She could stare at the fire.... Oh, right, he’d built her a fire. She wanted to curl up in front of it and never move. And if she avoided him, that would be the safer option.
“Marshmallow?” He waved the plastic bag at her and she bit back a moan of pleasure. Sugary, sticky goodness. He’d guessed her weakness with stealth-like precision.
She eyed him suspiciously and nodded toward the fireplace. “I thought you were worried about fires.”
He smiled and shrugged. “A fireplace isn’t a candle. Let’s give it a shot. Worst-case scenario, the storm dumps a load of water down the chimney and leaves us sitting in total darkness again. I’ll take that chance if you will.”
For the next two hours, while the storm winds picked up and the rain came down hard and then harder, he shared stories about his stint in the military and asked questions about her life on the mainland. The more he talked, the more Dani could feel herself warming up in every way possible. She wanted to kick being cautious to the curb, just once. And she wanted to enjoy. Daeg Ross could guarantee that before the night was over.
“So you’re part of the mission once you’re on the ground, is that right?”
His warm gaze met hers as he dropped an arm around her shoulders. “Uh-huh. Though I can fly the helicopter as well as swim.”
“Handy,” she said solemnly. “You clearly gave up a lot to come back here to Discovery.”
“I’m only here on loan.” Laughter filled his voice. “Can’t see me being a teacher for that advance diving class, but hey, I always help out when called.”
He was dependable...reliable...
The fire was dying down now, but she didn’t want to move or risk losing the magic of his strong fingers stroking her skin.
“The Black Hawk we usually fly is a big bird,” he continued, “but she has to be. She carries two hundred gallons of fuel. Tag puts her up and we can cover more than four hundred nautical miles before we have to turn around and refuel. She’s strong enough to take the hoist that was the lifeblood of our ops, too. We don’t land the chopper on a job. Hell, you don’t even have to land to refuel—just put her over the stern of a Coast Guard ship and let the boys toss us a line.”
“You love it. What you do,” she explained when he looked at her.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t worry about the danger? Never mind,” she said quickly. “That’s a stupid question.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Sometimes I worry,” he admitted, “but most of the time, I’m acting on instinct. And that’s why I train. I do my thinking and worrying before I fly, but as soon as I’m out over the water, I just do. You want to get in, get out with whoever is in the water. That’s the only thing that matters.”
Okay, so she never went on instinct. He clearly led a very different life. And yet, no matter how adventurous or heroic it sounded, she sensed she was missing something. She laid her head on his chest and tucked her arms around his waist, feeling the tension in the muscles of his arms. She couldn’t fix what he wouldn’t share, but her instincts screamed to for her to hold on to him. To let him know that he didn’t have to be alone.
* * *
“YOU THINKING ABOUT your man down? The one in the Indian Ocean?” She whispered the question, turning her head to see his face. Her expression betrayed a fear that possibly he’d be lost one day. He wanted to assure her, but that was the thing about fighting for your country. Sometimes good men did go out and never came back.
“You do what you can, you do everything you can and then sometimes it turns out that’s just not enough.” He tried to shake the melancholy. Here they were, sitting in a decked-out romantic suite that she’d planned to share with someone else. Someone she’d believed was special, even if the man had clearly turned out to be the biggest jerk of them all. If Daeg had been the one with that invite, he realized, nothing would have kept him away.
She was still watching him. “It can’t all be happy endings. I’ve seen the stats.”
Of course she had.
“The thing is, Lars put me in the basket and I went up. He could have gone first.”
“You were injured.”
“Not that badly,” he said fiercely. “That should have been a routine evac and it wasn’t.”
She rested her hand on his leg and stroked gently. “I’ve seen the scar,” she said. “That was no scratch.”