Lifting up on his elbows, he stared into her eyes while he waited for her answer.
She traced his lower lip with the tip of her tongue and whispered, “Now?” a second before his mouth covered hers. By the time he ended the kiss she was begging him not to stop.
“You’re going to love this,” he promised.
The man was nothing if not truthful. She could barely keep her arms around his waist when he finally gave in to his own need and thrust inside her. Though it didn’t seem possible she climaxed again when he did.
Could making love kill her? With Michael it just might, she thought.
He turned her and pulled her close, her head on his chest as he gently stroked her back. Even though there weren’t any sweet loving words, his caresses were enough. Isabel considered herself a realist. She knew that down the road, if she ended up with a broken heart, it wouldn’t be anyone’s fault but her own. She didn’t want to think about the future now. She wanted to savor every minute of the night with Michael.
She tried to get out of bed to get something to drink, but Michael wouldn’t let her move. He got both of them bottles of Coke. He even poured hers into a glass with ice. Like a man who had just taken a brisk walk through the desert, he guzzled his drink, and when it was empty, he drank most of hers.
“Oh, that’s lovely,” she said. There was less than a sip left in the glass.
His response was to laugh. He got her another Coke, then sat back against the headboard, looking perfectly content to be stark naked. He was such a distraction she couldn’t concentrate on what he was telling her, so she pulled the sheet up.
“I’m sorry. What did you say?” She scooted up and sat next to him, leaning into his side.
“I said your cell phone is charging,” he repeated.
“Thank you.”
“That son of a bitch called you three times while you were onstage.”
“Which particular son of a bitch are you referring to?” she asked sweetly.
“James Reid,” he said. “I let the calls go to voicemail.”
“His sales pitch is turning into harassment. He must be getting a big commission.”
“Want me to talk to him?”
“No, I can handle it.”
“Tell me about this land you’re going to inherit.”
“Why would I do that? You don’t share anything personal with me.”
He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Baby, I just shared my body with you. Can’t get any more personal than that.”
He had her there. “You know what I mean. You always close up on me whenever I ask anything about your personal life.”
He didn’t argue. “What do you want to know?”
“How did you get those three bullets in your back?”
“I was shot three times.”
He was being flippant, but she wasn’t going to push him. If he didn’t want to tell her, she would let it go. He was proving her point, though. He closed up whenever she asked anything personal.
“It’s like talking to a tree stump,” she remarked on a sigh.
He laughed. Another minute passed, and then he said, “I was on a mission. That’s when I got shot.”
“Navy SEALs?”
“Yes.”
“You were in Afghanistan, and before you ask, I heard your father talking to you.”
“What else did you hear?”
“That’s all. I know you can’t and won’t talk about your time as a Navy SEAL. There’s a code, isn’t there? You only talk to your other team members about your missions, but no one outside the SEALs?”
“That’s right.”
“Were your injuries the reason you didn’t stay with the SEALs?”
“No, the mission was my last. My tour was over and I didn’t re-up.”
“You could have died,” she whispered, a tinge of fear in her voice.
He nodded. “I was lucky.”
Michael could see that Isabel wanted more from him, but he couldn’t give it. The details of the mission were in a classified file, and that’s where they would stay for the time being, or at least until
the Navy released them, but the memories from that day would be with him as long as he lived.
The team had been sent into a village that was nothing more than a tiny dot on the map of Afghanistan. A band of insurgents had swarmed into the area and set up camp. By the time the SEALs arrived, almost half of the inhabitants had been slaughtered, including women and children. Michael would never forget the horrific scene when they arrived. Carnage and bloodshed everywhere.
Innocents gunned down where they stood.
The town was eerily quiet as the team went from house to house, searching for the men who had done this. In some, they found nothing, and in others they found terrorized victims too frightened to speak. Finally, a young boy, no more than nine or ten, whom they discovered huddled with his mother in the corner of a bedroom, timidly stepped forward and told them he saw the insurgents going into the house of one of the village elders. With some coaxing and despite the pleas of his mother, he agreed to show them the way. He then led them toward the edge of the village and pointed to the house, a traditional mud-and-timber structure surrounded by a low wall.
Reconnaissance and surveillance equipment revealed there were eight insurgents holding a man, a woman, and a young girl inside. The SEALs waited for the right moment, and then they stormed the house. The enemy put up a fight but were no match. Leading the way, Michael found the man and woman cowering by the door, but he didn’t see the child. He rushed the couple outside and ran back in. With gunfire all around him, he searched, finally spotting the top of the little girl’s head behind a stack of pillows on the floor. He snatched her up in his arms and raced out. Protecting the child with his body wrapped protectively around her, he sprinted to get her away from the house and the flying bullets. He almost made it to safety, but one of the insurgents, in a final blaze of glory before collapsing from his own wounds, took aim and fired at Michael’s back, hitting him three times.
The next thing Michael remembered was waking up in a field hospital with his SEAL brothers around him. The first words he uttered were, “Is she okay?”
“Thanks to you, yes,” his commander assured. “She’s with her family.”
Now every time images of his last mission returned to haunt him, Michael saw the devastation, the death, and the terror in that little girl’s eyes. He had seen enough brutality and its aftermath to last a lifetime. There was no way he could put an end to all the evil he had witnessed, but maybe the solution—at least for him—was to stop the terrorists before they could execute their plans. After weighing his options, he decided the Counterterrorism Division of the FBI would be the best place for him. He realized it would be naive to think he could save the world, but at least he could try to save a small part of it.
Isabel pulled him from his thoughts when she said, “Please answer one more question. Did that mission make a difference in anyone’s life?”