Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

here when you dive injured. Just strapping on the dive tanks must have hurt you.”
    Archer heard what Hannah hadn’t put in words: the thought of him hurting made her angry. If she could have taken his pain, she would have. The fact that he had six inches and eighty pounds on her—and easily twice her pure physical strength—didn’t seem to matter to her at all.
    Amusement and something much more intense rippled in his voice when he spoke. He liked the concern in her eyes. He would like even better to turn it into sexual need. “You saw me dive. Was anything wrong?”
    She took a deep breath, ready to chew him up one side and down the other for being a macho idiot.
    “Was it, Hannah?” he asked calmly.
    Her breath came out in a rush. “No. You dive like you were born to it. It’s just . . . ”
    He waited.
    “No one ever . . . ” She moved one hand jerkily. “I’m not used to being . . . ” Her voice died.
    “Helped?”
    “Protected. I don’t need it.”
    “Everyone needs it.”
    “Even you?” she retorted.
    “I must.”
    “What do you mean?” she asked warily. There was something beneath his calm that made her breath catch.
    “You raced to beat me to that cage full of snakes.”
    “I didn’t know if you knew that they were . . . um . . . ” Her voice faded again. She almost smiled despite the turmoil that had come when she saw his bruises and remembered how he got them. Protecting her.
    And now he had boxed her in quite neatly, using her own reasons, her own rules.
    “You wondered if I knew the snakes were lethal?” Archer asked with superficial calm. “As in the deadliest damn venom on the planet?”
    “Um, yes.”
    He took a half step forward. It was all the small room allowed. The palms of his hands slid across her cheeks as his fingers probed through her short, wet hair. He tilted her face up so he could see into her dark, dark eyes.
    “Let’s make sure I understand what you’re saying,” he said. “You can play with sea snakes so that I won’t have to, but I can’t take a few lumps for you when the roof caves in.”
    “That’s right,” she said defiantly.
    “Wrong answer. Try again.”
    “Archer—” Her voice broke. She had thought his eyes were like gray-green stone, hard and cold. Now she was close enough to see flashes of blue, gemlike shards buried in the smoky crystal iris. “You have blue in your eyes.”
    “That’s because the bathroom is blue. Stand me up in a greenhouse and my eyes are green. Make me mad enough, and I’m told they go steel gray. About that answer, Hannah.”
    “I hate knowing you were hurt because of me,” she said in as calm a voice as she could manage.
    “What do you think it does to me knowing that you could have been killed by that roof? What do you think it does to me knowing that I should have yanked you out of here the instant you called me in Seattle? What do you think it does to me when I see bruises on you and know I—”
    Her fingertips on his mouth were light, but they cut off his words like a fist.
    “I want Len’s killer, too,” she said. “Whatever happens to me along the way is my responsibility, not yours.”
    Archer closed his eyes for an instant, not trusting himself to look at her without kissing her. If he kissed her, he wouldn’t stop until she was naked and wet and he was buried so deep in her heat that he would forget what it was like to be separate, cold.
    “Hannah.”
    The huskiness of his voice sent tongues of fire licking through her. It had been a long time since she had lain under a man, but she hadn’t forgot the glittery excitement, the hot rush, the rhythmic urgency of body against body.
    “If you keep looking at me like that—” Archer began.
    “Like what?” she cut in.
    “Like you’re wondering what it would feel like to have me inside you.”
    “Are you wondering?”
    “I’ve been wondering for ten years.”
    Her eyes widened. Ten years.
    Len.
    Memories broke over Hannah in a cold, endless wave, drowning her heat. She had been so sure of herself ten years ago, so certain that Len was right for her. And now she was standing a breath away from a man who was just as hard, just as ruthless as Len.
    Len, who had been so wrong for her.
    Len, who hadn’t cared when their child died at birth. He literally had not cared. Though she was so ill her baby died and she nearly did, he had dumped her in a hospital where no one spoke English and took off. As always, he was pursuing