Fourteen

 

 

Sam Starrett was not going to be the first to leave the pool.

He was hungry, he was tired, but until Alyssa Locke walked her perfect ass out of there, he was staying right where he was.

If he worked really hard at it, he could pretend that it had nothing to do with the fact that she was wearing a bathing suit or his realization that this was the closest to her being naked that he was going to get, probably for the rest of his life.

Damn, she was gorgeous.

And she was going to dinner tonight with Rob Pierce. The British motherfucker.

Alyssa came out of the pool, adjusting her bathing suit in a way that made him want to scream. Sam let himself watch her from his lounge chair, wishing he weren’t so goddamn tired. He was too tired to be angry with her, too tired to feel much but sorry for himself for being the pathetic loser she’d had sex with and then rejected.

“Congratulations on being sent out here as an observer,” Sam told her as she dried her face on her towel.

She looked at him suspiciously, as if waiting for him to add a but and an insult.

“That’s all,” he said. “Just congratulations.”

“Yeah,” she said, “it’s been kind of obvious that you’re thrilled for me.”

He deserved that one. “Actually, I am. Your career’s going great. I’m ... I am thrilled for you. I just wish I could be thrilled for you while you observed someone else’s takedown of a plane in some other country.”

She sat down on the edge of the chair next to his, where she’d tossed her sweats and sunglasses. “Word in my office is that this observation thing is the precursor to a permanent transfer to Max Bhagat’s A-team.”

Sam knew what she was telling him. The SEALs in Team Sixteen’s Troubleshooters Squad worked with Bhagat’s top team all the time. “Gee,” he said. “Maybe we should just go steady. I mean, since we’re going to be seeing each other so often ...”

“Right.” She stood up. “Excuse me for thinking you were capable of carrying on a serious conversation.”

Sam stood up, too. “How am I supposed to react to that news, Alyssa?” God, he’d thought it was bad when he didn’t see her—he thought he’d go crazy from missing her so fucking much. But it turned out that was nothing —nothing—compared to being around her and not being able to touch her, not being able to talk to her, to make her laugh, to make love to her. Another few days of this and they’d have to cart him off in a straitjacket. “Are you going to be happy about working with me around most of the time? Can you really be around me and not—”

Want me. He stopped himself from saying it, aware of how egotistical it sounded. But he didn’t mean it that way.

She didn’t answer. Instead she jumped him.

It was the dead last thing he’d ever expected. He was completely unprepared, and she hit him, hard, in a way that pushed him back and down, as if she’d meant to tackle him instead of leaping into his arms.

It was as he hit the concrete, with Alyssa Locke on top of him, that he realized she had meant to tackle him. She was shouting. “Get down!”

Something hit right where they’d been standing, the force of the explosion throwing them even farther back as flames erupted, igniting his towel and her sweats.

It was some kind of Molotov cocktail, tossed down from one of the windows in the building above them.

Alyssa Locke didn’t want to jump his bones. She just wanted to save his life. He almost wished she’d just let him die.

He rolled back with her, moving away from the flames and a second explosion. She dragged him back, too, behind a low concrete wall beneath the overhang, until they were sheltered from further attack.

Holy shit, that had been close.

Sam felt more than heard pounding feet as the Marines ran out from the lobby to investigate. Through the ringing in his ears, he heard an order to put out the fire, another sending squads of men up into each of the towers of the hotel to search for whoever might’ve thrown those makeshift bombs.

Good. Someone else was going to play Superman. He didn’t have to move. He could just lie here for a minute, waiting for his head to clear.

Alyssa made a sound that pretty much summed up the way he felt. “Sam. Sam!” She shook his shoulder. “Oh, God, please don’t be dead.”

Sam. Now he was Sam, not Roger. “I’m alive,” he managed.

“Thank God!”

He lifted his head and looked down at her, suddenly intensely aware that he was on top of her. Their bare legs were intertwined. His thigh was pressed tight between hers and her body was soft and warm beneath his.

