Chapter 40
Every one of Derek’s instincts were ringing alarm bells.
Abby’s last sigh of contentment before her breath evened out into the lazy song of sleep told a whole story. Whatever her conscious mind thought, her subconscious had made a definite decision about him. One that apparently included sleepy, cozy thoughts.
Personally, his inner dial was set to run for the trees, except there were none to run to high over the Atlantic. No matter what she thought, it wasn’t a guy thing. There was no Y-chromosome gene that said screw ’em and get out. It was just the safest reality.
He wasn’t even one of those guys who claimed they just wanted to spare the women future pain.
Fighting as a D-boy ranked as one of the ultimate high-risk occupations, and ending up injured or dead had accounted for too many of his teammates.
Photos with a D-boy’s face were never published until after they died, because the crazies hated Delta operators even more than Navy SEALs.
Once revealed, they would be personally hunted.
But Derek always figured that if a woman fell in with a D-boy, and he made damn sure she knew what she was signing up for, then it was the woman’s choice.
No one could know the risks better than a person like Abby.
How many missions had she run with her helo filled with the dead and dying?
The downing of Extortion 17 and Turbine 33—two Chinooks that went down hard during the War in Afghanistan—would have both been before her time, but he’d wager she’d flown with plenty of people who’d lost friends among those fifty-six.
Henderson, Beale, and Gibson would definitely have lost friends among them.
All three had served at the highest levels to go beyond the front lines in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. The only explanation for the Three Colonels’ presence was the importance of this Miss Watson. Must be a hell of a lady.
He rested his cheek on Abby’s hair.
What the hell was he doing? The soft feel of it almost had him bolting upright. But…he didn’t.
What the hell had happened to him? Forty-eight hours ago he’d rolled onto her helo and gone forward to check in with the pilot. Now he was flying off to invade a friendly country. Yet that wasn’t the weird part of the scenario.
Derek had always favored a be-here-now mindset.
It served him well as a Delta Force operator.
Women had always been the ultimate iteration of the mindset.
Delta trained constantly, often on a thoroughly chaotic schedule just to keep them on their toes.
And being the nation’s top counterterrorism unit, they were on call-up at all times.
They often launched with no time for even a phone call.
His folks had gotten used to it. They knew that if they didn’t hear from the chaplain or his commanding officer, they should always assume that he was fine.
His friends were either in the field with him or had long since lost touch.
Connections with women? When a dinner date could easily be blown off for a month spent incommunicado while crawling through Burmese jungle?
That didn’t work so well. What did work was if his attachments didn’t… well, attach.
Somehow, slipping past all his guards, Abby had undone that in a single night. He’d wanted to stay with her. Wanted to watch her wake up and have sex before the new day started.
And he definitely shouldn’t have started trading stories with her. Because the more he found out, the more he wanted to know. She made him want to be with her. She made him…laugh.
Most women, truth be told, made him want to leave.
Not this one.