Page 75 of Honk if You Love Real Men (Tempting SEALs 1)

“Well, I’m not either.” Win loaded the dishwasher and went back for Vincent’s plate and utensils. She looked down at him. “I’m a little particular about my surroundings. I like things just so. I enjoy being single and having no one to worry about but myself, no one I have to make compromises for. I enjoy hefty doses of retail therapy. I’m not particularly suited for parenthood.”

“You’ve done pretty well with Fifi,” he said.

“It’s Lulu, and I think she’s a little less work than a baby.”

Vincent nodded but didn’t say anything.

“How about you? Had you ever thought of having kids?”

He looked up at her, and his eyes were dark and a little sad. “You know, every once in a while I wonder what I’d be like as a dad, and how I’d take my son here to the cabin, and to baseball games and stuff, like my dad did with me. Then I realize I’m nearly forty and I’m not home enough to even subscribe to the newspaper. I don’t have a girlfriend, let alone a wife. So, no. Kids aren’t on my radar screen.”

Win flipped on the dishwasher, but nothing happened. She put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “What’s the deal?” She laughed. “Is there an appliance poltergeist here or something?”

Vincent chuckled and removed the front of the dishwasher, seeing that the touch panel had been disconnected. He plugged it back in. “Artie arranged to have all this stuff not work so that you’d be sure to come get me.”

Win laughed. “Boy was I an easy mark.”

“I was too.”

She smiled up at Vincent. “Remind me to call Artie tomorrow and cancel the car. He promised me he’d bring me home in three days if I didn’t like it here.”

Vincent reached for her, and Win looked down to see how her small hands were swallowed by his. She thought it was the perfect metaphor for this—Vincent MacBeth was swallowing her. She was being consumed, sucked into a place she’d never gone before.

“So do you like it here, Win?”

“To a surprising degree,” she said. “And you?”

“I’ve never liked it better,” he said.

Vincent made a fire. And soon, Win found herself naked again, lolling on the rug on the floor, Vincent’s tongue probing and licking between her spread legs as she soared out of her head with the pleasure. She was floating, swimming, drowning, crying out, and then his big body was around her and on her and inside her, and she knew that this kind of sex was very different from the sex they’d had earlier that day. It was sex with connection. It was sex with affection.

This kind of sex felt an awful lot like making love.

Chapter Four

Mac and Win fell into a rhythm that seemed to work for both of them. Most nights he stayed with her, taking his musing responsibilities quite seriously, making her come and shake and sigh and fall asleep in his arms, a big smile plastered across her pretty face. Most mornings, she got up at a preposterously early hour to write before the sun came up. They’d spend the rest of the day in episodic sex that damn near bordered on Zen at times, punctuated by highly productive spurts at the keyboard for Win, who now wore her “lucky jammy pants” all day, every day, and hours of work for Mac at his dad’s cabin.

Win often napped in the late afternoon. Mac would return to the house and wake her up by licking the inside of her thighs until she spread for him, eventually welcoming him back into her body.

Mac also talked on the phone with his superiors, who were kind enough to tell him he was headed to the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan as soon as he was medically cleared. And every day he took time to visit his dad at the assisted-living place in town. With a combination of speech and handwritten notes, they talked about Realtors and his dad’s physical therapy. One day, about two weeks after her arrival, they talked about Win Mackland.

“You like her?!” his dad scrawled the words on a blank page of his spiral notebook. Mac grinned and patted his dad’s arm and thought he was looking less tired today. Maybe the fact that Mac had mentioned a woman by name for the first time in thirty years had lightened the old man’s heart.

“I do like her, Dad,” he said. “She’s funny and beautiful and talented. You’d like her too. She writes movies.”

His father’s words came out garbled but Mac knew what he’d just requested—he’d asked him to bring Win for a visit. It sounded innocent enough, but he wasn’t comfortable with the idea. Somehow, bringing her here would be letting her all the way in. Maybe too close. It might give her ideas that there could be something between them once they left the mountain, which wasn’t likely.

Yes, she was sexy and great and fun. No, he wasn’t relishing the fact that their time was drawing to a close. But in the final analysis, he didn’t see how a woman in New York and a man who split his time between the nation’s capital and various points in hell could make it work.

“I’ll try, Dad,” he said.

“Good,” his father wrote. “That’s my boy.” Then Old Mac scrawled out on the paper, “Any movies I’ve ever seen?”

Mac sighed, shoved his hands in his jeans pockets, and nodded. He knew his dad was going to love this shit.

“She writes the Lethal Mercy movies, Dad. Max Mercy is her creation.”

The smile started in his dad’s eyes, then spread across his face, culminating in a crooked grin and a robust laugh.

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