Claiming Her SEAL (ASSIGNMENT: Caribbean Nights Book 1) (12 page)

That wasn’t going to happen.

“Because, Emma.” Her name spread across his tongue, seeping down his throat, coating it. “I was a sniper. My job was to shoot people. And I was very, very good at it.”

Her huge rounded eyes blinked as she processed that. “This is your big secret. The thing you didn’t think I could handle.”

The quaver in her voice… it was killing him. She was off-kilter, a little freaked out and still standing firm. Not running away. This conversation was as much a testament to her strength as anything she’d done in the water. And he couldn’t even admire her for it, because he was doing everything in his power to break that down.

He cocked his head and let a slow, brutal smile spread across his face. “Yep. How you doing with it? Because it gets worse. I can see that million dollar question running through your mind. How many people could it have been? Four? Five?”

He let that sink in and waltzed a step closer with as much calculated menace as he could muster. She retreated a step, nearly stumbling.

“Sixty-eight, Emma,” he said. “I killed sixty-eight people in cold blood. Still want to get down and dirty with me?”

Her lips pressed together and she shook her head. “That was in the line of duty, Dex. Wasn’t it? You can’t think of it like that.”

Her voice wavered as if seeking validation for something she wasn’t quite convinced of yet.

“Oh, but it’s not an opinion. I’m an efficient killing machine, Emma,” he corrected silkily. “I trained to become one. I craved perfection at my chosen skillset and I earned it. I can hit any man you put in front of me from nearly any distance. Spill every drop of blood and watch it soak into the desert floor. Without regret.”

That was the kicker. The thing that kept him from ever earning true redemption. He’d killed people, and he wasn’t sorry.

“Go, Emma,” he commanded softly, and she tensed, poised to obey his command. But she didn’t flee, not yet, held in place by something he couldn’t fathom. “Don’t look back. Most little girls worry about the monsters under the bed. I’m saving you from having one
in
your bed.”

And then she whirled and stumbled away, but not before he saw the devastation and revulsion he’d been aiming for finally surface in her gaze.

Better the light go out in her vivid blue eyes than in her soul. He had enough lives on his conscience.

E
mma didn’t get very far before she fell to the sand, knees digging in painfully.

She welcomed the bite of the tiny granules against her skin because it kept her centered. Otherwise, she’d spiral off into oblivion. The fragile grip she had on her sanity might let go at any second.

Her torso heaved as she fought to drag oxygen into her lungs. She couldn’t get a deep enough breath, and her head spun with a hundred different conflicting images.

Most of them were horrific.

Dex was… well, she didn’t know what he was. The revelations of the past few minutes had rocked her, flipped her upside down and back again. And everything inside ached.

Once again, she’d proven to be a horrible judge of a man. She’d let her guard down, let Dex into her vulnerable insides, and he was not the stable, guiding force she’d thought he was.

He was a man capable of taking human life
with relish
. A million times worse than Chris. At least Chris has only attempted murder and failed because he’d misjudged Emma’s desire to escape her watery grave. She’d kicked her way out of that car because she didn’t want to die. And had latched onto the promise of what Dex had to offer because she wanted to live.

A sob bubbled up in her throat, and she choked it back. Hadn’t she cried enough tears over a man? Not one of them was worth it. All she hoped for in life was stability. She’d sought that out through Chris, assuming marriage was the path to it. After the number he’d done on her, this trip to the Caribbean represented yet another shot at finding her center.

Looked like the problem was Emma. She was too unbalanced to be stable. Obviously.

Emma fell heavily into the sand and rolled into a ball. It had never occurred to her that the darkness she sometimes sensed in Dex had its roots in evil that he’d willingly participated in. It wasn’t like she was naïve about things that people had to deal with from their pasts, but she’d expected to learn he’d been the victim of abuse once upon a time, or had his heart broken through an untimely death. She’d been foolish and oh so smug about being able to handle his secrets. Had tried to push him into sleeping with her because of her own selfish needs.

At least Dex—or whatever his name was—had the presence of mind to stop her from making a huge mistake.

Dex was a killer. A stone-cold killer. And totally unapologetic about it.

But as she lay there staring so hard at the blue sky that her vision blurred, the kind and sensitive part of Dex filtered through, gradually replacing the image he’d painted of himself as a cold-blooded killer.

He was a man capable of holding her hand as she swam. He’d listened—without interruption—as she spilled her guts about how Chris had upended her entire life. He’d saved her from being assaulted.

He’d even saved her from herself because she wouldn’t listen to his warnings. All of his actions since she’d met him had pointed to a man whose first instinct was to protect. His second was to help. He did not ever seek to destroy. Or to perpetuate evil. Dex was not a man who could be rightly called a serial killer.

Yet someone incredibly insensitive had foisted that identity onto him. And he’d internalized it, then started to believe he was a bad person.

The sharp ache in her chest spiked down into her stomach, spreading its misery to encompass her whole body, and she couldn’t breathe through the agony. She hurt for the tortured man who would rather send a woman away, denying his own needs, before he’d take advantage of what she was so clearly offering.

Walking away from him had been a mistake.

She sat up. He’d confessed his secrets, exactly as she’d pushed him to, and instead of holding him tight through his nightmares—like he’d done for her—she’d run away.

God, how selfish could she be? He’d needed her, and she’d let him push her away because she couldn’t process her own fears that he was like Chris. That she’d misjudged again.

Dex was nothing like Chris. Nor was he anything like the man he pretended to be—to everyone, including himself. And he needed Emma to prove it to him.

