A SEAL's Surrender

3

“DO YOU DO THESE THINGS just to keep me in practice?” Cade asked, grinning at his favorite perpetual-victim, her silky brown hair a dark curtain over a face he knew would be sliding into a sheepish smile.

Eden Gillespie always looked sheepish when she had to be rescued. Something, if he’d ever considered it, he’d have figured she’d have outgrown. He eyed her legs, smooth and bare all the way to the top of her hot-pink panties thanks to the way her dress was hanging. Her arms were wrapped around the tree limb and one foot dangled while the other was caught in a snarl of branches and leaves. Clearly he’d have figured wrong.

“Consider it my welcome-home present,” she muttered, blowing a puff of air so her hair cleared enough that he could see the resigned amusement in her big brown eyes.

That was one of the things he’d always admired about Eden. She could laugh at herself. So many of the girls he’d grown up with, and the women he’d dated for that matter, took themselves and life way too seriously. They were so worried about controlling the impression they made, they didn’t let themselves just live.

Without thinking, his eyes shifted back to Eden’s legs. Long and sleek, they wrapped around that big, hard branch. He frowned at the scrapes and faint reddening of her tender flesh, for the first time ever tempted to kiss away a boo-boo. All the way up to her panties. Practical cotton, he noted, his mouth going dry, but in a fun, sassy color. Since she was facedown on the branch, the curve of her butt was perfectly highlighted in that pink fabric. His fingers itched to touch, to see if her curves were as firm as they looked.

Whoa. Not cool, he lectured himself. Lusting after the sweet girl next door was walking an awfully close line to settling down. Nothing wrong with it in the big picture, but in his personal rulebook? Totally out of the question.

“Want some help?” he offered, wondering how many times now he’d had to hurry these rescues along because of a hit of inappropriate lust. After all, he was pretty sure he’d been hauling her out of scrapes since his pre-teen days. But it’d only been since

that

 rescue, when he’d seen her naked, that the sight of her made him instantly horny. He sighed with relief. There, now he was only a standard guy, not a weird pervert with a superhero complex.

“I can do it,” she muttered, tugging her foot to try and loosen it from the branch. Her shoe, a cute little black strappy thing, was good and stuck. She sighed and slanted him a rueful look. “But maybe you could just unhook my shoe for me?”

Cade didn’t bother arguing. He reached up and pulled the twigs from her foot. Then he wrapped both hands around her surprisingly narrow waist, easily lifting her from the overhead branch. It was like doing a military press, he thought with a grin as he lowered her body toward the ground.

Except he hadn’t counted on her shocked reaction. She gasped, struggling a little as if wanting him to let her go. Since he wasn’t about to drop her three feet to the ground, he shifted. Her breasts skimmed his chin. He froze. Other than to gasp and grab on to his shoulders for support, so did she.

Cade had felt the same energy pounding through his body when he held a live grenade. Danger, excitement, all senses on full alert.

Wrong, his brain screamed. Eden was the sweet girl next door. The same girl he’d been rescuing for years. She wasn’t supposed to inspire this degree of lust. The kind that made him want to take her, right there against the tree. He didn’t care that they’d only said a dozen or so words to each other in years, or that her friend was over there, face pressed against the window of the wrecked car, watching.

It was neither of those things that had Cade ignoring the hot need in his belly, or his body’s demand that he taste her, touch her.

It was the flutter of Eden’s lashes. The way her pulse trembled in her throat. The tiny trembles of her fingers where they dug into his shoulders. He, and his wicked desires, were out of her league.

So, nope. Not giving in to the need.

But that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy himself up to that limit line.

Grinning, he slowly brought his arms down. He didn’t let go of his hold on her waist, so her body had to slide, in one long glorious trip, down his.

His eyes never left hers. There was something heady, intense, in seeing the heat flare, then her gaze blur with passion.

As soon as her feet hit the ground, she pushed away like he was fire, too hot for her to touch.

“Thanks again,” she said as she stepped backward. Her foot caught on a root and would have sent her sprawling if he hadn’t grabbed her.

“Babe, I live for these moments,” he told her in a husky tone, only half-teasing. Because he really did. Eden always made coming home fun.

“Me, too.”

The look on her face, a mix of horror and chagrin, said loud and clear that she had, as usual, spoke without thinking.

He should let her off the hook.

It wasn’t like he was going to give in to the heat between them. Ever since his first romp at the tender age of fourteen, he’d made it a point to stay relationship-free and keep his sexual encounters easygoing and simple. There was nothing simple or easygoing about Eden.

Except looking at her. That was as simple and easy as breathing. And talking to her. He’d never had any hesitation there. Listening to her laugh was pure pleasure.

Hell.

“C’mon, I’ll give you a ride home,” he said, his words a little gruffer than he’d intended.

“I can get home.”

