Sandra Hill by Down, Dirty Read Free Book Online Page B

It’s your funeral, honey. “Here’s your first order. Come over here and give me a kiss.”
    She laughed. “Still trying to seduce me, lout?”
    “Oh, yeah!” He backed her up against the wall and nuzzled her neck.
    She tried to twist away.
    Which gave him better access to her neck. He gave the inner whorls of her ear a quick lick.
    She gasped.
    “I’ve missed you,” Zach said.
    “Liar.”
    “I wish.”
    “You wish, why?”
    “I don’t want to miss you. I have enough problems in my life right now without falling in love.”
    That one knocked her speechless.
    It knocked him speechless, too.
    Which gave him the opportunity to swoop in and lay his lips on hers. And, man, she was so sweet. Just like he remembered.
    With a moan, she opened her lips to his kiss, and he took advantage, deepening the kiss, tasting her.
    Suddenly, she went stiff as, uh, let’s say, his you-know-what and shoved him in the chest. “You tricked me,” she accused.
    “I did?”
    “Yea, you did,” she said, glancing down to see her nipples sticking out of her T-shirt like pointy sentinels. Quickly, she glanced up at him to see if he noticed her condition.
    He did. Hell, his you-know-what was also sticking out like a sentinel of a different sort.
    “You use your charms—tempting words and wicked fingers—to bestir wicked yearnings in me. But you will not succeed. I would fain stay here than return to my other life, and it has naught to do with you.”
    Zach liked the fact that she considered his words tempting and his fingers wicked. And he really liked those wicked yearnings he was stirring up. Good signs, both, in his opinion.
    As she opened the door, about to storm off, presumably back to the grinder, he called out to her, “Just for the record, Britta, I kissed you for one reason, and one reason only.”
    She paused, turning back to look at him. Her brown eyes were huge. Her full lips were rose red from his kisses.
    “Because I wanted to,” he told her. “And I’ll probably do it again. And again. And again. And—”
    She was gone, but his words echoed after her. Heaven was just a few smooth moves away, he promised himself. Just a few tastes of his well-honed seduction techniques, and she would be his. It was arrogant of him to be so self-confident, but he had years of success with women under his belt…so to speak.
    Just then, his cell phone rang. He flipped the lid on the second ring, still smiling about Britta, when he noted his home phone number on caller ID. His smile disappeared.
    “Pretty Boy, you will not believe what your kid did now. You know that stash of condoms you used to have in your bedside table?” It was Omar, who must have been back from the hospital, helping Madrene, bless the man.
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Let’s just say, a few of your neighbors are about to have heart attacks because of the water balloons pelting their windows.”
    Forget heaven. It was more likely that hell was just a few steps away.
    I know how to make you feel better, baby…
    It was the end of the day…well, end of the afternoon, though it felt like the longest day of Zach’s life.
    He’d already showered and changed, prepared to go home for the day. There would be another team of instructors taking over the evening run on the beach for the WEALS class.
    But then he noticed Britta standing on the grinder. All alone.
    Even though he’d advised the stubborn woman to ring out, over and over and over, he had to concede that this first day of exercise had to be even worse for Britta, who was not only in a strange place but in a different frickin’ time. Today’s evolutions hadn’t been as difficult as first day for first-phase BUD/S, but they’d been damn grueling. A lot of men broke under less.
    And much of the pain had been delivered by him, a regular Marquis de SEAL.
    The other women and some of the instructors had left for the chow hall across the Strand highway. He’d thought Britta went with them. Apparently not.
    She was