Page 6

Christ!

He was hard as a rock and, goddammit, not in the mood to jerk himself off like some pathetic teenager. He’d done far too much of that lately and he wasn’t a kid, he was a man.

Dec strode through the lot towards the darkness where the meadow began. Stopped. Turned. Strode back to his cottage. Went up the steps, across the porch, through the living room, out the French doors and onto the beach.

The beach was where he’d met Annie Stanton.

He’d been lying in a canvas hammock, chilling after getting back from the kind of mission that made you want to kiss the ground when you stepped off the transport that bought you home, listening to the whoosh of the surf and the cries of the gulls and hoping those sounds would crowd out the other sounds in his head when something swooped past. Not a gull. Maybe an osprey.

He’d turned to check… And saw her instead. Annie, except he didn’t know her name then. Not that he’d ever really known it, he thought, his mouth flattening into a thin line. She’d been standing ankle-deep in the frothing surf, a delicately built brunette wearing a simple one-piece swimsuit.

Unusual, he’d thought.

In Santa Barbara, especially within five or six miles of the STUD base at Camp Condor, bikinis were what all the women wore. And they travelled in packs. Pussy packs, some of the guys called them. Lots of giggling, lots of T-and-A, all for the benefit of Condor and its retinue of hard-bodied, maybe-just-a-little-dangerous Special Ops warriors.

Dec had wondered what this modestly dressed woman was doing on what he thought of as his beach.

A middle-aged tourist, he’d decided, who’d wandered away from the usual tourist haunts. It was a little surprising because even though the law said that beaches weren’t private property, this one pretty much was. The string of cottages was about it in both directions. There were no bars nearby. No shops. Plus, the tides were too strong for most swimmers.

The woman’s back was to him. She was looking out to sea. And, yeah, she was delicate-looking. Petite was maybe the better word—five three, five four, with lustrous brown hair streaming down her back.

His gaze had dropped lower.

Maybe she wasn’t middle-aged. She was slender, but she had a sweetly rounded ass. Nicely curved hips. Long legs. He wondered if she looked as good from the front as from the back.

Only one way to find out.

He’d swung his legs out of the hammock and sauntered across the sand towards her. When he was five, six feet away, he cleared his throat and said, “Hi.”

She’d spun towards him, mouth open, eyes wide with fear, one hand clapped over her heart.

Shit. He’d startled her.

When he was twelve or thirteen he’d found a small songbird—a wren, he’d later learned. The wren hadn’t been visibly hurt, but something had surely damaged it. It had stared up at him, wide-eyed and trembling. Dec had bent down, carefully picked it up and held it until it was recovered enough to fly away.

Would this woman fly away too?

Crazy, but he hoped she wouldn’t.

“Sorry,” he’d said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No. You didn’t. I mean—you did. Perhaps a little.”

Her English was perfect, but he could detect the faintest accent. French? Not French. Something a little more exotic.

“See any dolphins yet?”

“Dolphins?”

“I figure you’re looking for them. They come to this stretch of water very often. It’s the wrong season for Grey whales and too late for Blues or Humpbacks, but the dolphins are almost always a sure bet.”

“I haven’t actually been looking for anything in particular. I just—I found this place last week. I love how quiet it is.”

So she’d come here while he was in Iraq.

He’d nodded. “Yeah. It is.”

“And the ocean… It looks so peaceful.”