“Jeez!” She jumped so far out of her skin she was surprised she didn’t land back in Key West. Oh, how she would love to be back in Key West. “How are you so big and so quiet at the same time? You move like a Prius!”
Mason didn’t answer. Instead, he shrugged two gnarly-looking machine guns off his shoulders and onto the back console. Then, from the pockets of his swim trunks, he pulled out a matte-black handgun and a knife with a rubber grip handle and a shiny silver blade.
Once a SEAL, always a SEAL, Chrissy supposed, staring goggle-eyed at the weapons.
She forgot all about that night two months ago and what had happened between her and Wolf. She forgot she’d convinced herself that no way, no how was she allowing herself to like him again. She forgot everything except for how comforting it was to touch him.
Slipping her hand into his, she swallowed a shaky breath of gratitude when he unhesitatingly curled his long, strong fingers around hers.
Chapter 6
11:06 a.m.
Every time I think I’m done with killing, Mason thought as he press-checked the chamber on his pistol, something happens to prove killing isn’t done with me.
“What the hell’s goin’ on?” Wolf demanded, grabbing his Colt M4 A1 rifle off the console with one hand and holding tight to Chrissy with the other.
They’d taken the weapons with them after bugging out of the navy. Not because the Colts were souvenirs. More because they were old friends, and because their commander had agreed to look the other way.
The 5.56 NATO round-firing motherfuckers had seen them through some serious shit.
Looks like they’ll hafta see us through some serious shit again, Mason thought tightly, reminded of the old SEAL axiom that said The only easy day is yesterday.
He’d thought that would stop being true once he was a civilian.
What a joke.
“Not a clue,” he told Wolf. “But I recognize an ambush when I see one headed my way.”
Wolf squeezed Chrissy’s fingers and, in a soothing voice, said, “Chrissy, we’ll need you to captain the catamaran.”
For a second, Mason wondered if Chrissy heard. She remained frozen in place, her mouth hanging open while she watched Wolf eject, check, and then slam home a full magazine. Just when Mason thought Wolf would have to repeat himself, she came out of her daze. Snapping her mouth shut, she squared her shoulders and dipped her chin in determination.
“Attagirl.” Wolf praised her when she took up the captain’s seat. Turning back to Mason, there was dark purpose in his eyes. “Alex said there’s three of them?”
Mason nodded. “The odds aren’t in our favor.”
“Yeah.” Wolf’s grin was intentionally wry. “What else is new?”
“Different day. Same old song and dance.”
“Mind if I take a look?” Wolf gestured to the field glasses hanging around Mason’s neck.
After handing over the binoculars, Mason watched Wolf scan the seas behind the boat. “Think I recognize that blue shirt,” Wolf muttered. “Pretty sure the guy on the left was at the hotel this mornin’.”
Foreboding tightened the skin across Mason’s shoulders. He snatched the binocs out of Wolf’s hands, and sure as shit. The blue shirt did look familiar, but at this distance that was only because there was an unmistakable yellow emblem over the breast pocket.
The cocksucker watching me at breakfast.
A spurt of relief hit his blood. So he hadn’t been imagining things. He supposed there was comfort in that. Cold comfort. But comfort all the same.
Hearing Alex sign off with the Coast Guard, he turned to find her so pale that her cheeks and chin matched the zinc oxide on her pert nose. But his chest swelled with pride to hear her voice was steady. “There’s a cutter forty minutes out.”
“Damn.” Wolf said aloud what Mason was thinking. Forty minutes was too long. Whatever this was, it would be over and done long before that. “They couldn’t get a chopper to us quicker?”
Alex shook her head. “They said the one on base in Key West is down for repairs. And the one out of Miami wouldn’t be able to reach us before the cutter.”
Wolf turned to Mason. “How long you think we got?”
Mason did some quick math in his head. “Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes before they’re close enough to fire.”
“What if we engaged the engines?” Alex asked, having found the Webster’s Dictionary–size owner’s manual for the catamaran sitting beneath a box of Uncle John’s rolling papers. She flipped through the pages. No doubt looking for some helpful bit of information about the boat or its capabilities.
Her insatiable mind always turned to a book when she was fishing for answers. Usually, Mason found the trait oddly endearing. In this case, he knew nothing would help them but good old-fashioned bull’s-eye shooting.
“We’re already runnin’ close to hull speed,” Wolf said after walking over to study the instruments on the console, “but every little bit helps.”
Chrissy didn’t hesitate to crank over the two Volvo diesel engines. They grumbled to well-tuned life and the boat jerked forward. Alex—a landlubber through and through—was thrown off-balance. She whooped like a longshoreman on payday, dropped the manual onto the decking, and stumbled into Mason’s arms.
For just a moment, he felt the warmth of her breath at the base of his neck, the softness of her breasts against his chest. Once again, there was movement behind his fly, and he decided it’d probably take a nuclear bomb to keep his body from reacting to her nearness.
“Sorry.” She quickly pushed away, and he immediately missed her sweet feminine heat. She used one finger to shove her glasses higher on the bridge of her nose, and that’s when he saw her hand was shaking.
She wasn’t as cucumber-cool as she’d have him believe. Knowing that made him want to pull her back into his arms and promise her everything would be all right.
The problem with that scenario—beyond the obvious, which was that once he had her in his arms, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to let her go—was he never made a promise he couldn’t keep.
On a scale of one to oh-my-fucking-god, the amount of trouble they were in sat right around shit-on-a-stick. The only thing that kept them from going all the way up the scale to oh-my-fucking-god was that he and Wolf had been trained by the best of the best and had spent the better part of their adult lives in places where angels feared to tread, doing what only devils dared to do.
“What do you think they want?” Alex’s eyes implored him to explain how the hell she’d found herself in a situation where madmen were gunning for her. Again.