[When SEALs Come Home 04] - Heated

by Anne Marsh

  He sets her world on fire...

  Mercedes Hernandez is a “nice” girl who follows the rules. As the new deputy sheriff of Strong, California, she’s responsible for making sure everyone else follows those rules too. She’s also had more than her fair share of Mr. Wrongs in her life, so the big rough, too-handsome, always-laughing smoke jumper who roars through her town going ninety in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour zone is a definite problem. Not only is he breaking the law, but he just might break her heart. Speeding tickets can’t make him behave... so it might be time to break out the handcuffs for a more personal lesson in misbehaving.

  And tempts her to be so very, very bad...

  Former US Navy SEAL, smoke jumper, and unrepentant bad boy of summer, Joey Carter loves fast bikes, hot women, and a good time, because speed and pleasure drown the ghosts from the past. He’s never met a woman he wanted to slow down for, however, until he literally runs into the deputy sheriff of Strong, California. She’s sweet and sexy... and the more he acts up, the more she notices him. And he really, really likes the way she looks at him.

  Joey may be on his second chance with the law—but he wants a first chance at love... if he can convince Mercedes to let down her guard and let him show her just how good dating the wrong guy can be.

  HEATED

  A When SEALs Come Home Novel

  ANNE MARSH

  Copyright © 2015 Anne Marsh

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, with the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover design by The Killion Group, Inc.

  Prologue

  Funerals suck. Since the dead guy couldn’t possibly care if Joey Carter stuck around for the entire thing or not, however, Joey bailed as soon as the minister finished saying the words and the casket headed out the door.

  He hit his bike, hit the road, and coaxed as much speed as possible out of the motor. One hundred fifty miles per hour. Not bad for a vintage Ducati that had been in pieces in his garage just two weeks ago.

  Too bad speed couldn’t make up for the loss of a teammate.

  He gunned the motor harder until the pavement blurred beneath his tires, the black ribbon inches from his boots as he leaned into a turn. Misjudge one curve, one twist in the road, and he’d wipe out and earn himself a place in heaven right next to Will Donegan. Or, more likely, Will would flip him the bird as Joey went the other direction, straight to hell. Because that was where men like him belonged.

  The mountain air was cool and smelled good, like one of those pine-scented air fresheners, except that this was the real deal. The air also held more than a hint of damp because February in Northern California meant rain. Lots and lots of rain, which made his new home the polar opposite of the desert.

  Too bad the memories didn’t buy that logic, insisting on crowding into his head and replacing the California highway with another road.

  “You think we’re going to find a fight today?” Ben Marshall, his fellow SEAL, had called shotgun, which meant absolutely nothing when they’d piled onto the tank for today’s ride. The M1 Abrams was no luxury sedan and had neither front seats nor backseats. Their driver was secured inside, and the US Army, with whom the SEALs were hitching a ride, had provided a second soldier who manned an M113 as he slowly scanned the sand for trouble. And there was plenty of that out here. An empty horizon didn’t mean they were home free.

  “Is it a day that ends in y?” Not the wittiest of comebacks, but he was tired. He had sand in his mouth, his hair, his boots. He had the same sand, or its kissing cousins, in his boxers and every crack of his body to boot. He’d be ninety and in the nursing home and he’d still be finding errant grains of the stuff. Uncle Sam’s desert vacation had killed his fantasy of having hot, naked sex on the beach with a hot blonde. Or a hot brunette, hot redhead, or hot anyone female. It had been six months since he’d deployed, effectively ending his sex life. Ordinarily, he loved his job, loved his SEAL unit. Right now, however, curling up in bed with an agreeable female someone seemed way more attractive.

  The car by the side of the road up ahead wasn’t unusual. Burka-clad figures popped the hood and peered inside. They were likely as female as their clothes, although the insurgents had taken to cross-dressing. Being a gentleman was now a luxury item with a price tag too high to contemplate. Shifting the safety off his weapon was prudent. Just in case this wasn’t a beater car making a routine breakdown. The women had a couple of kids with them, running around the car and playing.