Beneath his very, very undead body.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She nodded as she looked up at him, something unreadable in her eyes. “Yes. Get off me.”

If she’d said please, he might’ve done it. But probably not. Her face was mere inches from his and he found himself staring at the softness of her mouth. All he’d have to do to kiss her was lean forward.

“I don’t know,” Sam said, trying to look as regretful and in pain as he possibly could. “I think I might have some kind of serious back injury and it’s probably imperative that I don’t move at all.”

“You are such an asshole,” she said, but she laughed as she said it, and something inside of him snapped.

“God, I missed you, Lys,” he breathed, and then, Jesus, he was kissing her.

He’d meant to kiss her sweetly. Gently. Carefully. But like every interaction with this woman, he couldn’t do it without completely combusting. And touching his lips with hers just wasn’t enough. He had to taste her, so he swept his tongue into her mouth.

And it was all over. Instant meltdown.

He couldn’t have stopped kissing her if someone had held a gun to his head. Her mouth was hot and sweetly spicy. She tasted faintly of cinnamon gum and the cola they’d all been practically shotgunning all day, both for the caffeine and to replenish fluids lost out in the hot sun.

She tasted like hope and laughter and a future in which he didn’t wake up from his dreams of her drenched with sweat—heart pounding and desperately alone.

Because she was kissing him back, just as fiercely as he was kissing her.

She. Was kissing. Him. Back.

Holy God.

Her hands were in his hair, her legs tight around his thigh as she kissed him as if she’d missed him as much as he’d missed her.

Jesus, he was a fool for having waited so long to see her again. He shouldn’t have listened to her when she’d told him they had to pretend that nothing had happened between them. He should have gone after her. He should have dogged her every hour of every day.

But that didn’t matter now. Because she was kissing him.

She was kissing him in the shadows of the overhang by the swimming pool in the hotel’s center courtyard—which was now crawling with Marines. It was only a matter of time before someone saw them. And he knew it mattered to her that she not be seen kissing him, at least not in public like this.

So he lifted his head. “Lys, please, let’s go to my room.”

She looked dazed—far more than she had right after that bomb had nearly killed them both. “I can’t.”

“We can go up separately if you want. I’m in 812 and—”

“No.” She struggled to get out from underneath him, pushing at him as if she were suddenly panicked, and he let her up.

She’d scraped her shoulder and one of her knees, and he couldn’t believe she was just going to kiss him like that and then run away. “Lys—”

But she was. She was backing away from him as if he were a dangerous rabid animal that she shouldn’t turn her back on.

“I can’t do this again,” she told him, and her voice actually shook. “I can’t. I don’t even like you. So just stay the hell away from me!” And with that, she turned and ran.

“Fuck!” If there were a wall nearby to punch, Sam would’ve put his fist through it. But there was only that low concrete divider that would’ve broken his foot if he tried to kick it.

And there was WildCard Karmody, too, standing silently about twelve feet away, even farther in the shadows, watching him. Jesus, how much of that had he seen?

“Lys as in Alyssa, huh?” WildCard said as Sam met his dark scowl. “As in Alyssa Locke.”

“Aw, fuck,” Sam said again, sitting down on the concrete divider, utterly defeated.

WildCard came closer. “So you were just never going to tell me that you scored with Alyssa Locke, were you, Lieutenant? When was it? In DC probably, right? That was six months ago.”

“Fuck,” Sam whispered. How could things have gone from so perfect to so completely fucked in a matter of minutes? Two minutes ago, he was euphoric. Two minutes ago, he’d been all but deciding who to invite to his wedding. Two minutes ago, he knew—knew—that he was going to spend the entire rest of the afternoon and evening making love to Alyssa, and that from now on, he was going to do it right. He was going to treat her so good, she was never going to leave him again.

But two minutes later, the truth emerged—kind of like the sewage that floated up and out into the streets of this stinking city whenever there was a heavy rain.

Alyssa didn’t even like him.

