Chapter 5

That had been the wrong thing to say.

Cassidy flinched hard, as if he’d struck her in the face. “What? What are you saying? We’re not—I mean, someone’s going to figure out we’re…well, maybe not right away, but soon, and even then, we’re not spending the night together, or at least not like that—”

“Breathe, Cassidy,” he advised her lightly. “I was kidding.”

She hadn’t quite lost the panicked flare to her gaze from earlier and it didn’t help either of them if she veered back into it. She’d been mid-freakout and all he could think about was how well her jaw fit into his palms. How easily he could slide his fingers straight back into her hair. Because he was a masochist who couldn’t stop thinking about the one woman who hated him. Not even in the midst of a semi-crisis.

“No, you weren’t.” Her expression shifted from panic to stormy in point two seconds. “You planned this, didn’t you?”

The accusation amused him so much that he let out a chuckle. “Sure. I volunteered to file your ridiculous papers strictly so I could lure you into an underground bunker that I had no idea existed, all so I could wind up trapped with you. That’s exactly what happened.”

Of course, he couldn’t deny that this was a great opportunity to figure out how to change the dynamic between them. Neither of them could escape. It was almost Freudian in its execution, the type of thing his teammate Hudson Rafferty would dream up in order to force the point.

But Rafferty had been pretty low-key since Syria, dealing with the fallout of being discharged from Navy in his own stoic way. This situation didn’t have his signature on it anyway. It was strictly an unfortunate accident.

“You know what I mean. You’re a womanizer of the highest order. Ready to pounce the moment there’s the slightest opportunity.” She fairly vibrated off the couch as she marked off the evils of his personality on her fingers. “We literally just figured out the door is locked and immediately you throw out suggestive comments designed to seduce me.”

“Did it work?” He shouldn’t be baiting her, but he couldn’t let that ride. If he’d been trying to seduce her that was not how he’d have gone about it.

“No!” And then she let out a string of nonsense words that might be English if she slowed down about a million miles an hour. Since it wasn’t cohesive in the first place, he had zero issue with interrupting her.

“If it didn’t work, then what’s the big deal, quoi?”

That set her back. She stared at him with her mouth open, then snapped it closed. “Because you just can’t say stuff like that to me.”

Why was she the only woman on the planet who would rather cross swords with him instead of hearing compliments and the kind of charming phrases that easily came to his tongue when in the company of basically any female besides her? It was almost like she did it on purpose to rile him.

This thing where you and Cassidy refuse to be in the same place at the same time is getting old.

Aria’s comment played back in Tristan’s head on a continual loop, whacking him with guilt. Yeah, well he’d been trying to fix it. Look where that had gotten him. Stuck in close confines with someone who hated him, which he still believed no matter what she’d said earlier.

“What can I say to you, Cassidy?” he asked her, weary all at once of constantly failing to understand what made her tick. “No one is coming to look for us, at least not for several hours. We’re going to have to figure out how to get along or it’s going to be very miserable for both of us.”

“Don’t flirt with me and we’ll be fine,” she advised him fiercely.

“I wasn’t flirting, au fait, mais d'accord.”

Her brows drew together as she cocked her head at him. “Why do you switch to French when you want to end an argument?”

“Because I want to end the argument,” he shot back instantly. What was she trying to do with that, psychoanalyze him? He stood and prowled around the shelter that had seemed large before they’d discovered the locked door. Now it felt like a somewhat luxurious cage, complete with his very own wolverine for company. “You stick to thinking of me as a womanizer and don’t dig into things that are none of your business.”

Probably he could figure out how to get out of here if he tried hard enough. The real question was how fast he could accomplish it.

“You make it my business by doing it. Do you even realize how condescending it is? Or do you just not care?”

“I—” He blinked as her point sank into him with tiny little barbs and all the words in either language died in his throat.

He stared at her. She was upset, not mad. As if he’d accidentally poked at an old wound.

Condescending? No. It was automatic, a by-product of growing up in a bilingual home. You used whatever language expressed your thoughts the best and if other people didn’t understand, too bad. Okay, sometimes he did it on purpose solely because other people wouldn’t understand but he didn’t do it to hurt anyone’s feelings.

