SEALs of Summer 2: A Military Romance Superbundle (15 page)

*

Dane shortened his
steps as they walked back to the briefing room. Ivy walked beside him, her chin in the air, her long dark hair falling in a luxurious silken wave down her back. She wore a black pantsuit with a red blouse and what his mom would call sensible heels. He knew for a fact Ivy looked fantastic in short skirts and high heels, but clearly she opted for something a little more sedate while working.

Except the shirt was low enough to give a tantalizing glimpse of cleavage, and since Dane knew what those breasts looked like bare, he couldn’t help but let his gaze stray there a bit more often than it should.

Ivy stopped suddenly and Dane was caught short. He turned to face her. She’d put her hands on her hips and her face was flushed.

Still so fucking pretty.

“I can’t believe you did that,” she said. “What in the hell were you thinking?”

Dane dragged his gaze from the scoop neck of her top. “Why are you wearing clothes that hide your figure?”

Ivy blinked. And then her face grew redder. “Un-fucking-believable! I’m being serious here, and you’re talking to me about my
clothes?
What about your clothes, asshole? Why are you wearing camouflage?”

“It’s my uniform.”

Ivy poked him in the chest with a manicured fingernail. “Exactly, dickhead. We aren’t dressing for a night out on the town here, are we? Not to mention your right to discuss my wardrobe ended when you walked out on me.”

A hot ball of anger coiled tight in Dane’s chest. He worked real hard not to let it explode. “When I walked out on you? Honey, you told me to get out, if I remember rightly. Told me to go join the fucking SEALs and stay out of your life.”

“You were going to join anyway. You told me that. I told you not to come back if you did.”

He couldn’t help the sarcasm in his tone. “Same as I told you when you wanted to join the DEA, right?”

She had the grace to look ashamed—for about half a second. “That was different, and you know it. You knew why.”

Yes, he knew that her mother had died from an accidental drug overdose after her father abandoned them and that Ivy had spent a few years in foster care before going to live with her grandmother. He also knew that she’d had a passion to prevent drugs from reaching the streets. It was her calling, and he couldn’t argue with that. But the Navy had been his calling, and she hadn’t understood. Neither had his parents. His father had gone particularly ballistic at the announcement. It had felt as if everyone in his life who was supposed to support him had bailed on him.

Which they had.

“And before you go getting all self-righteous,” she continued, “you weren’t precisely happy about it.”

“No, but I was supportive. Because you wanted it, Ivy. Because I loved you.”

And when you loved someone, you supported them.

He didn’t miss the way her green eyes darkened for a second or the way even saying those words formed a lump in his throat. Yeah, he’d loved her. He’d learned the hard way that it wasn’t a good idea. Thanks to Ivy, he wasn’t ever letting himself get so emotionally involved with a woman again.

He’d had no idea what love was supposed to be, but he’d thought it meant you did whatever it took to make the other person happy. Yeah, he’d been an idiot all right. Never again.

“If I’d never joined the DEA, if I’d followed you around the world, sat in port and waited for months while you were gone, you’d have been perfectly happy to let that happen. I needed more, Dane.”

“You knew when you met me what my plans were,” he growled. “If you didn’t like it, then why the fuck did you stay? Why did you marry me?”

She’d been the first person he’d told that he planned to join the Navy rather than the Army as expected. He hadn’t told her about the SEALs at that point because he hadn’t realized it himself.

She closed her eyes for a second. “It never changes, does it? We’ve had this argument before. Clearly, we don’t understand each other. We never did. And we shouldn’t have gotten married. It was wrong.”

“Didn’t feel like that at the time.”

She snorted softly. “You know it’s true though. We were young and dumb and hot for each other. That’s not enough to build a life together.”

Dane shook his head. “There are worse things than being hot for each other. It’s a start.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I can’t do this right now. We sat there and told that man this wasn’t going to be a problem. And I really need it not to be because I have work to do. I want to find these motherfuckers and get that sub, and then I want to go back to nailing the Ruizes to the wall.”

Dane put his hands up in surrender. “Not a problem, sweetheart. I’m not the one who started it this time. You did.”

“And you never answered the question. Why did you have to tell everyone I was your ex like that?”

“You think they don’t have a right to know? When they have to put their asses on the line in order to find these terrorists before they destroy innocent lives?”

“But what does that have to do with us?”

“If I have to give you an order, will you do what you’re told or tell me to fuck off?”

She bristled. “Who said you’d be giving me orders? I’m not a military operative, Dane.”

“No, but you’re assigned to this operation. What if I’m the one giving you the order? You think they don’t have a right to know there’s a problem between us when lives depend on the answer?”

She crossed her arms. All it served to do was lift her breasts higher. Dane gritted his teeth and kept his eyes on her face.

“Maybe so, but we could have gone to see the colonel privately. Or you could have announced I was your ex-wife. No need for all the drama and male posturing.”

It was Dane’s turn to snort. She really didn’t get it. He started down the hall, then called back to her, “Yeah, but where’s the fun in that?”

‡

I
vy was going
to go crazy before this mission was over. She got out of her car and locked it, then headed into her apartment building, her mind full of Dane Erikson and HOT, her hands full of groceries.

