Dangerous Passions

by Brenda Harlen

  He felt a stirring in his blood, heat in his belly.

  He stayed back, as far away from her as possible inside the confined space.

  “Wake up, Ginger.”

  She didn’t respond to his summons.

  Resigned, he moved closer, touched his hand to her shoulder. “Come on, sleepyhead.”

  She snuggled deeper into the thin blanket, mumbled, “Tired.”

  “I know,” he said, and then, as if of its own volition, his other hand reached out, brushed a stray lock of hair off her cheek. “But you need to eat something.”

  “Not hungry.”

  He smiled at her stubborn denial.

  She was probably starving, which she would realize as soon as she woke up.

  He nudged her again; she didn’t move.

  Okay, he could think of one thing that would surely penetrate her subconscious. But as certain as he was that the tactic would rouse her from slumber, he was even more certain she wouldn’t appreciate it.

  Now that the thought had crossed his mind, however, he couldn’t shake it.

  “Last chance, Ginger. Either you wake up right now, or I’ll be forced to take drastic action.”

  He could have raised his voice, or shaken her again. He did neither of those things, because he’d decided he wasn’t in such a hurry anymore. He didn’t want her to wake up just yet. Not until he’d had a chance to taste her again.

  She sighed in her sleep, turned her head slightly.

  Her face was tilted upward now, her lips mere inches from his own.

  He was insane to even be considering this. She’d made it more than clear she thought it was a mistake to pursue the attraction between them, and yet he couldn’t stay away. Her life was literally in his hands, and all he could think about was getting his hands on her.

  He stroked a finger down her cheek, along her jaw.

  Her lips curved slightly, temptingly, and she murmured, a soft sound of acquiescence that went straight to his gut.

  It was obvious she was dreaming about something—someone. He pulled his hand away. He couldn’t do this—he couldn’t take advantage of her vulnerability.

  “Michael.”

  Oh, hell.

  She was dreaming about him—and he wasn’t strong enough to resist the whispered plea.

  He slid his mouth over hers.

  She responded immediately to the gentle pressure of his kiss, her lips parting, welcoming. And his whole world tilted on its axis.

  His intention had been to wake her. Instead he found himself being drawn into her dream—reality fading into something softer, sweeter. Something he wished would never end.

  The blanket slipped from her fingers as she lifted her arms to wind them around his neck, pulling him closer. He needed no more urging.

  His hand moved from her waist, over her rib cage, brushing the side of her breast.

  She moaned softly.

  He cupped the gentle swell, stroked his thumb over the already beaded nipple, felt the shudder run through her.

  She moaned again, arching toward him.

  His body reacted instinctively, immediately.

  Suddenly she froze.

  Her eyes flew open. “Wh—what are you doing?”

  His fantasies came crashing down around him, but somehow he managed to smile. “I was trying to wake you up.”

  She unwound her arms from around his neck, placed her palms on his chest and pushed him away. “I’m awake,” she said coolly.

  “So I see.” He moved away reluctantly.

  She pushed herself into a sitting position, brushed her hair away from her face. “You might have considered saying, ‘Wake up.’”

  “I tried that.”

  She looked skeptical.

  “And I tried shaking you. You sleep like the dead,” he told her.

  “An appropriate analogy,” she said dryly. “Considering that someone wants me dead.”

  He wanted to assure her that nothing would happen to her on his watch, but they’d already had this conversation. She wasn’t ready to accept the lengths to which he would go to protect her, and her skepticism was threatening to erode his own confidence. So he only said, “It’s time for dinner. You need to keep up your strength for when Rico and Jazz come back.”

  Chapter 8

  Shannon blinked in the brilliance of the sunlit afternoon. She felt as though she’d been sleeping a long time and had been certain it must be night. The unexpected brightness left her feeling confused and strangely disoriented.

  Or maybe that was the aftereffects of Michael’s kiss.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  He glanced at the watch on his wrist. “Almost five.”

  As if on cue, her stomach growled.

  She scented the fire even before she noticed the telltale curl of smoke rising into the air. He’d set a couple of Y-shaped sticks into the ground on opposite sides of the circular stone pit he’d built and placed the skewered fish between them, high enough it was out of reach of the flames.

  “Are you sure it’s safe to build a fire here?” she asked.

  “There’s hardly any breeze now, and it’s well out of reach of the trees.” He turned the end of the stick, rotating the fish.

  She shook her head. “No, I mean, won’t it give away our location?”

  “Peart’s men already know we’re here,” he reminded her.

  She sat down beside the fire, her ravenous appetite suddenly gone. “We’re going to die here, aren’t we?”

  “No, we’re not.”

  He made the statement simply, with an absolute confidence that somehow managed to reassure Shannon even as she wondered at it. “But what can you do? How can we possibly hope to evade them indefinitely?”

  “We don’t have to evade them indefinitely,” he said. “Only long enough to circle back and trap them.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He shook his head. “This is what I’m trained to do.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “Apparently it’s classified.”

