The SEAL’s Secret Lover (6 page)

“I never shut it off,” she said. “Dad left when I was seven and Jack was four. Mom never stuck to a plan. She’d start a new job in a new place with wild expectations for the future, then abandon the job, and usually the town, at the first sign of trouble. I got in the habit of planning for whatever could happen because anything could, and often did, happen. Now it’s my job. Operations supports the marketers, the people who make money for the company. If we don’t do our jobs well, they don’t do their jobs well. We grew fast, acquiring companies all over the world. There are so many redundancies and inefficiencies that waste time and money. That’s what I do. I find those, and I fix them.”

Eyes fixed on the road, he drove in silence for a while. She’d built her life around a skill she’d developed early in life, and she’d made Senior Director by thirty by virtue of those skills. If all went well, she’d be a VP by thirty-five. Frankly, this worked for her, and she saw no reason to change it.

But Keenan wasn’t her boss, or a peer. “That must have been hard,” he said.

“It’s a useful skill to have,” she said with a shrug.

“Would you feel better if I kept you apprised of our progress?”

He said it so seriously she almost thought he might be teasing her. Then he turned his head to look at her, casting his profile in shadow and light. Either he had the world’s best poker face or he was completely serious. In the end, she didn’t care if Keenan Parker thought she was the world’s most uptight bitch.

“I’d appreciate that, yes,” she said.

Eyes back on the road, his cheek creased ever so slightly. “We’re exactly two hours and nineteen minutes from our hotel.”

Teasing. Definitely teasing her. She found she didn’t mind at all.

Chapter Four

After making sure Marian and Florence were settled in their room, Rose closed the door and walked down the hall to the room she was sharing with Grannie. She found her grandmother in bed, her soft, long silver hair loose around her shoulders, her tablet beside her and her laptop on her lap.

“What are you doing?” Rose asked as she rummaged through her bag for her laptop.
Please God let the hotel’s WiFi be faster than the one in Cappadocia.

“Uploading the pictures I took today,” Grannie said absently. “I want to label them as I go, or I’ll forget what I saw.”

Laptop in hand, Rose peered over her shoulder. Grannie was a not bad amateur photographer. The album was labeled “Bucket List—Turkey,” and she was organizing the pictures by date, then by location.

“Nice,” Rose said as Grannie tabbed through the pictures she’d taken. There were several in the caves, and two of Marian disassembling a toilet tank. “She’s so handy.”

“She worked in her father’s garage before she married Tom,” Grannie said.

“I didn’t know that,” Rose said, surprised.

“Ask her about it some time.”

“I’d love to get copies of those.”

“I’ll make a slideshow and upload it to the cloud”

“Not on this WiFi.”

A text message pinged on Grannie’s computer. Florence, down the hall, with a text message that read
I was right! It’s a relative of the forget-me-not!

“You three are as bad as teenage girls,” Rose said fondly.

“It’s so much fun,” Grannie said.

“I’m going down to the bar to work for a while. Don’t wait up for me. And take it easy on that screen time. Research shows the light prevents your body from transitioning to sleep.”

As soon as the words left Rose’s mouth, she wished she could take them back. Grannie looked up at her, a familiar fond exasperation in her cornflower blue eyes. “Rose. Honey. Go to the bar. I’ll sleep, or I won’t sleep tonight and I’ll sleep in the car tomorrow.”

“Sorry, Grannie,” she said, and let herself out.

Habits forged in a cauldron of childhood uncertainty die hard, she reflected as she waited in the hallway for the elevator to take her to the lobby. The little girl labeled bossy and a know-it-all grew up to be a woman responsible for the operations of a global energy company … who lived with her cat in her hometown. Alone. Except for Rufus, the cat. Until she met the right man, who also wanted a white picket fence and a couple of kids, and a stable home and family life.

Someone unlike Keenan.

Satisfied with that little bit of organizational efficiency, she strode into the hotel lobby already scanning the bar for signs of the bartender and a wall with an outlet she could plug her laptop into. But when she saw Keenan standing at the front desk, she stopped short. It wasn’t the relaxed, aware way he conversed with the desk clerk, in fluent Turkish, no less. It wasn’t the way his shoulders stretched his shirt, or the sight of his forearms, dusted with golden hair, so tempting in the Land Rover.

