“Not your fault. You didn’t leave live ordnance behind. Whoever used this facility last is going to hear about leaving a dud grenade lying around, however.”

He rolled off her, leaving her feeling needy and wanting. Why oh why did he have to feel so good? With a quick bunch and flex of muscles, he pressed to his feet. She followed suit.

Oh. My. God.

Where she’d been standing an instant before, an actual crater now gaped.

“That thing could have blown me to bits,” she said breathlessly. “You saved my life.”

He turned to face her, glaring at her nose-to-nose, and ground out, “That’s what it means to be a SEAL. And that’s why you’ll never be a real one. You don’t have the heart of a SEAL.”

He whirled and stomped away as the other men and women came running. Then the guys chased her and the other women away from the row of pits to perform a safety check of the whole area.

Shaking, Sherri had only one thought running through her mind over and over.

Griffin Caldwell doesn’t know the first thing about my heart.

Chapter 5

Griffin alternated between pleasant dreams of a lithe female smelling of soap and sunshine pressed against him, and nightmares of not reaching Sherri in time to knock her away from the unexploded grenade. He woke up groaning with lust from the first and sweating in fear from the second, his heart racing in something suspiciously akin to panic. Either way, it sucked.

He’d had plenty of close calls over the years, plenty of oh shit moments, but glancing down to see Sherri reaching for that grenade had literally made his heart miss a beat.

He had to get over this concern for her. Find a way to think of her as just another one of the guys. Except she wasn’t a guy. Hell, she wasn’t even one of his teammates for whom he would lay his life down without a second thought. Why then had he jumped for her in that damned fool move and nearly gotten himself killed, too? He could’ve just yelled at her to back away.

The answer was staring him in the face. But that didn’t mean he had to like it. He was attracted to her. Hell. He might even be a little obsessed with her at this point. Worse than that, he actually would’ve liked her under any other circumstances. She had a dry sense of humor that emerged at stressful moments and would serve her well as a SEAL, not to mention she was smart and kind and generous. Dammit.