Читать книгу Wicked Sexy - Anne Marsh, Anne Marsh - Страница 12

4

THE SANDY TRAIL leading to the beach was steep, and Daeg heard Dani coming before he saw her. Long, tanned legs in a pair of denim shorts followed a shower of gravel and a feminine voice. The summer heat was still lingering despite the forecast calling for rain. Swimming weather—as Dani with the towel slung over her shoulder clearly agreed.

One lap to go, he drove himself forward through the water. When he reached the far edge of the bay, right before the open water started, he dived for as long as he could. The week since he’d checked into Sweet Moon was one more week of training and strengthening his knee, though it still bothered him far more than he liked.

Dani was waiting for him when he pulled himself out of the water and dropped onto the sand beside her. Crossing his arms over his chest, he began a series of fast sit-ups. Flexing his stomach muscles until his elbows hit his knees, he sank into the familiar burn of the descent as he let gravity do the work, dropping his shoulder blades to the sand. Then up again. He had to do more than fifty-two in two minutes, yet, in fact, a hundred was barely average. He’d do better.

She was quiet as he completed his two minutes, and then she asked, “You always work this hard?”

He liked how her eyes lingered on his stomach as she spoke. He stopped and rolled onto his side.

“I need to fix this.” He gestured toward his leg. There was no hiding the scar, anyhow. Not that he wanted to. No, what he wanted to do was use the leg like he once had.

“In one week?”

One summer. One chance to make the team again. “My guys are out there, seeing action, so that’s where I go.”

“So that’s a definite on re-upping?”

Triceps bouncing, he pushed up fast and hard on his arms for his first push-up. One. He lowered himself, a fist’s distance from the sand then surged upward. Two. “That’s the plan,” he said finally, when he’d done the set. “Although Tag and Cal aren’t.”

Deep Dive was Cal’s dream, not his, but there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for his friend. Coming back to help him get his business off the ground was a given. Cal had had his back since their first dive together.

“They opened that new shop, Deep Dive.”

Deep Dive was far more than a dive shop. “They specialize in advance training for divers and do rescue and salvage jobs. They also offer the usual set of bread-and-butter dives to local hotspots.”

“Where do you fit in?”

That was the question. His teammates had decided to call Discovery Island home. He’d made a cash contribution and the temporary commitment to leading a training course or two when he was on leave, but he wasn’t ready to settle down. Not yet.

“I’m lending a hand,” he replied finally. “I’ll take experienced groups out on open-water dives and push the hell out of them to make sure they know what they’re doing. And I’ll wrap the current course and head back to San Diego and my unit.”

He’d ship out and life would resume its routine.

Switching onto his back, he looked up at her. Carpe diem.

“Come with me. We’ll go find more of that ice cream. Take another walk.”

“You eat ice cream on a regular basis?” Her eyes examined his body again and parts of him liked her attention just fine.

“I like sweet things.” His imagination worked overtime coming up with all the ways she’d be sweet. What would she let him taste and how far could he go? “I always have.”

She stood up, snatching her towel from the sand. She must have decided against the swim. Or picked up on the sexual tension humming through his body because, yeah, she was bolting on him. “No ice cream.”

“Why not?”

She smiled at him and, yes, that was one mean smile. He liked that spunk in her. She wasn’t going to make this easy. “Our dating wouldn’t go anywhere.”

“Ice cream,” he stated plainly. “I’m asking for one cone—not the next fifty years of your life.”

Dani looked skeptical. He was fairly certain she was running scenarios in her head, counting the possible outcomes and risks. He knew that sharing a second cone would be more than a quick, sweet treat. The question was, did she?

“Going for ice cream counts as a date. Are we dating? Because I was under the distinct impression that we’d already covered that—and ruled it out.”

“It would be fun,” he countered. “Take a chance. Jump on in.”

“Do you like doing it?” Her teeth worried the full lower lip. “Jumping?”

“Sometimes jumping is the only way to get the job done.” It had never occurred to him to not jump.

“That’s a hard way to live.”

