Revealing Her SEAL (ASSIGNMENT: Caribbean Nights Book 4) (6 page)

Out of her depth, she did the only thing she could under the circumstances.

She fled.

“Okay, well, call me,” she blurted out and stood, nearly knocking over the end table in her haste to get the hell out of this quicksand she’d somehow stumbled into. She did shallow flings for a reason—they made sense and no one got hurt. Nothing with Evan had made sense from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him.

Evan watched her go from the doorway of his house, arms crossed in that casual pose that she’d always assumed was defensive. She wouldn’t make the mistake of assuming she understood a blessed thing about Evan Silva any longer.

The final hit came later that night when someone knocked on her door. She half hoped it was Evan here to shoot her down. Because he should. Being Evan’s roommate was perhaps the worst idea she’d ever conceived.

She swung open the door to find Dex on her doorstep, which was a relief. She’d had a couple of hours to unscramble her wits but hadn’t made much progress.

“Evan told me you came by today,” Dex said without preamble. “You’ve got a thing for him.”

“Yeah.” No point in lying about it when it wasn’t a secret. Except she was very much afraid her fascination with Evan had morphed into something much more intense than a simple fling. “But I also have a thing for a living environment that isn’t hostile.”

“Cut the crap. Moving into the other half of the bungalow me and Emma are about to vacate is something you cooked up to get into his pants.”

Her eyes narrowed as she instantly calculated her adversary. Dex radiated with authority and testosterone. Not her type, but he treated Emma like a queen, so she liked him. For now. She’d like him a whole lot more if he butted out of her business.

“That’s between me and Evan.”

Though she did appreciate the fact that Dex apparently thought she had a shot at getting into Evan’s pants.

“Also crap. You mess with Evan, you mess with all of us.”

Us
. Meaning their former teammates. The six of them presented a united front always, even in something as trivial as Evan’s love life apparently. The sentiment was sweet though. They stuck together and watched each other’s backs. Her friendship with Emma was tight like that too, so she got the fierce love she sensed between the band of ex-SEALs.

He lifted his chin. “I think you’re good for him. If you repeat this, I’ll deny it, but he needs someone, even if it’s just to hang out. If you somehow find a way to talk him into this roommate insanity, you get the job.”

Her hands flew up of their own accord, as if she could push back the blasphemous flood of Dex’s words. “Whoa. I’m just looking for a place to live. If anything of a more intimate nature comes out of that so be it. But that’s all it is, consenting fun between adults who happen to be in close proximity.”

Even she didn’t fully believe that. Not anymore. If she ever had.

Dex shook his head, thunderclouds gathering across his face. “Evan is not a toy. He’s got a thick wall between him and the rest of the world for a reason. He’s an alcoholic. If you can’t handle that, bow out now.”

Oh, God.
Alcoholic
. The word swirled through her head, tightening her throat. All those times she’d offered him a drink… Evan should hate her for being so insensitive. Why hadn’t he said anything? Heat rushed to her face. Well, duh, because he didn’t say much of anything. Evan was the last person to be blabbing his secrets to the world.

“I… didn’t know.”

“That’s why I’m here, Rachel.” Dex gave her a once-over that flayed her open far deeper than any look Evan had ever treated her to. “I want you to know. So you can be the person he needs.”

Dex and Emma had far too few boxes. Which meant it took no time at all to help them carry their meager possessions two blocks to their new house, though Evan did manage to drag it out a little longer than was expressly necessary.

Because it sucked.

And he was being a big baby about it. Dex deserved to have a life with his new wife, and Emma made him happy. Evan wanted good things for his friend, who had been a highly decorated sniper, then spent months and months agonizing over the specifics of the job.

They all had their demons. Evan’s just happened to be at complete odds with each other. He hated being social, hated having inane conversations about things that didn’t matter. He hated it when someone tried to draw him into conversation about things that
did
matter, because then he’d have to share pieces of himself that he did not want to share. Or think about.

On the flip side, he hated being alone most of all.

That’s what made his friendship with Dex so great. They rarely talked, but Dex always included him no matter what. Never once did he poke his nose into Evan’s silence, and never once did he pass judgment.

So now what was he going to do?
Figure it out, man.
It was crappy to lean on someone so much anyway, and no one else could carry his burdens. This was his golden opportunity to stand on his own two feet.

Evan picked up the last box and balanced it on one hip so he could heft a small table lamp into his free hand. As he tried to pry open the front door with one tennis shoe, someone pushed it from the outside.

Rachel. Not wearing the red dress today. Shame. She’d looked spectacular in it.

“Oh, hey,” she said.

He jerked his chin in response before thinking better of it. Of course she was here about her outrageous proposal to cook dinner for him in exchange for a bed. Somehow she’d managed to lay out the entire plan without ever really specifying which bed she planned to be sleeping in.

Problem was, he’d spent a lot of hours weighing the idea of letting her into his, in spite of his convictions otherwise… because he wanted Jared Anderson cut off at the knees. Seemed like the guy sleeping with Rachel might have her ear, might have ample opportunity to drop incentives, motivation. He could encourage her to be ruthless and then give her a back rub after a long day of eviscerating the pompous ass.

