She was kissing him back with the same ferocity. A tangle of lips, tongues, and salt water.Frigidsalt water.
He wanted to go on kissing her forever, but he had to get out of this water. He pulled back and looked into her eyes. “Hit pause until we get on the boat.”
Her eyes flew open. “Oh my God, you must be freezing. I wasn’t thinking...” Her voice cracked. “How did you know I was in trouble?”
“I’ll tell you everything when we get on that boat.”
Normally he could swim the distance of a football field in just under a minute. But the fifteen minutes or so that he’d been in the icy water had sapped his strength and turned his limbs to bricks. The increasingly choppy waters didn’t help, either. It was a good five minutes before he was climbing the ladder onto his borrowed speedboat and reaching down to help Annie up.
But her head was turned toward the pier. The dive boat had just left the harbor and was making its way toward them, presumably with the police on board.
She turned back to him and shook her head, refusing to climb aboard. “You have to go, Dean. You can’t let them find you.”
“I’m not going to leave you—” Suddenly he stopped, staring down at her in shock. “How do you know my name?”
“I guess you haven’t seen the paper today. The reporter doing those lost platoon stories posted a photo of her brother and a few of his friends. It was hard to make out your faces, but you weren’t wearing a shirt, and I... uh...” How the hell was she blushing in ice-cold water? “I knew it was you.”
He wasn’t going to ask her how. Not right now at least. Not while he wasn’t naked and she couldn’t show him.
“That’s why you’re hiding,” she said. “You’re part of the SEAL platoon that she said disappeared.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me why?”
“I assume you have a good reason, and you’ll tell me what you can when it’s safe.” She stared up at him, her expression suddenly uncertain. “I’ll wait for you—if you want me to.”
He reached down the ladder and pulled her on board. She’dprobably be pissed off later at his high-handedness, but he’d make it up to her. He thought of all kinds of ways he was going to make it up to her, and he felt a spark of warmth pulsing through his frigid veins.
“Want you to? Fuck yes, I want you to.” He pulled her in tight against his body to emphasize his point. He’d give everything he had right now to strip off his wet jeans and her wet suit. But she was right. He had to go.
For now.
“I wasn’t sure,” she admitted. “I didn’t know why you came back. How did you know I’d be in danger?”
He gave her a twenty-second recap of what they’d found out about OPF and Jean Paul’s death. She was clearly shocked.
“Short-selling? Blowing up the drillship was about money?”
He nodded. “When I learned that the woman who’d killed Jean Paul had gone diving with you...” He shivered—and not from the cold, though it wasn’t much warmer on this damned boat. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
She smiled. “I thought big, badass SEALs didn’t get scared.”
“Sweetheart, you scare the livin’ shit out of me.”
The confession seemed to please her enormously. She looked like a kid in the proverbial candy store—him being the candy store. “I do?”
He wasn’t going to elaborate on how much. He’d do that the next time they were alone, preferably in bed. “If anything had happened to you, it would have been my fault. I shouldn’t have left you.”
“I understand why you did now.”
“Yeah, well, I still shouldn’t have left the way I did.” His fingers caressed the side of her cheek along the edge of the neoprene hood as she gazed up at him. His voice was suddenly husky. “I should have told you something first.”
She was scanning his gaze so intently that he felt his chest squeeze. She seemed scared to ask, “What?”
They were words he’d never said to any woman before, but he didn’t hesitate. The last few hours had made him damned sure. He would figure out how to make it work. That was whathe did for a living. Found solutions for the impossible. “That I love you.”
She blinked, tears suddenly filling her eyes. “You do?”
He nodded and kissed her again. This time far more gently, and unfortunately far too briefly. He hated this. But there would be time. Lots of time. He’d make damned sure of it.