And to make things worse, WildCard had seen Sam kissing her. Within hours, the entire team would know. And when the news got back to her, Alyssa would never believe that Sam hadn’t been the one to tell.

“Six months,” WildCard said again, with that self-righteous indignation that only he could do so fucking well. “It’s eye-opening, sir, to realize that you thought so little of our friendship six months ago that you didn’t bother to tell me that you’d shagged the Ice Bitch.”

Sam exploded. He launched up off the concrete wall and hit WildCard at a dead run. He pushed him back, slamming him against the bricks of the hotel.

“Don’t you fucking talk about her like that! Don’t you fucking dare! I’ll fucking kill you!” He was ready to pound the shit out of the asshole, ready to make someone bleed.

“Whoa,” WildCard said, holding his hands in front of him in a gesture of surrender. “Whoa, whoa, Starrett. I didn’t know! Time-out here! Time-out! You used to talk about her like that yourself.”

He was seconds from throttling Karmody. “You breathe a word of what you saw to anyone and I will fucking kill you! Do you understand me?”

WildCard stared at Sam, realization and a deep perception in his dark eyes. “Jesus, man, I had no idea you’re in love with her! This is what’s been making you act like a lunatic, isn’t it? You’re freaking out because she’s here, but she doesn’t want you. And the shit I’ve been giving you—that’s just making it worse. God, I’m sorry, buddy. Where you’re at right now, I’ve been there, done that, and it wasn’t fun, that’s for damn sure.”

Sam stared back at his friend. You’re in love with her. Oh, Holy Christ, WildCard was right. He was completely in love with Alyssa Locke. That’s what these feelings were, this achingly awful sense of misery. The nearly bipolar mood swings to joy when Alyssa so much as smiled at him.

“What do I do?” he asked, barely able to believe he was asking WildCard Karmody for romantic advice. “Do I follow her? Should I—”

“Shit, no, Sammy,” WildCard told him, the afternoon’s altercation by the plane totally forgiven and forgotten. “You stay the hell away from her before she completely breaks your heart.”

Helga made it into the hotel dining room just in time to hear the tail end of Stanley’s song.

He actually did it. He got up on the makeshift stage, took the microphone in hand, and sang.

His voice was better than merely good, his intonation uncommonly accurate, but it was his choice of song that made Helga laugh aloud. “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.”

He sang the words with a completely straight face, really delivering the soulful melody and tender words. Your love’s the key to my peace of mind ...

The pretty helo pilot was there, sitting at a table, but she wasn’t alone. She was with a glaringly handsome young officer. What was that about? The young man was grinning, as were most of the other SEALs—and the room was packed with them. They’d turned out en masse to see their senior chief make good on the bet he’d made.

The bet Helga had made a note of on the pad that she’d glanced at as she approached the restaurant. She was having a Swiss cheese night. Lots of holes, lots of confusion. She’d be lost without her notepad.

Across the room, the helo pilot looked exhausted. Still, she sat watching Stanley, completely transfixed. What was she doing, sitting with that young officer as if they were out on a dinner date?

The song ended, and the room erupted into a roar even louder than the poolside explosions that had woken her from an afternoon nap. Helga clapped and whistled, too, as Stanley executed a very dignified bow.

“Hey, Senior!” one of the men from the back of the room yelled. “Is there anything you can’t do?”

“If there is,” he said into the microphone, “I’m not telling.”

There was more laughter. As he put the microphone back into its stand, his eyes caught those of the helo pilot, who was still watching him from across the room. He gave her a look just a little bit longer than a typical casual glance. No one else in the room probably noticed it.

But Helga did. And when Stanley purposely moved away from the pilot and the handsome officer, heading instead toward the bar, Helga cut him off at the pass.

“Very nice,” she said to him. “You have your mother’s gift of music.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Do you dance as well? She loved to dance.”

“I’m afraid I inherited my father’s two left feet.”

“Oh dear, your father didn’t dance?”

