Twelve military heroes. Twelve indomitable heroines. One UNIFORMLY HOT! miniseries.

Mills & Boon® Blaze®’s bestselling miniseries continues with another year of irresistible soldiers from all branches of the armed forces.

Don’t miss

THE RISK-TAKER

by Kira Sinclair

A SEAL’S SEDUCTION

by Tawny Weber

A SEAL’S SURRENDER

by Tawny Weber

THE RULE-BREAKER

by Rhonda Nelson

UNIFORMLY HOT!

The Few. The Proud. The Sexy as Hell.

Dear Reader,

I had such a wonderful time writing A SEAL’s Surrender, in part because I am the Queen of Goals, and the Soul of Stubborn. So I can relate to Cade Sullivan in a major way, because he is a man who believes in goals, too, and stubbornly refuses to give up on one—even after he’s achieved it. But it was great, too, to explore Eden’s challenges as someone who wants so much, and deserves so much—but isn’t willing to actually ask for it. Oh, yeah, I can relate to that. Can you? I hope you’ll drop me a note after you read the story and let me know.

And, as always, I love writing about the special fun that pets are. In this case, Jojo the goat, Mooch the mutt and Alfie the Yorkie—who is actually based on my mom’s darling Yorkie. If you’d like to see Alfie, drop by my website at www.TawnyWeber.com and see his picture on A SEAL’s Surrender’s page. And while you’re there, I’d love it if you’d peek around, check out the recipes and contests. Or drop by Facebook and visit me at www.facebook.com/TawnyWeber.RomanceAuthor.

Enjoy!

Tawny Weber

About the Author

TAWNY WEBER has been writing sassy, sexy romances for Mills & Boon® Blaze® since her first book hit the shelves in 2008. A fan of Johnny Depp, cupcakes and color coordinating, Tawny spends a lot of her time shopping for cute shoes, scrapbooking and hanging out on Facebook. Come by and visit her on the web at www.tawnyweber.com.

A SEAL’s
Surrender
Tawny Weber

www.millsandboon.co.uk

With loving thanks to Anna Sugden,

simply for being awesome.

1

I WISH FOR A GUY who worships my body, is great at sex and makes me feel like a goddess. Someone who loves me, for me. Inside and out. And is really, really good at it.

And if he could be six foot two, with sandy blond hair and dreamy green eyes, a body that made nymphomaniacs weep and a smile that melted her panties, that’d be cool, too.

Eyes scrunched tight, Eden Gillespie let that visual play out for just a second. Then, with a deep breath, she opened her eyes wide and blew.

The flame went out. Thankfully. Because she’d blown so hard, the candle toppled from its perch on the chocolate cupcake. Good wishes did that, she told herself as she scooped up a fingerful of frosting and grinned at the woman sitting across from her.

“So? What’d you wish for?” Bev Lang leaned forward, her wild red curls bouncing like springs around her cheerful face.

“It’s a secret. If I tell, it won’t come true,” Eden said primly before bursting into laughter. Yeah. Like she was gonna lose out on her body-worshipping lover because she put the word out that she was waiting? Still, she pulled her cupcake closer and, since it was filled with molten chocolate, used a fork to enjoy the next bite … and fill her mouth so she didn’t blurt anything out.

Because you never knew with wishes.

“I can’t believe you won’t tell me. How long have we been friends?” Bev asked, putting on her best ‘affronted’ expression. It wasn’t very effective since she still looked like she was waiting for a white apron and her boyfriend, Raggedy Andy.

“Eleven years?” Eden guessed, counting back to the first day of high school. That’d been the year her dad had died, leaving her mom too broke to keep paying the exorbitant tuition to the private school Eden had always attended. Secretly terrified, Eden had put on a brave face in hopes that the public school kids would accept her more than the private school snobs had. Bev had been the new girl in town, unaware that Eden wasn’t acceptable because of her zip code. By the time she’d learned the ins and outs of Ocean Point social politics, she and Eden had been too good of friends for it to matter.

“Then as your best friend since ninth grade, I figure it’s my job to help you with the wish,” Bev decided, leaning back in Eden’s faded and frayed Queen Anne dining chair and digging into her own cupcake. “I think this should be your year for sex.”

“An entire year, dedicated to sex?” Eden asked with a laugh. She was sure there was nothing more than dust motes and the faint air of neglect floating through the formal dining room. But, still, it was all she could do not to look over her head to see if the wish was written there in the candle smoke.

“You should dedicate this year to the pursuit of sex.” Bev scrunched up her nose. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings or anything, but it might take a little effort on your part,” she added.

When was the last time she’d had sex worth the effort? Definitely not with Kenny. Not with any guy, if she were being honest. Eden swirled her fork in the gooey rich chocolate, using it to make a design on the Meissen plate. After all, what better time for brutal self-truths than a girl’s twenty-fifth birthday.

Kenny, the last guy she’d had sex with, had broken his foot trying to prove his manliness by doing it against a tree. Instead of accepting that he just wasn’t he-man material, he’d blamed her.

No wonder her love life sucked. Look at what she had to work with.

“So I know why I should want good sex,” Eden said, standing to clear their plates. “But why is my personal life on your radar?”

She didn’t have to look to know Bev was following her to the kitchen. The rat-a-tat-tat of her high heels was a giveaway.

“Janie was in the shop yesterday,” Bev said, sounding like her cupcake had been bitter lemon instead of rich chocolate. Bev owned Stylin’, the best salon in town. And despite her penchant for wearing her own hair in rag doll fashion, she worked pure magic on everyone else. Enough magic to lure in the well-paying Oceanfront set.

“Ah.” Eden didn’t need to hear any more than that. She wasn’t sure of the what, when and where, but she was sure she was the who the chatter had revolved around. That’s how Janie and company worked. They wouldn’t check in with Eden directly—they’d go to her best friend and mine for gossip.

“Don’t let her get to you.” Eden set the plates next to the sink.

“I’m just so tired of them talking about you,” Bev grumbled, throwing the cupcake wrappers in the trash so hard that they bounced right back out. “They are all so snooty and rude, with their perfect lives bought and paid for by someone else.”

“You think they have perfect sex, bought and paid for, too?” Eden asked, keeping her tone, and her expression, serious. She lost it, though, when Bev glared. Laughing, she asked, “What? You think I should get upset because they are talking about, let me guess … My love life, or lack thereof?”

“Well, it’s not like they are saying nice things.”

Eden shrugged, so used to pretending she didn’t care that it pretty much came naturally to her now.

As if realizing she’d brought the bummer cloud to dim the party atmosphere, Bev clapped her hands together and exclaimed, “Presents! I’ll be right back. I’m going to get your gift from the car.”

Eden kept a cheery smile of anticipation on her face until the wooden screen door clapped shut behind her friend, then let it drop. She sighed, tossing the forks into the dishwasher and squirting liquid soap on a sponge.

Hot, happy sex.

Her chances of finding that were about as small and slender as the half-melted candle she’d just blown out.

What a waste of a wish.

She should have used it on her career.

Only out of veterinary school six months, she still had student loans and now a substantial mortgage on this house. It’d taken every bit of daughterly influence she had to convince her mother to let her buy it instead of putting it on the market. It’d also taken her entire savings account and the tiny trust fund left to her by her grandfather, but Eden loved her home and her heritage too much to see it sold to the highest bidder. And then there was the fact that there was enough property for her to set up her veterinary clinic.

With a shake of her head, she carefully dried the china and walked over to place it in the ornate cabinet with the reverence her great-great-great-gramma’s plates deserved. Like most of the furnishings in her childhood home, the glass-fronted hutch was an antique. Rattling around here alone all the time, Eden sometimes felt like the house was just waiting for her to join the ranks of antiques so she’d better fit in.

It wasn’t that she minded being alone, really. But like sex, sometimes a girl got tired of going it solo.

“The postman drove by when I was at my car,” Bev said, returning to the room with a huge polka-dot box with a ribbon as curly as her hair. “I brought your mail in. Look, I think there are a couple of birthday cards here.”

More because Bev was looking worried again than because of any curiosity to see who’d remembered her birthday, Eden took the stack of mail. Before she could get to the telltale bright envelopes, she noticed one from the bank. It was addressed to both her and her mother.

“What’s up with this,” she muttered, tossing the others on the counter and sliding her fingernail under the flap. She and her mother had no bank business together. And since Eleanor was tooling around the country, following the craft fairs in a new RV, Eden didn’t hesitate to open the missive.

