wielding her knife with more enthusiasm than skill. She attacked the fruit the same way she appeared to attack life—head-on.
She was beautiful, but that wasn’t the reason for his attraction. Or, rather, it wasn’t the sole reason. As hokey as it sounded, when she got close, he wanted to smile. To hold her in his arms and dance her around in a big old circle until she collapsed against him, dizzy and laughing. He wanted to laugh with her—and he’d felt that way since he first landed on the island and had set eyes on her.
She was someone special. And if there was an edge of desperation beneath her laughter, he wanted to know that side of her, too. She wasn’t just the life of the party, even if that was what she wanted the world to believe. And he didn’t think for one second that she was content with standing on the sidelines, watching wedding after wedding. So what did she want?
A piece of mango hit the pool deck. She cursed, and nearly amputated her finger, and he decided it was time for an intervention. Her fruit was a mangled mess and he’d sharpened the Wüsthofs himself that morning.
“Did the mango do something to piss you off?”
She stopped chopping with a sigh, pink tingeing her cheekbones. “At least you can still tell it’s a mango, right?”
Only because he’d passed the fruit out himself. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to identify the goopy yellow mass. Handling a knife was second nature for him. His Swiss Army knife had gotten him out of nearly as many jams as his combat knife. Reaching around her, he adjusted her grip. “Keep the bottom of the blade on the cutting board. Make sure the tip is up.”
She brightened even as she impaled her knife on her cutting board. “I get points for effort, right?”
Her hair smelled good, like strawberries and coconut beneath the added bonus layer of mangoes. She also had mango juice on her fingers, her front and her cheek. He tried not to think about all the other places she could have self-decorated.
Focus. “Think squares.”
“Squares.” She sounded skeptical. He moved closer until his front was plastered up against her sweet butt. She inhaled, but didn’t protest.
“First one big square, then four smaller squares, then sixteen.”
“Math isn’t my thing.”
“Just dice.”
He mentally consulted what he’d dubbed the boyfriend cheat sheet. He needed to compliment her in a meaningful way. Establish a sense of emotional intimacy. Honestly, he had no clue what that meant, although telling her that her hair smelled nice probably didn’t count. A piece of flying mango hit him on the shoulder as he opened his mouth to praise her on her mad chopping skills.
Emphasis on mad.
“Oops,” she said and grinned up at him. He knew a deliberate hit when he saw one. If she wanted to play dirty, he was happy to play with her.
“Can I take over?”
She dropped the knife—and leaned back against him.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said, and she blushed.
“Chopping’s hard work. You can be my mango boy anytime,” she said, surrendering the knife. If he was smart, he wouldn’t read anything into it. Apparently, though, he’d checked his brain when he’d accepted her as his mission, because he could feel a small answering smile tugging at his mouth.
After he’d chopped her mango—and, Jesus, he wished that was a euphemism for something else—he moved down the table, checking on his other students. Ashley had her mango chopped into precise cubes. “Show-off,” he muttered, and she stuck her tongue out at him. All good there. The honeymooning couple at the far end had progressed to feeding each other slices of fruit, and he resisted the urge to tell them to get a room. They had one. They just weren’t using it.
Yet.
Fantasy Island made a guy think about sex about fifty times a minute. It didn’t help that Maddie was covered in mango juice, making her his very own sweet sticky treat. Her crepe had achieved some strange mutant shape that defied the round shape of the pan. He didn’t know what it was, but it certainly was no circle. It figured she’d make quirky crepes.
He peeled her crepe off the bottom of her pan and gave it a quick QA check. The top was raw and the bottom blackened. With a sigh, he substituted his crepe for hers.
She flashed him a dazzling smile. “Thank you. For the rescue,” she added after a brief pause. He didn’t know whether she meant yesterday on the hillside—or the mangoes.
“I still owe you makeup chocolate,” he said gruffly.
Her head whipped around, her ponytail slapping him in the mouth. “You meant that?”
“You bet.” He wiped a smudge of honey off the corner of her mouth. “I live to serve.”
That much was true. His family served. It was their tradition and he was proud to continue it. He’d do what he could do, push to be the best that he could be. Sure, he’d been the first to do it for Uncle Sam rather than Fish & Game or the Forest Service, but he figured service was like Christmas presents. It came in different sizes and shapes and sometimes you had no idea what you were getting, but it was all good. His dad had been a hotshot firefighter. His uncles were firefighters, too. He’d simply picked a different kind of fire, the kind that came with bad guys and bullets...and Maddie. Being her bodyguard detail was a whole different challenge.
She stared at him, evaluating something he couldn’t see. “Tomorrow?”
“It’s a date.”
“Like a date date?” Was that a hint of uncertainty in her eyes? He couldn’t tell, but that was nothing new. He wasn’t the kind of guy who dated much and being an active-duty SEAL made relationships near impossible. He never knew when he would be called up or for how long, which made any kind of connection or friendship outside his team difficult.
“Makeup chocolate,” he repeated, skirting the whole thorny issue of their relationship potential.
She gave him another assessing look and then grinned. “Okay. Sounds like fun, so why the hell not?”
He, on the other hand, could think of multiple reasons. He was staring down thirty—from the wrong side of the decade. Although he still had all his working parts, he was banged up something fierce. His knees were good; his trigger finger steady. In short, he was a fixer-upper project and she was no carpenter.
“Give me a time, big guy,” she said, leaning in and patting his chest. “So I can prepare properly.”
Yeah. He was definitely out of his league here. Maddie was a dating guru, unlike his sorry self. At the very least, his instant erection was ironclad proof that she’d mastered the fine art of flirting.
“Eight o’clock,” he muttered and beat a strategic retreat.
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