  He remained silent, but she had too many unanswered questions to let the subject drop.

  “Let’s suppose you do manage to trap Rico and Jazz,” she allowed. “How is that going to get us off this island?”

  “We’ll take Peart’s yacht.”

  “What if Peart comes back with them?”

  “I can handle Peart.”

  Now that she knew he’d been an army ranger, she figured he’d earned the right to sound so sure. He’d obviously survived dangerous situations before, and she had to believe that this one would be no different.

  “I guess if I had to be stranded here, I’m glad it’s with someone who has some survival training.”

  “Except that you wouldn’t be here if I’d been honest with you in the first place,” he said, reminding her of the accusation she’d thrown at him earlier.

  “I don’t really blame you,” she said.

  “You should.”

  His response startled her.

  He was angry with himself, she realized. Because he felt responsible for their current predicament. Because she’d made him feel responsible, blaming him when there should never have been any blame assigned.

  But Michael took his responsibilities seriously and held himself to high standards. She knew he would do whatever was necessary to ensure he didn’t fail her.

  The knowledge didn’t make her feel any better. She derived no comfort from knowing he would put his life on the line to save hers—as he’d already done when he’d put himself between her and the bullets Jazz shot at them.

  He’d been dismissive of his wound, and it obviously wasn’t a life-threatening injury. But it could have been, and that realization shook her to the core.

  “It wasn’t your fault any more than mine,” she said. “And you did save my life. Twice.”

  He didn’t respond to her comment as he removed the fish from the fire, carefully cutting it away from the stick and dividing it into
two empty coconut shells. He passed one of the makeshift bowls to her. “Watch for bones.”

  She was hungry and she accepted the offering with a heartfelt, “Thanks.”

  She picked up a chunk of the flesh and popped it into her mouth. It was hot but tender, with a mild and inoffensive flavor. “This is good.”

  He smiled at the obvious surprise in her voice. “It’s not French champagne and Russian caviar, but it’s edible.”

  “I think I’d rather have this.”

  “You’re not a woman of expensive tastes?”

  “I’d choose a peanut butter and jelly sandwich over fish eggs any day.”

  He made a face.

  “You don’t like PB and J?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever had it.”

  She was shocked by this disclosure. “Not even when you were a kid?”

  He shook his head.

  “What kind of deprived childhood did you have?”

  He laughed again, but there was a hint of strain in it this time. “You can’t imagine.”

  “What about mac and cheese?”

  He shook his head again.

  “Hot dogs?”

  “A ballpark staple,” he said. “But only with mustard.”

  She smiled. “Maybe your taste is salvageable, after all.”

  They ate in silence for several minutes. Shannon noticed that the sun was starting to dip toward the horizon, but she knew they still had several more hours of daylight. To do what? Watch the water and hope for a rescue? Hope it wasn’t Peart’s yacht that appeared in the distance?

  Not wanting to think about what could or might happen, she focused on her food. “Thanks,” she said again. “For catching and cooking dinner.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I wish I could make more of a contribution. So far I haven’t managed to do much more than get your boat blown up.”

  He dumped the fish bones into the fire. “Actually, it was my sister’s boat.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah. She’s not going to be too happy about that.”

  Shannon could imagine. She remembered how annoyed she’d been when Natalie borrowed a skirt from her closet once and spilled grape juice on it. Of course, they’d both been in high school at the time and although she’d planned to wear the skirt to a job interview the next day—it was only a skirt. On second thought she couldn’t imagine how Michael’s sister would react to the destruction of a boat that probably cost more money than Shannon earned in a year.

  “Are you close to your sister?” she asked.

  “Close enough that she trusted me with the keys.”

  She smiled at the warm affection in his voice that belied the casual statement. “Do you have any other siblings?”

  He shook his head. “Only Rachel.”

  “Does she live in Florida?”

  “For the past couple of years. She travels around a fair bit in her business.”

  “What does she do?”

  He leaned forward, poking a stick into the glowing embers. “She’s, uh, in the hospitality industry.”

  “What does she think of your job?”

  “She likes the P.I. gig better than when I was in the army. At least I’m usually within cell phone range so she can call me daily and nag at me about something.”

  “And you love her for it,” she guessed.

  “Despite the nagging, I do.”

  “Why did you become a private investigator?”

  “Why do you suddenly have so many questions?” he countered. “You didn’t seem half as interested in making conversation last night.”

  “Neither did you,” she pointed out. “Although I realize now that may have been because you already knew a lot more about me than I could have guessed.”

  She winced at the trace of bitterness evident in her tone, and hoped he wouldn’t comment on it.

  His next words obliterated that hope. “That bothers you?”

  She shrugged, pretending it didn’t. “I thought we were on equal footing.”

  “You thought we could have a night of wild sex and then go our separate ways without ever seeing each other again.”