“What the …” She had to wait for the room to stop spinning and the buzzing to clear from her ears before she could read the letter again.

Nope. The words hadn’t changed.

“I’m going to kill her,” she muttered through gritted teeth.

“What? Who? Where’s a shovel so I can help you bury the evidence.”

“My mother took out a loan against the house.” Fury pounded at her temples like a gorilla with a sledgehammer. Knowing the words wouldn’t change, no matter how many times she glared at them, Eden crumpled the letter in her fist and threw it against the wall.

“I thought the house was yours,” Bev said quietly. “I thought you bought it from her.”

“My cousin Arnie is a lawyer. He wrote up a legal document that said the house was mine once I took over the mortgage, and then added my name to the title. But he’d advised against transferring it out of my mom’s name at that point because I was still carrying student loans and needed the bank to approve another so I could start a new business.”

But why hadn’t he checked for loans against the property when he’d changed the title?

“She didn’t warn you? Talk it over with you before taking out the loan? Give you a heads-up that you were about to get hit with a big ole bill? Nothing?”

“Warn me? She didn’t even call to wish me a happy birthday,” Eden said, her laugh only a little bitter, wishing she could be as shocked as Bev. “To her credit, she probably forgot.”

“About the loan?” Bev scoffed, her freckled face furrowed in fury.

“About my birthday.”

And how sad was it that the fact that her mother forgot her birthday hurt more than a bill for thirty grand. Eden reached for the phone, then curled her fingers into her palm. As much as she wanted an explanation, an assurance that the payment-in-full had been mailed to the bank, she knew better.

Eleanor Gillespie didn’t worry about little things like money. She was too flaky to let the mundane rain on her creative lifestyle.

Glancing at the bank’s letter, Eden cringed. Flake or not, her mother had made a mess of things. And, as usual, Eden was the one who had to figure out how to clean it up. Because if she didn’t find some money quickly, she could lose the house. The property that’d been in her family for five generations. Her home, her place of business.

Her life.

As if reading her mind, Bev asked, “What are you going to do?”

Eden blinked fast to clear the dampness from her eyes. What she wasn’t going to do was cry, dammit.

“I guess I’m going to find thirty thousand dollars.” Where on earth was she going to find that on top of her other debts? And why hadn’t her mother arranged for a repayment plan? Coming up with that kind of money in one fell swoop was close to impossible. Eden rubbed her fingers against the sudden pounding in her temple, then walked over to retrieve the letter. She’d have to study it, contact the bank, so she understood all the details.

“You’re really going to take on your mother’s loan?”

“It’s against my property. I have to take it on. At least, until she turns up again and deals with it herself. But she’s tooling across the country from craft fair to art show right now. I have no idea when I’ll hear from her. Or when she’ll come home and clean up her mess.”

“How are you going to get the money?”

Hell if she knew.

Every penny she earned was earmarked. Despite her fancy address, she was living a ramen noodle lifestyle here.

There was nothing of value to sell. Oh, sure, she still had her great-grandma’s china and there were a few antiques left floating around. But they were all she had left of her family. Well, those and her mother. And right now she was pretty sure the china was worth more.

Eden took a deep breath. There had to be a way through this. She just had to think. Think, Eden.

Her eyes fell on a square envelope embossed with ivy and roses. The monthly garden club meeting. She wrinkled her nose, wondering if they resented having to send her the invitation as much as she hated getting it.

Because she was the last person the socially upstanding ladies wanted invading their exclusive get-togethers. But the Gillespie name guaranteed her an invitation.

“The Oceanfront set,” she exclaimed, snapping her fingers.

“What was the question again?” Bev asked with a confused look.

“I’ll hit up the country club ladies.”

“For loans?”

Eden cringed. Handouts? Oh hell, no. She was nobody’s charity case.

“For clients. They are all big on their designer pets. I just have to get two, maybe three of them to start using my veterinary services, and more will follow.”

“How much are you going to charge?” Bev asked, her eyes huge with a horrified sort of glee.

Eden laughed.

“Just enough that they consider the services exclusive. All it will take is a few of them using me as their vet, a little behind the scenes hype and pretty soon I’ll have a well-heeled clientele. I might not be able to pay off the entire loan at once, but if I can get enough of a down payment and show the bank that I have the potential income, I’ll bet I can swing a deal.”

Maybe.

And maybe was all she needed.

Eden reached for the phone again, quickly dialing the head of the Garden Club.

Five minutes and three grimaces later, she hung up with a triumphant smile.

“Why’d you RSVP for two?” Bev asked, pulling her head out of the pantry to give Eden a suspicious look.

“Because you’re going with me.”

“Oh, no,” Bev declared, emptying an armload of bins and jars onto the chipped tile counter. “I’m not a member. They won’t let me in.”

“You’re my guest.”

“They aren’t going to want me there,” Bev predicted.

“They don’t want me there, either.” Eden shrugged. “They’ll just have to deal with us. Because I need you with me.”

“For moral support?”

Eden wasn’t sure how much good moral support would be when faced with forcing a tight-knit group of women to accept an outsider at one of their chichi meetings. But she did need someone to play off. Someone who could talk up her veterinary skills and give her the verbal setups she’d need to spike home her point if this plan was going to work.

“What are you doing?” Eden asked, eying the eggs and butter that had just joined the flour, brown sugar and peanut butter.

“This is clearly a cookie situation,” Bev said, digging a bag of chocolate morsels out of the freezer.

Before Eden could decide if the two of them eating what, if the butter and eggs were anything to go by, would be a double batch of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies was a good idea, there was a rumbling outside.

Company? Or another birthday surprise? Maybe her mother had found a way to send the plague by UPS.

Or, Eden squinted, in a shiny new Jaguar.

“Hey, cool. It’s like the birthday fairy heard your wish,” Bev joked, joining Eden at the door to see who was pulling up the weather-pitted driveway.

Recognizing the car, Eden frowned.

Even though they were neighbors, Robert Sullivan never visited.

So the only way the birthday fairy was playing into this particular arrival was if his son, Cade, had hijacked the Jag and was driving up to make all of Eden’s fantasies come true.

Cade Sullivan.

Tall, blond and gorgeous, with hypnotic green eyes and more charm than a proud momma’s bracelet.

The sexiest guy to ever set foot in Ocean Point.

High school quarterback. Class president. Navy SEAL.

Her hero.

She knew most people in town who didn’t have membership with the exclusive Ocean Point Country Club—and even a few who did—saw Robert Sullivan as a major asshole. But when she looked at him, all she saw was an older version of Cade. The guy who always rescued her from mishaps, who’d never made a tag-a-long girl five years his junior feel stupid.

The guy she’d had a crush on since she was seven. The one she’d spied on at the small, private lake that bordered their two properties. The man who’d formed her every basis for what spelled sexy in a guy.

Eden sighed.

Then Robert’s car swerved.

Eden gasped.

The Jaguar made a beeline for the faded brick arch that welcomed people to the Gillespie house.

Eden hit the door running. Just as she made it to the bottom of the steps, the car slid into the unyielding bricks with a sick crunch of crumpling metal.

“What’s happened? Who is it?” Bev called as Eden sprinted across the lawn, skidding on the gravel driveway in her hurry to reach the car.

“Call an ambulance. Tell them to hurry.” Eden stared at the older, colder version of her favorite fantasy, her breath tight in her chest. She checked the pulse at his throat to be sure, then gave a shaky sigh. “Robert’s hurt. I think he might have had a heart attack.”

IT WAS LIKE WATCHING a bunch of virgins tour a whorehouse. Lieutenant Commander Cade Sullivan shook his head at the current crew of Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL trainees slogging through the wet sand, each carrying a dripping log over his shoulder.

“Were we ever that green?” he wondered aloud.

“You weren’t,” Captain Seth Borden said with a laugh, clapping Cade on the back. “You were one of the most focused BUDS we’ve seen come through here. I’ve been a MTS a long time, but even I can’t always tell which guys will make it through Hell Week. Sometimes none do. But when you came through, every instructor knew you’d graduate.”

Borden was a Master Training Specialist. One of the top at Coronado’s Naval Special Warfare Center, as a matter of fact. He was a machine. A guy who’d dedicated thirty years to the navy and scared the hell out of most people.

Cade considered him a crusty old bastard who drank like the sailor he was, cussed with flare and played a wicked hand of poker. And when they weren’t in uniform or on base, he was Cade’s favorite uncle.

