Still Her SEAL (ASSIGNMENT: Caribbean Nights Book 10) Read online

  You’ve seen the picture. The one where the returning sailor sweeps a lovely lady off her feet, kisses her, and they all live happily ever after? That’s not what happens when I come home.

  Six years ago, I met a girl, we fell in love, and we got married on the beach in the Florida Keys. Then I went back to my SEAL team and she launched a career designing lingerie (yes, I’m a lucky man). While I fought in the sandbox, she became the star of a reality TV show because her stuff’s that good. Hindi’s loud and colorful and everything I’m not. She lives for the moment and tying her down would be like forcing a firefly into a jar.

  I’d like to let her go. I should let her go. We’re explosive when we’re together, and that’s not just the sex (which is amazing). She drives me crazy. I need to be in control and I’m too serious, too sober, and way too old for her. The problem is, she’s special. She takes my breath away, makes my heart beat faster, and I have a sinking feeling that I’m still her SEAL no matter how many miles and years there are between us.

  Rohan

  Do you see that ass standing there in the mirror? The guy with his cargo pants around his knees and his best friend wielding a black marker? The friend is Finn Callahan and he looks pained as he draws big block letters on the cotton-covered backside in front of him.

  The ass goes by the name of Rohan MacCarthy in everyday life. I’m pleased to meet you. Not really, but most of the time I’ll pretend I didn’t wish I was alone on a desert island. Coconuts and palm trees trump people, although I wouldn’t mind a dog or six for company. Dogs are loyal, they know how to take orders, and they don’t abandon you for a TV contract, an agent, and hanging with the pretty faces. Not that my face sucks, but I’ve taken more than one hit in Uncle Sam’s service, and multiple tours of duty as a US Navy SEAL leave a mark.

  After I finished my last tour, I headed off into the sunset to lead a productive civilian life training dogs for the military and private security groups. Search and SEALs provides the best goddamned dogs in the business. Our dogs can sniff out a bomb, track targets, and take down criminals. It’s fucking meaningful. I rock it. I make a difference. I’m also the leader of our company, the CEO, and the man who makes it all happen. I’m organized, I always have a plan, and if I have a reputation as a grump or a killjoy, so be it. I’m still the guy you turn to when shit needs to get done.

  I live in cargo pants and I’ve got a favorite T-shirt for each day of the week. I still run five miles a day in my boots, just to keep my hand in, and I could pass the SEALs’ PT test with flying colors. You never know when you’ll need to be ready.

  Finn reaches around me and pokes my rock-hard abs.

  “You’re gonna leave the ladies drooling,” he says, clearly under the mistaken impression that I need a morale booster in the body image department. My body rocks. I have six-pack abs and civilian life has not made me soft. I’m as hard as any man out there—which is gonna be a problem when I hit the stage. Miami Fashion Week does not need a front row seat to a dick show.

  Finn punctuates his words by slapping me on the ass.

  “The fuck?” We’re close, but spanking crosses a line.

  He grins at me. “You’re all set, Lieutenant Commander. Sir.”

  Fucking Finn has an inconvenient sense of humor.

  I twist, trying to read my own ass, then give up and use the mirror. Where Finn is involved, it’s wise to double-check. The words are reversed in the mirror, but I count seven letters. Sure as fuck looks like MARRY ME, which is good because this is the second time I’ve asked and I’m going for two for two.

  The boxers, however, are something I’d be happy to never see again. They’re formfitting and sport more bling than any engagement ring. When I step out on that stage and the lights hit me, they’re gonna be able to spot me from Mars. It cost me a thousand bucks to convince tonight’s professional male model to trade his spot in the show to me, and I’m a little skeeved out to think he may have tried on my outfit. This isn’t me. This is not the uniform that a man who kills it at Spec Ops and secret infiltrations wears.

  It’s pink.

  It fucking sparkles.

  There is way, way too little fabric and what there is cups my junk closer than any lover.