He smiled at her dismay. “I didn’t say he didn’t, ma’am. He just wasn’t very graceful. But if you knew my mother at all, then you know he danced. She had the master chief doing the polka with her in the kitchen every night he was home.”

Helga laughed. “That sounds like the Marte I knew.”

“He would do anything for her. Except ...”

“Except stay home from Vietnam?” she asked gently. “I’d bet she didn’t ask him to do that, though.”

Stanley looked at her closely. “No,” he said. “She didn’t.”

“Do you have a few minutes?” she asked him. “Can you sit?”

He glanced over at the helo pilot. She and the handsome officer had just been brought their dinners. She wasn’t going anywhere for a while.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’d like that. Grab a table. Can I get you something from the bar?”

“What are you having?” she asked.

“Just a can of soda.”

“Not beer?”

“I’m operational. But I’d be glad to get you a brew, if you like.”

“Operational?”

“Lieutenant Paoletti and Max Bhagat could give the order to take down the plane at any moment,” he explained. “Until that happens, until those passengers are safe, no one on my team will have so much as a sip of beer.”

There was a burst of laughter from a table in the corner of the room. A waiter carried a tray of nearly overflowing beer mugs in its direction.

“They’re not operational?” Helga asked.

Stanley glanced at them. “No, ma’am. They’re the SAS, SIS, and FBI observers.” He smiled. “They’re allowed to have a hangover in the morning.”

Ah, yes. She recognized the tall man at the table. It was that James Bond wannabe from the UK. And the female FBI agent sat next to him. Someone Locke—and Helga was lucky she remembered that much.

“Can I get you something to drink?” Stanley asked her again.

“Just a bottle of water,” she told him. “Thanks.”

As he headed to the bar, she turned to look around the room.

There weren’t any open tables. But at the sound of more gales of laughter from the table in the corner, the SEAL she recognized as being the cowboy in charge of the takedown of the plane threw his napkin onto his half-finished dinner in disgust. He pushed his chair back from his table so forcefully, it nearly toppled over. With another grim look at the revelers, he strode out of the hotel restaurant.

There was quite a bit of pressure on that young man. Helga could imagine that she’d have little appetite—or patience for people having a party—if she were responsible for a team of men who were planning to force their way onto a locked aircraft to try to kill five hostile terrorists without injuring any of the innocent passengers on board.

Either that or he was miffed because what’s-her-name Locke was drinking without him.

Helga smiled at her tendency to find a budding romance under every rock. Avi used to tease her about it all the time.

She took the cowboy’s still warm seat as a busboy quickly cleared the table, stopping him from taking a linen napkin that had been placed in the middle of the table. “Reserved for Lt. Sam Starrett,” it said in messy blue ink.

That was right—the cowboy’s name was Starrett. Just like the character from the book Shane, about the gunslinger and the farmer’s family in the old American West. How fitting.

And how ridiculously odd that Helga should be able to remember that—the name of a fictional character from a book she’d read at least four decades ago—when there were times she couldn’t remember the name of the person she was talking to.

Or—worse yet—when there were times she didn’t recognize the person she was with. Such as the man sitting down across from her at her table, giving her a bottle of water and a smile.

It was frightening beyond belief when her world gave a sideways slip and she found herself here. Completely at a loss.

“You okay?” he asked, whoever he was who had sat down across from her, concern in his eyes. Eyes that she’d seen before. Eyes ...

Annebet, her eyes filled with concern as she pulled Marte off of Helga. “Why are you fighting? What’s this about? Helga, are you okay?”

“Just ... just a little warm,” Helga managed to say.

The man with the blue eyes so like Annebet’s reached across the table and took back the bottle of water. He opened the top, put it into her hand.

“Tak.”

He smiled. “My mother used to say that. You sound so much like her, it’s a little unnerving sometimes.”

His mother. Marte. This was Marte’s son, Stanley. The world slipped back into place. Thank God. “It’s a little unnerving for me, too,” she told him. “You have Marte’s smile and Annebet’s beautiful eyes. Did she become a doctor, Annebet?”

