When her arms curled around him, so did her feminine heat. Every cell in his body began to vibrate. “The smoke is making my eyes water,” she insisted.
A bald-faced lie, but he didn’t call her on it.
So brave. Too brave, he thought, hugging her tighter just to assure himself that, yes, she really was okay. Still living. Still breathing.
Still likely to make his life a misery.
“I swear to God, woman,” he told her gruffly, “you gotta be my penance for…something.”
“Penance? More like a prize.” Despite everything, despite what she’d just seen and done, despite the feel of her pulse pounding beneath her skin everywhere he touched her, there was mischief in her voice.
As much as he didn’t want to, as much as he’d have loved to stand there all day with her safe and secure in the circle of his arms, he had to step back. Number one, springing a boner while trying to comfort someone after a hair-raising firefight was something only assholes did, and he’d tried his whole life not to be an asshole. Number two, if she felt it, she’d never let him hear the end of it. And number three, there was still the hotel prick to deal with.
Pointing a finger at her nose, he told her in his sternest of voices, “Next time you involve yourself in a gun battle, I swear to Christ I’ll tan your ass.”
“You promise?” She batted her lashes.
He was saved from sputtering like a fool when Wolf told him, “If you want some answers from that bag of dicks, we better get a move on. The current is takin’ him fast.”
“When you get back, we need to finish that conversation we started before all hell broke loose,” Alex told him, her tone definitive.
Mason felt a scowl darken his features when he stepped into the dinghy. “Told you we were done with that.”
“And I told you you’re out of your chowder-eating mind if you think that’s true.”
“Not all Bostonians like chowder,” he grumbled, apropos of nothing. It was the best he could come up with since his brain was busy trying to devise a way for him to never, ever, ever have to repeat what he’d told her earlier.
She batted his assertion away. “Lies. The next thing you know, you’ll be telling me not all Bostonians like Dunkin’ Donuts.”
He grabbed his chest as if she’d shot him. “Shut your mouth, woman! Disparaging Dunkies is fighting words.”
She blinked myopically. “Did you just make a joke?”
“It’s the adrenaline,” he deadpanned. “Or maybe wishful thinking on your part.”
Her eyes roamed over his dripping form. It might as well have been her fingers, the way his muscles quivered. When her gaze returned to his face, she gave him an arch look. “I’ll have a towel waiting for you when you get back. Or we could always use friction to get you dry.”
Aaannnddd it happened again. She’d tied his tongue into one hundred knots.
Knowing he didn’t have (a) the wherewithal or the vocabulary to outwit her after something like that, or (b) the time, he simply turned his eyes skyward and prayed for salvation. Then he settled himself into the dinghy without looking back at her.
He and Wolf were headed toward the speedboat’s lone survivor, salt water spraying up behind the outboard engine, when Wolf gave him a considering look. “You okay, man?”
For a moment, Mason thought Wolf was asking if he was okay with what’d happened during the gunfight. Which was weird. In all the battles they’d fought, Wolf had never checked in on Mason’s emotional state. In fact, one of the ways they’d learned to handle their roles as death-dealers was to go on as if nothing had happened.
The human brain has an amazing capacity for compartmentalization.
Then Wolf’s considering look melted into a smirk, and pointing to his own face, he added, “You got a little sweat on your upper lip there.”
Mason pretended he didn’t hear and focused on piloting the dinghy around a larger-than-usual wave.
“I said”—Wolf lifted his voice above the sound of the engine and the sea shushing against the rubber hull—“you got a—”
“I’m fine,” Mason muttered. Which wasn’t exactly true, because he was still in the process of cooling the fire in his blood caused by that titillating little exchange with Alex. “It’s hot out here.”
“Right.” Wolf snorted. “It’s the weather that’s got you steaming, not the fact that it’s takin’ everything you have not to haul Alex’s ashes.”
Mason gave Wolf his best scowl. “Haven’t we been through these waters before? Just this morning, in fact? Alex is not for me. And her pressing the issue is gonna drive me to drink!”
“Because it’s every man’s worst nightmare to be chased down by a horny virgin hell-bent on his manhood,” Wolf scoffed.
Mason studied Wolf’s face and tried to decide if his fist would look better firmly planted in the man’s left eye socket or his right one. “Every time I reject her, I hurt her,” he insisted, rubbing at the deep ache in his belly. “I hate hurting her.”
“So stop rejectin’ her,” Wolf said, as if it were that easy. “And before you try to explain again in that emotionally crippled way of yours why—”
“I’m not emotionally crippled!” Now Mason was tempted to plant his fists in both of Wolf’s eyes.
“Please.” Wolf rolled his eyes. “I’ve never seen anyone more tainted by the dark stain of D-I-V-O-R-C-E than you. You’ve spent the last five years doin’ your best to bury all your emotions in a grave so deep I bet you can’t even see the bottom of it. And if you want my opinion—”
“I don’t,” Mason assured him.
“I think it’d do you a whole hell of a lot of good”—Wolf pressed on as if Mason hadn’t spoken—“to let Alex have her way. It’d make her happy. It’d make you happy. You deserve a little happiness, man. We all do, and—” Wolf jerked his chin. “Better slow down or you’ll run over our friend there.”
“Fuck!” Mason pulled back on the throttle and yanked the tiller hard right. He narrowly avoided plowing into the human buoy bobbing in the middle of the sea.
“Take over,” he told Wolf. “I wanna be the one to haul his sorry ass out of the drink. And if I happen to accidentally punch him in the face while doing it…” He shrugged. “Oops-a-daisy.”
One corner of Wolf’s mouth twitched. “Did you just say ‘oops-a-daisy’?”
Mason shot him a burning glare. “Ya-huh. And I’m owning it.”