“Why’d you haul me down here?” Cade asked, grimacing when one guy tripped over his own feet, taking three others down with him and sending his log flying ahead into the back of two more. “Wanted to make sure I appreciate how good my team is?”

He grinned when three wannabe SEALs sidestepped the downfall and just kept on going. Those guys, they had what it took.

“You need a reminder?”

“Nope.” Cade’s smile faded. He knew damned well that he served with some of the best SEALs in existence. Guys who gave their all, like his buddy Phil Hawkins, who’d given it right to the end. A familiar band of grief tightened in Cade’s chest, as it did whenever he thought of the loss. The Three Amigos, Phil, Cade and Blake Landon had gone through BUDS together, had served in the same platoon, on countless missions together. They embraced everything that being a SEAL stood for. Brotherhood. Dedication. Excellence.

And now the Three Amigos were two.

“C’mon in. We’ll have a cup of coffee.”

Grateful for any distraction from the gnawing emptiness that had started to overshadow his SEAL career, Cade followed the captain to his office. He shook his head when Borden held up the coffeepot. While on tour, he might have to stick with field rations, but the rest of the time, he opted for quality. From the looks of that pot, the sludge in the carafe was barely digestible.

“So?” Cade prodded, knowing he didn’t need to repeat the question.

“You’re coming up on your PRD.”

Cade wasn’t surprised at the captain’s statement. Borden figured he’d recruited Cade to the SEALs. Since being a SEAL had been Cade’s goal from the time he was twelve, he didn’t think recruiting was the right term, but he let the old man have his illusions.

“Not for six months,” Cade said, referring to his Projected Rotation Date, the time when he’d be up for reassignment. He’d been based here in California for eight years. Chances of being sent to Virginia or Hawaii were slim, but possible. Maybe a transfer was a good thing, though. He could start fresh, get away from the constant reminders of his lost friend. “Why?”

“I want you to consider taking your MTS cert.”

Cade laughed and shook his head. “Why the hell would I want to be certified as a trainer?”

“You’re a freefall jumpmaster, took gold in the Excellence in Pistol Shot, and were awarded the Silver Star. You aced out of Sniper School. And then there’s the advanced counterterrorism technology training. You’re one of the elite. You got the goods, boy.”

Cade rocked back on the heels of his jump boots and grinned. Yeah. That was a pretty sweet list of qualifications. He’d worked damned hard, and loved every second of getting all of them. But all he said was, “So?”

“So we could use you here. The certification, a year as a trainer—it’d bump your pay grade and move you a lot closer to those captain’s bars.”

Cade frowned. He didn’t care about the pay or rank. But he did care about losing his edge, about this depthless funk he’d sunk into, dragging his team down, too. He glanced out the window at the grown men falling all over themselves in the surf, struggling like toddlers to reach their boats. Those guys wanted to excel. To be the best. And he could be damned good at helping them get there. But to do that, he’d have to quit being a SEAL. And he didn’t quit. Not one damned thing.

So he shook his head. “Nah. I’m good.”

“Don’t you think it’d be mighty impressive?” the captain asked as he and his steaming cup of coffee settled behind the desk.

“Borden, I’m already a SEAL. There’s not a damned thing more impressive than that.”

“Sure, maybe to the ladies.”

“Who else matters?” Cade laughed.

Hell, it was rare that he ever even had to pull out the SEAL card to impress a woman. He looked good enough that the women tended to fall all over him anyway. They always had. And it wasn’t ego talking. He credited genetics for his sandy blond hair, sharp green eyes and chiseled features and the navy for his ripped body.

He had nothing to prove to anyone else.

“You want to climb higher than Lieutenant Commander?”

Cade shrugged again. Rank and money didn’t mean anything to him. Neither one had the thrill, the excitement, or the rock-solid satisfaction of being a part of Special Ops. At least, up until last fall, when Hawkins had taken a piece of shrapnel to the head while under Cade’s command.

“I’ll bet there are some people who’d like to see you move up the ranks,” Seth said, staring into his cup like it held some fascinating secret. Or, more likely, because he didn’t want his expression to give away his trump card.

“I don’t live my life for other people,” Cade countered with a grin, dropping to a chair and getting ready to play. Mind games were almost as much fun to win as war games.

“What about Robert?”

Cade’s smile fell away.

“I definitely don’t live my life for my old man.”

“Not saying you should. But I’ll bet it’d go a long way toward keeping him off your back for a while.”

“You mean it’ll keep him off your back?”

Robert Sullivan had married Seth’s little sister Laura thirty-five years ago and had probably muttered an average of a few dozen words a year to his brother-in-law since the reception. Less after they’d lost her to cancer five summers ago. But Robert somehow managed to find a few here and there to touch base with Seth for a little secondhand haranguing for his one and only child.

“Robert doesn’t bother me,” Cade’s uncle said, dismissing him with a jerk of one shoulder. As if his ex-in-law was that easy to flick off.

Cade wished that were so. But he knew better. Robert Sullivan, of Sullivan Enterprises, specialized in tenacity, had the personality of a bulldog and the charm of a cactus. He’d been furious when Cade had joined the navy instead of taking his rightful place at the helm of the family’s financial consulting firm.

“If he doesn’t bother you, then why are you using him as bait?” Cade challenged.

“Because you’re a damned good soldier. A fine SEAL and a strong leader. I don’t want to see you derailed. You’re on edge lately. That’s the kind of thing that some people look for, try to take advantage of in order to make things go their way,” he said, referring to Cade’s father. “A break would let you figure it all out, before you’re played.”

His pleasant expression didn’t change, nor did his body shift even an inch as a painful sort of tension spiked through Cade’s system.

“No offense, Captain,” Cade said with a grin as he got to his feet. “But I don’t give a good damn what my father does. And nobody plays me. Not even the old man.”

To Robert Sullivan, Cade was a pawn. A useful tool. He’d expected his only child to follow in his footsteps, to learn the ins and outs of finance and take over the vast Sullivan holdings if and when Robert deemed it time.

Cade had never been interested in any of that. Not even as a kid. So he’d never let the old man in on his plans. He’d enlisted the day he’d turned eighteen, three months before he’d finished high school. Already knowing the value of good strategy, he’d waited to tell his father until the morning after graduation. And he’d left for basic training right after the ensuing big ugly fight.

It wasn’t just that he didn’t want to take some bullshit business major if his father covered tuition that made him decide not to go to college.

He simply hadn’t wanted to wait to get started in the navy.

And then, like now, he hadn’t given a damn about rank.

He just wanted to be a SEAL.

He was born for the military.

He just had to remember that and get through this damned … What did his squadmate and amigo, Blake’s fiancée, Alexia, call it? Journey of grief. Stupid thing to call being pissed off over losing his buddy. And definitely not something he wanted to talk about. Not to Blake, not to Alexia. And definitely not to his uncle.

Before he could make excuses to leave, Cade’s cell-phone rang.

“Speak of the devil,” he muttered, noting the number on the screen.

“The old man?”

“Close enough—it’s my grandmother.”

The only thing that kept Cade from turning his back on his family, and all the drama and crap that went along with it, was his grandmother. He would do anything, even play nice at holidays, to make Catherine Sullivan happy.

With that in mind, he gestured his apology to Borden and took the call. Five minutes later, he wished he hadn’t.

“Robert had a heart attack,” Cade murmured as he slid the phone into his pocket.

“Is he okay?” Seth asked, looking up from the paperwork he’d been pretending to do to give his nephew some semblance of privacy.

“He’s in intensive care. They don’t know if he’s going to make it.”

Seth frowned, coming around the desk. “Are you okay?”

Cade shrugged. He didn’t know what he was. Numb. Despite a lousy, contentious relationship, shouldn’t he care that his father might die? That he was hanging by a thread?

Cade’s mind couldn’t quite take it in.

He was a SEAL, specially trained in multiple ways to cause death. He’d served during wartime. He’d watched men die. He’d held one of his best friends as life drained away. It wasn’t that he wasn’t familiar with the concept.

But his father? He’d always figured the old man was too stubborn, too obnoxious, too uncompromising to allow it to happen on anything but his own approved timetable.

“You need anything?”

Cade gave Seth a blank look, then shook his head. “Gotta see my CO, get leave. Grandma wants me home.”

Seth’s wince pretty much summed up Cade’s lifelong feelings about returning to the Sullivan Estate.

Cade grimaced in return. “Looks like I’m getting that break after all.”