  I yank my pants up. The stage manager is already shooing the next wave of spray-tanned, buff models toward the runway. He gestures imperiously toward me. For the first time in a long and decorated military career, I feel an overwhelming urge to run.

  Run back to Angel Cay.

  Run back to my nice, safe, boring, perfect life on a tropical island in the middle of the fucking ocean. I mean, what’s not to like about that? I have a lifetime supply of coconuts and there’s a bar just down the road from me. I live on a goddamned beach and life is good.

  The problem is that islands get lonely. Have you ever noticed that when people are asked what one thing they’d take with them if they were marooned on a desert island, they talk about company? The people, the books, the pets, the stuff they need to plug the empty spaces and fill the silence? It’s not that a steady diet of coconuts is that horrible. It’s that you need someone to share the coconuts with.

  And that need to share my island is why I’m here, standing in the wings of a Miami fashion show, about to drop my pants in front of a thousand strangers wielding cameras.

  It happened to me.

  I came home on shore leave and I met the perfect girl.

  Fuck, we had the whirlwind romance, complete with hot beach sex. And if I was a bit of an ass and more than a little overbearing, Hindi Alvarez didn’t seem to mind. Secretly, I think my Hindi likes orders.

  Especially orders given in bed.

  I button my pants. I have a plan. I have this. “Go time.”

  Finn slaps me on the back—the man is definitely enjoying this.

  She’s somewhere out there on the other side of the stage, and this is the only way to get her attention. To show her once and for all that I’m still her SEAL.

  It’s show time.

  Hindi

  Two months earlier in Angel Cay

  Just deserts.

  Restaurants and bakeries like to play with the spelling, call it just desserts, dress the words up in frosting when the truth is nowhere near as sweet.

  Vengeance.

  Karma.

  Balance.

  Reward.

  Punishment.

  Take your own personal pick, but my favorite is comeuppance. That’s the point in time when life decides you get what’s coming to you in spectacular, public, and often humiliating fashion. Where life spanks you and it’s not a fun bedroom game but a moment of overwhelming exposure and pain. Worse? You had it coming to you. Today is shaping up to be one of those days. Four years ago I got a little careless—and today life’s handing me the bill with enough interest to make the last New York City parking ticket I got look modest.

  Sometimes just deserts even include forgiveness, but today won’t be one of those days. Justifying your actions to your audience takes constant effort. Everyone’s a critic, and there’s no perfect choice when the TV camera’s watching. It can be exhausting and overwhelming—or thrilling because you’ve got the eyes of the world trained on you, a reason to misbehave and act out and do every last thing your audience has thought—but never done. When I go to work, I put on my game face and pretend that I’m perfectly okay with the whole television-watching world having a front seat to my life. That I have zero problems with screwing up in a public venue where others can and will record my actions and play them back over and over.

  Every day is Groundhog Day in my world.

  I screw u
p, I laugh. The cameras roll, you watch and applaud, and then I do it all over again tomorrow. I’m really, really good at screwing up—and I’m telegenic.

  Hello, match made in heaven.

  Six years ago, I drove to New York City in a beat-up, rusted-out van. It’s a miracle the Beast made it across the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a one-way trip—the van lurched its way to the fashion district where it promptly gave out. Maybe it was the selfies I took documenting the van’s smoky curbside death. Maybe it’s because I’d been invited to participate in a casting call for a reality fashion show and there just happened to be cameras recording my ridiculous entrance. Maybe I just have a natural gift for screwing up in stupendously spectacular fashion.

  Whatever the reason, the reality show producer immediately cast me. I spent a season vying with eleven other would-be fashion designers to create the sexiest, most out there lingerie. And I won.

  Surprised, aren’t you?

  Hindi Alvarez—award-winning fashion designer. Me being successful? You could have knocked my family over with a feather from the pink flamingo-inspired number that won me my TV crown. For one brief, shining moment, I was the best. A winner. On top of the fashion world.