And sure, a few choice phrases murmured in French had helped him get a little further with a woman. Most of them melted into little puddles when a man spoke in a foreign language. He wasn’t a saint, nor did he pretend to be.

That excuse wasn’t going to cut it here. Cassidy wasn’t a normal woman, and this wasn’t the time or the place to fall back on principle. He needed beaucoup points and fast.

“I’m sorry,” he told her sincerely wishing he could read her well enough to figure out what he’d unwittingly uncovered here. “I wasn’t trying to make you feel stupid. It’s habit. I’ll try to stop.”

It was her turn to blink in apparent shock and that coupled with the wary confusion in her gaze told him he’d hit closer to the mark of what had upset her than he’d expected.

“How did you kno—I mean, that’s…great of you. I wasn’t trying to be mean about it. It’s just that I don’t know French and—well, of course I don’t—”

“It’s fine,” he broke in before she could launch into another one of her marathon responses to a simple statement. How had he known what? That was the million-dollar question. “No one speaks French, not in this area anyway. Which makes it poor form to do it around you. We’re going to be together for a while, no two ways about it. This is me attempting to make that more pleasant for both of us.”

“Okay.”

She sat back against the couch, the first time she’d relaxed since he’d made the mistake of closing the door with them on this side of it and toyed with her hair absently, which did nothing but draw his attention to it. Reminding him how much he’d wanted to touch it earlier, but only because it was attached to her, and he couldn’t erase the inexplicable urge to see if her mouth worked as well at kissing as it did at causing extreme irritation.

The vibe in the small room grew a few teeth, and they weren’t of the hostile variety. He wasn’t sure he liked the idea of being trapped with her while they were at odds, but he liked the idea of spending hours together with this fine edge of awareness slicing between them even less—because he didn’t know if he could stop himself from using this forced proximity to dismantle her barriers, one at a time.

If he could get her to respond to him the way every other female did, it would fix everything. The prediction would be fulfilled and then he could let things die with Cassidy the way he always did with a woman. The problem was that none of that sat right with him all at once. And he couldn’t figure out why.

“I guess this is useless.” He pulled his cellphone from his pocket and checked his impulse to toss it on the concrete floor. Not that it would matter if it broke into pieces. Cell service was sketchy in Superstition Springs in the first place and underground—forget it. “I suppose there are worse places to be trapped. Does the TV work?”

She nodded. “And the refrigerator is stocked with some things, so we won’t starve.”

“Dr. Pepper I’m assuming?” Her expression confirmed that horrific sidenote of this incarceration exercise. “Fantastic.”

Trapped with Cassidy. They’d miss the party after all, but ironically, not because they were both trying to avoid each other. Isaiah and Aria would be sorely disappointed with them both. Could this day get any further off-kilter?

“There’s nothing wrong with Dr. Pepper,” she said but without her usual bristle in what seemed to be her attempt at being more pleasant as well.

“There is so much wrong with Dr. Pepper, I scarcely know where to start,” he informed her but likewise without any heat. He knelt and fingered the seam where the plaster walls met the concrete floor. “Any hidden panels or hidey-holes?”

She watched him with a slightly fascinated look on her face, blinking those melty brown eyes that shouldn’t be as much of a distraction as they were. “I’m not—maybe. There’s no telling with Tallhorse.”

Yeah, that guy was something else all right. Double tumbler locks on a storm shelter. What exactly had the quiet Native American envisioned these mythical Russians would do if they found him hiding in his bomb shelter? Russians were pretty innocuous compared to a zealous al-Qaida general, who had limitless surface-to-air-missiles at his disposal.

Maybe it was a leftover product of having to start each day as a SEAL in fearless mode, but he had little use for men who hid from danger instead of meeting it head on. He’d spent the last decade wiping his opponents from the map so others didn’t have to be scared. It was impossible to turn that off.

Tristan went over the entire structure with his fingers poised to sense even the slightest variations in texture or surface area but couldn’t find anything that might serve as a conduit to the outside other than the round, reinforced hole for the TV wires. Likely, the wires ran underground to some type of junction box at Tallhorse’s house.

