned to his hometown of Atlantic City to make babies with a saucy redhead. And the other six SEALs from their unit had traded sorties for scuba tanks, firefights for swim fins, and joined their lieutenant, a man by the name of Leo “the Lion” Anderson, in the search for the storiedSanta Cristina—a prize treasure hunters had been after for centuries.
Wolf and his SEAL brothers all had big plans for the cabbage they hoped to pick up from the salvage.
Leo, or LT as they called him in a nod to his rank, wanted to buy Wayfarer Island, the small spit of land rising out of the Caribbean that his family had leased from the U.S. government way back when Ulysses S. Grant sat pretty at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The same lump of sand and mangrove forest they all called home.
Then there was Spiro “Romeo” Delgado, who leaned against the palm tree next to Wolf. Romeo planned to use his slice of the pie to start a charity in L.A. for kids like himself. Kids who had grown up on streets so mean that a run-in with drug addiction, gun violence, and rival gangs just meant it was a Tuesday.
Mason “Monet” McCarthy hoped to buy a row house in Beantown and season tickets to the Red Sox. Brando “Bran” Pallidino made noises about opening an Italian restaurant in his fiancée’s hometown of Houston. And Dalton “Doc” Simmons had his eye on a ranch back in Montana.
Then there was Wolf himself. His aims, though not so grandiose as buying an island or funding a charity, were of no less personal significance.
You see, he had himself a trio of sisters, and each of them had worse taste in men than the one before.
Wolf had read a quote somewhere once.“I view each and every one of your glaring red flags as a personal challenge,”and he reckoned that summed up how his sisters went about choosing partners. Which wouldn’t have been a bad thing, except Rebecca, Roxanne, and Robbin were also fertile as turtles.
Between the three of them, they’d gifted Wolf with ten nieces and nephews. A whole brood of Roanhorses, and not a single baby-daddy offering up child support among them. Which meant the cheddar needed for braces, baseball cleats, and college funds was nearly impossible to come by.
Wolf hadhopedto be the one to make it rain. Had hoped to provide his sisters’ little crotch goblins with all the creature comforts he had done without while growing up on a scrubby piece of property outside Tahlequah, Oklahoma. But with every passing day, that hope dimmed. In fact, at this point it was little more than a glimmer.
Thinking of the women in his life who confounded him brought his thoughts around to thesecondthing giving him fits.
Her name was Christina Szarek. Chrissy for short. And she was as long limbed and blond as her Polish surname implied.
He’d had a thing for blondes ever since he was five years old and found himself in Miss Featherstone’s kindergarten class. Miss Featherstone had reminded him of a sunflower, sweet and radiant. Then there’d been Dana Teague in the sixth grade, a bubbly soccer player with a pleasant smile and long, thick braids. She’d been followed by Keely Potter in high school. Keely had turned out to be a bottle-blonde—a fact Wolf learned only after she let him get to third base under the bleachers at the football stadium. But none of those flaxen-haired sirens had ever made himwantquite like Chrissy did.
Wantwhat, though?
That was the million-dollar question.
Want her kisses? Certainly.I mean, have you seen her mouth?Want her long, curvy body stretched out beside him in bed? Undoubtedly.I mean, have you seen those legs?Want her cool, slim fingers running over his skin until he shivered and moaned and begged her to let him take her? You betcha.I mean, have you seen those hands?
Still, there was something more he wanted from her. Something nebulous and shadowy he couldn’t quite put a name to.
All he could say for sure was she was a pressure in his chest. A void in his stomach.And a pain in my ass, because she breaks out the Heisman move every time I get close,he thought as he let his eyes travel over to her.
Chrissy stood in the sand at the base of the beach house’s front porch steps, her hands shoved deep in the pockets of her cutoff shorts as she listened to the gathered group discuss theSanta Cristina’smissing mother lode. From the top of her messy ponytail to the tips of her unpainted toenails, everything about her screamed islander.
