Never Surrender Read Online Free PDF Page A

loving her fiercely. Loving her forever.
    “Are you okay?” he rasped unsteadily. They hadn’t made love in months. That was a hell of a long time. He was worried about her.
    Bay managed a strangled laugh. She slowly raised her head, caught and held his sated gaze. “I’ve decided to call you Shark Man. You’ve graduated from being just a frogman.” She gave him a drowsy, sweet smile radiant with love only for him. “Helluva swim, Shark Man...”

CHAPTER THREE
    “C OME HERE , BABY .” Gabe hauled her into his arms as he settled into the bed. They were clean, dried off and so damned weak it had taken them leaning on one another to make it to the master bedroom together. Bay had fallen asleep immediately. Gabe felt Bay’s softened breath, the warm moisture flowing across his chest as she slept deeply, her head resting in the crook of his shoulder. Her hand across his pounding heart. God, did life get any better than this? Hell, no.
    Gabe closed his eyes, his woman in his arms, her body pressed wantonly against his, their legs entangled. Her hair was still damp, although he’d done his best to dry it off with a towel afterward. He’d seen the exhaustion in Bay’s half-closed eyes and knew she had to sleep off five months of brutal training. The darkness was complete in their bedroom. Gabe felt himself begin to utterly surrender against her warmth and curves.
    He lay awake for a long time, his body still vibrating with simmering heat after having made love with her. Bay’s background was as a Hill person from the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia. She was a woman of the earth, wild and completely natural. Her spontaneity was unfettered, freeing him from his dark and miserable past, infusing him with hope of a bright future. Love did incredible things for a human being, Gabe was discovering.
    Closing his eyes, his arm wrapped firmly around Bay’s shoulders as she slept, Gabe couldn’t shut off his mind. Bay had come from a happy family, deep in the mountains, away from most of civilization. She’d lived and hunted in those mountains. Not only was she a crack shot, but her mother, Poppy, was a Hill doctor. Bay obviously got that healing gene from her. Her father, Floyd, had been a Marine Corps sniper and had started teaching her at a young age how to hunt and shoot. When her father died of Black Lung, she’d entered the Navy afterward to make money for her economically struggling family.
    Moving his fingers slowly across her firm, warm flesh, he felt her inborn strength, her Hill backbone. Lowlanders, people who weren’t Hill-born, would say she was backward and uneducated. Nothing could be further from the truth. Bay was simple, homespun, and had a strong sense of right and wrong. When her father had become ill, she’d picked up the family mantle of responsibility, being the oldest, to feed and care for her mother, father and her mentally challenged younger sister, Eva-Jo.
    A sigh slipped between his lips as he savored the darkness embracing them. He felt Bay’s hand twitch and move slightly on his chest. She was moving more deeply into a healing sleep, and that was good. His mind revolved back to her, back to her simple way of living.
    When he’d met Bay last year in Afghanistan, he’d instantly felt attracted to her. It was her humbleness, the idealism she saw in others, her compassion, that called powerfully to him. In those four months of combat, they’d known they had something good between them, but they could never act upon it. Not in a combat team. Fraternization could tear a team apart. And it could get people killed. They’d cooled their heels, looked, but hadn’t touched one another. And only after Bay had come home after her six-month rotation out of the combat zone, did they realize the beauty of what they held in one another. Real love.
    Frowning, Gabe thought about how at twenty-nine he’d thought he’d known what love was. He’d married Lily after five days of sex and heat. It was