She groaned, but still kept on chuckling. “You’re bad.”
“No way. I’m entering the priesthood tomorrow. Wanna join me for one last sin?”
Her laughter turned to giggles until she hiccupped. “Okay, okay, enough already.”
“I figure if I make you smile enough, you’ll sleep with me.”
She swatted his stomach. “You’re so sensitive it’s a wonder all those women divorced you.”
Ouch. That one stung a little. But he liked the way she didn’t pull punches. And no, he wasn’t known for his sensitivity. But he was known for his ability to make a person smile in the middle of a crisis.
He stopped at the Red Cross supply station, holding up two fingers for the worker dispensing boxed lunches, complete with the little half-pint cartons of orange juice. Liam took the two stacked meals and looked at the crumbled street around them. The chaos of a few days ago had shifted into a steady grind of tackling a cleanup that would easily take years.
There weren’t exactly a lot of places to hang out by the beach and eat, so he steered her back toward their cottages. One of the porches would be as good a place as any to park it for now.
“Rachel, to be honest, I don’t get the vibe from you that you’re looking for sensitive.”
“Hmmm… True enough, I guess. Comes from the way I was brought up. Around my house there was lots of love but no coddling. My mother was an ACO—animal control officer. Like those shows you see on the animal channel.”
“Was? What does she do now?” He fell into the ease of their conversation much as they fell into sync walking side by side.
“Nothing. She’s dead now.” She looked at him quickly, then away. “She was breaking up a dog-fighting ring. The owner didn’t take kindly to having thousands of dollars’ worth of assets seized.”
Holy crap. “He didn’t turn his dogs on—”
“No! Heavens, no.” She sighed heavily, rubbing her bare arms. “The man was the killer animal—not the canines. The bastard came after my mother with an aluminum baseball bat and cracked her skull. She never regained consciousness.”
She went silent with the kind of thick quiet that couldn’t be broken with a smart-ass comment, the kind of pause that was best to wait out while she put her thoughts together on what she wanted to say next.
“I got my love of animals from my mom, but I can’t do what she did.” Rachel kicked a chunk of concrete ahead with the toe of her boot. “All of those people who hurt animals? I would go after them with a baseball bat myself.”
The fire in her voice made it clear she would have done just that, for the dogs and for her mother. Rachel Torres was the kind of woman who brought everything to the table in life. No wonder he’d missed the fact she was a foot shorter than him. Her personality, her force of will, was off the charts.
“God, woman, I think I love you.”
She snorted, rolled her eyes, and pretty much did everything to punt him in the ego except laugh at the size of his Johnson. “Okay, that line was your funniest one yet.”
“You don’t think I’m serious.” He looked forward to proving it.
“Not for a minute.” She shook her head and the topknot went a little loose and lopsided. “You can’t really be trying that high school move to get in my pants? ‘I love you, baby, really, I do.’”
“Who says I was trying to get into your pants? Okay, wait. I did say that. Getting you to sleep with me is way high up on my list of personal goals, but I can wait. Something tells me you’ll be more than worth the extra time and effort.”
She clapped a hand to her chest with the melodrama of a seasoned soap star. “You’re willing to wait to have sex with me? I’m devastated. I may never recover from the crushing disappointment that I won’t get to have you as my naked love slave tonight after work. Because heaven knows, there’s nothing more romantic than an earthquake zone.”
He stopped in front of the cottage where her search and rescue team was bunking. “You know you’re only making me love you more when you get all feisty like that. Oh, and in case you were wondering, when I fall in love, I most definitely want to have sex. Love? Big-time aphrodisiac in my book.”
Love.
Just the word rocked the ground under his feet. This woman rocked the ground until his vision fogged. Or was that dust from the earthquake? Except he wasn’t coughing.
He struggled to rationalize the memory morphing in his dream fog. He reached to hold her, pulling her closer until her naked body merged with his.
Naked?
She was clothed in her SAR gear. He clung to the dream as tightly as he clung to her. Knowing he needed to stay with her. Keep her with him. Love her and protect her against a looming threat he couldn’t identify.
A shadow stretched from behind her, over her, encompassing her. Then the shadow split in two, moving closer until he could see his mother standing beside a man swinging a metal baseball bat straight at Rachel’s head—