Cade didn’t bother arguing. He just pointed to her fender, wrapped around that tree as intimately as he’d like to see Eden wrapped around his body.

“Oh. Yeah.” She sighed, looking from the fender to her friend, then to Cade. Her gaze shifted again to the cat, then his car. Finally she shrugged. “Thanks. We appreciate the ride.”

As soon as both women—and the feline—were settled in his borrowed BMW—the quiet redhead in the back and Eden and her rescue cat in the front—he started the car.

“So, you still seeing Kenny Phillips?” he asked, hoping like hell she’d say yes.

“Not anymore.” She did that cute little nose-wrinkling thing then shook her head. “He never quite forgave me for breaking his foot.”

It’d been Kenny’s screams that’d caught Cade’s attention a couple years back, leading him to rescue a stunning, naked Eden. Cade was still baffled by that situation, since Kenny was nothing if not a missionary kind of guy. How the hell did a guy break his foot having standard, missionary sex? You’d think it’d take a swing, a tube of body lube and a few leather straps to reach that level of risk.

“I don’t think you lost out on much. Dating is a full-contact sport,” he told her with a laugh.

Unlike a lot of women, Eden didn’t get that speculative,

how interested are you in playing the game with me

 look in her eyes. Instead she just shrugged.

“I guess Kenny decided to sign up for a lower-risk league, then,” she informed him as she rolled her ankle first one way, then the other. “And he took most of his teammates in town with him.”

“Wimps,” Cade muttered. What kind of jerks blamed the girl for their own incompetence? Sure, Eden was a little accident prone. But she was sweet and sexy in that girl-next-door way. She was fun and easy to talk to, and unlike so many others around town, she didn’t play the user game. A guy would be lucky to date her. If he was interested in dating, that is.

“So you’re saying you wouldn’t be scared?” Eden challenged. Her chin was high and her tone light, but he could see the vulnerability in those gold-flecked brown eyes.

“Sweetie, unless a woman straps an explosive device around her waist and insists we go dancing, there’s not much that will scare me.” Cade laughed.

“So you’d date a girl who had a reputation for being a little clumsy?” she asked quietly.

Well, how the hell had he missed that trap? Cade frowned, even as a gurgle of horrified laughter came from the backseat.

“I don’t base my dating choices on things like that,” he sidestepped. Then, to further cement the

keep out

 message, he added, “Really, I don’t see myself dating at all in the next little while. Between the old man in ICU and my grandmother needing me, I figure I’ll be pretty tied up until I return to base. Gramma said something about some deals my father was trying to wind up when he had the heart attack, something with important timing. I’m probably going to have to take care of that, too.”

Ah, silence.

He had no idea what’d caused it, but he’d take the stilted quiet over tap dancing around a verbal trap any day. Other than the uncomfortable shifting her friend did in the backseat, nobody made a sound. Even the cat quit purring.

Still, by the time they reached Eden’s place, less than a mile up the road, tension tight enough to bounce coins off rippled across the back of Cade’s neck. He drove down the long, circular driveway, his discomfort slowly fading as he noted how rundown the Gillespie place had become. The immediate yard around the huge house was still tidy, but beyond the fence, weeds were brushing the trees. Even the once vivid white paint on the shutters was graying, chipped and curling.

One of the outbuildings looked like the roof had collapsed and someone—probably Eden—had built a crude wire fence to pen up a goat and what looked like a horse-size dog.

“Thanks for the rescue. And the ride,” Eden said when he stopped in front of wide bank of steps leading to her front door.

“Anytime,” he told her. “Just try to keep your accidents scheduled for my visits home. I hate to think of you hanging from a tree and only wimps here to save you.”

She laughed, the pained discomfort chased away by amusement. “Would you believe that I usually manage to rescue myself when you’re not around?”

Cade considered that for a second.

Then he shook his head. “Nope.”

Her cheeks warm with a pretty pink wash, Eden gave him a sweet look from under her lashes. The kind of look that should make him feel protective. Or manly, like a superhero.

Not horny like a sailor on leave.

Time to go, he decided.

Leaning one elbow on the seat, he angled himself around.

“It was nice to meet you,” he told the quiet redhead in the backseat. She gave him a wide-eyed, about-to-hyper-ventilate look.

Because he was a SEAL, trained in multiple ways to kill men and defend his country? Or because of his high school rep and near rock-star dating status?

Then the redhead blushed.

Yep. Rock star.

“Cade?”

He looked at Eden with a friendly smile, ready to politely brush off her thanks.

She was staring at the cat on her lap, as if one glance away would send it leaping out the window.

“Did you maybe want to get drinks with me? Sort of a welcome-home and thank-you combination?”

Drinks? Unless that meant standing in line together to each buy their own bottle of water at the corner market, drinks were a really bad idea. Drinks were code word for tiptoeing into dating territory. A precursor to, part of or windup from something more intimate.

