part of his job description. He shifted his weight, turning fully onto his back, and Nissa found herself rolling toward him as the mattress sagged beneath his greater weight. She braced herself to stop the roll and froze in dismay as she realized she’d planted her hand on his stomach. Ridges of carved marble formed beneath her palm before she managed to jerk it away from him. Good grief. Touching him was like sticking her hand into a volcano.
Sharp awareness of how much bigger than she he was, in every dimension, made lust shoot through her nether regions, hot and liquid, and nearly as disorienting as her dream.
Had they actually kissed, or had that been part of her dream, too? Nissa could swear she still felt him on her mouth, still tasted him on her tongue. And her face around her mouth definitely felt razor burned. Or maybe that was just chapped skin from the wind and salt water. Confused, she stared at the silhouette of his lips barely visible beside her.
He clicked his flashlight on and shined it up at the underside of the roof, exposed beyond the rafters. Methodically, he ran the light over every inch of the ceiling.
“How does it look?” she asked.
He turned toward her, turning the flashlight with him, abruptly blinding her in its brilliant LED beam. “So far, so good.”
“Could you get that light out of my eyes, please?” She threw her hand up to shield her face.
It clicked off and total blackness descended over them, making her lurch in alarm. Even as a kid, she’d been scared of the dark. She’d mostly grown out of it as an adult. Mostly.
“Easy, Nissa. I’ve got you.” He rolled toward her, and she was swept up against his delicious body, his arms firm and protective around her.
Oh. My. God. He felt every bit as amazing in real life as he did in her dream.
Out of the darkness, Cole murmured against Nissa’s temple, “I promise I’ll keep you safe. No harm will come to you on my watch. You don’t have to be afraid.” His low voice was raw silk, caressing her skin and sending cascades of shivers down her spine.
They lay like that for several minutes, neither one moving, Nissa barely daring to breathe. The sexual tension between them stretched tighter and tighter until she thought it had to snap. Terrified of what that would mean, she cast about in her mind for something to say. Something to distract both of them from this endless, insane moment of raging mutual lust.
“I had the strangest dream,” she blurted.
“How strange?”
“You and I were swimming underwater. And we could breathe the water. You were some sort of sea-god. Poseidon, maybe.”
“I like this dream. And I do have a trident. Although mine is only on my SEAL pin and not real.”
He’d been all real in the dream, that was for sure. Just remembering the way she’d burned for him made her forehead break into a sweat now.
“Tell me more about this dream.”
Hah. As if she would confess in a million years about them being naked and crawling all over each other.
“That’s all there was. We were underwater, but we weren’t drowning. The water was clear and warm and bright turquoise. It looked as if we were near a tropical shore, not the Gulf of Mexico in the middle of a hurricane.”
“Good choice. Yesterday, those were the roughest seas I’ve ever seen.”
“So I’m not crazy to have been scared out of my mind?”
“Not at all. That was a daunting ride, and climbing aboard the Anna Belle with her so close to capsizing would have scared the bravest soul.”
“Were you afraid?”
His features twitched into a frown. “We’re trained during a mission to set feelings like fear aside. They get in the way of the work. But I did register that it was a dangerous situation in which we all could easily have died.”
She turned his words over in her mind, applying the filters her years as a CIA analyst had honed to a fine edge. It was probably as close as she would ever come to hearing a SEAL admit to being scared. And she had heard that SEALs were taught techniques for fear and pain control.
Cole murmured, startling her out of her analysis, “There had to be more to your dream.”
“How do you know? It was my dream.”
His low voice was soft like suede caressing her skin. “I know because you all but tore my clothes off and had your wicked way with me.”
Hot shame flooded her face. He knew. Cole knew exactly what she’d dreamed. Every sordid, sexy detail of her unconscious fantasy. She was never going to be able to look him in the eye again. Ever. Humiliation tasted sour in the back of her mouth, and an urge roared through her to curl up in a little ball, pull the quilt over her head and never come out from under it.
Without warning he rolled off the bed and the quilt lifted off of her abruptly, letting in a rush of cold air. She squeaked, but just as suddenly, the quilt was tossed back over her. She yanked it up around her neck, not that it would shield her from what he knew about her now.
“Where are you going?” she choked out.
“Back to the main room to check the water level outside. It’s my turn on the watch. I only came in here because I heard you making...sounds.” He added in a rush, “I wanted to make sure you were all right. That’s all.”
What kind of sounds had she been making? The way his voice had hitched over the word had suspicions leaping to mind that heaped embarrassment on top of her humiliation. Horror poured over her, her own personal ice bucket over the head. Some of that smoking-hot embrace had been real? Oh, God. How much of it? “What did I...what did we...”
“Do?” Cole murmured down at her. “Enough to seriously consider doing it again someday but not so much that you need to go looking for a shotgun just yet.”
She pulled the quilt up over her head then. But it didn’t stop her from hearing Cole’s quiet laughter as the bedroom door opened and he slipped out of the room, leaving her alone with her new best friends Shame and Self-recrimination.
Cole made it out to the living room before he let go of the breath he’d been holding. Damn, that had been a near miss with total disaster. When he’d tried to wake up Nissa and she’d grabbed him, pulled him down on top of her and then all but crawled down his throat, he’d been in grave danger of succumbing to his attraction to her.
He abruptly understood the saying about a person’s world tilting on its axis. He felt off-balance, physically and emotionally, but also on some deeper, more fundamental level. As if his world would never be quite the same again. Which was doubly strange given that he considered himself to be the most thoroughly grounded of men, stable, unshakable and sure of who and what he was.
But that woman...throwing herself at him like that...the way she’d felt in his arms...the things she’d made him feel... This was uncharted territory for him.
Hell,
