Goddess of the Sea Read Online Free PDF

thankful she hadn’t set her apartment on fire. She glanced down. Her nightgown made a rumpled, pale spot on her cream-colored carpet.
    She shook her head and sighed. Two bottles of champagne—what had she been thinking?
    â€œI forgot,” she muttered. “The process of rational thought stops after bottle number one.”
    No wonder she’d had the weird dream; she’d been in a drunken stupor.
    She glanced back at the nightstand and squinted at her bedside alarm clock, which read 11:42 A.M. CC’s eyes widened. Panic banished the dream, and she sat bolt upright.
    â€œIt’s almost noon!” She yelped, scrambling to her closet to frantically pull out a fresh uniform before she remembered that she didn’t have to report for duty that day. She was flying out tomorrow, which meant that today would be dedicated to packing and tying up the loose ends being gone for three months created.
    She took a shaky breath and ran her hand through her hair. Actually, the only reason she had to go on base at all that day was to stop by the orderly room and pick up her new set of dog tags. (She was still chagrined that she’d lost her old set during the move from Colorado.) Besides that, she just needed to buy some last minute toiletries for the trip, come back to the apartment and move her plants from the balcony to her living room so that her neighbor, Mrs. Runyan, could water them and finish her packing. And, of course, she had to remember to drop her key off with Mrs. Runyan before she left for the airport the next morning.
    CC took a deep breath. What was wrong with her? She was usually so organized and logical about a deployment. She had planned to get up early that morning and finish her business on base, and then get her plants taken care of and her packing completed early so that she could spend the rest of the day relaxing. The trip to Saudi would be long and exhausting, and CC definitely was not looking forward to it—and that’s not even considering how much she hated flying.
    She shook her head. Instead she’d chosen to send herself off with an enormous hangover. CC marched into the bathroom and flipped on the shower. As the warm, soothing mist began to rise, she started searching through the cabinet for some aspirin for her tremendous headache. But before she found it, she stopped herself.
    Headache? No, now that her heart wasn’t yammering a mile a minute, and she wasn’t afraid she’d been AWOL for half a day, she realized her head didn’t actually hurt. At all. Actually, she felt fine. She closed the cabinet door and studied herself in the mirror.
    Instead of the sallow, hollow-eyed look of a morning-after hangover, CC’s chestnut-colored eyes were clear and bright. Her gaze traveled down her naked body. Her skin was healthy and vibrant; she glowed with a lovely pinkish flush. It was almost like she had spent the night being pampered in an exclusive spa instead of drinking two bottles of champagne, eating a ton of KFC and getting caught in a thunderstorm while she danced in the moonlight.
    â€œMaybe . . .” she whispered to her reflection.
    A thrill of delight traveled the length of her nakedness as she remembered the moonlight and the electric passion it had fueled within her body. She could almost feel the night against her skin again.
    The warm mist from the shower crept around her in thick, lazy waves.
    â€œLike the pinyon smoke,” she gasped, and her heart leapt. “Remember,” she told her reflection. “You promised to break your mold.”
    Tentatively, she raised her arms, trying to mimic her movements of the previous night and turned slowly in a sleepy pirouette. The fog swirled around her, licking her naked skin with a liquid warmth that reminded her of her sensuous, bittersweet dream. Thinking about the handsome stranger her sleeping mind had conjured, CC continued to spin, catching quick glimpses of herself in the