Except he couldn’t do it. Maybe other guys could treat a woman like that, using sex to manipulate the situation to their advantage. At best, he could offer her a quiet place to do her lawyer thing and probably would. Provided she agreed to some strict ground rules.

With Rachel close enough to touch, his blood woke up and started sniffing around, lending a lot of credence to the idea of becoming one of those other guys superfast. Hell, it shouldn’t be this hard. She was a sexy woman who had great legs. It wasn’t like it would be a chore to give her what she’d so clearly been begging for since day one.

But that wasn’t fair to anyone, least of all Rachel, who had no clue that Evan wasn’t the harmless fling type on a good day. After Iraq there were no good days.

“I came to tell you I reconsidered.” Rachel’s gaze darted around, landing everywhere but on him. “About moving in together. It’s not a good idea.”

Instantly his hackles raised. She was up to something. “Why not?”

She recoiled, either surprised he’d spoken or taken aback by his tone. Maybe both. But she didn’t get to change the game at the drop of a hat. Especially not when he’d already resigned himself to the inevitable.

“It was a dumb idea to begin with. You’re a guy who clearly likes his privacy, and I threw all that out the window for my own selfish reasons—”

“I want you to live here.”

Her mouth closed and opened again, but no sound came out. It probably said a lot about how all this was going to go down that he enjoyed rendering Rachel speechless. But there was an undercurrent here he couldn’t put his finger on, and
that
he didn’t like.

“Your reasons were not selfish,” he continued. “You’re helping Aqueous Adventures and need a place to concentrate. Let me give that to you.”

They both knew she’d hoped it would lead to something more, but that wasn’t happening. Ilhota Rosa meant everything to Evan and, if giving up his empty space to Rachel helped secure the future of the island, small price to pay. If she was here under his roof, he could monitor the situation well enough. He didn’t have to be sexing her up to make sure she did what she’d promised she would.

And well he wasn’t above admitting—to himself, not out loud—that the idea of having another person in close proximity, even one who annoyed him to no end, had its pluses. Looked like she was going to get what she wanted after all. He just hated that it felt like giving her the upper hand.

Warily she eyed him. “You were singing a different tune yesterday.”

He shrugged the shoulder of his non-box-carrying arm and resisted the urge to remind Rachel he was in the middle of something. “I like to eat.”

“I see.” She crossed her arms, and the hint of vulnerability he sensed in her sometimes sprang up in her gaze.

All at once he clued in that she’d really and truly had second thoughts about moving in here. This hadn’t been some kind of mind game designed to get her way, a thinly veiled reverse psychology tactic she’d invented because she thought he’d been born yesterday.

It was a reminder that her bold personality hid layers he’d yet to discover. And that alone improved his mood dramatically. Rachel as a roommate suddenly seemed a lot more palatable.

“Move in,” he insisted. “Today. I’ll help you.”

Without
any ground rules. A perverse part of him hoped the lack of them might get her to reveal why she put up such a front all the time. It was a calculated gamble, but he had a feeling she’d ignore any agreement they struck anyway, especially if the rules involved items such as no flirting and no accidentally wandering around naked.

“Why the about-face, soldier?”

“Sailor,” he corrected automatically because nearly everyone got that wrong. It shouldn’t be so hard to remember that SEALs were Navy.

“Don’t change the subject. Something happened. Why are you so hot to get me here?” Suspicion clouded her gaze, provoking his temper, which was the only reason he continued this conversation that should have been done five minutes ago. She was getting what she wanted. Why the argument?

“Anderson. He needs to be taught a lesson.”

Getting that taken care of alone was worth an enormous amount of discomfort. She didn’t have to know about his other reasons for agreeing.

“And that’s it?” Her dubious expression didn’t change. “You know I’m going to shamelessly flirt with you, right? All the time.”

“I can ignore you.”

“That’s what
you
think, honey,” she shot back, and their normal dynamic slid back into place, which he’d deny to the grave made him far more comfortable than when he didn’t understand her agenda.

Under threat of packing her belongings himself if she didn’t get started, Evan herded Rachel out the door so he could deliver the rest of Dex and Emma’s stuff. And then spent the rest of the afternoon refusing to analyze why it had grown so dang critical to have Rachel as a roommate when he’d have sworn from the moment she mentioned it that living with her would happen when hell froze over.

N
o matter where Rachel put the framed picture of her family, it didn’t look right. In Boston it had been on the mantel of the fireplace in her Back Bay condo. There were no fireplaces in the Bahamas.

She tried it on the small bedside table in the bedroom she’d taken over from Dex and Emma. The frame was eight-by-ten and nearly as tall as the lamp. This spot would have to do as the common area she now shared with Evan had no more furniture than a coffee table, couch, and a rather sad entertainment center that didn’t provide all that much entertainment.

He’d looked at her sideways when she propped up the frame next to the twenty-year-old TV in the scant space between it and the pressboard side of the entertainment center. So she’d shrugged and moved it to her room because she was still feeling her way around Casa Evan.

When she and Emma had decided to stay on Duchess Island instead of returning home to Boston after their vacation, they’d both realized they would have to do at least a quick weekend trip back to pack up their belongings and tie up loose ends. In Emma’s case it meant breaking the lease on her apartment and enthusiastically selling off what little furniture she had on Craigslist.