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made.
    “Look, I’ve got an appointment this morning,” she said now, tugging on the arm he held. “There’s someone I’m supposed to see. You need to let go of me, Finn.”
    “Yes, Finn, ” Dez, the brat, said with a smirk. “Don’t you think, Finn, that you should let her go, Finn ?”
    Hannah Davis’s attention turned toward Desirée. Her head tilted. “Do I…do I know you?”
    Dez’s head tilted the same way, and Tanner remembered how at first sight he’d mistaken Hannah for his bad luck charm. They did have a more than passing resemblance, which should have scared him off from the get-go. What an idiot he was.
    “Do you watch much television?” Desirée asked. “Entertainment shows, gossip TV, that kind of thing?”
    Hannah shook her head. “I’m a teacher and I make a deal with my students every September. No more than five hours of television a week and I throw a pizza party in class at the end of every month. I spend mine on crime dramas and the occasional sitcom rerun.”
    Dez nodded. “But do you ever skim a copy of US Weekly ? People ? The Enquirer ?”
    Hannah shrugged. “I live alone. The fifteen-or-less line at my grocery store goes pretty quick.”
    Tanner remembered what his former boss, Geoff Brooks, had told him about his niece. An elementary school teacher from the same small town from whence Geoff hailed. This young woman had been going through some “rough times,” and though the older man hadn’t specified exactly what kind, he’d made it just short of an order that Tanner take good care of Hannah while she was in Coronado.
    “Show her the sights. Make sure she doesn’t have to sit at restaurants alone,” Geoff had said. “Keep the hounds away from her.”
    Christ. Tanner knew what that meant, didn’t he?He was supposed to protect her from himself and what they’d almost done last night.
    What he’d wanted to do when he unveiled her a few minutes ago. Flushed and tousled, her warm body had spoken to his without any words necessary. He’d just stared at her, fascinated by all her pink and creamy skin, his gaze snagging on the cute pillow crease that ran across her cheek and arrowed his attention onto her puffy, blush-colored mouth.
    Her lips were naturally red, the reddest, sexiest he’d ever seen. To disguise his reaction to his wayward thoughts, he gathered the sheet around him and piled it in his lap. He needed to boot Dez out the door so that he and Hannah could—
    Damn it! Damn it!
    His mind should be off her. Off her and off her mouth and off how he wanted to touch it, taste it, have it. Geoff would skin Tanner alive—or worse, ban him from the Ser vice for life—if he didn’t do right by his precious niece, and a one-night stand or even a ten-day fling certainly wasn’t “By the Book” Brooks’s idea of “doing right.”
    What the hell was Tanner supposed to do now?
    Suddenly aware that both the women were staring at him, he frowned. “What?” Then, realizing he still held Hannah’s slender wrist in his hand, he dropped it like a hot potato. His gaze met hers. “What?”
    Oh, shit. She was doing it again, just with a look from her warm brown eyes. It was some sort of apple-pie and American Legion voodoo, which made him think of hay rides and picnics and having sexoutdoors. He could see her standing naked in a sunlit mountain pool. Shadows from the leaves of the surrounding trees would dapple the sleek surface of her wet thighs and rounded ass, focusing his attention on the palm-sized curve at the small of her back and the sweet dimples above her butt. Her nipples would be raspberry hard and he’d wade through the cool water to taste them, only to halt, mesmerized, as she lifted her face to a waterfall and let it drench her hair and from there run in clear rivulets over all that sun-warmed flesh.
    “Are you all right?” she said from her half-dressed and full-dry, nonimaginary place on the bed, a frown wrinkling the spot between her dark