Page 35 of Rescue Me (Tempting SEALs 6.10)

“You live with a snake?” she wheezed.

“Well, she lives here.” He snickered, moved to the far wall, and pressed a lever.

And there it was, the biggest aquarium she had ever seen, ripples of water, foliage and flat stones displayed behind glass as Macey opened the door.

“Come on, Drack, time to go home.”

Drack. The snake. The huge snake. The twelve foot-long, at the very least, reptile slithered from beneath the chair with lazy ease and slid into the aquarium.

Once it was inside, Macey closed and locked the glass door before turning back to her with a grin.

“She watches the place while I’m gone.”

Emerson sat down slowly, staring at the well-lit aquarium, certain her heart had stopped and she had died.

“She lives here?”

“Right in there.” Macey nodded, chuckling as he pointed over his shoulder at the glass-enclosed cage.

“You should have left me with the terrorists,” she said. “It would have saved them the trouble of recapturing me after I leave here. Because no way, no how, not in a million years am I staying here with a snake.”

FIVE

EMERSON’S SLEEP WAS RESTLESS that morning, filled with visions of a naked Macey and an anaconda twined around his body rather than her. Flickering tongue and slitted eyes dared her to touch his gleaming, muscular body.

She shouldn’t have been bothered by it. She didn’t consider herself innocent; sometimes she considered herself too jaded, too cynical. She had learned years ago that defending her heart wasn’t easy. She wasn’t like her family. The Navy, preserving honor and tradition, had meant more to them than trying to understand the clumsy, too-emotional child they had found themselves stuck with.

Her parents had been overprotective, and each time she tried to protest the restrictions, her parents had pulled the guilt card. They were trying to protect her. They couldn’t work if she was constantly crying for their attention or arguing over their precautions. So Emerson had kept her mouth shut and endured. Until her graduation from high school, until she left on her own for college and began carving out her own life.

But she had learned that those lessons she had missed as a child held her back now. She succeeded in her career, enjoyed it and the company she worked with. But interaction, allowing herself to be vulnerable, defenseless enough to allow herself to belong anywhere or with anyone, had become impossible.

Now, lying on Macey’s big bed, that monster snake curled in the glass tank across the room, she admitted that she had never felt that loss more keenly than she did now.

She could have been curled against him, reveling in a fantasy come to life. Macey had starred in her most erotic dreams for nearly two years. But as she lay there, she realized he had somehow managed to situate himself into her heart.

If he were any other man that she desired, then she could have at least taken the physical pleasure he could give. If she hadn’t hungered for more than just his touch, if she didn’t crave more than just his kiss or the heated possession of his body.

Shaking her head, she forced herself from the bed, glancing at the bedside table and the clock set there. It said twelve, but if it was noon or midnight, she had no idea. There were no windows in the basement Macey called the cave, no way of telling if it were day or night.

She glanced at the glass cage and watched as the snake, Drack, Macey had called it, flicked its tongue out, her eyes slitted and displaying something akin to curiosity.

It figured Macey would own an anaconda. He couldn’t do anything the easy way, could he?

“Well, she’s awake,” he spoke from behind her, his voice lazy and amused as she straightened the bed.

“Is it noon or midnight?” Whichever it was, she needed coffee before she took someone’s head off.

“Noon. Sunny and in the high nineties. Weather guy said it might hit a hundred before evening. Be thankful we’re nice and cool down here rather than sweltering out there.”

“I like the heat.”

“Yeah, I like it hot too,” he assured her. “Want me to turn off the AC?”

Emerson shook her head. “Do whatever you want to as long as you have coffee.”

“I couldn’t live without it. I also have lunch on the stove and ready to eat. You can shower first if you like. Homemade veggie beef soup and bread. It’s one of my specialties.”

She straightened and stared back at him suspiciously.

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