It was the book he held in his left hand, his fingers curled around the edge, hiding the title. She recognized the cover design, black with an orange stripe, used for modern editions of classic books, but her brain filed that little detail away in favor of remembering how those fingers tightened in her hair, held her wrists, clamped over her mouth while she shuddered out her climax.

Her body awakened, the tiny dents along her jaw and bands around her wrists throbbing back into her awareness. He hadn’t seemed to notice her, so she let herself look, and feel, let it spread through her body to the tips of her fingers and toes, to her nipples and clit.

Without breaking the conversation or looking her way, Keenan lifted the hand holding the book and held up his index finger, indicating she should wait for him. He finished the conversation with a smile and a nod and an
inshallah
, then crossed the lobby, all loose joints and pantherlike.

Get a grip, Rose.
She lifted her chin. “I didn’t think you saw me,” she said when he was right in front of her.

“Mirrors,” he said succinctly.

Rose looked over his shoulder, saw herself reflected in the mirror on the wall behind the desk. “Damn,” she said.

“Work?”

“Yes. The Bucket List Babes are settled in for the night. They’re texting each other from their rooms.”

He chuckled, soft and genuinely amused, and held out his hand to indicate she should precede him into the bar. “They’re a fun group.”

“Apparently Marian’s skill with toilets comes from working in a garage before she got married,” she said. “I had no idea. Grannie just told me.”

He chuckled again as they sat down across from each other. The room was dark, intimate seating arranged around small tables. The bartender came over to their table.

“An Efes,” Keenan said, then looked at Rose. “Red wine again?”

“No,” she said fervently, focused on opening the laptop and watching it search for a WiFi connection. “I’ll have the same. And a glass of water. Thank you.”

The bartender disappeared, reappearing with bottles of beer and her water around the time Rose connected to the WiFi. She logged in through the secure website, and signed in to her email.

“Oh, great,” she groaned.

“What?”

“Five hundred and thirty-six emails, all downloading from the secure server through the firewall, then onto this completely inadequate WiFi. It will take all night just to get the email.” She blew out her breath with frustration. “So, what exactly did Jack say to warn you away from me?”

“Nothing specific. He showed us unflattering pictures of you, and made you sound like a career woman too smart to date a bunch of losers like us.”

“Who? His teammates?” She smiled. “You’re not losers, but he didn’t need to go to that kind of work. I don’t tend to go gaga for a uniform. I’m in the market for an ordinary guy.”

The second the words were out of her mouth, she wished she could take them back. She was often blunt, but rarely rude. But saying something trite like
present company excluded
was a lie. They both knew what this was.

He smiled again, lazy and confident. “Don’t look so worried, Jetlag. You’re not going to hurt my feelings. SEALs are anything but ordinary. We make shit boyfriends, much less husbands. We’re gone all the time, and even when we’re home, our minds are somewhere else.”

She appreciated his honesty. “Is there … someone?”

“Not for a long time,” he said.

“Girlfriends?”

“Depends on how far you’re willing to stretch the word,” he said.

“No money changed hands?”

Another laugh. “That’s about right.”

She could learn to like this. She glanced at the progress bar for her email. Six percent done.

“Lancaster sounds nice,” Keenan said finally.

“Really?” she said, disbelieving. “Jack always hated it. He couldn’t wait to enlist. But it’s a nice small city, with good parts and bad parts. Grannie lives in a really nice neighborhood, old brick houses and big yards with gardens. The East Side is a mess. The high school we went to pulled from both neighborhoods.”

“Jack always made it sound idyllic. White picket fences and the Garden Club.”

She snorted. “Sounds like exactly the kind of place an active duty Navy SEAL would avoid.” Keenan’s eyes widened a little, then he snorted while she tapped her nose. “I know my brother. He was in high school when I was in college, and I knew if I went away he’d run completely wild. For a while he had Grannie bamboozled into thinking he was the president of the youth group at church and seriously considering the ministry, which was, as nearly as I could tell, a cover for seducing the pastor’s daughter.”

