Lindsay McKenna – Never Surrender (страница 6)

“Are you okay?” he rasped unsteadily. They hadn’t made love in months. That was a hell of a long time. He was worried about her.

Bay managed a strangled laugh. She slowly raised her head, caught and held his sated gaze. “I’ve decided to call you Shark Man. You’ve graduated from being just a frogman.” She gave him a drowsy, sweet smile radiant with love only for him. “Helluva swim, Shark Man...”

CHAPTER THREE

“COME HERE, BABY.” Gabe hauled her into his arms as he settled into the bed. They were clean, dried off and so damned weak it had taken them leaning on one another to make it to the master bedroom together. Bay had fallen asleep immediately. Gabe felt Bay’s softened breath, the warm moisture flowing across his chest as she slept deeply, her head resting in the crook of his shoulder. Her hand across his pounding heart. God, did life get any better than this? Hell, no.

Gabe closed his eyes, his woman in his arms, her body pressed wantonly against his, their legs entangled. Her hair was still damp, although he’d done his best to dry it off with a towel afterward. He’d seen the exhaustion in Bay’s half-closed eyes and knew she had to sleep off five months of brutal training. The darkness was complete in their bedroom. Gabe felt himself begin to utterly surrender against her warmth and curves.

He lay awake for a long time, his body still vibrating with simmering heat after having made love with her. Bay’s background was as a Hill person from the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia. She was a woman of the earth, wild and completely natural. Her spontaneity was unfettered, freeing him from his dark and miserable past, infusing him with hope of a bright future. Love did incredible things for a human being, Gabe was discovering.

Closing his eyes, his arm wrapped firmly around Bay’s shoulders as she slept, Gabe couldn’t shut off his mind. Bay had come from a happy family, deep in the mountains, away from most of civilization. She’d lived and hunted in those mountains. Not only was she a crack shot, but her mother, Poppy, was a Hill doctor. Bay obviously got that healing gene from her. Her father, Floyd, had been a Marine Corps sniper and had started teaching her at a young age how to hunt and shoot. When her father died of Black Lung, she’d entered the Navy afterward to make money for her economically struggling family.

Moving his fingers slowly across her firm, warm flesh, he felt her inborn strength, her Hill backbone. Lowlanders, people who weren’t Hill-born, would say she was backward and uneducated. Nothing could be further from the truth. Bay was simple, homespun, and had a strong sense of right and wrong. When her father had become ill, she’d picked up the family mantle of responsibility, being the oldest, to feed and care for her mother, father and her mentally challenged younger sister, Eva-Jo.

A sigh slipped between his lips as he savored the darkness embracing them. He felt Bay’s hand twitch and move slightly on his chest. She was moving more deeply into a healing sleep, and that was good. His mind revolved back to her, back to her simple way of living.

When he’d met Bay last year in Afghanistan, he’d instantly felt attracted to her. It was her humbleness, the idealism she saw in others, her compassion, that called powerfully to him. In those four months of combat, they’d known they had something good between them, but they could never act upon it. Not in a combat team. Fraternization could tear a team apart. And it could get people killed. They’d cooled their heels, looked, but hadn’t touched one another. And only after Bay had come home after her six-month rotation out of the combat zone, did they realize the beauty of what they held in one another. Real love.

Frowning, Gabe thought about how at twenty-nine he’d thought he’d known what love was. He’d married Lily after five days of sex and heat. It was the stupidest choice he’d ever made in his entire life. He was divorced before he’d met Bay, hurting and wounded by the experience. He’d thought he’d known what love was, but he hadn’t.

Meeting Bay changed his life, but Gabe had been afraid to act on it for any number of reasons. And only in those thirty incredible days after she’d returned home to his arms, did he understand what real love was about. She’d given him her heart without games, manipulations or lies. That was the only way Bay knew how to be. And she had healed his heart in the process, taught him how to laugh once again, to love another once more.