  “Isn’t that what you thought?” She stared into the flames as she asked the question, hoping it would be a little easier to have this suddenly awkward and intensely personal conversation without looking at him. Still, she heard the smile in his response.

  “Actually I was hoping for two or three nights.”

  She managed to smile at his teasing but shook her head. “I’m not good with relationships—casual or otherwise. And last night was completely out-of-character behavior for me that would not have been repeated.”

  “It was out-of-character for me, too,” he said. “I’ve never gotten involved, or even been tempted to get involved, with the subject of an assignment before.”

  She remained silent.

  “Aren’t you going to ask why I did this time?”

  “I figured it was a convenient way for you to keep an eye on me.”

  He pinned her with a steely gaze. “That’s insulting to both of us.”

  “What was I supposed to think?”

  “That I was attracted to you.”

  “That is what I thought—until I found out Dylan hired you to watch out for me.”

  “Do you really believe that I would have slept with you just to keep tabs on you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about you,” she reminded him.

  “Well, let’s get one thing perfectly clear,” he said, suddenly angry. “What happened between us last night had absolutely nothing to do with my assignment. In fact, had I been thinking about the job—as I should have been doing—it never would have happened.

  “I made a mistake. I let my personal feelings interfere with my duty to protect you. As a result—this is where we are. Believe me,” he said fervently, “it’s not something I planned as a surveillance tactic.”

  Despite the harshness of his tone, his words caused a strange warmth to seep through her veins.

  He was attracted to her.

  This strong, sexy man was attracted to her.

  But maybe that was only because they hadn’t actually completed the act.

  Her heady sense of power fizzled away.

  “Speaking of surveillance,” she said, in a determined attempt to redirect the conversation, “what made you decide to join the army?”

  “I thought we agreed we weren’t going to talk about my military career.”

  “That wasn’t a mutual decision,” she said, turning the words he’d spoken earlier back on him. “Besides, I didn’t ask about your career in the army, only why you signed up.”

  “I enlisted because of my father.”

  “Was he in the military?”

  Michael smiled. “No. I was trying to get away from him. It’s not that he was a horrible father or a bad person,” he explained. “It’s just that we couldn’t agree on what career path I was supposed to follow.”

  It was the first insight he’d given into his personal life, and she was surprised by how eager she was to hear more. “What did he want you to do?”

  “Get a business degree and work for him.”

  His words and his tone left her in no doubt how he felt about that idea.

  “My father has his own business,” he continued. “Actually, it’s a business my great-grandfather started. Then he passed it down to my grandfather, and my grandfather passed it to my father.”

  “You didn’t want to carry on the family tradition?”

  “I know I should have been grateful for the opportunity he offered me, but I always felt trapped by his expectations. I needed to make my own way, to prove to him—and maybe to myself—that I could.

  “He wanted me to go to college, so I did. I stayed in school long enough to get my MBA. Then, the day after graduation, I joined the army.”

  “What happened to make you leave?” She knew this question pushed at the No Trespassing si
gns he’d already established, and she was fully prepared for another refusal to talk about his military career.

  He shook his head. “You don’t let up, do you?”

  “You were the one who said that talking could help.”

  “I meant help you.”

  “Why can’t it work both ways?”

  He didn’t respond for so long she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he finally said, “A friend of mine was killed in Righaria.”

  “Where’s that? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “It’s a small African country just west of Somalia. We were there at the request of the UN,” he explained. “To help restore control to the proper authorities. Because although Righaria has a democratic government, at least on paper, in reality it’s controlled by drug lords. Unfortunately, no one outside of the rightful government wanted us there.

  “It was a bad situation from the beginning. We couldn’t walk down the main street without risking our lives. But we knew the risks—we were prepared for them. We were brothers more than soldiers, and we looked out for one another.

  “Brent and I were even closer than most. We’d been buddies in ranger training and became best friends. Neither of us was thrilled about going to Righaria, but at least we were going together.

  “I was supposed to be watching his back…” His voice trailed off as he shook his head. “I’d met a woman at a little café in the center of town a few weeks earlier. We were two Americans drawn together by the commonality of being foreigners in a hostile country.”

  “You fell in love with her,” she guessed.

  He laughed shortly. “I was young. Lisa was even younger. I thought I loved her, but maybe I just loved the distraction she provided.

  “I never intended to get involved with her,” he continued. “But somehow it happened, anyway. And when I found out about the raid we’d planned, on the building next door to where Lisa was staying, I went to warn her. I wanted her to leave the city, go somewhere safe.

  “While I was gone, there was an attack on our camp. Brent was killed.”

  She laid her hand on his arm, wishing now that she’d never asked about the circumstances that precipitated his leaving the army. She’d been curious about this man who’d already risked his own life to protect hers. Now she was starting to get a clearer picture, starting to understand his determination to protect her—as if keeping her safe might somehow compensate for the fact that his friend had died. But she’d never intended to hurt him by bringing up such an obviously painful subject.