A SEAL's Surrender. Tawny Weber
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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