A ghostlike smile curved the corners of Gabe’s mouth as Bay’s shallow breath continued to calm him, anchor him to the here and now. At Camp Bravo as soon as they’d made eye contact, something magical, something beautiful, had occurred between them. He ran his fingers slowly up and down her arm. Her heart thudded slowly against his rib cage, and Gabe absorbed every beat of it into his soul. Bay was alive, so sensitive and kind to everyone.

He continued to be amazed that she’d spent three years, half of them in combat with black ops teams, and still retained that sweet, simple disposition of a woman who held hope out for the hopeless. Bay had the inborn ability to pick someone like him up and, literally, change his life for the better. What kind of titanium steel backbone did she possess? A damned strong one, for sure. Combat changed people, and yet, Gabe had watched her handle it. Bay was...remarkable. A stunning example of a strong, passionate woman who knew what she wanted out of her life.

Gabe felt the corners of sleep tugging at him, dragging him downward as his heart started to beat in rhythm with Bay’s. She had chosen him as her partner. How lucky could he get? Of all the men on earth, Bay chose him. His last feelings were a deluge of love smothering him, dissolving his mind and taking him to that place of peace and tranquility, his woman in his arms, at his side. As it should be.

* * *

BAY AWAKENED SLOWLY, wrapped in a sense of protection and love. Dragging her eyes open, she lay on her left side. Gabe’s slow, deep breathing brought a soft smile to her lips. She was home. She was at his side once more. Easing up on her elbow, she watched the morning light peeking around the dark drapes at the window that faced the Pacific Ocean, which surrounded Coronado Island.

Her gaze moved lovingly across his sleeping features. Gabe’s hair was military short, mussed, softening the hard look and lines in his weathered, darkly tanned face. In sleep was the only time he looked vulnerable to Bay. Awake, he was a SEAL warrior, alert, always watchful, on guard. And how sweetly he bristled over his need to protect her. He was like a knight from King Arthur’s Round Table that she’d read about so often when growing up as a child. She remembered her mama reading about Sir Galahad, Sir Lancelot and beautiful Guinevere. At times she would lay out in a field of wildflowers, hands behind her head, watching puffy white clouds slowly move by. Sometimes, she imagined shapes within them of these powerful knights on mighty chargers who saved others.

The corners of her mouth tugged upward as she absorbed Gabe’s sleeping face. She took in his rugged features, trying to imagine his childhood, how horrible it had been on him. His drunken father had used him as a punching bag. He’d made sure to conceal the damage and bruises done by his fists and leather belt. And his father had made sure it was hidden from his mother, Grace. All he’d known as a kid was that fatherly love packed a fist and a punch. His father had sworn he’d kill his mother if Gabe ever breathed a word of his punishment to Grace. Bay couldn’t imagine how it would have affected her emotionally.

Tears gathered in her eyes momentarily as she imagined his past. A few dark strands lay across Gabe’s broad, lined brow. She wanted to reach out and gently tame them back into place. Bay knew if she did, he’d instantly awaken and become fully alert. On guard. Looking for an enemy. That’s what SEALs did; they took the fight to the enemy and they were always in harm’s way. They learned in BUD/S that five-minute combat naps could carry them for days without real sleep. Resisting the urge because she knew Gabe had just come out of intense training himself, Bay didn’t move. She wanted him to sleep.

Her fingers itched to touch his darkly haired chest, run her index finger across his full lower lip that knew how to bring her world into a fiery cauldron of hungry need for him alone. No one could love her to the depth and breadth that Gabe could love her. It was simply a part of his being able to touch not only her willing body, but gently hold her heart in his large, scarred hands and twine her soul with his own.

Drawing in a ragged breath, her body responded, knowing Gabe loved her on every possible level. How had she drawn such an incredible man like this to her? He was Sir Lancelot, and she was his Guinevere. He was a warrior. She was a healer. He knew combat, and so did she. And all they wanted was to find peace and sanctuary from a crazed world in the arms of one another.