It had been a long day. Not only because of Dane, but also because of the potential for catastrophe. They had to find that submarine, and they had to put a stop to the terrorists who were planning to sail a nuke into some unsuspecting harbor.

Based on the time the sub could operate underwater and how secure the terrorists potentially were in their plan, the nuke could end up anywhere. Miami, Virginia Beach, Baltimore, Boston—or maybe Los Angeles or San Diego.

Yeah, the damn thing could be anywhere, though it seemed most likely the East Coast was the target since the sub had last been seen in Cartagena. The US Navy was on high alert, as were the Coast Guard and the port authorities. But the ocean was mighty big, and the sub mighty small. Talk about your basic needle in a haystack.

Ivy juggled her groceries and unlocked the door. This was new territory for her, but she understood the urgency—who wouldn’t? You’d have to be insane not to get why this was important.

Still didn’t mean she liked the idea of working with Dane. Maybe she should have called Leslie up and told her she couldn’t do it after all—but that wasn’t the way Ivy operated. She was stronger than that.

Dane was a complication, but she could handle him. Even if seeing him again made her heart ache and her body light up in ways she really didn’t appreciate.

Damn his handsome face and spectacular body anyway.

She set her groceries on the counter, then took everything out of the bags and put it away. The light on her answering machine blinked incessantly, so she went over and pressed the button. She knew a lot of people only used their cell phones, but she kept a landline too. In the event of a catastrophe, cell towers wouldn’t work while landlines still could.

Ivy frowned at the thought. She’d always been paranoid. Always planning for the worst that could happen rather than the best. She’d planned her entire life that way. Dane used to tease her about that.

Ow.
She rubbed in the vicinity of her heart and deleted the first message, a generic spiel from a telemarketer offering to cut her credit card interest rates in half. The second was dead air. The third started to play…

We know who you are, Ivy McGill… we know where to find you…

The message ended with a sharp beep, and Ivy’s heart kicked inside her chest. She was accustomed to being threatened, but this was the first time anyone had ever phoned her at home.

And her number wasn’t simply unlisted—it was unpublished. Unavailable to anyone except those people she wanted to have it—other than random telemarketers who targeted every known number regardless of who lived there, of course.

Out of instinct, Ivy pulled her gun and swept through her apartment. There’d been no signs of forced entry, but that didn’t mean anything these days. Criminals were clever. Drug dealers like the Ruizes were even more so.

She didn’t find anything that indicated anyone had been inside, and the apartment was clean. But she had to take the threat, however vague, seriously. She wasn’t going to stop working and go into hiding, because that would mean the criminals had won—but she would go to a hotel while her agency sorted this out.

She went and grabbed her bugout bag and her computer, then headed back out again. She phoned Ace once she was in the car and told him what had happened.

“Ivy, what the fuck? Do you think it’s the Ruizes?”

“Who else could it be? We’ve been working on bringing them down for months now.”

Months in which she’d traveled a lot, slept a little, and eaten a load of fast-food crap as they stalked the Ruizes and waited for a break. They’d thought they’d had it with the submarines. And then the fucking Freedom Force had to get involved.

Ace snorted. “Yeah, true. But what if it’s someone fucking with you? What about that musclehead you call an ex-husband? Would he do something like this to screw with you?”

Ivy’s gut clenched. “What? No way! Dane might still be pissed off at me, but he wouldn’t threaten me. Not even as a joke.”

“Okay, okay, calm down. If you say so, I believe you. Where you headed?”

“I’m checking into a hotel near the base. Might as well stay near HOT HQ since we’ll be working there for the foreseeable future.”

“Yeah, sounds good. You calling Leslie next?”

Ivy bit her lower lip. There was the possibility Leslie would pull her from the HOT mission over this—but the threat was real, and Ivy wasn’t stupid. Leslie had to be informed.

“Yes, I’m telling her. She can get a trace put on that call, see if we find anything.”

Ace blew out a breath. “Yeah, good plan… You need anything, Ivy? Need me to come watch your back tonight?”

“No, I’m good. I’ll see you in the morning. It was a vague threat, Ace. We’ve certainly heard worse.”

“True dat. Let me know where you’re staying.”

“I will.”

They finished the call and then Ivy phoned Leslie. Her boss wasn’t precisely happy, but she said she’d start the IT forensics department working on the call. If they figured out where it came from—where it really came from and not just the VOIP masking system the caller had used to hide the number from her caller ID—maybe they’d learn something useful.

Until then, there was nothing Ivy could do except check into the hotel and keep doing her job.

After she was settled, she texted Ace her information and then opened up her computer and started searching through some of the unclassified files she had on the Ruizes. There was a lot to think about with the missing sub and the Freedom Force, but the Ruizes were her specialty. And maybe something in the files would trigger a thought about the terrorists.

Ivy had been scanning the files for approximately ten minutes when there was a hard knock on her door. Her heart leapt, and she shoved the computer aside to reach for her gun.

“Ivy! Open up! It’s Dane.”

Ivy blinked. Dane? Here? Oh, holy shit.

She went to the door and opened it, though she didn’t slide the chain back. Dane loomed on the other side, his face thunderous. He was dressed in jeans and a navy T-shirt that molded the hard planes of his sculpted chest like a second skin.