2

“DID YOU HEAR? Cade Sullivan is back.”

Eden shook her head as twitters and giggles filled the room, women from the ages of eighteen to sixty-eight offering up a communal sigh. From what she’d seen, the members of the Garden Club rarely agreed on anything. Leave it to Cade Sullivan to bring women together.

But as hot and sexy as Cade was, he wasn’t the kind of stud she wanted to talk about right now.

It wasn’t like she wasn’t a fan of Cade herself. She adored the guy. Heck, she’d love to do the guy. But she was here to talk up her business. To try and garner a few new clients. Instead, the entire conversation had been derailed by the homecoming of the town hero.

Cade was good at that kind of thing. Making women sigh, fantasize, and if rumors were true, have some mighty fine orgasms. At least, that’s what the Cade-ettes, as those lucky few who were in the know liked to call themselves, claimed.

“I heard he’s here for a month. He doesn’t come back often, does he?” Bev mused, her eyes dreamy. No doubt visualizing Cade in some form of undress. “It’s been, what? Ten years since he left?”

“Twelve,” Eden corrected absently, leaning over to scoop up a bite of her friend’s lemon chiffon cake. The fork halfway to her mouth, she noticed all the stares aimed her way and shrugged. “It’s not like I’m marking off the years in my diary. He left for the navy the same week I broke my foot the first time. He’s the one who carried me home from the lake.”

“Did you know him well?” asked a pretty blonde whose name Eden didn’t remember. The girl had married her way into the Ocean Point high society, so she didn’t have firsthand knowledge of the almost mythical wonderfulness that was Cade Sullivan.

“Oh, please,” Janie Truman scoffed, sliding into an empty seat at the table and taking a single grape from the bowl in the center. “You barely knew Cade Sullivan. Sure, he rescued you a few dozen times. But that’s sort of what he does for a living, isn’t it? You were like basic training.”

Her laugh was too bubbly for Eden to take offense. At least, not unless she wanted to look like a bitch. That was the problem with Janie. She always came across as all smiles and charm, even while she slid her pretty jeweled knife between your ribs.

Eden sighed, wondering why belonging to this group was her holy grail. The ugly was always as subtle, but as real, as the expensive perfume. But only to outsiders, she figured. The only way to avoid being the butt of their jokes and pitying looks was to belong.

“I’d say growing up next door to the Sullivans means she probably knows Cade well enough,” Bev defended, her irritation on Eden’s behalf shining bright.

“Sort of,” Eden demurred, not sure she wanted to share just how much about Cade she did know. Instead she settled on the simple facts. “Cade’s five years older than I am, so we weren’t in school together, didn’t run in the same crowds. Cade was busy with football and the swim team and I was playing with animals and volunteering at the shelter.”

How was that for an opening to talk about veterinary care, Eden thought, giving herself a mental back-pat.

“Captain of the football team. Class president, homecoming king,” Janie rhapsodized, her sharp chin on her hand as she gave a dreamy sigh, ignoring any references that included Eden. “Oh, to be a Cade-ette …”

“Cade-ette?” Bev asked with a laugh. She gave Eden an are you kidding look.

Eden grinned. It was a little shameless, as far as titles went. Still, it carried as much cachet as an Oscar did for an actor. “It’s silly. When Cade was in high school—”

“Junior high, even,” Janie interrupted.

“Maybe,” Eden acknowledged, wrinkling her nose. “That’s awfully young, though. Not for Cade, of course, but for the girls? But nobody knows for sure, do they?”

“Knows what?” Bev prompted before Janie could launch into one of her typical attempts to prove that she did, indeed, know everything.

“Knows when it all started, what the rules are or even who’s in the club,” Eden said. “The story goes that Cade, while being quite the ladies’ man even in his teens, knew he wanted out of Mendocino County and wasn’t about to let anything—not even a girlfriend—keep him here. So while he played the field, he kept things simple, uncomplicated.”

“In other words, he was really careful about sleeping around because he didn’t want to be trapped. Not just because he’s super cute, but because the Sullivans are filthy rich,” Janie explained, eyeing the cake with an envious look before nibbling on another grape.

“But after a while, girls started bragging. I think the allure of having done Cade Sullivan was better than a pair of diamond studs, and they just couldn’t keep from showing off.” Eden remembered the almost mythical shot to fame the girls would get, being fawned over, buddied up to, romanced by other guys. “Pretty soon, the Cade-ettes had an even more exclusive membership than the country club.”

“Exclusive, and elusive,” Janie interrupted. “There weren’t many who could make that claim to fame. Maybe a dozen at the most.”

“How do you know they were telling the truth?” Bev wondered. “I mean, if he was determined not to get trapped, would he really sleep around, even with a dozen girls in four years?”

“Sixteen years,” Janie corrected. “That dozen counts the girls he was with before—and after—he left for the navy.”

“You mean the club still has openings?” Bev joked.

I wish, Eden almost said aloud. Horrified, she focused on shoveling cake into her mouth to keep it busy. She had a bad habit of looking before she leapt, and speaking before she thought. Usually, she didn’t worry about the results. But this was Cade they were talking about. And she cared about everything that had to do with Cade Sullivan.

Which was why she’d never shared, not even with her best friend, how often she’d seen Cade at the lake behind their properties. Skinny dipping sometimes, practicing martial arts others. But usually with a girl. Eden had rarely seen the girl’s face, but could see through the bushes clearly enough to know they both usually ended up naked.

He’d been gorgeous, even as a teen, with the body of one of the Greek Gods Eden had been fascinated with. Tan, sculpted and, well, huge, he’d been worth the many bouts of poison oak she’d gotten spying through the trees.

She dropped her fork onto the empty plate and reached for her iced tea, needing to cool off.

“So this rumor, you believe it?” Bev prompted.

“Sure.” Eden shrugged. “I mean, the few who did try to claim they’d done Cade Sullivan were outed as liars pretty fast. Nobody but the Cade-ettes themselves know what the secret is that proves the truth. I guess they think it’s a pretty good secret, too. Like I said, it’s been twelve years since he left and they still aren’t talking.”

And while she’d only watched him a couple of times before embarrassment and a heart-crushing envy had made her avoid the lake altogether just in case he was there, she’d never seen any distinguishing marks or heard him use any special phrases that might stand out as tells.

“Everyone wanted to be a Cade-ette,” Janie said with a sigh, either forgetting her constant diet as she scooped up a fingerful of chocolate from the cake in front of her, or envy making her so morose that she didn’t care.

“Everyone?” Bev asked, her eyes questioning Eden.

Eden just shrugged again. She wasn’t going to lie to her best friend, but neither did she see any point in admitting that she would have given anything to join the well-sexed crowd. But not for the title. Nope, she just wanted Cade.

“Ladies, time to get to work,” Gloria Bell, the Garden Club president called, clapping her hands for attention. “The Spring Fling is just around the corner. Our biggest society ball needs the best flower arrangements, don’t you think? Come on now, chop chop.”

Most of the older women got up and gathered around the three head tables, discussing what kind of flowers screamed fancy party. That left Eden and a dozen women her own age seated next to the dessert buffet. A fact that seemed to pain half of them, since they studiously kept their gazes averted. Eden, who while carrying a plethora of issues and challenges, could happily eat anything and everything without gaining an ounce, just grinned.

This was the only way she stood out, a wren among peacocks. They were grace, she was clumsy. They were as beautiful as money could buy, she was as average as broke could maintain.

“I can’t believe nobody has shared the secret yet. Are you sure there is one?” Bev asked, wrinkling her nose. “I mean, it sounds like more of an urban legend than fact, you know?”

“Oh, it’s real.” Crystal Parker leaned forward, her eyes shifting to the matriarchs to see that her mother was occupied before she shared in a low tone, “My sister, Chloe, was almost one of the Cade-ettes.”

“Almost?” gaped Bev. “How is one almost in the club?”

“She went on a few dates with Cade the winter before he graduated. The two of them were getting really friendly, if you know what I mean, during the high school Winter Bash and Chloe got a little loud. Then the principal, Mrs. Pince, walked in on them. Chloe said Cade charmed his way out of a lecture, but never did ask her out again.”

She gave a good-humored roll of her eyes, as if her sister’s getting busted making out still amused her.

“Of course, that couldn’t have been as embarrassing as what happened to poor Eden here,” Janie said with a giggle before patting Eden’s hand. As if that friendly gesture made the joke any easier to take. “You never have told us the real story about what you and Kenny Phillips were really doing when he broke his foot and ended up covered in a nasty rash.”