  “Looks like they got engine trouble.” Ben nodded toward the locals and gently swung the business end of his gun toward the women. “You think that’s all it is?”

  God, he hoped so. It sucked when a man couldn’t stop and offer an assist. When he had to assume that everything and everyone was an enemy intent on gunning for his head. Not taking any chances, he scanned the edges of the road, looking for disturbances in the sand. There was no such thing as harmless digging out here and the insurgents liked to bury tripwires. When a convoy drove over them... boom... fewer American troops to harry their asses, thanks to the IED. Getting from A to B was no pleasure drive and usually proceeded at a sedate crawl. He’d give almost anything to open the throttle up, to burn up the highway with some semblance of speed. Not that where he was going was a picnic, but at least he could enjoy getting there. He’d bet the women poking at the engine of their busted car felt the same way. Who wanted to be stuck out here in the desert, frying in the heat, when there were other places to be?

  A kid appeared from behind the car and darted away from the women. Chasing a ball? It didn’t matter. Don’t stop driving. That was rule number one on this highway from hell. Fuck. He eased his finger onto the trigger of his M16.

  The tank picked up speed. The kid’s ball bounced onto the asphalt. Bull’s-eye.

  “There’s a kid in the road.” That was his voice, except in real life... he didn’t know if he’d actually said the words. Or only thought them.

  Their driver didn’t pull left or right, sending the tank straight down the not-so-empty road.

  The gunner spoke into his headset. “We’ve got locals. Two o’clock. Got a kid making for our twelve o’clock.”

  The tank didn’t stop, just kept chewing up the asphalt. The women abandoned the broken-down car and came running toward them, arms waving, mouths moving. He was finally getting some of that speed he’d wanted, except he hadn’t wanted what came next. Christ. Not in a million years.

  The bike drifted toward the centerline, and Joey automatically corrected. Killing himself was one thing. Taking out innocent civilians... he’d already done that, hadn’t he? He might no longer be a SEAL, but a hundred fifty miles per hour wasn’t fast enough to outrun what he’d done. Or let be done. He hadn’t done a goddamned thing to stop the tank’s relentless forward momentum. And then the women had looked away from the tank and the car and...

  Stop thinking about it.

  He was home.

  He could drive as fast as he wanted and not worry about the asphalt exploding around him. Strong, California, was safe. The only hazard right now was him on his bike. He flexed his legs, feeling the engine’s thrum through the soles of his boots. Two arms, two legs, one dick. All in working order. His head, on the other hand, was fucked up beyond repair, but who needed to think logically when he could feed his need for speed?

  Trees whipped by, and he knew where he was. Just around the next bend, a burned patch marked the spot where there’d been a roadside fire a year ago. The green stuff had come back, although
the early winter twilight made sightseeing impossible.

  Good men died in these mountains too, and he’d once again failed to stop it. If he’d run faster, thought quicker, used the eyes in his goddamned head, he would have spotted Will Donegan stumbling in that gopher hole, would have heard the crack of his ankle and known the guy wasn’t up to sprinting into the canyon and hauling ass into the portable fire shelters every other man on the hotshot team was deploying. Instead, he’d sat by while someone else died. No do-over, no fixing that kind of broken. Dead broken. FUBAR one hundred percent. And he hadn’t even had the decency to see the man’s funeral through to the end.

  The familiar red-white-and-blues lit up the road behind him. A quick glance in his mirror, and, sure enough, he had the deputy sheriff’s patrol car chasing him. She must have been hiding in the last turnout, although his head was so far up his ass that she could have been parked in the middle of the road and he wouldn’t have noticed. So much for tonight’s ride. Deputy Sheriff Hernandez would pull him over, slap him with yet another speeding ticket, and then follow him back to Strong at a sedate forty miles per hour like he was a sheep and she was the sheepdog. Buzzkill.