“Yes, she did,” Stanley told her. “She was a pediatrician—ran a children’s clinic in Chicago.”

Helga put her hand to her mouth, suddenly afraid she was going to cry. “Did she ever ... marry?” She had to know.

“No. She always said she was married to her career. She passed on just two years ago. The winter after she retired.”

“That must’ve been hard for Marte.”

Stan looked at her. “My mother passed twenty years ago.”

Merde. “Forgive me,” Helga said. “Of course. I’m ... tired, and ...”

“It’s all right. Really.”

“She was my best friend during a time when I couldn’t have survived without a best friend. Quite literally,” she told him. “In my heart, she’ll always be twelve years old. In my heart, she’ll never be gone.”

“In mine, too,” he told her quietly, a completely unexpected admission of deep love from this big, rough warrior.

“The first time I defied my father,” Helga told him, “the first time I stood up to him and told him he was wrong, I pretended I was Marte. She was so brave, so ferocious.”

He smiled. Damn, she’d lost his name again. The more she tried to force herself to remember, the more it eluded her.

“That’s a good word for her,” he said.

“She beat me up once,” Helga told him.

He laughed. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“She thought I’d told my parents ... about something we’d been hiding from them. She was furious with me. Annebet had to pull her off. She felt just awful when she found out she was wrong. Marte,” she qualified. “It turned out another girl, Ebba Gersfelt, was the one who told.”

Ebba Gersfelt had been jealous. She’d seen Hershel and Annebet meeting in the park, and she’d told her parents, who had called the Rosens.

Marte’s son glanced across the room, trying not to be obvious about the fact that he was more interested in watching the pretty dark-haired helo pilot than in what Helga was saying. The pretty pilot was finishing up her dinner with an outrageously handsome young officer. What was that about? Why didn’t Marte’s son go and talk to her, join them?

Maybe it was because he was sitting here with her.

Helga might not be able to remember a name, but after being a diplomatic envoy for over forty years, she knew how to end a conversation.

“I’ve kept you here for long enough,” she told the man with a smile. “I know you have things to take care of. But perhaps we can find another time to talk.”

He was enough of a professional soldier to recognize a dismissal when he heard one. He stood up, pushed in his chair. “Your assistant mentioned something about sharing a flight back to London. I’d like that.”

She had no idea what he was talking about. Was she going to London? Still, she kept her smile intact. “Wonderful. It was nice talking to you.”

“Likewise, ma’am.”

As he walked away, Helga dug through her purse for her notepad. Stanley. His name was Stanley. And the helo pilot was Lt. Teri Howe.

But as she watched, Stanley gave Lieutenant Howe a wide berth, passing the young woman without even giving her a glance.

It didn’t make sense. But too often these days, nothing made sense.

Of course, that was really nothing new. Nothing had made sense back when she was ten years old, either.

“You’ve continued to see this girl, despite our objections,” her father had roared at Hershel on that awful day that had started with Marte’s fists and her angry accusations that Helga had betrayed them. The accusations had hurt far more than the fists.

Hershel had looked at their father, his anger evident only by the tightening of his jaw. “I’ve asked her to marry me.”

Poppi exploded. “Over my dead body! I forbid it! I forbid you to see her ever again!” He caught sight of Helga cowering in the doorway. “And you—I forbid you to play with the other Gunvald girl! From now on you will come straight home from school! You will not talk to either of them, am I understood? If you live in my house, under my roof—”

Forbid her to see Marte ... ? Helga couldn’t breathe.

But Hershel just laughed. “I’ll pack my things.”

Mother was aghast. “And go where?”

“Anywhere but here,” Hershel told her. “If my friends in the resistance don’t have room for me, I’ll stay in the Gunvalds’ barn. They’ve never been anything but welcoming to me.”

“Because they’re fortune hunters—all of them,” Poppi stormed. “If you walk out of this house, I’ll cut you from my will. Go and tell this Annebet that—that you have no more money. See if she’ll marry you then.”