Nothing worth doing came easy, and he always loved a challenge. He had a feeling the woman sharing the beach with him understood that—she just found her challenges somewhere else.

She continued. “So what happens if—when—you jump in and you can’t pull the other person out?”

The memory flickered to life. He’d already had his backside hoisted into the chopper and the mission had been a routine rescue. He and Lars had put the survivor in the basket and sent him up. Daeg had gone next because of the hit he’d taken in the water, making him incapable of a climb he’d done hundreds of times before.

And then the ocean had sucked Lars under as their spotter barked curses and directions to Tag. Too late. Lars had disappeared beneath the tsunami’s deadly debris-filled water. Cal had signaled he was going back in and dived. Dived and dived again, until Cal hadn’t had the air in his tank to keep going. The chopper, too, had been dangerously low on fuel.

They’d all given up and flown away. Knowing Daeg had left a man behind, who wouldn’t be coming home, crushed him.

Hell. No.

He forced his eyes open. Having Dani in his sights was better than rehashing the past, and he wasn’t going there again. Not today. Instead, he stood up, holding out a hand to tug her up. She hesitated, then accepted it, wrapping her fingers around his.

He glanced down to where they were temporarily joined and damn if he didn’t find that small bit of contact sexier than any of the dates he’d had in recent years. She was trusting him not to let go.

“Rescues don’t always succeed,” he admitted when the silence stretched out between them for too long. “When I got this souvenir for my leg, that was one of those times everything went wrong. I jumped with a partner and we got the survivor in the basket.”

Her fingers tightened on his, but she didn’t move.

“No swimmer gets in the basket before the survivor.” Flashbacks aside, he’d replayed that afternoon a hundred times in his head. “That was the one thing that went right. We were in the Indian Ocean, got there fourteen hours after a tsunami hit. The water was a mess, still churning with destroyed boats and other crafts, but we’d set the basket down where she seemed clear.”

“But the water wasn’t clear?”

“Not even close.” The current had picked up, that first bump against his legs a nauseating wake-up call. He hadn’t known if he’d struck something, or a living and breathing something that would surface and take a chunk out of him. “The circumstances made it impossible to see. A piece of some kind of strong metal fence tore through my leg and there I was, bleeding all over the place. My partner signaled for the basket, put me in and I got out alive. Less than a minute later, he went under.”

The tsunami had wrecked a number of coastlines. All that mud and churn. Torn-up wood, dead animals and cars. Stuff that had once been a part of people’s lives, but was loose in a deadly flood. Shock had had him good by the time he’d reached the bird’s floor.

He hadn’t realized until much later that the pilot had been circling and circling, searching for the missing swimmer until there’d been no more fuel and therefore no more time.

“Surgery followed by eight weeks of rehab back in Japan, then shipped stateside. I’ll be fine by the end of summer. Strong again.”

“And then you go back.”

“Yeah. I think so.” No, he was certain. The rest of his team was waiting for him and, as soon as he could pull his own weight, he’d be there. Right now, though, he was a liability. He hated that truth, but he couldn’t shake it. He wouldn’t be helpful to anyone in the field, not with his leg the way it was. And never mind his head.

He was done examining his head, he decided, and what had gone wrong that day. The expression on Dani’s face was all caring. He didn’t want her pity.

He swept her up into his arms and dashed for the water.

“If you don’t want ice cream, you should at least have that swim you came here for.”

He tossed her gently, and all that control and sleek elegance vanished as she broke the surface of the water and then shot back up with a loud shriek, arms flailing. He let her call out while he dived in and got his arms around her, steadying her. Yeah. This was a lot better than pity.

She quickly shoved away from him, slogging toward the shore.

“Next time,” she hollered back, “I’ll opt for the ice cream.”

Her use of next time was good, but at heart she was still a play-it-safe girl, while he—well, he wanted to get this going. See where their attraction could take them.

“You’re sitting on the sidelines and thinking the water might be cold,” he called. “Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. But you’re never going to know until you’re all in. Testing the water won’t help, not really. That’s not enough to tell you anything at all.”