“The man you’re hunting, Jack Carlson, he’s one of my targets. I’ve got my hands full with an...unexpected situation.”
Nudging the door open the rest of the way, I traced my finger down the gaping neckline of the shirt I was wearing. Although he was on the phone, Merrick spotted me right away and shook his head, his eyes sharp with warning. When his dark gaze locked on me, I whispered, “If you’d stayed in that big bed of yours until I woke up, then I could’ve told you about the sexy dream I had. Maybe we would’ve even turned it into reality.” He glared at me as I popped open the first button.
Merrick covered the receiver so the person on the other end of the line couldn’t hear him. “You’re going to earn yourself another spanking, Audrey,” he growled. “Now, be a good little girl and behave.”
A shiver raced up my spine as I remembered the sting of his palm against my butt cheeks and how wet I’d gotten. I was giving serious thought to being naughty when he lifted his hand from the receiver and continued his conversation without looking away from me. “I’m going to send you the warehouse blueprints. Take him out for me, and I’ll owe you.”
I was captivated by the sensual gleam in his dark orbs as he scanned me from head to toe, his tongue sweeping out to wet his bottom lip. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was remembering what I tasted like. My nipples pebbled, pushing against the soft material covering them, and if I’d been wearing panties, they would have been drenched.
“It’ll make us square then.” Merrick paused for a moment, presumably to listen to what the other person was saying. “You’ll have the plans in thirty seconds. Send proof that it’s done for my employer. Just keep everyone out of the fucking picture so no one realizes it wasn’t me who did the job.”
His fingers tapped quickly against his keyboard as he murmured,
“Hooyah.”
It wasn’t until Merrick stood and started to prowl toward me that everything I’d just heard finally registered in my brain. Shaking off the sensual fog that wrapped around me whenever he was near, I held my hands up and took a step back. I could tell by how his hands clenched at his sides and a muscle jumped in his jaw that he didn’t like it, but Merrick gave in to my non-verbal request and abruptly stopped.
A million thoughts whirled around my head, and there were plenty of difficult questions I needed to ask. Things I couldn’t ignore just because I was falling head over heels for the man who’d stolen me from my best friend’s wedding. I believed Merrick when he said that I was safer with him, but I needed more than vague answers if I was really going to give him my heart along with my body.
To get the ball rolling on the conversation that could change the direction of my life, I decided to go with the easiest question first. “Hooyah is a military thing, right? Were you a soldier?”
“Not a soldier, a sailor.” He sighed when my brow wrinkled in confusion since I didn’t understand the difference. “When you’re in the Navy, no matter what your rating is, you’re a sailor.”
He hadn’t really given much away with his answer, and the lack of information frustrated me. “You can’t keep secrets from me forever. Not if you want whatever this thing is between us to work.”
“You’re my woman. That’s what’s between us.” He prowled toward me, and my heart raced at the predatory gleam in his dark eyes. When I tried to back up again, he wrapped his fingers around my wrist and yanked me against his chest. “And that’s never going to fucking change, Audrey.”
I slapped my free hand against his chest. “Then you’d better learn how to share stuff with me, big guy.”
“Dammit,” he groaned, dropping his forehead against mine as he sighed. “I hear what you’re saying, kitten. I’m used to keeping shit close to my chest, and I don’t like the idea of tainting you with the darkness in the secrets I keep. But I’ll share what I can if that’s what you need.”
I felt the weight of his offer deep in my soul, butterflies taking flight in my belly as I began to have hope that this talk would go better than I expected. “What did you do in the Navy?”
“I served on the teams as a SEAL, based out of Coronado.” He led me toward a black leather couch and pulled me onto his lap after he sat down, my butt on his thighs and my legs stretched out on the cushions. His fingers toyed with the ends of my hair as he went into more detail. “I would’ve been happy to serve in the Navy for twenty years and retire with my pension, but my team was betrayed after our last mission a few years ago. Our identities are always supposed to be protected, which is why we can’t share specific details with anyone outside the unit. When we were running a black op with top-secret clearance, the list of people who were in the loop was short as fuck. When our names were leaked to a terrorist organization out for revenge, only so many people could’ve given them the information. While the members of my team scrambled to get their families safe, I started hunting down the bastard who betrayed us.”