Read Close Quarters (Her SEAL Protector #1) for Free Online

catching her slick fingers. "I'm sorry."
    "You're better than that, you know?"
    "Obviously not," he replied, the tips of his ears flushing red. "I let my jealousy get the better of me."
    She studied his face for an agonizingly long moment before finally putting her hands back on his throbbing thigh. She worked her palms up and down his tight flesh, pressing hard and easing the ache from his body. "You have no reason to be jealous of Hurley. I'm not his type." She eyed the front of his shorts. "But you sure are."
    "Oh." He ducked his head so she wouldn't see his embarrassment spreading. Somehow Jamie managed to reduce him to a stumbling kid who couldn't stop putting his foot in his mouth.
    "More?" she asked, increasing the pressure as she kneaded his thigh.
    "Yes." He leaned back and let the tension ease of out of his back and shoulders. "Did you find your shipwreck in Samana Bay?"
    "It was exactly where Dad's maps said it would be."
    "But?" He sensed there was more to this story.
    "It wasn't the right one."
    "How can it not be the right one if you found it exactly where it was supposed to be?"
    Her gaze remained glued to his thigh as her skillful hands moved over him. His entire body hummed with a languid sort of vibration. He opened his mouth to prod her a little, but she finally answered him.
    "Before Dad took me climbing with him that last time, I found this old book and some ancient looking maps in his office. The maps were in English and French, but the book was in Spanish. Thank goodness Mom insisted that I take all those foreign language courses, right?"
    Squeezing another dollop of lotion onto her palm, she said, "I flipped through the book and glanced at the maps, but I didn't think much of them until after…" She couldn't bring herself to say it, but she didn't need to because he knew what she meant. After his death . "And then it was too late to ask Dad what he thought he had found out there."
    "And what did he think he had found?"
    "The night before we buried Dad, I sat in his office chair until sunrise and read the book cover to cover and studied his maps. Somehow, some way, he had puzzled out the location of a Spanish shipwreck that people have been trying to find since the 1600s. The shipwreck," she emphasized. "Like the shipwreck and salvage to end all shipwrecks and salvages. It was going to be his prize and the splashy recovery that would make put him in the record books."
    Her slick hands moved to his calf. She carefully avoided his slightly swollen knee as she massaged the lower part of his leg. He waited for her to continue her story, certain there was some juicy part coming up next. She didn't disappoint him.
    "That first week after he was gone, I read through his journals to feel close to him, but then they made me really angry. I was thumbing through them one morning, and I realized he kept these meticulous notes of his adventures but you know what he said about me?"
    Leland shook his head.
    She lifted her hand and scribbled on the air with her pointer finger. "December 1—Junior's birthday. Michelle went overboard with party. Gave kiddo one gold doubloon. She smiled." Blinking rapidly, she dropped her hand to his calf and resumed her massage. "Fifteen fucking pages describing the hurricane he sailed through off the coast of Cuba and one line for my thirteenth birthday. That's what I meant to him."
    "Jamie," he said gently, his heart breaking for her. "He loved you."
    "I packed away all the journals and maps that afternoon." She deflected his assertion that her father had loved her. Clearly it was still a very sore spot. "Mom sent them away to storage, and I tried to forget about them, you know? But as I got closer to graduating high school, I started to get curious. I had this moment of, like, supreme clarity one night in the dorm room I shared with Peyton."
    "Oh?"
    She slowed the movement of her hands and sat back on her heels. "Dad traipsed around the world, chasing treasure and fame. Mom was