"Thank you." She squeezed his hand back. "I asked your father once why he never told you where I was. He said he'd learned the hard way about letting a person find their own path in the world."
And in a flash of intuition Daniel had only just begun to acquire from his own brief stint at parenting the boys, he understood. His father had been making amends. Making peace through Mary Elise.
Daniel stopped fighting with his father's shadow long enough to identify his own. "I'm glad he was there for you.">Restraints fell away. His. Hers. Until everything became theirs as they moved together in a frenzied pace of gasping breaths and demands.
His mouth closed over her breast, pulled, drew. The rock of waves beneath them increased the hot friction of skin against skin until she wasn't in control anymore. But then, neither was he.
His dog tags pressed, almost cut into her slick skin. Not that she could think or care, her mind focused totally on Daniel and completion.
Yet also not wanting that end and the afterward that would accompany it when they would have to face each other. Deal with the line they'd crossed that couldn't be retraced. Had she won or lost in demanding his surrender?
And then she couldn't think anymore, just felt the quickening of his pace, his heart, his heated breath against her flesh.
Her memory must have been faulty because no way could she have forgotten this. Knew she never would forget.
"Danny."
His name rode her scream of release. Her name swelled from his hoarse shout against her neck as he buried his face in her shoulder.
And echoing in her head with a resonation that soothed and excited and scared the hell out of her all at once, she heard…
Welcome home.
Daniel sprawled in the hammock, scanning the expanse of ocean in the fading light, his booted foot on the dirt nudging a lulling sway. Mary Elise lounged with her head at the opposite end, keeping watch over the other stretch of ocean. He drew lazy circles along her ankles and wondered when he'd developed a foot fetish. Of course, the woman did have pretty toes in those sandals.
Toes? He was in big trouble here.As much as he'd enjoyed the hell out of Mary Elise when they'd been younger, this woman flattened him. There was an intensity about her now that demanded more from him than before.
And he didn't just mean in bed.
"I asked you a question, Daniel."
Man she had that schoolteacher tone down pat, and damned if he could remember the question because he'd been busy drooling over her feet.
"Danny?" She scooped up a pinecone and pelted him on the chest, dead center on his survival vest. "I'm tired of talking about me. What have you been doing with your life since finishing the Academy?"
Talk would be good, keep his mind on task rather than on thoughts of taking her back into the cabin.
But once the sun set… He cleared his throat and mind. Talk. "I started out in a regular flying squadron—then became a test pilot with C-17s out at Edwards Air Force Base in California for a few years. Flew with all the newest cutting-edge gizmos on the planes. Figured out which ones worked, which ones didn't and why."
"You enjoyed that." Her soft affirmation blended with the rustling branches and gushing waves.
"Oh, yeah." Almost as much as he would enjoy peeling those copper-colored shorts from her body in another hour.
"Sounds dangerous."
"Sometimes." His thoughts skidded over to less tempting terrain. Would she run screaming from stories of his more-than-one emergency landing? Even a crash landing in the middle of the California desert?
"So you have connections."
Her question yanked him back to the present. "So you're a dog with a bone you're not letting go of."
She toed him in the side. "You're calling me a dog? First washed-out hag and now dog?"
He grabbed her foot in a firm hold before she could damage a kidney. "You have the prettiest feet."
She snorted.
Still, he couldn't unwrap his brain from the notion that his job bothered her, a problem he should have considered before. The stresses of military life had broken up plenty of marriages in the squadron.