“You’re wrong!” Helga stepped into the room, and her father turned to look at her, incredulousness and anger on his big face. She’d never dared to speak back to him before.

She nearly faltered, nearly backed away and scrambled up the stairs to the safety of her bedroom. But Marte wouldn’t have run, and she closed her eyes for a second, trying to imagine what Marte would say next.

She’d call him a fat pig and tell him to eat horse droppings.

Helga tempered Marte’s fight with her own gentle reasoning. “Poppi, you don’t really know the Gunvalds. You don’t know Annebet. If you took the time to meet her, you’d see that she doesn’t want Hershel’s money. She cares nothing for that, and everything for him. She loves him more than she loves herself, more than she loves her own comfort and happiness. The only reason she won’t marry him is because she can’t bear to be the cause of a rift between you.”

“She told you that?” Hershel’s face was filled with emotion. For an instant, Helga wasn’t sure if he was going to laugh or cry. “Mouse, my God, she said that to you? That she loves me that much?”

Helga nodded.

Hershel laughed as he kissed her. “She loves me that much! Thank you, God! I’ve got to go find her.” He started for the front door.

Poppi was still furious. “If you leave this house, you’ll get no money from me!”

Mother was crying. “Hershel, don’t do this!”

Hershel stopped, looked back. “I don’t want your money—take it, please.”

“If you walk out that door, you will be my son no more!”

Helga gasped, but Hershel just shook his head. “How does that work, Poppi? You proclaim it and make it so? You can shut me out of your heart, but you can’t shut yourself out of mine. I may not be your son, but you’ll always be my father, in my eyes and in the eyes of God. Unless you think He listens to your pronouncements, too?”

For once her father was speechless.

“Won’t you wish me luck and long life?” Hershel asked quietly. “Because tonight will be my wedding night.”

Poppi pointedly turned away.

“Luck, Hershel,” Helga said. “Luck, and prosperity and—”

“To your room, miss,” her father raged, as Hershel quietly shut the door. “To bed without supper!”

And Helga escaped, only too glad to take the stairs to the second floor two at a time. She closed her bedroom door behind her. Locked it. And went out the window and into the softness of the late summer twilight, down the drainpipe, just the way Marte had shown her.

Hershel had seemed so convinced that Annebet would marry him—tonight.

And Helga wouldn’t have missed their wedding for the world.

“The best we could figure, it was some kind of equipment error,” Mike Muldoon told her as they sat over coffee in the hotel restaurant.

Teri was exhausted. She was having what had to be very close to what people described as an out-of-body experience. She was still partly numb from the afternoon’s emotional roller-coaster ride. She still couldn’t quite believe that, after over twenty years of silence, she’d finally told someone about those awful months when she was eight.

She’d told Stan.

And he hadn’t blamed her and he hadn’t hated her. And, probably most important, he hadn’t pitied her. He’d listened and held her. He’d cried, but it hadn’t been from pity. It had been because he cared.

Yeah, he cared—enough to bully her into coming downstairs for dinner and then virtually delivering her to Mike Muldoon.

Teri had been stunned. Again. Stan wasn’t going to join them. Again. She’d thought ...

Obviously she’d thought wrong. Her whole world had gone through some major gyrations, yet nothing had changed for Stan. He was still working overtime to set her up with his friend.

And she’d sat down at Muldoon’s table, even more exhausted than ever, figuring, Why not? Why fight this? Stan wanted it so much—one of them deserved to get exactly what they wanted.

It had been awkward again at first, sitting there alone with Muldoon. The ensign was remarkably bad at small talk. Still, she’d managed to get him going by asking him questions about Stan.

Muldoon admired the senior chief possibly even more than she did. And he was full of some pretty wild stories—wild enough to keep her from begging exhaustion and crawling back to her room the minute she’d finished her dinner.

She glanced at her watch. It was only 1700. It felt closer to midnight.