  It wasn’t until afterward, when I had an agent and a two-season TV contract and a film crew dogging my footsteps, that I realized something. While I’d like to think I’m an amazing designer who knows how to create lingerie that makes every woman feel like a queen, it’s not the satin, the bows, or the bling that make me successful. Just as lingerie’s the perfect frame for a woman’s body, my designs showcase me. And the TV-viewing world likes to watch me screw up.

  So now I screw up weekly in my thirty-minute slot, and I make sure to be an overachiever because my paychecks invariably grow in proportion to the size of the scandal. With the next season of my reality TV show on the line, my producer sent me down here with the instructions get good tape. Did I mention I was an overachiever and really, really good at this part of my job? I’m pretty, I photograph well, and I’m entirely shameless. Okay, the last part isn’t entirely true, but I can wallow in my mistakes with the best of them—and I make a lot of mistakes.

  Today I’m fifteen hundred miles from New York City. So, even though I’m not striding about my usual stomping grounds, I’m still doing what I do every day in the city. I’m screwing up. In fact, there’s six foot two inches of mistake gamboling around in front of me on the beach right now.

  The half-naked man on the beach? Wrestling with that enormous, muscle-bound dog who’d probably chew my face off at a single command? That man’s my legal husband and he has no idea that I’m about to crash his party.

  Rohan MacCarthy is a former US Navy SEAL turned canine trainer. He’s part owner of Search and SEALs, a Florida Keys-based business that trains some of the best search and rescue dogs in the world. His dogs sniff out bombs, detect drug shipments, and track down lost two-year-olds in the woods before anything worse can happen. He’s a bona fide hero and has the medals to prove it. He doesn’t screw up, doesn’t make mistakes. You know that line Jack Nicholson delivers to a cocky Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men about how people die where he comes from when a mistake is made? Yeah. Ro’s job—his life—is spent living on that edge and he’s absolutely brilliant at it.

  It drives me crazy, all that serious, wonderful, so sober responsibility. He wears it like Superman’s cape and he always will. He’s disciplined, in control, and forever giving orders. In case you haven’t figured it out by now, these are words that will never, ever be applied to Hindi Alvarez. In fact, if you happened to have a dictionary handy and popped it open, thumbed to the o’s, you’d probably find our pictures under the word opposite. We couldn’t be more different from each other, and the only place where that turned out to be a good thing was in bed. You know. Because it’s a plus to be boy and girl, penis and vagina when you’re bumping uglies in the bedroom.

  Ro was always so physical, and yet the man never stopped thinking and planning. It was like God had surgically replaced his brain with a Day-Timer or an eternal, never-ending planner. Me, on the other hand? Around him, my brain shut down altogether and my only thoughts were of getting him naked. Running my hands down his gorgeous arms, his back, his… ass. Dear Reader, I married him for that ass and for every other sexy inch he let me touch.

  Let me explain our brief marriage to you. Those few months felt like when you book a thousand-dollar-a-night room at a hotel, but you do it using coupons and reward points rather than ponying up the cash. I wasn’t a real guest. I hadn’t earned any of the perks—and it was an aberration, a temporary but wonderful blip in my life that had to end sooner rather than later. You see those stupid goddamned sunglasses he wears even when he’s wrestling a dog? Those sunglasses keep you from seeing his eyes and are a courtesy notice from the man that he’d prefer to minimize all people contact, thank you very much. He’s distant, remote, controlled. Pick your adjective, but being married to him was like being married to Mount Kilimanjaro. He was always off on the horizon looking fucking majestic. That sweep of dark slope with its icy cap isn’t the kind of shit you scale for fun, but admiring it from a distance works. You’ve got zebras and giraffes in the foreground, snow in the back. What’s not to like?

  The key is that mountains belong in the distance. They’re not up close and personal material, because then you can’t help falling over the rocks or losing your breath or getting a gigantic, aching stitch in your calf and your heart as you try to scale all that height and fail miserably. There is no way I want to stay married to Ro. Every broken relationship has a guiltier party, and that would be me. I’m not good at letting people in, and consequently I suck at relationships. If we hadn’t parted ways six years ago, I’d have spent those days constantly trying—and failing—to please him like my mom did my dad. My front row seat to their marital battleground was informative. As my mom cycled through attempts and failures, my dad pulled further and further away. She disappointed him and he rewarded her by asking her to live in an emotional desert. Turns out hot sex isn’t enough.