  Pissed off at the need to stop, he dragged the pull-over out another five miles. Which, at his current speed, bought him a bonus two minutes and not a second more. He could practically hear her gritting her teeth and sweet-cursing. A good old-fashioned fuck or goddamn simply wasn’t in the woman’s vocabulary. He liked riling her up. Next to flying down the highway, making Deputy Sheriff Hernandez mad was his new favorite thing to do.

  Before she could completely lose patience and call out the National Guard on him (which she might not be legally able to do, but she’d threatened on more than one occasion), he guided his bike onto the shoulder, hitting the brakes right before he ran out of gravel and ended up in the trees. The patrol car pulled in right behind him. Literally. Huh. He’d definitely irritated the good officer of the law if she was parking her bumper on his back tire.

  Bracing his feet on the ground, he turned off the bike. The engine ticked, starting its cooldown. Without his headlight, it was dark enough to see the stars overhead and the full moon. The crickets went mad in the new silence, like they needed to weigh in on his stupidity as well. The headlights from the patrol car carved out a cone of yellow light, the deputy sheriff apparently in no rush to get out and yell at his ass. Maybe she was finally tired of this game they played.

  Which would be a bummer, because his semiweekly encounter with the deputy sheriff’s speed trap was just about the only interesting thing that happened to him now that fire season was over. Doing ride-alongs with the local fire departments wasn’t cutting it. A barn fire couldn’t compete with the adrenaline rush of parachuting out of a DC-3 and three thousand feet down into a forest fire. Smoke jumping with Donovan Brothers was the only thing keeping him sane.

  Lecture. Ticket. Threaten him with the cuffs and a night in Strong’s one jail cell. Check, check, and check. He’d been doing one hundred fifty, and while there was no one else out here on the road, there could have been. He didn’t need Deputy Sheriff Hernandez to point the truth out to him. That it was one thing to kill himself with his need for speed and another thing altogether to drag in an innocent third party.

  Behind him, the car door opened and then closed. He twisted around to watch the law officer stride toward him. This part was fun. He liked looking at her. Deputy Sheriff Hernandez wasn’t a tall woman, but she had plenty of presence, particularly when she was pissed off. Despite her best efforts to hide it behind a mask of stern professionalism, her face danced with life. His favorite part was the happy gleam her brown eyes got when he said something particularly ridiculous, like she enjoyed laughing even if a belly laugh was off-limits in her current occupation. Tonight her dark hair was ruthlessly braided into some kind of fancy twist thing. He wasn’t supposed to notice she was a woman because she was acting in her professional capacity, but her uniform failed spectacularly to hide her curves. He’d fantasized more than once about those buttons on her uniform shirt either popping open on their own or with an assist from his fingers. He knew better than to tell her how good she looked. She’d only chew him out harder.

  “Mr. Carter.” As always, her voice sounded husky and certain, and when her dark eyes met his, parts of him shot to attention. Unfortunately, those weren’t the parts she was interested in. “We need to stop meeting like this.”

  “You finally accepted a job offer somewhere else.” He sighed dramatically and gave her his best smile. She glared back at him. She’d been doing the serve-and-protect thing for Strong for the past year or so. The rumor was that she’d be tapped for a bigger position somewhere else before another year passed. He’d miss her. Her buttoned-up, starchy attitude made him want to unbutton her. Muss her up some.

  She glared at him, although not half as badly as she would have if she’d known what he was thinking. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “You, on the other hand, apparently have somewhere to be that requires you to travel at Mach 10.”

  “You know all my Saturday nights are yours, sweetheart. I’m not busy unless you’d like to get busy.” He winked at her and waited for the gleam.