“But there was no doubt about it,” Muldoon was telling her now. “We were dropped so far from the LZ—the landing zone—we were in a completely different country.”

“I know what an LZ is,” Teri told him.

“Right. Sorry.” He made a face. “I keep forgetting you’re a pilot. You’re ...” He cleared his throat, fiddled with his glass of water. Glanced at her. “Too pretty to be a pilot.”

“You’re too pretty to be a SEAL,” she countered, and he laughed.

“I had a good time tonight,” he told her. “Stan was right. You’re great.”

It took every ounce of willpower she had not to pounce on that statement, to ask if Stan really said that about her in those exact words. But she knew she really didn’t need to ask. Of course Stan had said that. He said it while trying to talk Muldoon into going out with her. It meant nothing.

“So you missed the LZ by a few dozen miles,” she said, wanting to hear the rest of Muldoon’s story before she went up to bed. She had fewer than nine hours before she had to report for duty, and she was determined to spend every one of them sleeping.

“Try a few hundred,” he told her. “Like, three hundred.”

What? “How could that have happened?”

“We didn’t spend a lot of time speculating,” he said with an adorable smile. There was no doubt about it, Muldoon was gorgeous with that chiseled face—a nose that was the closest thing to perfection she’d ever seen, those cheekbones, that sensitive mouth and strong jawline and chin. It was not a hardship to sit here and watch him tell his story, watch his eyes light with amusement, watch emotion and candlelight play across his face.

“We were in the middle of the jungle, near this mountain road. It was raining so hard visibility was down to eight inches, communications had crashed, our team leader was missing, and we had four hours to travel three hundred miles to meet L.T.—Lieutenant Paoletti—and his squad for an op that was ... Well, let’s just say we needed to be there. But the senior chief is undaunted. He goes out to find us a truck. We need wheels because we’re running out of time—so he’s going to get us wheels. Our job is to find Lieutenant O’Brien, our missing CO.

“Stan set up a rendezvous point where we’re all supposed to meet—him with a vehicle and us with O’Brien. And then we start search patterns. It was a big jungle—I’m talking a needle in a haystack situation.

“But Izzy and I found him. He’d hit his head and was way out of it. I remember thinking, thank God—because the last thing I wanted to do was show up at that rendezvous point empty-handed.” He laughed softly. “I also remember thinking, thank God he’s unconscious. Now the senior chief will remain in command, and he’ll get us out of here. I mean, I outrank the senior, sure, but I didn’t have the experience, so ...”

“Let me guess,” Teri said, her chin in her hand as she watched him. “While you found O’Brien, Stan managed to find a truck.”

“He did.” Muldoon grinned. “It just so happened that it was filled with cocaine and being pursued rather relentlessly by the angry drug runners he’d stolen it from. So suddenly we’re in a firefight, and the senior chief’s like, ‘Well, I couldn’t just leave the drugs behind, could I?’ As calm and matter-of-fact as could be.”

Teri had to smile. She could just picture Stan... .

“Did I mention the volcano?” Mike said.

She laughed. “You’re making this up, aren’t you?”

“I swear to God, I’m not. This really happened on my first op with the team.”

“A volcano,” she said. “Where did you say you were?”

“I didn’t. But you can probably guess.”

“I’d bet it wasn’t Hawaii.”

He laughed—a flash of white teeth. “You’d win. Anyway, there we are. We’re being chased by forty angry men with automatic weapons, and Mount Kumquat or whatever the heck it was called chooses that moment to erupt. Now, it’s not quite in our neighborhood, but it’s close enough for some pretty intense earthquakes as we’re zooming down this mountain, heading for some little one-hut town in the valley. The road is crumbling beneath our wheels and Senior’s like, ‘Oh, good. This way security’ll be down on the airfield.’ Turns out there was a map in the truck—he’s pinpointed where we are and where we need to be, and there’s a nearby airport where we’re going to steal a plane so we can get there.”

“Of course,” Teri said with a laugh. “I should have guessed.”

