Redeeming Her SEAL (ASSIGNMENT Caribbean Nights #9) - Kat Cantrell Page 0,17

of water to introduce reality once again.

“Stop.”

He did instantly, stepping back and taking all his delicious heat with him.

Expression hooded and implacable, he stood there, torso rising and falling erratically. Watching her. Reason returned along with a healthy bit of remorse. This man had the power to break her, and she’d forgotten far too quickly that she couldn’t rely on him.

“All that proved was that you kiss like the devil and that my girl parts are in working order,” she said, but her body wasn’t on board with the distance between them and swayed toward him.

At that, he laughed. Wickedly. “Wrong. It proved that you’ve been severely neglected and are in desperate need of a man in your bed who’s worth his Y chromosome.”

The simmering testosterone in that statement should have her rolling her eyes, but she was still too raw and achy to ignore how his laugh crept into every last pore of her skin, heating it. “I’ve never denied that you have a singular ability to turn me on. The problem is that I don’t want you to.”

“Still have a thing for Anderson then?”

“Will you get off that subject?” Hands jammed down on her hips, she stared him down. “Jared has nothing to do with this. I don’t need either one of you, frankly. My vibrator doesn’t ignore every word I say or drop me in the middle of a territory grab between two grown men. Both of you should know better than to poke at each other because I had the audacity to exercise my God-given right to sleep with whomever I choose.”

Instantly, his expression closed in. The chill crawled down her spine and not in a good way.

“You’re right,” he said softly with an undertone that warned her it wasn’t agreement in any way. “You do have the choice to sleep with whoever you want to. Just like I have the choice to be pissed that you deliberately picked a man you knew was my friend.”

He let that settle with a brief pause, but before she could fire back, he interrupted her.

“Just imagine how much fun it was to hear from him how you’d moved on. Especially since he got a little graphic with his description of how close the two of you were. That’s why I didn’t come running to you with an explanation of why I sent that text message. I could not take it, knowing that he’d had his hands on you. That you’d been with him the same way you’d been with me.”

No. Not the same. At all. Jared had never penetrated her head, her soul. Just her body.

She snorted, but it came out as shaky as her insides. “So this is just a competition thing. You hate the idea of him pawing at your woman, right? You staked your claim first, and how dare Jared betray you like that.”

“I don’t blame him,” Charlie bit out. “Your choices are one hundred percent on you.”

Speechless, she stared at him as a glint of pain surfaced in his pale blue eyes, then vanished as they turned back into ice chips. He wasn’t just pissed off about Jared encroaching on his “territory”—it was far more personal and deep than that. She’d hurt him.

Where was all of this coming from? She’d have sworn she didn’t mean anything to Charlie. Until this moment.

“If it’s so upsetting to you, maybe you might ask a couple of questions about the genesis of my relationship with Jared then,” she said, bewildered at the turn the conversation had taken.

Her stomach turned as she internalized that while she’d been drowning in grief, yearning for Charlie, wishing he was there to keep her from going under, she’d instead reached out to Jared. Only to wind up here in this alleyway in Freeport with the niggling, unsettling feeling that it had been a huge mistake.

If she hadn’t been with Jared, would Charlie have sought her out for that conversation she’d desperately wanted but never gotten? He’d come back to the Caribbean after unceremoniously dumping her, a move that had totally shocked her. What if he’d intended to seek her out, maybe to explain, maybe to try again, and hadn’t because she’d removed that possibility?

“I don’t care.” His derision cut through her chest like a machete. “That’s why I haven’t asked.”

“I can’t go back and undo it, Charlie,” she whispered. Numb all at once, she stared at him. Had she somehow lost what she could have had with Charlie before even realizing it was in