  Ro rolls with the dog, crooning something in the same rough, rich voice he used in our bed. The dog eats it up, as eager to please as I was.

  My camerawoman and Gal Friday nudges me as she starts filming. “You didn’t tell me he was such a hottie.”

  “Surprise.” I wish I could stop looking at him, but Lilah’s not wrong. Ro is gorgeous. He’s still big and dark, but now his skin has this deeper, sun-kissed bronze to it that makes a girl think of cones and licking. His hair is cut short, military-style, and his face is as hard and closed off as ever. Except when he’s looking at his dog. Then something in him kind of melts and lets go, and it’s perfectly clear that he loves this animal.

  He was supposed to love me forever.

  He was supposed to be mine. I don’t know where that crazy thought comes from. It just pops into my head as I’m trespassing on Ro’s beach, jealous of his damn dog.

  Supposed.

  Life comes with no guarantees. Pick up any issue of Cosmopolitan and I promise you a wealth of unhappy endings. You fall, and people offer well-intentioned advice about picking yourself up. About going on, making lemonade out of lemons, finding your bigger and better whatever-it-is. Yes, I’ve juiced enough fruit to flood a small continent, and I’ve been searching for years.

  I wasn’t supposed to have regrets.

  Lilah’s foot connects with my ankle. This is less pleasant than it could be because, unlike me, she’s not barefoot. She maintains that she likes to keep her fight-or-flight options dialed into run like hell, so she’s wearing sneakers. Get in there, she mouths.

  Right. She needs her filmable moment and I’m stuck on the side of the pool of life. I need to jump. To hold my nose and throw myself in. To go for it like I always do. But Ro’s like the wolf you watch through that six-inch plexiglass at the zoo. He’s gorgeous, his body ripples with power—and if that glass disappears, you’re fucking toast because he’s a pack animal and t
erritorial at heart. Angel Cay is his place now, and I don’t belong here.

  I take another step toward the beach. I’m dragging my feet and we both know it.

  Ro deserves better than a lingerie designer and public sideshow of a wife. Worse, I’m the wife he doesn’t even know he has. Yes, let’s imagine for one brief moment how he’s going to feel about my big reveal.

  “This is easy, right?” I force myself to stop staring at the man on the beach and confront Lilah instead. “I go out there. I ask him for a divorce. He agrees.”

  This is where she’s supposed to lie to cheer me up. I’m pretty sure it’s in her job description.

  “Sounds like a plan,” she agrees cheerfully. This is a win-win situation for her. “But are you sure you don’t want to keep him? He’s one fine-looking man.”

  “Sometimes the outside doesn’t match the inside,” I say as lightly as I can. Lie. Ro may bear a passing resemblance to Grumpy Cat, but he’s an all-round nice guy once you get past the bark. And the bite.

  Lilah exhales disappointedly. “Too bad, because I’d totally roshambo you for him.”

  Rock, Paper, Scissors is so not on my agenda for today and I’m not playing Lilah for Ro. I don’t like the possessive mine that threatens to escape my lips. My relationship with Ro was perfect right up until it wasn’t, but there was always one constant. I didn’t deserve a guy like him. It was only after we’d met and married that I realized how much I was lacking in the merit department. And honestly, he couldn’t have been the perfect man immortalized in my head because he’d married me—and then he’d gone back overseas. I’d seen him twice since our wedding weekend, which kind of made my point. He was good in theory, but missing in practice.

  A divorce is our best option. In his eyes, I haven’t been his wife for years anyhow. I’m sure someone with his fine looking package has been active in Dating Land, and for all I know he may have Mrs. Number Two lined up and ready to go. I’ll always be his first, but never his best and last. The future Mrs., whoever she is, will score his tomorrows and the real engagement ring.