“Yeah,” Muldoon said, grinning back at her. “It won’t be easy, but we’re SEALs. We can do it. At least that’s what the senior chief tells us. He has me and Jimmy rig enough C-4 to blow the truck and the drugs to Kingdom Come. Turns out—oops—the airport is a military air base, but Senior turns that snafu to our advantage, too. We drive that truck right through the locked gate and trigger the explosives—and we’ve got ourselves a nifty little diversion. We get off the ground in a military transport, complete with jump gear.

“By now O’Brien is awake and pretty embarrassed that he missed most of the action. He swears he’s feeling up to making another jump, so Senior tells Cosmo to set the plane on autopilot—it’s got just enough fuel so that it’ll go down over the ocean—and we get ready to make our second jump of the day.

“Visibility sucks because of the ash and dust from the volcano, but the senior chief says he knows where we are. He says jump, so we jump.”

“And ... ?” Teri said. This entire story was pure Stan. Missed LZs. Rainstorms, volcanos, earthquakes, drug runners, trucks filled with cocaine. He would glower about the PITA factor, but then he’d go about taking it all in stride—and making things right.

“And he was right. He knew where we were,” Muldoon told her with another smile. “This time we hit the ground an eighth of a mile from the LZ. We made it to the rendezvous point with Lieutenant Paoletti with ten minutes to spare.

“And L.T. says, ‘We expected you here sooner. Did you have any problems, Senior?’ And the senior chief doesn’t bat an eye. He kind of shrugs and says, ‘Nothing the team couldn’t handle, sir.’ ”

Nothing he couldn’t handle was more like it. And it was true. There was nothing that Stan couldn’t deal with. Nothing he couldn’t fix.

Except maybe for the fact that Teri couldn’t stop thinking about him—couldn’t stop wanting him. Even when she was sitting here with Muldoon, who was undeniably gorgeous and incredibly sweet.

“You okay?” he asked.

She looked up to find concern in his pretty eyes. What was wrong with her? It was obvious that this man was interested in taking their budding friendship and tweaking it up a level. Or ten. But when she looked at him, she felt ...

Exhausted.

And maybe a little flattered.

That was the best she could do. Maybe after a good night’s sleep ...

“You look beat,” Muldoon said gently. “We should get out of here so you can get some rest.”

Teri didn’t argue. She let him lead her out of the restaurant, let him carry her heavy flack jacket. Together they went up the endless stairs and into the dimly lit hotel lobby.

“Which tower are you in?” he asked.

“West. You?”

He rolled his eyes. “South. But it’s not that far—I’ll walk you up anyway.”

“That’s okay,” Teri told him, shaking her head no. She didn’t want him to. She didn’t want to stand awkwardly with him outside of her room, praying that he wouldn’t try to kiss her good night.

She didn’t want to kiss him. Not after kissing Stan earlier this afternoon.

God, she’d never been kissed quite like that before. With so much passion and power and ferociousness. She gazed up at Muldoon, watching his mouth as he said something to her, something she couldn’t hear over the memory-induced roaring in her ears.

No, although he had a very nice mouth, Teri didn’t want to ...

He kissed her.

Muldoon kissed her. Right there in the lobby, where anyone could see them. Shock made her just stand there, so he kissed her again, settling his mouth against hers. As far as kisses went, it was nice—warm and soft and sweet.

And Teri realized that she’d asked for this. By looking at his mouth the way she had, he’d no doubt assumed that she wanted him to kiss her.

Oh, damn.

She stepped back, away from him, pulling out of his arms.

They were standing in the gloom of a lobby that was more shadows than light, thanks to the current brownout. And it was an empty lobby, too, thank goodness. No one had seen them.

Muldoon was looking at her as if he were thinking about kissing her again, so she quickly held out her hand to him. “Good night.”

He laughed as he shook her hand and opened his mouth to speak. “Teri, I—”

Teri didn’t want to hear it. So she did what she did best. She took her jacket from him and ran away.