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If you were saved by a SEAL from an abductor in a sizzling desert, you'd be grateful. You'd want to thank him. You'd also be astonished he came to visit you in the hospital and that he asked after you. You might even fall in love...and seek him out to tell him that.
* * * * *
Getting in the party mood for a weekend away with his SEAL
teammates is no easy deal for “Zeus” Calderon. He’s hung up on a woman he saved
from terrorists months ago, but he should be able to forget a gutsy blonde
reporter who showed resilience and humor under fire. Shouldn’t he?
Kim Stansfield got the instant hots for the hunky Navy SEAL
who led her out of harm’s way—and she’s got proof Zeus feels the same about
her. He’s stubborn, but she’s devised a plan to conquer him.
When she shows up in Key West and surprises him on the
beach, Zeus learns that once in a lifetime a man meets a woman he can’t
forget—and every day without her is no easy day.
Excerpt, CONQUERING ZEUS
by Cerise DeLand, 2012-3. All rights
reserved.
Pissed at himself for leaving Coyote and Ghost at the rockin’
Friday night beach bar scene hours earlier at Sunset Pier, he pushed through
his temper and used it as fuel. Of all
the women in all the joints in the world, the blonde bombshell who doesn’t walk
in there tonight is the one I want.
He pounded through the waves, spotting someone lean and female
strolling the beach with a sizable dog.
They were harmless. He had jumped in naked. No matter. Whoever it
was would be long gone by the time he hauled his bare ass up the sands toward
the house.
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He angled for the shore, fighting memories of doing a door-to-door
in an Egyptian shantytown to find her. His team had landed the night before,
marched hours over abandoned desert to the tribesmen’s village, then fanned out
to search for her and her two fellow hostages. Amid machine gun fire, he
discovered her in a tin-roof lean-to, weary and weak, dehydrated, blindingly
beautiful and bravely smiling at him in her filthy rags.
“Keep your head down,” he had whispered, pushing her to sit
beneath the edge of the window in the hovel where the Bedouin tribesman had
tied her to the post of an old iron bed frame.
With a classic profile, Nordic and tall, Kim Stansfield, reporter
and hostage, stared at him, sunburned and dazed from hunger and thirst. Despite
her dire condition, she smiled, pointing at his face and the green and brown
desert camouflage paint that disguised his features. “Are you wearing make-up?”
“What? You don’t like a
man to wear foundation?” He fluttered his lashes at her, whipped an MRE drink
from his vest and shoved it toward her. “Guzzle this.”
Grasping the pouch with shaking hands, she downed it while he
sawed off her chains with his Spyderco blade. She coughed, choked, then hacked
some of it back up.
“Cancel the guzzle. Sip it. Let me see how fit you are.” He ran
his hands over her body, checking for sprains or injuries from beatings. God
knew what these animals had done to a blonde Western woman who didn’t suit
their ideals for dress or habits. After seven days of captivity, her body was
still sleek, but limp from lack of nutrition. Outside, the rat-tat-tat of
machine gun fire and bursts from his buddies’ Sig Sauers told him his team had
run into her captors and it was his job to snatch her and run.
“I can’t go with you,” she rasped, wiping drops of the liquid from
the corner of her mouth with the sleeve of her dirty linen abaya.
The hell you can’t. He shot her a look that spoke his
thoughts. But hostages, especially women, needed assurances. He knew how to do that.
Grandmothers, mother, sisters and cousins. He had gentled them all. The only man in a huge Tex-Mex family since his father had
passed away when he was a baby, Jesus “Zeus” Calderon knew how to talk to
women. “You’ll be fine. Do as I say.”
This female, he knew, tended not to follow anyone’s orders. Not
her newspaper editor’s. Not the American government’s. He had studied her
top-notch professional background and her tough-as-nails character, all as part
of his team’s mission prep. She might look like a runway model, but she was an
Amazon in spirit and truth. Though she hailed from preppy American and crusty
British diplomatic stock, Kimberly Morran Stansfield was a dare devil,
thirty-one-year old investigative journalist who spoke fluent Arabic and had
used her excellent skills to file stories from Bengazi and Cairo during the
Arab Spring. For more than three years in the Middle East, she had strolled
through gunfire, air strikes and riots. Seven days ago, while working an angle
on famine in Egypt after the overthrow of Mubarak, she had been abducted and
held for ransom by a renegade tribe of Bedouin.
“You don’t understand,” she objected, clutching his shirt in one
fist. “They expected you. Planned for you.” She coughed again and he fretted
about how deeply the spasms wracked her. “They’ll kill my cameramen Johnson and
Hassan if you take me. Said they’d torture them first.”
“No, they won’t.”
“But—"
“We’re getting your two guys. No worries. Then we’re putting down
your captors.”
“How many are you?” she asked, the reverence in her voice a
prayer.
“Enough.” He smiled at her then and it was as if the sun
multiplied into a thousand more when she grinned back at him. “Drink all of
that. Fast as you can. It’s got your meds in there.”
She had a chronic condition of high red platelets. That was the
reason the SEALs had come for her and her two colleagues as quickly as they
had. Delay by even two more days and she would have died. Besides, this
particular group of Bedouins had shown their hand at violence last year when
they had kidnapped a French female television commentator. That woman they had
brutally tortured and killed. Without a cause, save their own enrichment, this
nomadic group tried to ransom those whom they abducted. And they always
abducted women.
“They’re cowards,” he told her as he checked her bare feet,
concluding he would simply carry her with him. “And they’re dead meat.”
Laughing hoarsely, she put a hand to her temple and swayed in delight.
“Woosy. Think I’ve had too much to drink. Can you do that? Take them all?”
“My only job is you.”
She had
laughed then, giddy with the strength of the MRE. Drawing his face down to
hers, she planted a big fat kiss on his cheek. “Color me grateful, SEAL of my
heart. Your wish is my command.”
* * * * *
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my website for more delicious tales: http://cerisedeland.com
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