A huge mistake.

It wasn’t that Cade didn’t date. And he was nowhere near being a monk. But here in his hometown, the rules were different. Here, the women tended to see him as Robert Sullivan’s son. The guy who’d get the key to the Sullivan coffers. A great catch.

Not that women didn’t have an agenda outside of Ocean Point, as well, but usually that had more to do with being able to say they’d been with a SEAL. Being a notch on a woman’s lipstick case, he was okay with. Being the target of her engagement ring search, he wasn’t.

Still, this was Eden. He’d need to let her down easy.

“Sure,” he heard himself say instead. “A drink sounds good.”

His momentary chagrin at giving in to the urge fled quickly at the look of surprise on Eden’s face and the delighted shock on her friend’s.

She’d expected him to say no. To be a wimp.

Her friend had figured the same, hopefully without the wimp part. He knew his rep, and the status-obsessed focus of a lot of the country club set that Eden ran with. The Sullivans were big shit around town. The Gillespies barely danced around the fringe. From the time he was fourteen, he’d heard hundreds of lectures on dating, all focused on the girl’s last name, never her first. God, he hated that. That, and the way everyone always gossiped, judging each other’s worth by who they dated or the limit on their credit card. Hell, before he hit the end of the driveway, he’d bet her friend would have texted twenty of her best friends to tell them the news.

Within ten minutes, forty more people would probably have texted her back with varying degrees of shock, denial and outright horror at the idea of a Sullivan lowering himself to date a woman like Eden. One who lived in a rundown house, whose sexual encounters resulted in broken bones and who wrecked cars to rescue cats.

Who didn’t date for status.

Who liked him for him, not because of his last name.

Who made him feel like the hero she always teased him about being.

Any intention Cade had of retracting his agreement disappeared. He was going out for that drink, and he was going to make damned sure that Eden—and anyone else who might be curious—knew he was glad to spend time with her.

“Tomorrow night?” she asked, her casual tone at odds with the tension in her eyes.

“Six okay?”

She gave a tiny frown, her arched brows drawing together for a second before she nodded. Then she leaned down to grab her purse, gathered the cat closer and reached for the door handle.

“Let me,” Cade offered. Giving in to rare mischief, he grinned, then leaned across Eden’s body to open the passenger door from the inside. He let his forearm brush, ever-so-lightly, across her breasts. She gave a tiny gasp, her doe-eyes rounding with shock. Her scent wrapped around him, earthy and sweet at the same time, like honeysuckle at midnight.

He forgot about the woman in the backseat, ignored the purring mass of fur draped across Eden’s lap. All he cared about was the woman staring up at him like he’d hung the moon, lit the stars and made the sun rise when he whistled.

Without thinking, he leaned down and brushed a whisper-soft kiss over her shocked mouth.

“Thanks for the welcome home,” he murmured, immediately leaning back. He kept his expression light. Amused even. As if his own body hadn’t just gone into overdrive at the taste of her lips under his.

“Anytime,” she murmured, draping the huge cat over her shoulder and sliding from the car as if in a fog. He waited until her friend was out, too, then shifted the car into gear.

A quick glance in the rearview mirror confirmed that both women were still staring.

Cade grinned.

Maybe the next couple of weeks wouldn’t be so bad after all.

THERE WAS NO WAY in hell he was sticking around another couple of weeks. Cade clenched his teeth to keep the fury inside, both because spewing it would upset his grandmother, and more to the point, because he refused to let his father know he was pushing buttons.

“You need to step it up, put in more effort,” his father lectured from the crisp white sheets of his hospital bed. A chorus of beeps and buzzes accompanied his rant, medical equipment proving that a man could have a heart and still be a heartless bastard. “You’ve been doing the same thing for years now. When are you going to get a promotion? What’s it take to get a raise in that military you serve? Don’t my tax dollars pay enough for you to make a little more? Call up your ambition, boy. Push harder.”

It didn’t stop there. Cade made a show of inspecting his boots while Robert droned on.

And on and on.

And on.

It was like he was trying to spew out every demand, every put-down he could as fast as possible because he knew the drugs and his body’s need to heal would soon take over and knock him back out.

Cade wished they’d hurry the hell up.

At first, he’d listened in sympathy to the slurred words dragged down by drugs and age. He’d stared at the man lying in the hospital bed, trying to reconcile the sagging gray skin and fragile appearance with his no-bullshit father. Seeing him tapped every which way into wires and machines, for the first time in his life, Cade had felt sympathy for his old man.

Once Robert had awakened, that sympathy had lasted about five minutes.

Now, an hour later, Cade was once again asking himself if his mother, rest her soul, had bumped her head a few times before agreeing to marry such a tyrant. He’d served under some hard-asses in his years, had worked with egomaniacs and assholes. But none held a candle to his old man.

“You hear me, boy?”

