“Why do I get the feeling you’re trying to distract me?” she asked.
“Distract you?” He donned his most innocent expression. “I would never. But…did I mention that Boss keeps a box of condoms in his locker?” Hooking a thumb over his head, he indicated the row of small gray lockers lining one wall. “I mean, I’m just saying…”
“We’ll get to that in a minute,” she said matter-of-factly. A zing of anticipation shot through him. “After”—she stressed the word—“you answer my question.”
“I was in BUD/S training.” Man, it felt good to admit that. To give her an unvarnished truth.
Her eyebrows arrowed toward her nose. “Say again?”
“BUD/S training,” he repeated. “Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL. I was working to become a Navy SEAL.”
She blinked once. Twice. Then a look he recognized spread over her pretty face. He’d named it her hard-nosed journalist expression. She smelled a story.
“That’s why it was so hard to find out any concrete information about you all when I went digging,” she said. “You’re not just a bunch of retired military men; you’re a bunch of retired black ops!”
He could have said there was no retired about it. But there was a huge difference between telling her they used to be spec ops and admitting they were a clandestine group of private military contractors running top secret missions for none other the president and his joint chiefs.
“I knew it!” she crowed. “I knew you guys were more than you seemed! Ha! What a story this will make! Charlie’s going to go nuts for it. The headline: Spec-Ops Soldiers Turned Grease-Monkey Motorcycle Mechanics.”
She looked on the verge of doing a happy dance. And part of Ozzie, the guy part who knew he would enjoy watching all her naked bits jiggle, almost let her do it. But the other part of him figured it was best to burst her bubble now, before it grew too big or rose too high. “You can’t write about me. About them.” He deliberately made sure his tone was the audio equivalent of a tire iron, hard and sharp.
She immediately sobered. “Why?”
“Same reason the military and the government don’t list the identities of operators even after they’ve left the services,” he told her. “Our enemies don’t care whether or not we’re active duty. All they care about is getting revenge on everyone who could have been involved in a mission against them. If you print what I just told you, you’ll put all of us here in danger.”
She blinked and opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. He could see her struggling, the reporter in her dying to tell the story.
“Pbwbwbwhh.” She blew out a windy breath that fluttered the wild mass of hair hanging around her face. “But grease-monkey motorcycle mechanics sounds so sweet. The alliteration alone…” She shook her head sorrowfully. “Hey, at least knowing is something. And it is something. Because it explains a couple of things.”
“Such as?” he asked curiously. He hadn’t doubted her, exactly. But he had worried that he would have to reiterate his point a time or two before she would give in and agree not to run with the story. That he hadn’t had to do that delighted him and proved what an amazing woman she was. She was willing to forgo writing something that was sure to put a feather in her reporter’s cap simply because…well…simply because he’d asked her to.
“Such as why you all have been dodging me for years. Reporters and men who have big, honking secrets don’t generally play well together, do they?”
That was pretty much the understatement of the century. “So that’s one thing. What’s the other?”
“You,” she said.
“Me?” He frowned. “What about me?”
“The way you are. The way you don’t hesitate to jump onto a moving van. The way you can threaten to end a man without blinking. The way you…look sometimes.”
Okay, now he was really curious. “How do I look?”
“It’s not really an expression or anything, but more something in your eyes. You have the eyes of a warrior. Someone who has seen things, done things. And even though you only spent a year as a SEAL, I guess that was enough.”
He wanted to tell her that the thirteen months he had spent training weren’t what had put that look in his eyes. It had been all the years since. All the missions and sweat and tears, all the bloodshed and death and destruction. But he couldn’t do that. That secret was not his to tell. So he did the next best thing. He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed her palm. Her fingers curled around his face, holding on to the sensation of his lips.
“So mystery solved,” she said. “But there’s one more thing I want to know.”
“What’s that?”
“Why has it been so long?”
“So long since what?”
“Since you had sex.” That delectable gap-toothed grin was back.
Uh-oh. Red alert! Red alert!
“Is it just me?” He glanced around. “Or are the walls suddenly closing in? Did they move when I was blinking?”
“Come on,” she cajoled. “Surely, the reason behind your recent sexual hiatus isn’t nearly as juicy as the one behind the unwillingness of the Black Knights to sit down for an interview.”
The walls were definitely closing in. Since they were at it, he wished that they would talk to their good buddy, the floor, and convince it to open up and swallow him whole.
Given her we’re-good-for-now-but-not-forever stance, he couldn’t very well tell her that he’d decided to lay off the ladies until he met someone special. Until he met her. That was sure to send her screaming for the hills.
*
Had Ozzie been a clam, he would have slammed shut. As it was, his expression shuttered, and his body, stretched out beside her, became the flesh-and-blood equivalent of a two-by-four.
“I should’ve known you wouldn’t just let that go,” he grumbled, wiping a hand over his face.
His calloused palm made a rasping noise against the short beard on his chin and cheeks. And that sound… It was a bad-boy sound. It swirled around in her ears, affecting her in the naughtiest possible way.
“When have you ever known me to let anything go?” she demanded.
Although, in all honesty, she had let go of the whole spec-ops thing pretty quickly, even though a bazillion questions were buzzing through her head. Did you just train, or did you go on missions? What about the others? What were they involved in? Anything I would have heard about? But she recognized a closed door when she saw one. And besides, she was so happy he had opened up to her about something so personal and secret and potentially dangerous—He trusts me! He really, really trusts me!—that it didn’t take all that much to beat back her naturally nosy tendencies.
At least not on that topic.
On this topic? Um, yeah. No way. It was too juicy.