Her English was about to get a lot better.
She smiled, already anticipating the look on Dan’s face. He wouldn’t like being outplayed, but Annie had to admit itwas fun trying to do so.Mrs.Thompson wasn’t the quiet, barefoot, and pregnant-in-the-kitchen type.Mr. Thompson needed to figure that out.
Annie poked around a little more, picking up a paperback mystery that took place on the Isle of Lewis that looked interesting, until the older man finished and her name was up.
It was an ancient PC, something she was used to in university research and with many of the nonprofits she’d worked with. Making sure no one could see the screen while she browsed, she went to work.
It took her a few tries. “Special Forces tattoo” and “Navy Special Forces tattoo” didn’t come up with much, but when she added the word “Budweiser,” that did it. A nickname for the Navy SEALs trident insignia was “the Budweiser.”
A little more poking around, though, and she realized that Dan had probably been telling her the truth—it was a Budweiser tattoo. SEALs didn’t get tattoos that would identify them by branch or unit. They were more subtle. One article mentioned tattooing frogs (a reference to the frogmen that had predated SEALs) with numbers or things like that. The Budweiser was no doubt Dan’s tongue-in-cheek play on the insignia.
It made horrible sense, given his knowledge about diving and his skill with boats.
Being right didn’t soften the disappointment. He’d gone from not a good idea to no way in hell.
His defense of her father suddenly took on a new light. A personal light. He’d been defending himself also.
She was tempted to run to the beach to confront him, but what would that do? It wouldn’t change anything. She already knew he wasn’t for her; now she was only more certain of it. She knew only too well the kind of baggage and scars those guys came with—visible or not—and she had no desire to wade in that cesspool ever again. The memories of finding her father had haunted her for years; she wouldn’t resurrect them. Nor would she take the chance of coming home again one day to find someone she loved with a bullet through the head.
She should stick to her type: intellectual, cultured, and not so brutally masculine. A little more passive. Beta with a capitalB. If a little voice pointed out that that hadn’t exactly worked out for her lately, she pushed it aside.
She wasn’t going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as her stepfather liked to say. Just because Julien had turned out to be a dud didn’t mean the next guy would be. She wasn’t going to change what she knew was best for herself because she’d had great sex.
Discovering Dan’s Special Forces past had only solidified things in her mind. Their attraction had been off the charts, but now that they’d given in to it, they could move on. She could stop thinking about it.
Which was easier said than done.Knowingwhat it was like was much worse than speculating about what it would be like.
A SEAL... She shook her head. Just perfect.
She had a little more time—the computer terminal slots were for fifteen minutes—so she searched for news of the murders. Most of the stories were versions of a short Reuters article, but there was a longer, more detailed one from the local paper on Lewis.
She gasped, seeing a picture of herself staring back at her from the screen—she definitely needed a new passport picture—along with pictures of Jean Paul, Julien, and Claude. Even though she’d known it was Jean Paul who’d killed the others, seeing the picture of him in the hospital room in Stornoway made her sad all over again. Poor Julien and Claude.
She read through the story quickly, seeing there wasn’t much new information but distressed to read that they’d tried to contact her mother. She logged in to her e-mail and thought about sending her a message, but something held her back. Or rather, someone.
Whatever Dan was involved with, it was serious, and she didn’t want to do anything that would put him in jeopardy after everything he’d done for her. He’d been adamant about the need for secrecy. She would explain everything to her mom in a few days when this was all over. She hoped.
She scrolled down over four days’ worth of e-mail—shehadn’t been checking regularly on Lewis—and stopped when she saw the header from her bank.
After the credit card problem, she’d put a Fraud Alert on her credit file. Opening the e-mail, she realized it didn’t have anything to do with that. Apparently someone had tried to access her bank account from a different computer. It was dated a couple of days ago. Could it have been Julien?
She didn’t know, but she felt the stab of betrayal all over again.
God, how had she not seen it?
Just in case it had been someone else, she went ahead and changed the password after verifying the library computer with her security questions.
Her time was up and someone was waiting, so she quickly cleared her browsing history and logged off.
Thanking the librarian for the dictionary and the book, Annie walked back to the guest house. Now that she had her answers, she was more anxious than ever for this nightmare to be over. She wanted to go home and put it all behind her: Julien; Jean Paul; ecoterrorist plots to blow up drillships; murder charges; and too-sexy, Navy SEAL, Texan ship captains who spoke in hard truths and made her weak. While she still could.
Twenty-three
Dean spent the morning in the water, doing his best to put what had happened earlier out of his mind.
It was easy to see why Tiree was such a popular place for windsurfers. The combination of white sand beaches, temperate weather, consistent waves, and prevailing westerlies made it ideal. He and his rented board had cut across the waves for hours.
It was exhilarating, exhausting, and exactly what he needed. He felt a shitload better dragging the board out of the water than he had going in.
