Her Mission With A Seal. Cindy Dees

sink, and a few cabinets rounded out the kitchen corner.

      Ashe called from down the short hall to their right, “All clear. One bedroom, one bathroom.”

      “How hurricane-proof is this place?” Cole asked Bass.

      “Windows could use some plywood or at least some boards over them. There’s no time to check out the roof. We’ll just have to hope it’s nailed down tight. The pilings look sturdy and they’ll take a fifteen-foot storm surge easy.”

      “Is Jessamine forecast to surge that high?” Cole asked no one in particular.

      Ashe, just returning to the main room, replied, “That’s right about what the forecast calls for. Fourteen to seventeen feet.”

      Cole glanced back at Bass, who said grimly, “Lemme go out and take an exact measurement from the canal behind this place to the bottom of the porch.”

      The door opened, and wind and rain howled inside until Bass wrestled the door shut once more. Meanwhile, Ashe moved over to the kitchen cabinets to poke around. “There’s some canned food in here. Should hold us for a few days.”

      Nissa surprised Cole by speaking up. “Drinking water’s going to be the problem. The storm surge will bring in filthy, polluted salt water that no amount of purification will make drinkable.”

      She had a point. Give the intelligence analyst credit for common sense on top of her book smarts.

      She asked, “Is there a tub in the bathroom, Ashe?”

      “Yes. A small one.”

      “Let’s see if there’s running water,” she suggested. “If so, we need to sterilize the tub and fill it while we still can.”

      Cole set Ashe to scrubbing the tub with a jug of bleach they found under the kitchen sink, while he went outside to check for a water well and possibly a pump for it.

      He met Bass coming up the steps. “Seventeen feet, sir. That’s what this place can take before the house floods. Even with a lower surge than that, we may see wave action pushing some water inside.”

      “Good to know. Any sign of a well and a water pump down there?”

      “There’s a well. But the electricity’s already out. Pump won’t work.”

      “Generator?” Cole asked.

      “Maybe. Whoever owns this place has it decently stocked. There’s a shed, and that’s where I’d look for a generator. It’s locked, but we can break in and have a look around.”

      They ended up using an axe they found sitting on a ledge over the shed door to break the rusty hasp and get inside. They didn’t find a generator, but they did spot a small lawn mower whose gasoline motor Bass thought he could jerry-rig to run the water pump. And they found a toolbox. Armed with a hammer and pocket full of nails, Cole scrounged under the house for pieces of scrap lumber that he hauled up to the porch and nailed across the windows. They weren’t as good as sheets of thick plywood, but they were better than nothing. The boards would break the worst of the wind pummeling the glass and should catch large pieces of flying debris.

      He and Bass stumbled inside an hour later, wet, cold and exhausted. Construction in hurricane-force winds turned out to be strenuous stuff.

      Ashe and Nissa had been busy inside, as well. They’d hauled in a big pile of firewood from the porch and stacked it beside the wood-burning stove, in which they had started a fire. Baked beans were heating in a pot atop it, and the sound of running water came from the bathroom, where Ashe poked his head out to announce that they should have enough water for several days. He’d also filled a dozen empty moonshine jugs he’d found with water for flushing the toilet.

      As they pulled chairs around the wood-burning stove to warm and dry themselves, Nissa asked in a small voice, “Are we going to be safe here?”

      She looked fearfully at Cole for an answer, and he replied, “This old place is sturdier than it looks. Jessamine won’t be its first hurricane.” He forced himself to give Nissa a smile in hopes that it would encourage her. “We’ll be fine. And even if something unexpected does happen, we’re SEALs. We take problems as they come and deal with them.”

      They’d battened down the hatches in the nick of time, for within the next half hour, the winds outside rose from a roar to a howl and then to an ominous scream. The entire structure shook alarmingly, but it held.

      For now.

       Chapter 3

      Nissa crawled into the only bed in the cabin at the unanimous insistence of the guys. They assured her they were perfectly comfortable sleeping on the floor. Cole set up a watch rotation for himself and his men, and then he urged her to get some sleep before the storm got bad.

      This wasn’t bad? The walls shivered every time a big gust hit, and she shivered right along with the tiny cabin. The glass in the windows rattled, and she flinched every time something hit the boards nailed over them, sure that this was the time the window was going to shatter and let in the full fury of the storm.

      What had she gotten herself into, volunteering for this insane mission? It wasn’t supposed to be like this at all! She was supposed to hang out with some super hot Navy SEALS and catch a notorious bad guy, thereby advancing her career, which was rapidly threatening to die of boredom in a beige cubicle. Although, she had gotten the super hot SEAL part of the deal. All of the men with her were extremely easy on the eye. But the one she couldn’t look away from was their leader.

      Cole Perriman was totally hunkalicious. She’d tried really hard not to fantasize about crawling all over that spectacular physique and keep her mind on business, but it had been rough listening to the inbriefing he’d given her and his two guys. She kept getting distracted by how big and rugged he was, but how he had movie-star looks, too. He was a perfect blend of raw masculinity and sheer beauty.

      Her friends back at Langley wouldn’t believe she got to work with him. She vowed before she headed back to Virginia to get a few pictures of him to show to the girls around the watercooler...and maybe to fantasize over when she returned to her bland, dull, colorless life.

      The wind got so loud it hurt her ears, and it was relentless, moaning and roaring like nothing she’d ever heard before. She finally resorted to pulling the covers up over her head in a futile effort to block out the noise. And maybe she was also hiding like she had as a little girl, when monsters had come calling in the dark of her bedroom at night. She always had been a giant thunder-chicken.

      As exhaustion overtook her body, her thoughts drifted, replaying the horror of the past twelve hours: sailing into the teeth of a hurricane, the nightmare climb aboard the Anna Belle, the frantic search for shelter as Jessamine roared ashore. She’d been so certain she was going to die a watery death, drowned at best and bashed to pieces by the stormy sea at worst.

      When she finally fell asleep, it was no surprise she dreamed of water. Except in her dream, the ocean was not black and angry...

      The sea was brilliant turquoise, light and warm and lazy, and she swam below the surface easily, breathing water. She swayed gently as surf rolled past overhead, untouched by the cheerfully churning surface of the sea.

      Her hair drifted in pale wisps around her, and she was startled to realize she was naked. The sea caressed her body lovingly, and she felt safe. At home down here.

      She became aware of a large shape moving toward her, knifing forward with strong strokes of humanoid arms. She started to backpedal in alarm, but as the man drew near, she recognized his beautiful, chiseled face and stilled. Cole.

      He stopped before her, righting himself until he floated vertical, as naked as she in this underwater dream world. He smiled at her and the temperature of the water around her rocketed up. She looked down and was captivated by his body, more spectacular than she’d imagined in her waking state. His skin was smooth and supple, the