Eden pressed her lips together in a grimacey sort of smile, hoping someone, anyone, would change the subject. She didn’t need anyone speculating about what particular sexual position Kenny had been in when he’d fallen.

Cade had rescued her then, too. Turning the tables nicely, he’d shown up at the lake to find her with his best buddy from high school. The poor guy had been rolling around naked in a patch of poison oak while clutching his broken ankle.

“Girls,” Gloria called, gliding over like an elegant steamship. “Chitchat is over. Now it’s time for work.”

“I can help,” Eden offered, gratefully getting to her feet. But in her desire to escape further sexual comparisons, her hip bumped the table, sending the unlit candles toppling, forks bouncing off plates and the grapes rolling over white damask to the floor.

“Oh, well …” Mrs. Bell grimaced, then shook her head. “Thank you, dear. But we need someone with a little better eye for color. Janie, why don’t you and the girls come along now and see what you think of the plans.”

En masse, all of the women except Bev and Eden migrated to the front of the room. To the popular section.

Eden sighed, pushing aside the last plate of dessert, this one a double-chocolate brownie.

“What’s wrong? It’s not like you to stop rubbing your super-fast metabolism in the princesses’ faces before you’ve tried every dessert,” Bev said quietly.

Although Eden noticed a few envious glances at three empty plates in front of her, all she could focus on was the giggling group of women all bundled together around the flower displays. All fitting in, all contributing meaningfully. All perfect, even if they couldn’t eat more than two hundred calories at a time.

“Nothing. I’m just tired,” she excused, not completely lying. She was tired.

Tired of being so easily dismissed.

Tired of feeling like a failure.

Tired of wallowing in mediocrity.

Just once, she wanted to be admired. To stand out—in a good way. To feel like someone special. To be part of the in-crowd.

And maybe she should wish for a time machine, too, and blast back to high school when she should have gotten over these silly issues.

“Oh, Eden,” Lilly-Ann Winters, who sat at the next table, called, offering a charming smile. “I’m so glad you made it to the meeting this month. You so rarely do.”

“I usually work Thursday afternoons,” Eden said with a cautioning look toward Bev. Lilly-Ann had a trio of Parti Yorkies and a pedigree Persian at home.

“Oh, you still have that, um, job?” Lilly-Ann asked, a rapid flutter of her lashes probably supposed to be a distraction from her having no clue what Eden did.

“I opened my veterinary clinic six months ago, and yes, it’s still in business,” Eden said with a nod, amping up her smile and getting ready to pitch her real reason for subjugating herself to this torture. “You should bring Snowball in for a checkup. I have a wonderful new program for cats, an all-natural diet and supplements that are guaranteed to add luster to her coat.”

“Oh, no. Snowball only sees Dr. Turner,” Lilly-Ann said, her eyes wide with horror at the idea of taking her precious Persian anywhere but the most expensive vet in three counties.

“I understand,” Eden said, pulling out the diplomacy she’d been practicing since she’d called in her RSVP. “Dr. Turner has a wonderful reputation. And he’s so popular. Just last week someone was saying she had to wait a month to get her puppies in for a routine exam.”

Lilly-Ann’s smile tightened at the corners. Bingo. Eden knew the only thing the other woman hated more than designer knockoffs was having to wait for anything.

“Don’t you worry about emergencies, though?” Eden continued, leaning forward and speaking in a hushed, let’s-share-a-secret tone. “You can’t take risks with a feline as delicate as Snowball. If you wanted to just bring her by for a checkup, I’d have her information on file in case, God forbid, there was ever a crisis.”

For one brief, gratifying second, Lilly-Ann looked tempted. Then she gave Eden a once-over, as if to remind herself who she was dealing with, and shook her head. “No, no. Thanks, though. Dr. Turner has a pet ambulance. I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

With that and a giggling little finger wave, she got to her feet. Bev stood, too, an argument obviously on her lips.

Eden shook her head, gesturing to her friend to sit. What was the point? She needed clients desperately. She’d hoped a few of the women would, if only for faux-friendship’s sake, give her a chance. But to them, and to most of Ocean Point, she’d always be the klutzy girl who’d broken Kenny’s foot while having sex. A joke. An average, broke joke who was about to lose her home. Because she’d tried everything she could think of, even calling her mother—who hadn’t answered—to find a way out of this financial mess. If she didn’t come up with the money—or at least enough to negotiate a deal—within three weeks, her home, her heritage, would be gone.

“Brownie?” Bev offered again with a sympathetic frown.

Eden shook her head.

Some things, even chocolate couldn’t help.

SHE WAS STILL ASKING herself what the point of it all was two hours later as she drove home.

“Well that was a total waste of a Saturday,” Bev declared from the passenger seat, nibbling on the piece of cake she hadn’t let herself eat in front of the other women. “I can’t believe that in a roomful of thirty women, twenty-six of them have pets.”

“And of that twenty-six, I couldn’t get a single client,” Eden mumbled, wishing she hadn’t wasted Bev’s time. “Still, it wasn’t all bad.”

She didn’t have to take her eyes off the road to know Bev had shot her an incredulous look. Probably a sneer, too, if Eden knew her friend.

“Hey, I made contacts. That counts. They might not have signed on board today, but all it takes is one good word, one rich matron with a colicky dog, and I’m set.” She slanted a sideways glance toward the passenger seat. “And, hey, at least dessert was good.”

“Well, I’ll give you the desserts point. But do you really think a matron or two using you as their vet is going to stop the bank from calling in the loan?” Bev didn’t even bother with the skeptical look this time. Her tone, even wrapped around chocolate icing, spoke volumes.

“Until I come up with something better, this is the best shot I’ve got,” Eden said morosely.

Damn her mother. Damn herself for not forcing Eleanor to sign herself off the property when Eden had bought her out. She should have known better. According to her personal bio, Eleanor Gillespie was a free spirit. A wild wind that couldn’t be tamed. Eden sighed, her fingers clenching and unclenching on the steering wheel. A loving flake who specialized in making life difficult for her only child.

From preschool when she’d used all of Eden’s classmates to test her politically incorrect, factually accurate and visually scarring nursery rhymes to high school when she’d volunteered as a parental chaperone at the senior all-nighter, then lectured everyone on birth control, sexual satisfaction and the benefits of a vegan lifestyle, she’d been a challenge. But she was also fun and bubbly, creative and clever, and loved Eden in her own self-absorbed, offbeat way.

Eden rounded the corner of narrow country road, tall trees looming on either side of the asphalt. But just as she passed the pretty stone gates that led to the Sullivan Estate, something white flashed. She lifted her foot off the gas, peering through the window. She saw it again.

White fur and gray spots.

She slammed on the breaks.

Bev’s hand shot forward, bracing against the dash.

“What the hell …?”

Half on and half off the road, Eden killed the car engine and threw her door open.

“It’s Paisley,” she called as she hurried around the car toward the stately bank of large maple trees Laura Sullivan had planted when she was a young bride. “Mrs. Carmichael has been frantic since the cat ran away last week. We need to rescue her.”

“That cat is evil,” Bev muttered, following her. “Besides, do you really think ran away is the right term? That sounds so innocent. I heard it was more like a prison break, complete with injuries and property damage.”

Eden waved that away. So Paisley was a little difficult. She was a rare snow Savannah. Being standoffish was a characteristic of the breed, as was the need for play and fun. Since Mrs. Carmichael wasn’t much good at either, the poor cat had probably run off out of boredom.

Before she could explain the psychological makeup of Savannahs, there was a loud screech, then a crash boomed out from behind the women.

Except for a teeth-clenching wince, Eden froze.

Bev screamed.

Cringing, they both pivoted toward the car.

Eden had forgotten to set the parking brake.

She and Bev stared at the tree-hugging vehicle in silence.

Damn.

“This is a bad week for cars around you,” Bev observed with a resigned sort of huff.

Eden groaned. It was like she was a walking, talking accident waiting to happen.

The car wasn’t new, or even in very good condition, but it’d been big enough for her to transport anything smaller than a horse, was paid for and had looked decent enough not to irritate wealthy potential clients.

Now the passenger fender had formed an intimate relationship with a redwood.

After staring at the car for a solid minute, Eden sighed and deliberately turned her back on it to walk the rest of the way across the street.