  Instead of acknowledging his tease, however, her gaze dipped, eyes running over his body and cataloging what she saw. He’d bet she could make a bullet-point list of every article of clothing. She was always precise like that. Usually when she pulled him over, he was wearing jeans and boots, a leather jacket, and a T-shirt. Today he still sported the boots, but Will Donegan’s funeral had required a suit. He’d ridden away with the jacket unbuttoned and his shirt open at the collar, so he wasn’t entirely put together. Plus he’d stashed his tie in his pocket because he’d never gotten around to putting it on. Did she like a man in a suit? Or did she prefer the rougher types? It was hard to tell with his deputy sheriff.

  Inspection finished, she nodded her head like two plus two plus suit added up to four. “You were at the funeral. I saw you leave.”

  He hadn’t noticed her.

  “You weren’t paying attention to anything but the road,” she told him, apparently having learned how to read his mind since the last time she pulled him over. “I had to escort the hearse from the church to the cemetery, so you had a head start on me.”

  “You’d pull me over in front of the church?” He grinned at her. “That’s not nice at all.”

  “I can’t let you drive like a madman.” The authority radiating off her should have pissed him off. He didn’t take orders anymore. Instead, it was... hot. The guys on the jump team had teased him about the game of hard to get he was playing with her, but those had been jokes. Maybe. Or not.

  “You can’t stop me, sweetheart.” Challenging her would be child’s play. He was straddling a motorcycle built for speed while she was out of her car. He also had at least a foot and a hundred pounds on her. Unless she shot him, she couldn’t stop him.

  None of which explained why her presence and her ass-chewing were strangely comforting. A moment of deep introspection would have benefited him, but screw it. Instead, he planned on having fun.

  With the good deputy sheriff.

  She sighed. “I have a name. Use it.”

  “Deputy Sheriff Sweetheart.” When he grinned again, because damned if she didn’t make him smile like a loon, her eyes went right to his mouth. Score one for him.

  “You knew Will Donegan,” she said, clearly determined to talk about where he’d come from.

  “We jumped together.” His head decided now would be a good time to suggest what his buddy must look like. The funeral had been closed casket because Will’s wife had cremated what was left of Will since Mother Nature had gotten a jumpstart on that process and then the funeral had been postponed until Will’s brother could get leave of absence from his SEAL team unit. Abbie Donegan hadn’t even had a chance for a last look or a last kiss. Shit. It should have been him and not Will. Will had a wife and a junior Will on the way. While
he was pretty much a me, myself, and I guy, especially since his sister had reunited with her husband and was now on a belated second honeymoon.

  “Did you know him?” He didn’t want to talk about how he knew Will.

  “I know his wife.” She tightened her fingers on her notepad. “She’s not going to have an easy time of it.”

  “We’ll be there for her.” And if he wasn’t exactly sure what a pregnant woman needed, he could learn. His sister had to know, and half the smoke jumpers had wives who’d be happy to tell him what to do and how to do it. He could make things work for Abbie Donegan, even if he couldn’t be Will.

  She shook her head. “Some things a woman has to do on her own.”

  He had no idea what she meant. Could have been sex, for all he knew, but her face looked as serene as ever, without a hint of naughtiness. Which wouldn’t have been appropriate, he reminded himself. Will Donegan was dead.

  “Come on.” She headed back toward her car, supremely confident that he’d follow. Part of him realized that she was right. Going after her just seemed like what he wanted to do, even if he’d never been one to buckle under to authority figures. Somehow, though, when he looked at Deputy Sheriff Hernandez, he didn’t see an officer of the law. Or rather, he saw someone more. Hell, he didn’t even know her first name, an oversight he intended to remedy.

  Reaching inside, she killed the flashing lights. He blinked at the renewed darkness. The only light now was the cone of yellow from her headlights.

  “Are you arresting me?”

  Her eyebrows rose. “You’d know if I was.”

  True. Arrests usually involved Miranda rights and handcuffs, neither of which seemed to be happening right now. He didn’t like the off-balance feeling she woke in him. Either she was writing him a ticket—or she was doing something else. He needed to know what that something else was. Instead of explaining herself, however, she popped open the passenger-side door and gestured for him to get in.