Authors: Sabrina Devonshire
Tags: #exotic romantic adventures, #erotic romance, #erotic military romance, #travel romance, #Lefkada, #Hellenic Navy, #military romance, #Greece, #Ionian Islands, #Sabrina Devonshire, #contemporary erotic military romance
My Greek SEAL
My Greek SEAL
by
Sabrina Devonshire
This work is copyright. No part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted in any form, or by any means without the prior written permission of the author except by reviewers who may use brief excerpts as part of a review.
Please purchase only authorized editions, and do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
My Greek SEAL
Copyright © 2016 Sabrina Devonshire
Published by Corazon del Oro Communications, LLC
Cover art by Sabrina Devonshire
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank Marion Cook for her diligent editing work and Patricia Dawson for her copyediting support.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Lefkada Island, Greece
I snatch my backpack and glance in the bathroom mirror. Frowning, I tug down my floral print wrap to cover more of my thighs and twist my lips into a frown. My long strawberry-blonde hair is a tangled mess and dark circles rim my eyes. What was I thinking? After a ten-hour flight from the States and a five-hour bus ride across Greece, the few hours of toss and turn sleep on a rock hard mattress haven’t done a damn thing to improve my exhausted state. Or my appearance.
My weary muscles rebel against every step and even keeping my eyelids open is a struggle. What am I doing here? I’m a high maintenance woman. I don’t do sleep deprivation and Third World countries. I usually head to a beach resort in southern California, sprawl out on a lounge chair and drink Mai Tais until it’s time for my late afternoon massage.
I exit the bathroom and glance at the wrinkled sheets and the stiff pillows on the bed where I just spent a mostly sleepless night. Dropping back down into that bed of discomfort doesn’t tempt me in the least. What do they make mattresses out of in this country? I reach over to peel off the mattress cover and then decide against it. I really don’t want to see what’s hiding under that sheet. It’s probably a block of cement. I let out a long sigh.
What I really need is a spa day and twelve hours of sleep in a five star hotel. I imagine drifting off into a blissful sleep, my back pleasantly cushioned by a pillow top mattress and my body cocooned with a cushy comforter. I could be awakening refreshed now, about to sip espresso delivered to my room instead of feeling like absolute hell and about to embark on a long day of bouncing over waves on a boat. But this is Greece. The water and the islands will be beautiful.
“Shit.” I forgot the motion sickness pill. I drop my backpack, rush into the bathroom and rummage through my toiletry kit. My hand finally closes around the cylindrical container of pills. I pour two of them into my hand and down them with water before snatching up my backpack and heading toward the door.
Despite my high-maintenance tendencies, I’m an exercise addict. Back home in Arizona I leap out of bed at 4 AM to rush off for a pre-work swim. Yes, 4 AM is an ungodly hour, a time when any normal person should be curled up under the covers. But I’ve always been a bit of a freak anyway. Hey, exercise is my coffee. It wakes me up and energizes me.
Getting the blood pumping hard and fast elicits my enthusiasm to accomplish something. I’ve loved the water since I wore diapers. It must have been love at first splash because my mom said I fell in the pool when I was two and she only left me unattended for a minute. My butt high in the air, the diaper kept me floating until my mom screamed, ran to the edge of the pool and grabbed my plastic-coated buttocks and hauled me out. Expecting a scream, she was startled when I burst out laughing. Apparently, falling in the pool was just a game to me, she said. Ever since, she’s regaled family and friends with this story.
I feel a tug of sadness inside my chest thinking about mom and my dad and even my annoying little brother. I long for the comforting safety of my youth. Growing up I never appreciated the home cooked meals or having my own room with a comfortable bed to sleep in. Comfort and security have always been things I’ve taken for granted. Even in college, my dorm room was fairly comfortable. After I graduated and was hired by a Tucson company, my salary paid more than enough for a high-end apartment. I never imagined the necessities and comforts I expected to always have would be taken away in an instant.
My boss terminated me without warning last week. I felt so depressed I could barely drag myself out of bed. I should have gone job-hunting instead of drinking myself unconscious and holding a non-stop pity party for myself. Or called my mom and asked her if I could move back home until I landed another job. But I hate the weather in Seattle. Cold and dreary days are the worst. A recipe for depression, actually. And it would be awful going back to my parents’ house, not for vacation, but because I can’t handle life on my own. So instead of job-hunting or calling my parents and asking for help, I’m here in Greece. How logical is that?