Keenan’s totally involuntary laugh lingered as a smile on his fine, fine mouth. “I never heard that story.”

“He always did have a thing for the sweet, serious type. Anyway I stayed, got an internship at Field Energy, and went into their management training program after I graduated.”

“Pretty impressive,” he said.

She shrugged, then took a risk of her own. “What about you? You and Jack left the teams around the same time.”

He shrugged. “The plan was for both of us to go to work for Grey Wolfe. He changed his mind. I didn’t.”

“Where’s home?”

“An apartment in Galata,” he said, then clarified, “a neighborhood in Istanbul.”

“I meant, where’s home home?”

This time he didn’t even shrug. “That is home, Jetlag. Dad was an Army Ranger. I grew up on bases, joined up as soon as I could.”

“But … the Navy?”

“The SEAL program is tougher to complete than the Ranger program. I’m not knocking them. I’m just stating fact.”

Her eyes widened ever so slightly. “And you were going to do better than your dad?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What’s he doing now?’

“Six feet under in a cemetery near Fort Hood. He was KIA just after I graduated from BUD/S. He was getting a little old for active duty missions, but he thought he had one more in him. His dream in life was to die with his buddies.” He shrugged. “Guess he did that.”

“I’m sorry,” Rose said. “What about your mom? Are you close to her?”

“She took off when I was seven.” He looked at her. “It sounds worse than it was. Made my life easy. Gave me focus.”

“Why did you leave the Navy?”

He didn’t answer for the longest time, made a big show out of checking the GPS. She didn’t change the subject, though. Experience with Jack had taught her to wait him out. “You know the last mission we were both on?”

“The one that shook Jack so badly?”

“That’s the one. I saw our friend bleed out in front of our eyes. We both did. It shook Jack pretty badly. Me … all I could think about was that I didn’t want to die like my dad.”

He clearly didn’t want to talk about it. The windows were thrown open to the late spring night, the cool breeze caressing Rose’s cheek a constant reminder of how flushed her skin was. She should be chilled, but her blood seemed to beat at the surface of her skin, wild and demanding. Keenan’s gaze sharpened, then softened into the heated, intent gaze of a jungle cat.

Rose cleared her throat. “What are you reading?”

He handed the book to her, fingers brushing hers, his knee pressing against hers and not moving when he sat back. The simple contact, heated through two layers of clothing, subtly reminded her that he knew something about her, something she hadn’t known she wanted or liked. She could, she realized, trust him because he hadn’t explicitly gone all alpha-male badass on her. If he’d come on to her, said
You know you liked it, baby I got what you need right here
, she wouldn’t have given him a second thought.

Which made him so much more dangerous.

The right thing to do was to hand him back his book and go back upstairs to actually work. That was the practical, pragmatic, sensible thing to do. Instead, she turned the book over to see the title.

“
The Iliad
,” she said. “Preparation for this trip?” They were visiting Troy after Ephesus, but even as she flipped to the back cover copy, then paged through the book, she knew he’d carried this around for far longer than the last couple of weeks. The corners of the cover and pages were blunted, dusty, stained with what looked like coffee. It smelled like Jack’s belongings when he came home, a distinct combination of sweat, dirt, and superhuman effort.

He shook his head. “Do you know the story?”

“I have a business degree,” she said. “I took art history to satisfy my humanities requirements, then promptly replaced everything I learned with organizational theory. I saw
Troy
, though. And
300
.”

“That’s Greece,” he said. “Sparta, to be accurate.
The Iliad
is the ultimate story of war. When I first joined the teams, I read it for the glory.”

“And now?” she asked, watching him closely.

There was a short silence during which he framed his answer. “Now I read it differently.”

His answer piqued her curiosity about the book, and him. “I brought my e-reader,” she said.

“Too bad you can’t work from that,” he quipped.

“If I thought I could jerry-rig it, I would,” she said. “But I’ll download the book and read it.”

“You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I want to,” she said, surprising both of them. “We’re visiting the site. I read Rumi’s poems in preparation.”