In case there was the slightest chance Tallhorse would hear and understand, Tristan tapped out a short message in Morse code and repeated it several times. Probably it would go untranslated if Tallhorse did register the pattern, but it was worth a try.

“What was that?” Cassidy asked. “Morse code? Exactly how many languages do you know?”

“Why the fascination with my skill set?” he countered since her question didn’t sound like the precursor to a compliment. If she had some kind of problem with his linguistic ability, the truth wouldn’t win him any favors since the answer was something like six or seven. “If you want me to teach you, just say so.”

Cassidy immediately slid off the couch to crawl over to where he sat on the floor near the wires, crowding him all at once with her presence. “Show me.”

Wait, what? She was supposed to snort and give him some grief or a flippant comment. Now that she’d called his bluff, he had absolutely no clue how to manage her proximity. A lock of her hair fell into her face as she zeroed in on the wires, apparently on board with a lesson in Morse code. Problem being that his mind had immediately shifted to some other things he could show her that had nothing to do with archaic forms of communication.

“You, um, have to know the alphabet,” he said or tried to, but his voice had gone hoarse. For crying out loud. He was so hyper aware of her, he could almost sense the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. Ridiculous. He cleared his throat. “It’s easier to remember the sounds rather than thinking of it as dots and dashes. Here.”

He settled his hand over hers and guided it to the wires, promptly forgetting whatever they’d been talking about so he could concentrate instead on how good she felt. Her hand fit inside his as if it had been fashioned from the same mold at a smaller scale, and he had to fight the urge to slide his fingers between hers, twining them together so he could raise her wrist to his lips.

Madness. She wouldn’t welcome it if he did.

But that was the one place on a woman that you could really gauge her responsiveness. When he kissed a woman’s wrist, he could immediately determine if she’d be the type to close her eyes and savor when he did something she liked, or if she’d lock gazes with him to communicate her inclinations that way. Tristan prided himself on learning to read a woman’s cues faster than should be humanly possible, but it was no big trick if you paid attention.

And he was paying an enormous amount of attention to Cassidy. Unfortunately, her cues were all about Morse code, not Tristan’s lips on her skin.

“S,” he croaked. “It’s tap, tap, tap. Three short bursts.” He demonstrated by tapping on her index finger with his. “Try it.”

She lifted his fingers with hers as she complied, their flesh sliding together in a way that had no call to feel so intimate, but it did, and he’d never again think of Morse code quite the same.

“What next?” she murmured. “I’m not sure what I’m spelling out.”

It took him a minute to remember that he was the one with that information. “SOS. The O is three long tones. Let me show you.”

His taps weren’t perfect but at this point, it hardly mattered. The odds of Tallhorse knowing Morse code were slim to none. Of course, that was assuming the man was even home and not already on his way to the rooftop party in the center of town. Far be it from Tristan to mention it. He’d rather bite his tongue off before ending this little interlude with Cassidy that had turned very intriguing indeed.

She repeated his short-short-short-long-long-long-short-short-short pattern like a pro.

“That was good,” he told her and forced his voice into a normal register before she clued in on exactly how bothered she’d gotten him simply by sitting near him on the floor.

After a beat, she sat back against the wall, hugging her knees with her arms as if trying to make herself as small as possible. Because she was similarly affected by the extremely close space and large blanket of awareness draping over them? Or was that wishful thinking on his part?

“You learned this stuff in the military?” she asked out of the blue.

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “Sometimes when you’re in the middle of nowhere, technology isn’t a thing. You have to learn to communicate without it.”

Like that time Rowe Hardy had taken an unexpected dip into Al Jaboul Lake due to a misunderstanding with some insurgents about which of them would meet their maker first and subsequently lost his MBITR. With no communication device, his teammate had recounted how he’d been forced to hike fourteen miles to the rendezvous point as a result. There was no way to signal a ride without also putting a big flashing sign over his head that would point him out to the very evil he was trying to avoid. So sometimes you bit the bullet and made do without getting a message out to anyone—which seemed to be what was in store for Tristan tonight.