“I’m not the one under medical observation,” Cade said laconically, rocking back on the heels of his boots and giving his father the easygoing smile he knew irritated him the most. “My hearing is just fine.”

The older man’s eyes, just as green as Cade’s though blurred now, narrowed.

“I wasn’t sure. You’re always being shot at, or surrounded with bombs going off all around you. You might have lost a few brain cells.”

Cade’s smile slipped a little. Nope. All he’d lost was one of his best friends. But Robert Sullivan wouldn’t give a damn about that.

Hell, the loss of his wife had only slowed him down a few weeks. If he missed her now, Sullivan-the-elder never showed it. Cade wished, for the first time in his life, that he had a little of that distance, that he could tap into that emotional void and just not care. Not feel the pain. Not carry the almost too heavy to bear weight of responsibility.

Gut clenched, he stared at the tubes pumping health into his father, focusing on the slender plastic until he could slam the lid shut on the gnawing pain.

“I’ve got to say, I find it difficult to believe you haven’t made Commander yet. You clearly aren’t applying yourself. You want me to die here, knowing my son quit for nothing? That he walked away from his familial obligations to play soldier and then didn’t get anywhere?”

Cade’s fists clenched and his blood boiled. He took a step forward, not caring that he was teetering on the edge of an explosion.

“Robert.”

That’s all it took. One word from Catherine to settle her son against his well-fluffed pillow. And, more likely her goal, to make her grandson stand down without challenging his father’s obnoxious remarks.

Cade hated that the old man got to him. He didn’t have a damned thing to prove to anyone. Still, he couldn’t shake the tension knotting his shoulders or the fury coiling in the pit of his belly. Why had he come back? Why wouldn’t his grandmother let him fly her to San Diego once in a while, or at least listen to his oft-repeated advice that she give up on that crazy illusion that they were a cozy family.

He needed to get out of here. And, if he was smart, he should go call Eden and cancel drinks. A night of thinking had provided plenty of reasons why it was a really bad idea. Mostly because all the images he’d had involved stripping those pink cotton panties off her.

“I’ll be back to pick you up in a couple hours,” he told his grandmother.

Catherine patted his hand with her own gnarled one, her expression peaceful, even with the tiny line of worry creasing her brow when she gazed at her only child. It must be a mother thing, Cade thought, shaking his head. That ability to see something positive where nobody else could.

“I have a job you need to do,” his father called out when Cade’s hand closed on the doorknob. “I loaned one of the neighbors some money with their property as collateral. Turns out they took out a loan with the bank, too. If the bank decides to foreclose, I’ve got no leverage to get my money back. So I need you to collect before that happens.”

Since there were only two tracts of land close enough to be considered neighbors, and one belonged to Cade’s grandmother, that meant Robert was talking about the Gillespie property.

Cade was surprised his fist didn’t crush the knob.

With the same caution, vigilance and care he’d take in facing an armed enemy, Cade slowly turned around.

“I’m not available for side jobs,” he said, keeping his tone light, his expression neutral. Both because he didn’t want to upset his grandmother, and yes, because he knew it’d piss his father off even more. Petty, he acknowledged, given that the guy was in a hospital bed. But he couldn’t help himself.

“You need to do this one. If you don’t the bank is going to take the property. I’ll lose my money, and the Gillespie girl will lose her home.”

“Eden borrowed money from you?”

“Eleanor did.”

Robert didn’t meet the shocked looks of his son or his mother. Looking frail again, he glared at the tubes in his hand for a second, then muttered, “She kept trying to sell me those ceramic things she makes. Erotic art, she calls it. I finally gave her the loan against the house just to get her to go away. Now she’s off, who knows where, and not paying her debts. Figures.”

Cade should be amused that someone could knock his father down a peg or two. But he was too busy worrying about the sweet girl next door.

“Eden has no idea?”

“As flaky as Eleanor is, I doubt it. I was on my way to tell Eden she was going to have to make good on her mother’s debt when all of this …” he waved his tube-tapped hand toward the machines “… happened. I’ve been a little preoccupied since.”

“You’d take the home out from under a girl you watched grow up. A neighbor? She made you cookies,” Cade said, gesturing to the tray on the sideboard with a bright red bow and get-well card.

“The bank’s the one that would be taking it out from under her. I just want to collect on what’s due to me,” Robert argued, shifting to his elbow to glare at his son. “Eleanor shouldn’t have taken that loan if she couldn’t pay it off. That’s on her, not me.”

“You’re the one trying to kick Eden out of her home.”

“The bank’s going to kick her out. I’m the one stuck in this damned hospital bed peeing into a hose while I get screwed out of ten grand.”

Maybe there was justice in the world.

It was something Cade had believed, once. Just like he’d believed he could make a difference. Now, he didn’t have much faith in anything.

He couldn’t stop his father fr