Mission laid out for her, she walked back to the resort with purpose, took a shower and did her hair and makeup, then slid into a flirty sundress that she’d bought specifically to wear to someplace thick with men. She’d hoped it might gain the attention of a cute guy across the room, who might be interested in buying her a drink. Then he’d slide onto the next barstool and make her laugh as they talked about their mutual love of the Red Sox.

The man she was ultimately wearing it for probably wouldn’t even notice it, but the dress made her feel like a woman who could handle anything, and that’s what she needed. She had no business claiming to be strong if she couldn’t right the wrong she’d committed by failing to see through Dex’s ploy.

He’d deliberately scared her away. And she was terribly ashamed that it had worked—but she was going to fix it. Somehow.

By the time she finished dressing for battle, dusk had fallen. She had no idea how to find Dex. But he had a habit of appearing out of the thin air, and she hoped that if she walked in the direction of the village where he lived, which he’d said was located on the other side of the island, that trend would continue.

Rachel waved good-bye with a saucy grin. “I won’t bother to wait up.”

Barefoot, Emma set off purposefully, but the closer she got to the little inlet where she’d first gone in the water—where Dex had first kissed her—the less sure her steps became.

What if she’d completely blown this situation out of proportion? Dex hadn’t seemed particularly tortured when he’d spelled out his sins. But she’d gotten the distinct impression that he’d deliberately coated his comments with a layer of harshness so she’d leave.

And she had. But regretted it. He hadn’t fled in the middle of her crisis. For all her claims of being strong enough to handle a man like Dex, she’d folded under the pressure nearly instantaneously. Maybe she wasn’t actually enough for him.

But there was more to his story. She could feel it. Dex still had vast, uncharted reaches under his skin and if she hoped to discover his depths, uncover them, start to know them and eventually help him heal, she needed to wade out into the water.

The sun started to set in a spectacular burst of reds and oranges. A few small bungalows came into sight and then a few more. The village where Dex must live was indeed a tiny dot on the map, and after hearing Dex’s revelation about his past, she wondered what secrets his friends must have for them to
all
have hidden away from civilization. There was a deliberateness to their choices that said they’d banded together and intended to keep the world out.

A young woman holding the hand of a little boy emerged from the bungalow closest to Emma, and with a few words to the boy to go play in the sand, she began unpinning laundry from a line stretching from her house to a tree in her backyard.

“Excuse me,” Emma called. “I’m looking for Dex…”

She’d been about to supply his last name, which she didn’t know.
Idiot
.

All her second thoughts came roaring back. She’d walked all this way to comfort a man who had no interest in comfort or he’d have presented his secrets in a far different way. The lessons to be learned here were escaping her, and she should just go back to her room. Dex had warned her away time and time again, then had to resort to scaring her away. Was she never going to learn?

“Sure, love.” The woman nodded toward the center of the village. “Numba four. He share with Mr. Evan. They inside.”

“Thanks.” Emma smiled and then realized she was stuck.

If she went back to the resort, this woman, who obviously knew Dex, would probably mention it to him, particularly the part where Emma had walked all this way and then didn’t seek him out. He’d know she’d come chasing after him but had chickened out. That wasn’t going to work. Maybe she could pretend like she’d set off in search of the proper bungalow so the woman would be fooled, but then veer off before anyone else saw her.

The woman waved cheerfully as Emma skirted a palm tree on her way to number four. She scouted around for a detour, praying she’d find it before she got too close and ran into Dex by accident.

Except Dex wasn’t inside number four—he was outside. In the small yard. Their gazes connected, and there was nowhere for her to hide. Her eyelids fluttered closed for a beat as he broke off his conversation with another man who wasn’t Jace but had been cut from the same cloth.

Oh, it was so easy to see these guys were ex-military, now that she knew. They were all built from solid muscle and an even more solid command of themselves. Like Dex and Jace, this unknown guy had a swoon factor, but it was uniquely his own, with a stubbly jaw that pushed him way out of the realm of merely good-looking and straight into the path of
hello
.

Both men watched her approach. Dex leaned one hip against the old-school style picnic table that served as the only outdoor seating in the sparse, scraggly yard. Gardner, he was not. Dex still wore the board shorts that he’d had on earlier but had donned a white T-shirt featuring a logo with a silvery trident crossed over a black anchor. The words Aqueous Adventures circled the logo, which must be the name of his excursion company.

“This is Charlie St. Croix,” Dex said smoothly as if he and Emma had just parted ways a few moments ago and the swirl of uncertainty between them didn’t exist. “And he was just leaving.”

“I’m Emma Richardson,” she said with a small frown at Dex for being rude. “Nice to meet you, Charlie. I’ve heard absolutely nothing about you.”

Charlie shook her hand with a wide smile that lit up his face, turning it instantly more interesting. “Likewise. I’m guessing there’s a reason for that. Which I will apparently not get to hear right now because, as I’ve just learned, I’m leaving.”

They watched him disappear between two houses, and then there wasn’t any way to keep procrastinating, so she glanced at Dex. His jaw was set so tight she couldn’t fathom how his teeth had escaped being crushed under the pressure.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, his voice unnaturally low. “You can’t barge into the place where I live and—”

“I came to apologize.” Her pulse picked up. “For earlier. I shouldn’t have walked away.”

“You… what?” He shook his head, hard. “Yes, you should have, and you never should have come looking for me.”

His hands curled into fists at his side, and he was almost vibrating with tension. It was a vastly different pose than when he’d faced down the cretin on the beach. He’d been so very calm then, almost lazy about it, like he could have handled that situation with one hand tied behind his back and still taken time to pull an old lady’s kitten out of a tree.