“Aren’t you going to do something? Where are you going?” Bev hurried after her. When Eden stopped under a tree and peered through the leaves, then reached up to test the strength of one branch, the cheery blonde gaped. “You can’t be serious? You’re still going to try to rescue the cat?”

“Why not? The car is already a mess—I might as well have something to show for it.” A safe, secured pet was a reasonable price to exchange for a molested fender. And maybe, if she was lucky, this could be her chance to bond with Paisley and get in Mrs. Carmichael’s good graces.

“Paisley,” Eden called in a cajoling tone. The cat, perched high on a maple branch, stopped its upward bounce to toss Eden a disdainful look. “C’mere, pretty kitty.”

“Why don’t we just call Mrs. Carmichael and tell her we saw her cat. She can come get it herself,” Bev suggested when her stilettos slid on the dirt bank. “And give us a ride while she’s at it.”

“Sure, a sixty-year-old woman needs to be climbing a tree after her cat,” Eden dismissed, her own stubby-heeled Mary Janes not slipping at all—girls who tended to trip over their own feet wore stilettos at great risk—as she made her way around the base of the maple.

After a few more calls, a few snarky remarks from Bev and another dismissive look from the cat, Eden sighed. She looked up the road, then down, to make sure no cars were coming. She only climbed trees once in a blue moon, but somehow she always managed to get busted.

“You’re lookout,” she told Bev. She glanced down at her pretty blue cotton dress, then tugged the back of the pleated skirt forward between her thighs, tucking it into the wide black belt. “There, modesty intact.”

“There, fashion destroyed,” Bev said, shaking her head in dismay. “If anyone asks, I tried to talk you out of this. I pointed out the likelihood of you falling, of you breaking yet another bone or something horrible happening to your hair.”

Eden’s fingers combed through the thick swath of heavy brown hair at her shoulders and gave Bev a confused look. “My hair?”

“I think it’s the only thing you haven’t messed up so far. It’s due.”

Eden grimaced, then shrugged. Bev was probably right. Some people might lament their fate, others would spend hours in therapy. She figured that by simply accepting that she was a little accident prone, she was not only ahead of the game in terms of dealing with emergencies—because after all, she created at least one a month—but she was saving a fortune on psychiatric fees.

“Watch for cars,” she warned again, reaching up to grab the closest branch.

“What do I do if I see one? Whistle? Throw myself across the driver’s window to hide their view?”

There might be a few drawbacks to having a BFF with a smart mouth, Eden decided as she levered her body onto the first branch.

“Just give me enough warning so I can hide,” she said as she gained her balance and slowly stood upright to reach for another limb.

With Bev’s voice droning in the background, covering everything from the fact that she’d never learned to climb a tree to the insanity of grown women acting like squirrels, Eden scurried higher.

A minute later, she was one branch away from Paisley.

“Hi, sweet kitty,” she said in a soft singsong voice. “Are you up here playing Queen of the Jungle? You should be—you look like royalty.”

She kept the soothing tone going, her outstretched fingers in constant motion to get the cat’s attention.

It worked. After a few seconds and a cautious sniff, the exotic white cat was nudging her broad forehead against Eden’s knuckles.

“Oh, aren’t you sweet.”

Unable to resist, Eden gave herself a moment to cuddle and pet the pretty cat before tucking her under one arm and slowly lowering herself until her butt met the branch. Like scooting down a rickety ladder, she went one branch at a time, with plenty of cuddling in between. Finally she was close enough to hand the cat to Bev.

“Why don’t you put her in the car,” Eden instructed, her belly flat against a wide limb that was about six feet from the ground. “Crack the windows, and there’s a bottle of water and portable pet dish in the trunk. If you’ll sit with her, she’ll probably drink a little.”

Despite her earlier opinion that the cat might be evil, Bev didn’t hesitate to reach out and cuddle the gray-spotted feline. Paisley gave a meow of protest, and threw an injured look toward Eden, but didn’t try to escape. Eden waited until her friend and the cat were safely inside the car, treats and water dispensed, before she lowered herself to the next branch.

There. She smiled her relief. Almost down.

It was the smile that did it, she figured.

Because she went from enjoying an easy descent to being suddenly trapped in the space of a heartbeat. Like an anchor, something held tight, so she couldn’t move.

Breathless, Eden twisted to see what was wrong.

Then scowled when she saw that the strap of her shoe was caught on a branch. Eden tugged. The shoe stuck. She tried to slip it off, but the branch was too rough, scratching painfully against the soft flesh of her instep.

A minute later she added cursing to the mix.

“Haven’t we been here before?” a husky voice asked.

Oh, hell. Eden froze. She hadn’t even heard a car. Please, oh, please, let him be talking to someone else.

“That is Eden up there, right?” the voice asked.

Double hell.

She shook her head, hoping the move would shift the curtain of hair from blocking her view.

Her heart, already pounding like a freight train, sped up. What little was left of her breath escaped her lungs in a rush.

She twisted her torso, angling herself sideways to make sure the face matched the voice.

Gorgeous green eyes, a tanned complexion over sculpted cheekbones and a strong jawline. Wide, full lips stretched in a smile that bordered on laughter. And the sexiest man-dimple she’d ever seen.

Her eyes widened and she gave a long, lusty sigh.

Didn’t it just figure? At least she’d tucked her skirt in so she wasn’t flashing him. Sure, she might have a few dozen fantasies about sharing her undies with this particular man. But this position wasn’t featured in a single one.

So she did what she always did when caught in an uncomfortable situation.

She smiled and made the best of it.

“Hi, Cade.”

3

“DO YOU DO THESE THINGS just to keep me in practice?” Cade asked, grinning at his favorite perpetual-victim, her silky brown hair a dark curtain over a face he knew would be sliding into a sheepish smile.

Eden Gillespie always looked sheepish when she had to be rescued. Something, if he’d ever considered it, he’d have figured she’d have outgrown. He eyed her legs, smooth and bare all the way to the top of her hot-pink panties thanks to the way her dress was hanging. Her arms were wrapped around the tree limb and one foot dangled while the other was caught in a snarl of branches and leaves. Clearly he’d have figured wrong.

“Consider it my welcome-home present,” she muttered, blowing a puff of air so her hair cleared enough that he could see the resigned amusement in her big brown eyes.

That was one of the things he’d always admired about Eden. She could laugh at herself. So many of the girls he’d grown up with, and the women he’d dated for that matter, took themselves and life way too seriously. They were so worried about controlling the impression they made, they didn’t let themselves just live.

Without thinking, his eyes shifted back to Eden’s legs. Long and sleek, they wrapped around that big, hard branch. He frowned at the scrapes and faint reddening of her tender flesh, for the first time ever tempted to kiss away a boo-boo. All the way up to her panties. Practical cotton, he noted, his mouth going dry, but in a fun, sassy color. Since she was facedown on the branch, the curve of her butt was perfectly highlighted in that pink fabric. His fingers itched to touch, to see if her curves were as firm as they looked.

Whoa. Not cool, he lectured himself. Lusting after the sweet girl next door was walking an awfully close line to settling down. Nothing wrong with it in the big picture, but in his personal rulebook? Totally out of the question.

“Want some help?” he offered, wondering how many times now he’d had to hurry these rescues along because of a hit of inappropriate lust. After all, he was pretty sure he’d been hauling her out of scrapes since his pre-teen days. But it’d only been since that rescue, when he’d seen her naked, that the sight of her made him instantly horny. He sighed with relief. There, now he was only a standard guy, not a weird pervert with a superhero complex.

“I can do it,” she muttered, tugging her foot to try and loosen it from the branch. Her shoe, a cute little black strappy thing, was good and stuck. She sighed and slanted him a rueful look. “But maybe you could just unhook my shoe for me?”

Cade didn’t bother arguing. He reached up and pulled the twigs from her foot. Then he wrapped both hands around her surprisingly narrow waist, easily lifting her from the overhead branch. It was like doing a military press, he thought with a grin as he lowered her body toward the ground.

Except he hadn’t counted on her shocked reaction. She gasped, struggling a little as if wanting him to let her go. Since he wasn’t about to drop her three feet to the ground, he shifted. Her breasts skimmed his chin. He froze. Other than to gasp and grab on to his shoulders for support, so did she.

Cade had felt the same energy pounding through his body when he held a live grenade. Danger, excitement, all senses on full alert.

