on the couch, chairs and floor of the hotel suite. Jeff looked at them all, each in turn and smiled to himself. Four more unlikely friends you’d never meet. But they had become more than friends over the past few years. They’d become family.
Travis, one of six kids, hailed from a small town in Texas. Deke came from old-line Boston money. J.T. was the only child of a three-star General. and Jeff, hell, the only family he’d ever had was here in this room.
The three of them looked at each other before looking back at Jeff. But Travis was the one who spoke up. “All right, then. What you’ve got to do is think of Kelly like you would any other target.” “Target?” he repeated.
“Hell, yes,” Deke broke in. “Scope the situation out, plan your assault, then go in under cover of darkness.”
“Sneak up on the enemy, er, Kelly,” J.T. added, “until you’ve got her right where you want her.” Of course, he thought. Go with your strengths. And he’d had plenty of practice for this kind of thing. After all, trying to talk Kelly into marrying him would be every bit as dangerous as slipping undetected into enemy territory.
“You’ve got three weeks left, Jeff,” Travis said in that slow-moving speech of his, “make ‘em count, boy.”
“Ooh-rah,” Deke muttered. J.T. lifted his beer in silent salute, and Jeff reached for the phone.
The telephone rang, interrupting her thoughts, and Kelly reached for it like a drowning woman grabbing at a life preserver.
“Hello?” “Hi.”
Even if she hadn’t recognized his voice, the reaction of her body to that deep, rumbling sound would have told her that it was Jeff. Good heavens. He could do this to her even over the phone lines?
“Kelly,” he was saying, and she drew her hormones back from the brink far enough to concentrate. “You think you could get one of your brothers to baby-sit tonight?”
“I suppose so,” she said. “Why? What’d you have in mind?”
“I was thinking about taking you out on a date.”
A warm flush swept over her, and her fingers curled tightly around the receiver. “A date?”
“Yeah,” Jeff said, and his voice came soft and intimate in her ear. “A date.”
“Uh …” she said, stalling for some unknown reason because she knew as well as he did that she would say yes. “Okay. What time?” “I’ll pick you up at seven.” “I’ll be ready.”
Jeff hung up the phone, then picked up his beer. Lifting it high, he waited for his friends to do likewise before saying, “Target acquired.”
Nine
She should have known he’d play dirty.
Kelly steeled herself against being swayed by his tactics, but it wasn’t easy to stand firm against a man like Jeff—especially when he was determined to be romantic. Especially a man you were already halfway in love with.
And he’d pulled out all the stops for their “date.”
Moonlight poured down from a star-filled sky and danced across the surface of the ocean. A soft wind ruffled the sand and lifted her hair from the collar of her turquoise cowl-necked sweater. As Jeff refilled her champagne glass, she glanced around the tiny cove and told herself he’d chosen his spot well.
This was their beach. The spot where he’d saved her life eighteen months ago. The place where this had all started.
In a couple of months, the beach would be crowded, even at night, with scores of teenagers. But now, this early in the season, it was deserted. The rock walls of the cove surrounded them on three sides, and high above, perched on a cliff, was a five-star restaurant. The soft strains of piano music drifted down to them and seemed to melt into the sigh of the outgoing tide.
“More champagne?” Jeff asked, ending her thoughts and bringing her back to the moment at hand.
“Sure,” she said, though an inner voice was warning her to stay alert. He already had everything going for him here. The romantic setting was perfect. A tablecloth spread out on the sand, candles set in hurricane globes, their flames bobbing and shifting in the breeze, iced champagne and a caterer’s tray of snacks. Moonlight glinted in his blue eyes and a shaft of pure, unadulterated lust shot through her, and Kelly knew she was in big trouble.
She had to keep her wits about her. He was using the big guns on her tonight, and if she wasn’t careful, she’d find herself pillaged and captured. And right now, that didn’t even sound like a bad idea.
Oh, boy.
She lifted her glass and took a sip, letting the icy bubbles slide down her throat. When she was sure her voice would work without quavering, she spoke up. “You really went to a lot of trouble tonight, Jeff.”
“No trouble,” he insisted, pouring himself more of the expensive wine.
She laughed and shook her head. “You set all this up, and even posted a guard on it while you came to get me.” She hadn’t gotten a good look at the man Jeff had waved off as they’d arrived, but he’d had the bearing of a Marine.
“That was Travis,” he said, taking a drink of champagne. “Travis Hawks. He’s a member of my team.”
Safe territory, she thought and snatched at the subject. “Tell me about them,” she said. “Your team.”
He looked at her for a long minute, and Kelly knew that he knew what she was up to. But it didn’t seem to matter. He shrugged and started talking. “There are three of them. Travis, Deke and J.T. We’ve been together for a long time. Long enough that we can each tell what the others are thinking.”
“You’re good friends,” she said, judging more from the warmth in his tone than his words.
“The best,” he agreed, giving her a soft smile. “But it’s more than that. We’re family.”
Family. He said the single word as if it was sacred, and she knew how much that meant to him. The last time they were together, he hadn’t talked much about his childhood, but he’d said enough for her to know it hadn’t been an easy one. She knew he’d grown up mostly in an orphanage before being placed in a foster home when he was in his late teens. But by then, it was too late for him to forge any kind of a bond with a family situation.
He was too much his own man. Even then. Kelly had no trouble at all imagining what he’d been like at sixteeen. Tall, good-looking, with shadows in his eyes and a way of holding himself apart from everyone around him.
Which pretty much described him as he was now. Except with her. And Emily.
And the realization of that hit her hard. Family was all-important to Kelly, and she’d grown up in the loving arms of four overbearing brothers.
Though their parents were gone now, killed in a traffic accident five years ago, the five of them remained close. If family meant so much to her, what would it mean to a man who’d never really known it before?
“We’ve