As an image of cliff diving off of the highest rocky promontory on Lefkada Island into the shallowest water imaginable flashes through my mind, I grimace. Okay, I’m damn depressed, but I’m not ready to give up on life. I feel like I’m trapped in one of those eddies in a river that swirls around and around so fast that I can’t seem to escape. Maybe being away from the mess that is my life now will help me figure things out. I pause in front of the door and turn around and look longingly at the unmade bed.
A few more hours sprawled out on that hard mattress with the shades drawn might rid me of this pounding headache and allow me to temporarily forget that I’m unemployed and will likely be in debt for the rest of my life after this week ends.
No, that could never work. I won’t sleep anyway. I’ll toss around in that bed ruminating about what went wrong at work and the fact that I have no idea what I’m going to do next until I get so entangled in the sheets I have to cut my way out with nail scissors. Bad plan.
Before I can change my mind, I reach for the knob, yank the door open and step outside.
CHAPTER TWO
The balmy sea air embraces me, as if trying to persuade me this day won’t be so bad. I make a sour face so it knows I won’t be won over so easily. Being miserable is my plan for the day and I won’t be dissuaded from it. I hear only a faint whisper of wind through the leaves of the olive trees on the hill above where I’m standing. There are no chirping birds, car engines or barking dogs; sounds I would expect to hear even in this remote village. The silence seems strange. There’s never quiet where I live. I open my window to let in fresh air to hear leaf blowers and thundering garbage trucks and the roar of car tires on nearby roads.
I give myself a pep talk as I stride down the steep stone driveway. I need to go easy on myself today. People are supposed to be a little crazy when they find themselves suddenly unemployed and about to plunge into financial ruin. Manic laughter, biting my nails and deck pacing will be permissible behavior for the day. Muttering to myself, randomly bursting into tears or mentioning my unemployment status to anyone won’t.
As I walk, I see clay pots bursting with brilliant pink, orange and yellow flowers. A drop-dead gorgeous man and an attractive woman with long, dark-brown, to-die for hair sit on their room patio sipping tea. She speaks to him in Greek and he leans in and kisses her in response. Towels and swimsuits hang from chairs and tables on some of the vacant patio railings. Perhaps they belong to other swimmers on the tour who have no time for a cup of tea because they are rushing down to the dock.
Last night I met the swimmers and the guides at a poolside welcome meeting where we were served beer and told what to expect on the week’s swimming outings.
I had been eager to find out what everyone was like. Would they be fun to hang around or drive me nuts? My mind sorts through the faces of the people I met the previous night at the hotel bar. Only one of the guides, Libby, showed up at the meeting. She had shortly cropped blond hair and a solid, sturdy frame. It was obvious from her accent that she was British, although she wasted no time filling us in on her life’s details. It was on to business from the get go. Turning down our offer to buy her a beer, she passed around laminated pages with maps of the places we’d be swimming. After going over each swim in exhaustive detail, she told us her expectations for safety.
The swimmers I remember meeting were a retired couple from Australia and their new friends who had recently moved to Sydney from London. Oh, and there were two female friends traveling together who were also Aussies. There was a mother and her college-age daughter from Scotland, and two middle-aged couples from London. All had mentioned pools, lakes or oceans they frequented. No one said they were training for an Iron Man or to swim the English Channel. Thank God.
The group as a whole gave the impression they were here to see sights, to unwind, to enjoy the blue waters of the Ionian Sea, not to embark on a reality show-like endurance contest.
They all seemed so nice. I don’t want to be the problem tourist. None of them seemed worried about cold water or rough seas. Meanwhile, I’m the high-maintenance American from Arizona who swims in an outdoor pool heated to eighty-two degrees, indulges in ice-cream binges, Saturday morning sleep-ins and bi-monthly massages, and pops motion sick pills before cab rides.
It won’t be a problem. I’ve taken my motion sickness pill so I won’t be heaving over the deck anytime soon. If I’m uncomfortable for any reason, I’ll just keep it to myself. I won’t complain if the water’s too cold or that I’m jetlagged and tired. And most of all, I won’t drink too much wine at lunch and babble on about how I got fired three days ago with no notice and all my commissions unpaid and spent most of the money in my account to hire an attorney.
I know it’s stupid I came on this trip. A wise woman would have cancelled her pending vacation and started interviewing for new positions. I, on the other hand, foolishly decided to travel anyway because I couldn’t get a refund on the flight or the tour and figured if I stayed home I would probably keep drinking myself into a stupor every night. The cash I’d brought along had taken my savings account balance down to less than five hundred dollars.
I look both ways before crossing the street. No cars are approaching from either direction on the winding, weathered road bracketed by olive trees and the occasional weathered stone building. Apparently no one drives around in remote Greek island villages at seven thirty AM. I stride across the street and down the steep staircase leading to the harbor.