Wrong, his brain screamed. Eden was the sweet girl next door. The same girl he’d been rescuing for years. She wasn’t supposed to inspire this degree of lust. The kind that made him want to take her, right there against the tree. He didn’t care that they’d only said a dozen or so words to each other in years, or that her friend was over there, face pressed against the window of the wrecked car, watching.

It was neither of those things that had Cade ignoring the hot need in his belly, or his body’s demand that he taste her, touch her.

It was the flutter of Eden’s lashes. The way her pulse trembled in her throat. The tiny trembles of her fingers where they dug into his shoulders. He, and his wicked desires, were out of her league.

So, nope. Not giving in to the need.

But that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy himself up to that limit line.

Grinning, he slowly brought his arms down. He didn’t let go of his hold on her waist, so her body had to slide, in one long glorious trip, down his.

His eyes never left hers. There was something heady, intense, in seeing the heat flare, then her gaze blur with passion.

As soon as her feet hit the ground, she pushed away like he was fire, too hot for her to touch.

“Thanks again,” she said as she stepped backward. Her foot caught on a root and would have sent her sprawling if he hadn’t grabbed her.

“Babe, I live for these moments,” he told her in a husky tone, only half-teasing. Because he really did. Eden always made coming home fun.

“Me, too.”

The look on her face, a mix of horror and chagrin, said loud and clear that she had, as usual, spoke without thinking.

He should let her off the hook.

It wasn’t like he was going to give in to the heat between them. Ever since his first romp at the tender age of fourteen, he’d made it a point to stay relationship-free and keep his sexual encounters easygoing and simple. There was nothing simple or easygoing about Eden.

Except looking at her. That was as simple and easy as breathing. And talking to her. He’d never had any hesitation there. Listening to her laugh was pure pleasure.

Hell.

“C’mon, I’ll give you a ride home,” he said, his words a little gruffer than he’d intended.

“I can get home.”

Cade didn’t bother arguing. He just pointed to her fender, wrapped around that tree as intimately as he’d like to see Eden wrapped around his body.

“Oh. Yeah.” She sighed, looking from the fender to her friend, then to Cade. Her gaze shifted again to the cat, then his car. Finally she shrugged. “Thanks. We appreciate the ride.”

As soon as both women—and the feline—were settled in his borrowed BMW—the quiet redhead in the back and Eden and her rescue cat in the front—he started the car.

“So, you still seeing Kenny Phillips?” he asked, hoping like hell she’d say yes.

“Not anymore.” She did that cute little nose-wrinkling thing then shook her head. “He never quite forgave me for breaking his foot.”

It’d been Kenny’s screams that’d caught Cade’s attention a couple years back, leading him to rescue a stunning, naked Eden. Cade was still baffled by that situation, since Kenny was nothing if not a missionary kind of guy. How the hell did a guy break his foot having standard, missionary sex? You’d think it’d take a swing, a tube of body lube and a few leather straps to reach that level of risk.

“I don’t think you lost out on much. Dating is a full-contact sport,” he told her with a laugh.

Unlike a lot of women, Eden didn’t get that speculative, how interested are you in playing the game with me look in her eyes. Instead she just shrugged.

“I guess Kenny decided to sign up for a lower-risk league, then,” she informed him as she rolled her ankle first one way, then the other. “And he took most of his teammates in town with him.”

“Wimps,” Cade muttered. What kind of jerks blamed the girl for their own incompetence? Sure, Eden was a little accident prone. But she was sweet and sexy in that girl-next-door way. She was fun and easy to talk to, and unlike so many others around town, she didn’t play the user game. A guy would be lucky to date her. If he was interested in dating, that is.

“So you’re saying you wouldn’t be scared?” Eden challenged. Her chin was high and her tone light, but he could see the vulnerability in those gold-flecked brown eyes.

“Sweetie, unless a woman straps an explosive device around her waist and insists we go dancing, there’s not much that will scare me.” Cade laughed.

“So you’d date a girl who had a reputation for being a little clumsy?” she asked quietly.

Well, how the hell had he missed that trap? Cade frowned, even as a gurgle of horrified laughter came from the backseat.

“I don’t base my dating choices on things like that,” he sidestepped. Then, to further cement the keep out message, he added, “Really, I don’t see myself dating at all in the next little while. Between the old man in ICU and my grandmother needing me, I figure I’ll be pretty tied up until I return to base. Gramma said something about some deals my father was trying to wind up when he had the heart attack, something with important timing. I’m probably going to have to take care of that, too.”

Ah, silence.

He had no idea what’d caused it, but he’d take the stilted quiet over tap dancing around a verbal trap any day. Other than the uncomfortable shifting her friend did in the backseat, nobody made a sound. Even the cat quit purring.

Still, by the time they reached Eden’s place, less than a mile up the road, tension tight enough to bounce coins off rippled across the back of Cade’s neck. He drove down the long, circular driveway, his discomfort slowly fading as he noted how rundown the Gillespie place had become. The immediate yard around the huge house was still tidy, but beyond the fence, weeds were brushing the trees. Even the once vivid white paint on the shutters was graying, chipped and curling.

One of the outbuildings looked like the roof had collapsed and someone—probably Eden—had built a crude wire fence to pen up a goat and what looked like a horse-size dog.

“Thanks for the rescue. And the ride,” Eden said when he stopped in front of wide bank of steps leading to her front door.

“Anytime,” he told her. “Just try to keep your accidents scheduled for my visits home. I hate to think of you hanging from a tree and only wimps here to save you.”

She laughed, the pained discomfort chased away by amusement. “Would you believe that I usually manage to rescue myself when you’re not around?”

Cade considered that for a second.

Then he shook his head. “Nope.”

Her cheeks warm with a pretty pink wash, Eden gave him a sweet look from under her lashes. The kind of look that should make him feel protective. Or manly, like a superhero.

Not horny like a sailor on leave.

Time to go, he decided.

Leaning one elbow on the seat, he angled himself around.

“It was nice to meet you,” he told the quiet redhead in the backseat. She gave him a wide-eyed, about-to-hyper-ventilate look.

Because he was a SEAL, trained in multiple ways to kill men and defend his country? Or because of his high school rep and near rock-star dating status?

Then the redhead blushed.

Yep. Rock star.

“Cade?”

He looked at Eden with a friendly smile, ready to politely brush off her thanks.

She was staring at the cat on her lap, as if one glance away would send it leaping out the window.

“Did you maybe want to get drinks with me? Sort of a welcome-home and thank-you combination?”

Drinks? Unless that meant standing in line together to each buy their own bottle of water at the corner market, drinks were a really bad idea. Drinks were code word for tiptoeing into dating territory. A precursor to, part of or windup from something more intimate.

A huge mistake.

It wasn’t that Cade didn’t date. And he was nowhere near being a monk. But here in his hometown, the rules were different. Here, the women tended to see him as Robert Sullivan’s son. The guy who’d get the key to the Sullivan coffers. A great catch.

Not that women didn’t have an agenda outside of Ocean Point, as well, but usually that had more to do with being able to say they’d been with a SEAL. Being a notch on a woman’s lipstick case, he was okay with. Being the target of her engagement ring search, he wasn’t.

Still, this was Eden. He’d need to let her down easy.

“Sure,” he heard himself say instead. “A drink sounds good.”

His momentary chagrin at giving in to the urge fled quickly at the look of surprise on Eden’s face and the delighted shock on her friend’s.

She’d expected him to say no. To be a wimp.

Her friend had figured the same, hopefully without the wimp part. He knew his rep, and the status-obsessed focus of a lot of the country club set that Eden ran with. The Sullivans were big shit around town. The Gillespies barely danced around the fringe. From the time he was fourteen, he’d heard hundreds of lectures on dating, all focused on the girl’s last name, never her first. God, he hated that. That, and the way everyone always gossiped, judging each other’s worth by who they dated or the limit on their credit card. Hell, before he hit the end of the driveway, he’d bet her friend would have texted twenty of her best friends to tell them the news.

Within ten minutes, forty more people would probably have texted her back with varying degrees of shock, denial and outright horror at the idea of a Sullivan lowering himself to date a woman like Eden. One who lived in a rundown house, whose sexual encounters resulted in broken bones and who wrecked cars to rescue cats.

Who didn’t date for status.

Who liked him for him, not because of his last name.

Who made him feel like the hero she always teased him about being.

Any intention Cade had of retracting his agreement disappeared. He was going out for that drink, and he was going to make damned sure that Eden—and anyone else who might be curious—knew he was glad to spend time with her.

