Levi eyed him. “You gonna sulk all night? Or are you just striving for perfection as the strong, silent type?”
“Don’t push your luck.” He wasn’t in the mood for Levi’s brand of shit.
“Okay.” Levi bumped his shoulder companionably. “Then, think less loudly about your AWOL girl, because your mental whining is louder than the skeeters they’re growing down here, and it’s clear Mr. Fantasy Fodder misses Maddie.”
“I’m never living that down, am I?”
“In about a century.” Levi sounded way too cheerful. “She took photos of your ass and shared them with ten thousand women. You’re an internet sensation.”
“I’m imagining introducing your head to my fists. Or the ground,” he growled.
Levi, being Levi, didn’t back off. Nope. He just wiggled his hips suggestively and kept right on talking as they sprinted toward the extract point. “You’re gonna have to watch out for the paparazzi next time you’re on the mainland. You’ll have women stuffing dollar bills in your wetsuit.”
“Maddie’s better off without me,” he said, because he wasn’t touching Levi’s vision of him as a male stripper.
His teammate blended into the shadows, dropping low as the Black Hawk started to drop overhead. “You bet. Santiago’s neutralized and she’s back on her home turf. She doesn’t need a bodyguard. If I was the kind of guy who had feelings, though, I’d tell you I was worried about you.”
Okay. Despite knowing that he should let her go because she deserved far better than his sorry ass, that didn’t really make him feel any better. Bottom line? He couldn’t stand the idea of losing her for good. He wanted to be with Maddie in ways that had nothing to do with standing guard from the shadows and everything to do with that relationship he didn’t know how to have.
“I don’t know how to do this.”
“Sure you do. You wait until the chopper is about two feet above the ground and then you run like hell, hoping the Marcos brothers haven’t hired a team of snipers to shoot at your fine ass.”
“Relationships,” he gritted out, surveying their surroundings. Given the lack of welcoming gunfire, he doubted the lack of movement inside the compound was a decoy. “I’m completely out of practice at having one. Hell, I’m reading articles from girlie magazines.”
“Actually, you’re following the directions.” From the gleeful expression on Levi’s face, the other SEAL was enjoying this way too much.
“Screw you,” he said, without heat, because Levi was right. It was kind of desperate, but this was Maddie... Apparently, he’d do whatever it took to win her. He hated the idea that he’d lost her.
“If we’re getting our grade school on, I need to tell you that I think Maddie likes you. I should probably write it down and pass the note to you in study hall, but I’ll give you the heads-up now since we’re going to be busy extracting later on.”
“She doesn’t like me.” Funny how that hurt. “She likes Mr. Fantasy Fodder, aka the guy pretending to be her perfect boyfriend based on a bunch of stupid magazine articles.”
“Wake-up call.” Levi forged ahead. “What did you do as the perfect boyfriend?”
“It’s not as though we had a real relationship.”
Levi grinned. “I’ll try it a different way. Did Mr. Fantasy Fodder do anything that Mason Black wouldn’t have done?”
Mason opened his mouth. Closed it. Because the answer, honestly, was no.
“I’m betting not,” Levi said quietly. “Which means it wasn’t a lie, was it? You’re still the same guy you were. She just had your job description wrong.”
Damn it. Levi actually had a point. Just because he’d never done well in the relationship department didn’t mean that what he and Maddie had had was any less real. It just wasn’t something he’d been ready to slap a label on.
“SEALs and relationships don’t mix.” He and Bethany had learned that together.
“It’s not easy.” The carefree smile vanished from Levi’s face. “It’s tough as hell, actually. We both know that, but you’ve got family stateside. They’re okay with waiting for you to come back, right? Maybe they’d rather have you full-time, but they understand you’ve got a job to do and that you’re gonna be back when and if you can.”
Yeah. He did. The emails always piled up in his account when he was on a mission, but they understood that he couldn’t communicate while he ran an op. But all those emails were just words, while he missed the little moments. An inbox full of photos couldn’t really make up for all of that.