If she cared about him, she wouldn’t ask him to change.
She said she couldn’t bear it if he ended up like this father, killed in the line of duty, and she refused to be like his mom. Widowed at forty.
Hell, she might as well have asked him to quit breathing. He’d learned one thing from that relationship. His ideal mate had to accept him just as he was—military career and all. He was done bending himself into a pretzel to please a woman.
Unless of course it was in bed.
Grinning, he stuck his oar into the water, pushed aggressively against the current. A gator slipped from the banks into the channel right behind him, but Scott didn’t pay much attention. He was bent on getting sexual frustration out of his system before meeting an old friend for breakfast. Alligators were a fact of life in Florida and as long as you didn’t do anything stupid, they generally minded their own business.
Six months.
The longest dry spell he’d had since college. He was a charming guy and he knew it. He’d been graced with his father’s good looks and his mother’s outgoing personality. Usually he had no trouble coaxing a willing lady into his bed, but as much as he wanted sex, short, hot liaisons had oddly lost their appeal.
What he couldn’t figure out was why. Maybe it was because his baby sister was getting married. Megan’s wedding made him realize he wasn’t getting any younger, but then again neither was he ready for commitment.
So what do you want? Sex or a relationship?
That was the quandary and explained his lengthy dry spell. Scott blew out his breath and rounded the bend.
That’s when he saw her.
Where the channel turned into an estuary just before it joined the sea, a lone woman bobbed in a small dinghy.
A precarious spot. Rocky shoals. Swift current. And there were the gators. Not to mention bull sharks.
Instantly, his protective instincts engaged. What was she doing out here alone at this hour of the morning when dew still dampened the air and darkness lingered in the shadow of the mangrove trees?
Was she unaware of the trouble she could get into? Between drug smugglers, human traffickers, deadly wildlife and the tourist trade that attracted scores of inebriated college students, Key West was not a place to be taken casually. As much as he loved the tropical beauty of his hometown, as a Coast Guard officer he knew all the locale’s dirty little secrets.
The woman stood up in the boat, her back to him. The skiff rocked gently.
What was she up to?
She held something in her hands, but he couldn’t make out what it was. Damn, he wished he had binoculars.
From what he could see of her she was thin as a sapling. Scott preferred women with a little meat on their bones. He liked rounded bellies, curvaceous butts and lush thighs. This woman could do with a double helping of his homemade chicken and dumplings. A thick slab of his famous Key lime cheesecake wouldn’t do her any harm, either.
Still there was something about her that instantly attracted his attention and it went much deeper than looks. Yes, she was pretty, but in a careless way, as if she couldn’t be bothered with anything as shallow as tending to her looks. She possessed both intense concentration and a quiet serenity that called to him.
She lowered whatever she held in her hands into the water via a black cable.
Scowling, Scott changed directions and paddled toward her, territorial impulses driving him. Who was she and what was she doing here?
He drew closer, but she never glanced up from her task. His kayak glided over the water, swiftly, silently. If she were up to something illegal, wouldn’t she be more furtive? Or maybe she was just that arrogant.
She bent at the waist, her white cotton T-shirt riding up to expose her smooth, slender back and showing off her heart-shaped butt. From the waistband of her low-rise blue jean shorts, a red thong bikini peeked out.
Scott stared as if he’d never seen a woman in a thong, angling his head for a better look and feeling his pulse quicken. What was that all about? Normally, he was a pretty even-tempo guy and this woman was not his usual type.
And yet … and yet he could not stop staring at her.
A pair of mile-long legs tapering to skinny, but shapely calves had his breath coming out in hot, tight rasps.
Exertion. It was nothing more than exertion.
Yeah? You exercise every morning and you’ve never gotten short of breath like this before.
Curiosity tickled the back of his neck. Interest tingled his hands. Startling desire stirred beneath the zipper of his khaki shorts.
Leave her be. She’s not your concern. You need to turn around now if you want to be on time for your breakfast meeting.
But he kept stroking straight toward her, hands curled tightly around the bent shaft of the fiberglass paddle, because she was his concern. If anything happened to her, he’d feel forever guilty for not warning her about the dangers of boating alone in the Key West mangroves.
Um, you’re alone.
That was different. He was a guy, for one thing, a native for another and third, he carried a gun.
Is that really why you’re going over? To warn her?
Of course it was the reason. He was Coast Guard. Even though he wasn’t on duty, he’d been raised to look after people on the coastal waterways. “A Coast Guard,” his father had been fond of saying, “is a shepherd of the seas.” The Coast Guard motto was Semper Paratus. Always prepared.
The glare of the rising sun caught him squarely in the face. He squinted, wished he’d worn sunglasses, his gaze fixed on the woman in the dinghy. He turned his kayak away from the sun, hungry for a second look.
She straightened in silhouette, a lithe figure in the splendid dawn. The denim shorts she wore were cutoffs with unraveling threads. One side was higher than the other as if she’d just grabbed a pair of scissors and whacked away without measuring.
Scott didn’t mind. The shorter side revealed a glimpse of where her firmed thigh rounded into her buttock. He had an overwhelming urge to press his mouth to that sweet spot and nibble.
A shiver went through him and sweat popped out on his forehead. Look away. Paddle away. Get out of here.
He didn’t move.
She reached for the hem of her T-shirt and in one quick swoop tugged it over her head, revealing a red bikini top that matched her bottoms. Although she was not overly endowed, she curved in all the right places.
More than a mouthful is a waste anyway, his best friend since grade school, entrepreneur Gibb Martin, loved to say about small-breasted women. He’d heard somewhere that the French considered the perfect breast size to be one that could fit into a wineglass. Frankly, Scott was more of a leg man. There was a reason Rod Stewart’s “Hot Legs” was on his MP3 player
