Hell or High Water (Deep Six #1)(102)
She made a face. “It would’ve been if I wasn’t already green with mornin’ sickness. I think I threw up over the side of her”—she hooked a thumb toward where the new salvage ship was bobbing with the tide—“about fifty times. Consider her good and christened.”
Leo widened his eyes at Mad Dog. “Pregnant?” Now that’s how you grab life by the balls and really live it. Good for you, man.
Mad Dog’s face split into the kind of satisfied smile only men who’ve planted a baby in the belly of the woman they adore can pull off. “Ten weeks.”
“Mazel tov!” Bran crowed at the same time Leo offered the happy couple his congratulations. Then Bran threw his arm around Harper, hugging her until Mad Dog was forced to growl, “Get your dirty mitts off my wife, or find both of them cut off and shoved up your ass.”
Bran chuckled, bending to kiss Harper’s cheek before dancing out of reach when Mad Dog took a swing at his head.
Leo couldn’t put it off any longer. He had to look at her. Olivia. His Olivia—if she’d just pull her head out of her ass and admit it. And when he did look at her, he felt like he’d taken a haymaker to his diaphragm. He couldn’t breathe because she was so beautiful. Her inky hair wild around her face. Her soft cheeks pink from the sun. She caught her lower lip between her teeth, giving him a glimpse at her sexy front tooth.
“Hello, Leo,” she murmured in that smoky voice he’d been hearing in his dreams for three long weeks now. Her subtle perfume drifted on the evening breeze, causing his nostrils to flare.
“Olivia.” He nodded, giving himself major points for playing it cool when cool was the dead last thing he was feeling.
“You ever get the feeling we’ve done this before?” she asked, tilting her head and referring to their initial salvos, which were basically the exact same greetings they’d given each other when she first arrived on Wayfarer Island the morning of Whackass Wednesday.
“I’m beginnin’ to think that when it comes to you and me, it’s a case of as it ever was and—”
“Ever shall be, darlin’,” she finished for him. “I think we need to get some new material.”
“You won’t hear any complaints about that from me,” he said, his tone full of innuendo. His point being that simply “leaving it at that,” as she’d said that night before walking away from him, wasn’t going to cut the mustard.
“Uh.” Bran glanced back and forth between them, no doubt feeling the tension radiating in the air. Quick to change the subject, he turned to Mad Dog. “Did you guys build that beauty in record time or what?”
“As luck would have it,” Mad Dog said, flicking a look at Leo, then at Olivia, his expression turning contemplative, “we were already ninety percent done with her when the original buyer backed out a little over a month ago. Which is why I could tell Morales it’d only take us a week and a half to build her when he called asking how fast I could get a salvage ship done. And then it took us four more days to add the bells and whistles this one”—he shot a finger gun at Olivia—“insisted on. She was there every step of the way. Making sure we got it just right. Even down to the font we used on her name.”
Leo glanced out at the ship, at the stark red lettering just visible from that distance. It read Deep Six. And it was perfect. The perfect name for the salvage company the six of them had finally gotten around to incorporating. Any other time he would have appreciated that fact. But right now he had something else on his mind.
“So that’s where you’ve been all this time?” he demanded, feeling his blood pressure rise. “Atlantic City?”
“Annnnddd that’s our cue,” Bran said to Mad Dog and Harper, motioning for them to head up the beach. “How about you two come up to the house with me? Let’s get something fun to drink. Uh…”—he stopped herding them and shook his head woefully at Harper—“sorry. Mad Dog and I will get something fun to drink and you, Mrs. Wainwright, will get something decidedly unfun to drink.”
Leo watched them go, silently seething. She’d been in Atlantic City the whole time, and she hadn’t taken two minutes to let him know that she—
“I got your emails,” she said, breaking into his heated thoughts.
“Right.” He jerked his chin. “And you didn’t respond because?” He made a rolling motion with his hand.
“Because I d-don’t…” She shook her head and swallowed. “I don’t understand. After everything that’s happened, how could you possibly want to keep seeing me?” And he’d been right about the first reason she’d been so willing to walk away from him. He figured he was right about the second reason too. “I mean, I get that the sex was—”
“Stop right there,” he warned her, fisting his hands lest he reach out and shake her. Shake some sense into her. “This doesn’t have a cotton-pickin’ thing to do with the sex, and you know it.”
She searched his face, her expression so damned sad and unsure it nearly had him grabbing his chest and falling to his knees. “Then what does it have to do with, Leo?”
And having never been a coward, he gave her the straight, unvarnished truth. “It has to do with me lovin’ you and wantin’ to spend the rest of my life with your crazy, stubborn ass.”