Secret Dream: Delos Series, 1B1

Secret Dream: Delos Series, 1B1 Read Free

Book: Secret Dream: Delos Series, 1B1 Read Free
Author: Lindsay McKenna
Tags: Romance, Military
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sent a picture of him, Steve.”
    He turned at the sink after rinsing off his hands. “Why? So you can throw darts at it?”
    Susan had the good grace to laugh. “I’m really being ridiculous, aren’t I?”
    Steve held up his thumb and forefinger. “Just a smidgen, sweet.” Wiping his hands on a red and white checked towel, he added, “The man saved our only daughter’s life down in Costa Rica.” He hung the towel on a nearby hook. “If Cav Jordan hadn’t been there to protect Lia, we wouldn’t be seeing either one of them here today. Hold on to that.”
    *
    Cav Jordan wished he could share his fiancée’s excitement as they left the security area of the Ontario, Oregon, airport. Lia looked fetching as the sunlight glancing through the large, tall windows brought out the red and gold highlights among her brown curls, which nearly touched her shoulders. When he’d met her met her in San José, Costa Rica, she had been a pale, scared ghost of herself. She had just escaped being murdered five days before by a regional drug lord, Dante Medina. Her friends, two women teachers, had been brutally murdered, and their school had been burned to the ground. She’d been smart and run to the jungle before his men could find and kill her.
    As they walked down the green and white tile floor toward an escalator that would take them to the baggage claim where her parents were waiting for them, his mind went back to that afternoon. He had been hired by Dilara and Robert Culver, who owned the global charity Delos. Lia worked for their Home Foundation charity in La Fortuna, in northern Costa Rica, near a volcano known as Arenal. He had been hired to be her bodyguard, and it was the first time he’d met her.
    Nothing had prepared him to see the deep, slicing scar on her left cheek or the semicircular one that ran along the left side of her neck. Cav, because he’d been a SEAL and knew knife work better than most, saw that Lia had, at some time in her past, been savagely attacked. He didn’t know how bad it was at first because she always wore long-sleeved blouses and jeans to hide the scars on her forearms and calves. The worst one was across her belly, which he didn’t see until months after they’d fallen in love with one another.
    That love had changed both of them in the best of ways—dramatic, breathtaking ways. Lia had been a silent shadow, her hair cut shorter than most men’s, when he’d first met her. She hid in her clothes, wary of men in general. Ashamed of her facial scar. He’d met her at probably the second-worst time of her life, a few days after she had narrowly escaped being killed, and she was still terrorized by the experience. Medina’s men had attacked Delos’s school in La Fortuna, and Lia had run and hidden in the jungle, the only survivor. The trauma left her pale, shaken, and more ghost than woman. Yet he’d seen so much more in her that she’d hidden from the world, and he’d fallen in love with her regardless. At first, he didn’t know the real root of her shyness and reserve, but as he got to know her, he had found out about her assault at Bagram, and it had sickened him. She was just twenty-one years old when two Army soldiers in her unit attacked her one night when she was alone and on watch. It had been a major miracle that she hadn’t bled out before escaping and getting help. Cav admired her quiet bravery, her resilience, and her desire to regain her old self. Her stubborn courage had given her the strength to work past the scars, to reach out to him and build a relationship with him.
    Cav had to admit he wasn’t the best-looking fruit on the tree, for sure. And his nightmare childhood haunted him to this day. He knew what it was like to suffer. And maybe that’s what had drawn him and Lia so powerfully to one another, like metal to a magnet.
    As he slanted a loving look over at her, he smiled at her eager, flushed face, her gray eyes alight with joy over seeing her parents once

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