“You saw some pretty ugly things I would imagine,” she stated quietly and flattened her mouth out when he nodded without comment. “I’m sorry for what I said earlier. At Voodoo. It was uncalled for. I really do respect you for laying down your life.”

His heart spilled up and into his throat as he took in the sincerity radiating from her face.

“I…thanks,” he bit out because there was literally nothing else his vocal chords would allow him to say. “It wasn’t life threatening every day.”

“But even once would be enough.” She jerked her chin. “You don’t have any scars.”

“Not visible ones,” he said automatically but bit back the rest of what he usually tacked onto the end of that statement. It was far too provocative.

Cassidy had been super clear about her boundaries, and he aimed to respect them. Any other woman would have gotten the Scar Striptease he’d perfected, which involved unbuttoning his shirt enough to draw it away from his shoulder where he’d taken a bullet through the soft tissue. It looked far more impressive than it was. The nick had barely created a scarlet stain the size of his fist at the time he’d earned it, but women loved to cluck over it.

For some odd reason, just thinking about slipping a few buttons free in Cassidy’s presence affected him more than the last time he’d actually done it.

He kept his shirt buttoned.

And had literally no idea what his next move should be.

This was unprecedented territory. He was so far behind enemy lines that any intel he might have gathered along the way would be useless because he had zero shot at interpreting it. Everything he did and said set her off and his sole goal in tracking her down at the schoolhouse had been to reverse that trend. This was a golden opportunity he could not waste but neither could he fall back on anything tried and true, especially not a practiced move designed to reduce her will to the consistency of butter so he could have his way with her, which was how she’d interpret it despite that not being how he operated at all.

“I’m not a womanizer,” he blurted out and when she cocked a brow in his direction, he couldn’t seem to stop the flow of words. “Earlier. When you accused me of being a womanizer. That’s the opposite of who I am. You’ve got me confused with someone who treats women like dirt, a heavy-handed cretin who only has one thing on the brain.”

“Are you trying to tell me you have more than one thing on your mind?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

The saucy slant to her head as she tilted it in contemplation said she didn’t believe him and given that he’d just pictured exposing his shoulder to her as a method of increasing the intimacy quotient between them, she wasn’t wrong.

But he hadn’t done it, so she wasn’t right either.

For the first time in his life, Tristan Marchande was at a crossroads, desperate to get this woman to respond to him as a man, yet unable to fall back on the skill set that had served him well for more than a decade. He loved women, loved figuring out how to make them feel good, loved the passion that built when he did it right—which was always. That dynamic made sense to him.

This did not. Without that fire blazing hot and bright between them, how could he be expected to eventually burn it out?

Answer: he couldn’t. Which meant a stark new reality that he had to navigate.

“I have to ask then,” she said, completely oblivious to his disquiet. “What’s on your mind?”

You. One hundred percent Cassidy Calloway. Except his mind wasn’t filled with seduction strategies. Normally, he’d have a dozen or more lined up that he knew without a doubt would work on the woman in his sites since he would have just spent several hours figuring them out.

And that’s when he realized what he’d been doing wrong.

He’d spent zero time learning what would work on Cassidy. Just because his end goal wasn’t to get her to melt in his arms didn’t mean he had to completely abandon his skill set. He’d always prided himself on having extrasensory perception when it came to understanding a woman’s subtle cues, but he hadn’t even tried with her.

His skill wasn’t undressing a woman. It was learning how to make her feel good enough about herself and who she was while she was with him that she wanted him to. Tristan was the maestro des femmes because he could build up a woman, not because he could tear her down, which he’d forgotten in the midst of this battle with her.

It was so simple. And also the most difficult undertaking he’d ever imagined. In order to stop this madness of the two of them never laying down their weapons long enough to coexist in the same place at the same time, he had to romance Cassidy without fanning the spark between them.

That’s what the give and take in his prediction meant. He’d been thinking this whole time that he’d have to give up the woman in question and that wasn’t the case at all. Instead, he had to give up pieces of his soul if he had any hope of changing his future.