“Tomorrow night?” she asked, her casual tone at odds with the tension in her eyes.

“Six okay?”

She gave a tiny frown, her arched brows drawing together for a second before she nodded. Then she leaned down to grab her purse, gathered the cat closer and reached for the door handle.

“Let me,” Cade offered. Giving in to rare mischief, he grinned, then leaned across Eden’s body to open the passenger door from the inside. He let his forearm brush, ever-so-lightly, across her breasts. She gave a tiny gasp, her doe-eyes rounding with shock. Her scent wrapped around him, earthy and sweet at the same time, like honeysuckle at midnight.

He forgot about the woman in the backseat, ignored the purring mass of fur draped across Eden’s lap. All he cared about was the woman staring up at him like he’d hung the moon, lit the stars and made the sun rise when he whistled.

Without thinking, he leaned down and brushed a whisper-soft kiss over her shocked mouth.

“Thanks for the welcome home,” he murmured, immediately leaning back. He kept his expression light. Amused even. As if his own body hadn’t just gone into overdrive at the taste of her lips under his.

“Anytime,” she murmured, draping the huge cat over her shoulder and sliding from the car as if in a fog. He waited until her friend was out, too, then shifted the car into gear.

A quick glance in the rearview mirror confirmed that both women were still staring.

Cade grinned.

Maybe the next couple of weeks wouldn’t be so bad after all.

THERE WAS NO WAY in hell he was sticking around another couple of weeks. Cade clenched his teeth to keep the fury inside, both because spewing it would upset his grandmother, and more to the point, because he refused to let his father know he was pushing buttons.

“You need to step it up, put in more effort,” his father lectured from the crisp white sheets of his hospital bed. A chorus of beeps and buzzes accompanied his rant, medical equipment proving that a man could have a heart and still be a heartless bastard. “You’ve been doing the same thing for years now. When are you going to get a promotion? What’s it take to get a raise in that military you serve? Don’t my tax dollars pay enough for you to make a little more? Call up your ambition, boy. Push harder.”

It didn’t stop there. Cade made a show of inspecting his boots while Robert droned on.

And on and on.

And on.

It was like he was trying to spew out every demand, every put-down he could as fast as possible because he knew the drugs and his body’s need to heal would soon take over and knock him back out.

Cade wished they’d hurry the hell up.

At first, he’d listened in sympathy to the slurred words dragged down by drugs and age. He’d stared at the man lying in the hospital bed, trying to reconcile the sagging gray skin and fragile appearance with his no-bullshit father. Seeing him tapped every which way into wires and machines, for the first time in his life, Cade had felt sympathy for his old man.

Once Robert had awakened, that sympathy had lasted about five minutes.

Now, an hour later, Cade was once again asking himself if his mother, rest her soul, had bumped her head a few times before agreeing to marry such a tyrant. He’d served under some hard-asses in his years, had worked with egomaniacs and assholes. But none held a candle to his old man.

“You hear me, boy?”

“I’m not the one under medical observation,” Cade said laconically, rocking back on the heels of his boots and giving his father the easygoing smile he knew irritated him the most. “My hearing is just fine.”

The older man’s eyes, just as green as Cade’s though blurred now, narrowed.

“I wasn’t sure. You’re always being shot at, or surrounded with bombs going off all around you. You might have lost a few brain cells.”

Cade’s smile slipped a little. Nope. All he’d lost was one of his best friends. But Robert Sullivan wouldn’t give a damn about that.

Hell, the loss of his wife had only slowed him down a few weeks. If he missed her now, Sullivan-the-elder never showed it. Cade wished, for the first time in his life, that he had a little of that distance, that he could tap into that emotional void and just not care. Not feel the pain. Not carry the almost too heavy to bear weight of responsibility.

Gut clenched, he stared at the tubes pumping health into his father, focusing on the slender plastic until he could slam the lid shut on the gnawing pain.

“I’ve got to say, I find it difficult to believe you haven’t made Commander yet. You clearly aren’t applying yourself. You want me to die here, knowing my son quit for nothing? That he walked away from his familial obligations to play soldier and then didn’t get anywhere?”

Cade’s fists clenched and his blood boiled. He took a step forward, not caring that he was teetering on the edge of an explosion.

“Robert.”

That’s all it took. One word from Catherine to settle her son against his well-fluffed pillow. And, more likely her goal, to make her grandson stand down without challenging his father’s obnoxious remarks.

Cade hated that the old man got to him. He didn’t have a damned thing to prove to anyone. Still, he couldn’t shake the tension knotting his shoulders or the fury coiling in the pit of his belly. Why had he come back? Why wouldn’t his grandmother let him fly her to San Diego once in a while, or at least listen to his oft-repeated advice that she give up on that crazy illusion that they were a cozy family.

He needed to get out of here. And, if he was smart, he should go call Eden and cancel drinks. A night of thinking had provided plenty of reasons why it was a really bad idea. Mostly because all the images he’d had involved stripping those pink cotton panties off her.

“I’ll be back to pick you up in a couple hours,” he told his grandmother.

Catherine patted his hand with her own gnarled one, her expression peaceful, even with the tiny line of worry creasing her brow when she gazed at her only child. It must be a mother thing, Cade thought, shaking his head. That ability to see something positive where nobody else could.

“I have a job you need to do,” his father called out when Cade’s hand closed on the doorknob. “I loaned one of the neighbors some money with their property as collateral. Turns out they took out a loan with the bank, too. If the bank decides to foreclose, I’ve got no leverage to get my money back. So I need you to collect before that happens.”

Since there were only two tracts of land close enough to be considered neighbors, and one belonged to Cade’s grandmother, that meant Robert was talking about the Gillespie property.

Cade was surprised his fist didn’t crush the knob.

With the same caution, vigilance and care he’d take in facing an armed enemy, Cade slowly turned around.

“I’m not available for side jobs,” he said, keeping his tone light, his expression neutral. Both because he didn’t want to upset his grandmother, and yes, because he knew it’d piss his father off even more. Petty, he acknowledged, given that the guy was in a hospital bed. But he couldn’t help himself.

“You need to do this one. If you don’t the bank is going to take the property. I’ll lose my money, and the Gillespie girl will lose her home.”

“Eden borrowed money from you?”

“Eleanor did.”

Robert didn’t meet the shocked looks of his son or his mother. Looking frail again, he glared at the tubes in his hand for a second, then muttered, “She kept trying to sell me those ceramic things she makes. Erotic art, she calls it. I finally gave her the loan against the house just to get her to go away. Now she’s off, who knows where, and not paying her debts. Figures.”

Cade should be amused that someone could knock his father down a peg or two. But he was too busy worrying about the sweet girl next door.

“Eden has no idea?”

“As flaky as Eleanor is, I doubt it. I was on my way to tell Eden she was going to have to make good on her mother’s debt when all of this …” he waved his tube-tapped hand toward the machines “… happened. I’ve been a little preoccupied since.”

“You’d take the home out from under a girl you watched grow up. A neighbor? She made you cookies,” Cade said, gesturing to the tray on the sideboard with a bright red bow and get-well card.

“The bank’s the one that would be taking it out from under her. I just want to collect on what’s due to me,” Robert argued, shifting to his elbow to glare at his son. “Eleanor shouldn’t have taken that loan if she couldn’t pay it off. That’s on her, not me.”

“You’re the one trying to kick Eden out of her home.”

“The bank’s going to kick her out. I’m the one stuck in this damned hospital bed peeing into a hose while I get screwed out of ten grand.”

Maybe there was justice in the world.

It was something Cade had believed, once. Just like he’d believed he could make a difference. Now, he didn’t have much faith in anything.

He couldn’t stop his father from being a jerk, from hurting people. But he’d be damned if he’d help him.

But if he walked away, what happened to Eden? Cade remembered the state of the property. Run-down, rough looking. She didn’t have the money for upkeep, which meant she probably didn’t have enough to pay off his father. Or the bank.

He wanted to say screw it all. To get the hell out of here and go back to San Diego. For the first time since Phil had died, Cade wanted a mission. Something dangerous and intense. Something with a lot of guns, escalating violence and hopefully a shot at a little hand-to-hand combat.

“Cade,” Catherine said, her quiet voice still loud enough to be heard over the sudden beeps and buzzing of the machines monitoring Robert. “That sweet girl is going to need help. Someone has to step in and keep the bank, and others, from taking her property. You’ll take care of this for her until Eleanor gets back to pay her debts, won’t you?”

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