Molly Anderson. She’d recently tried to rebraid her thick reddish brown hair, but she was the kind of woman who moved too quickly ever to achieve real tidiness. Bits and pieces of her hair had escaped, some curling wildly in the humidity, some clinging damply to her neck and face.
It was a face that wasn’t even really that pretty. It was too broad, with a too generous mouth that would have been sensuous if she’d bothered to wear lipstick. Which, as far as he knew from his days of living in her tent, she never did.
Her eyes were pretty enough—a light, almost golden, brown. But they had laughter lines around them, showing her age. She had to be closing in on forty, fast, and she’d lived, if not hard, then certainly enthusiastically.
She was wearing the same drab green T-shirt and the cargo shorts that came down nearly to her knees that she’d had on during the flight to Parwati. Leather sandals on her feet.
Pink nail polish on her toes. It was such a contradiction to the lack of lipstick, it fascinated him. He refused to let himself so much as glance at her feet again.
“Joaquin’s going to be okay,” Molly said. “You were right, Mr. Jones. It was an allergic reaction to black market penicillin. His mother gave it to him, thinking it would clear up an infection in his foot.”
He shrugged, still hoping rather futilely that she’d get a clue and leave him alone.
The bartender put a tall glass of juice in front of Molly, and she thanked him, then nearly drained the glass in one long chug.
With her head tipped back, she looked as if she were inviting vampires to dinner. All that pale skin, that long, elegant throat.
Jones was probably the only man in the place who wasn’t staring at her. Terrific, now he had to worry about one of these lowlifes following her out of here.
No, he wasn’t going to think about it. That was her problem. He’d made up his mind weeks ago not to think about her anymore.
But when she put the glass down, and drew a line in the frosty condensation on the outside with one of her long, elegant fingers, he had to force himself not to remember her hands, so cool against his heated forehead and face as he lay, feverish, in her bed.
“I heard about your plane,” she continued. Of course she had. Everyone on the island had heard about his plane. “That you burned out the something or other and have to wait two weeks for the part to come in from Jakarta. I’m so sorry.”
Jones finally looked at her. Because of her, he’d missed his appointment, lost more money than he could believe, and pissed off some very dangerous men in the process. He was stuck in this shithole until tomorrow—and that was the absolute best case scenario. It could well take Jaya a full week to get that part.
And she was sorry.
The real stupid thing was, she was sorry. Most people didn’t mean it when they said it, but Molly Anderson did.
How did she manage to be so goddamn beautiful all the time? Her eyes, her face—they just seemed to shine despite her lack of cosmetics, despite the fact that she wasn’t conventionally pretty, despite the wrinkles and lines. Or maybe because of them. Jones couldn’t figure it out.
“I know you’ve been seriously inconvenienced,” she was telling him, “but if it weren’t for you, Joaquin would have died. So finish your beer. I’m taking you to dinner.”
Oh, no. No way. He was absolutely not going to have dinner with Molly Anderson. “No, thanks.”
“Mr. Jones, I refuse to take no—”
“Look, we’re even now.” His voice came out louder and edgier than he’d intended. He took another pull on his beer and when he spoke again, he managed to sound more matter of fact, more like his normal bored but deadly self. “By flying you down here, I paid you back. I don’t owe you anything else.”
Molly laughed and he had to look away. He pretended to be fascinated by the picture of the Playboy Playmate of July 1987 that was pinned up behind the bar. Faded and tattered around the edges, she hadn’t aged quite so well as Molly.
“I want to treat you to dinner,” she told him. “That means I’ll pay. Honestly, I don’t expect anything else from you.”
“You wanna bet?” He turned slightly on his stool to face her. “You don’t want to take me to dinner. You want to go out with some watered-down, defanged version of me. And I’m telling you right now, I no longer have an obligation to act like some goddamn choir boy around you. We’re even. You still want to have dinner with me? Fine. But you’ve been warned. You’re going to be getting way more than you bargained for.”
He looked directly into her eyes, and let her see that he wanted her, that when he looked at her, when he thought of her, he thought of sex, pure and raw, primitive and pounding. Him hard inside of her, her face flushed with desire as she clung to him. No finesse, no promises, no emotions—just a good old-fashioned banging.
But he should’ve known she wouldn’t scare easily.
She didn’t look away, didn’t blush, didn’t rush out of the bar, scandalized.
No, she just stared right back at him, a slow smile spreading across her face.
“Well,” she said. “You’re mighty sure of yourself, aren’t you, Mr. Jones?”
He let himself look at her wide mouth, imagining just what she could do with lips like that.
And she laughed, rich and thick and throaty, genuinely amused.
“What do you really think is going to happen? That during the hour or so that we have dinner, I’m going to find you so irresistible that I’m going to beg you to come back to my room so I can have you for dessert?” She actually licked her lips, the witch.
And he was the one who started to sweat.
But then she leaned forward so that he had to look into her eyes, not at her mouth anymore. “Get over yourself. Even if you showered and shaved, it’s not likely I’m going to succumb to your vast charms tonight—although I have to admit, your chances would be greatly improved. I do so prefer a man who doesn’t stink.”
This was not the way this scenario was supposed to play out. She was supposed to run away. He was supposed to sit right here at this bar and have another five, six, seven beers until he was too drunk to care about the hard-on she’d just given him.
Molly slipped down off the bar stool. “So cut the macho crap, get off your butt and come have dinner.”
Jones finished his beer and stood up. Let her see what she did to him. Maybe that would give her pause. “You’ve been warned.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said as she led the way out onto the street. She glanced at him, glanced down and smiled. Again, she was genuinely amused. “I’m terrified.”
Love ya.
Ken had actually said, Love ya, right before he’d hung up the phone.
Maybe Savannah hadn’t noticed.
But holy God, maybe she had.
Well, there wasn’t much he could do about it now. The words had slipped out, shocking the hell out of him. Did he really love this woman? After knowing her for just a few hours? After only one night?
One freaking great night.
Savannah clearly felt something for him. She was so not the type to just randomly shack up with a stranger.
Wasn’t she?
Jesus, he’d been hideously wrong about women before.
He headed for Lieutenant Commander Paoletti’s office, paperwork for his two weeks of vacation in hand, both anticipating and dreading seeing Savannah again.
What if he’d royally screwed things up by using the L-word too soon? What if she thought he really meant it and decided he was an emotional imbecile for thinking he could fall in love that quickly?
What if he was an emotional imbecile . . . ?
Johnny Nilsson and Sam Starrett were in the hallway, no doubt exchanging diapering tips. The two officers were his best friends in the world, and they were both married, both relatively new fathers, and lately both as boring as hell.
These days, it seemed as if they were unable to talk about much besides the various types of bowel movements of their children.
It was mind numbing how long they could keep that conversation going.
Well, that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about today.
“Hey,” Ken said in greeting, interrupting Johnny midsentence. “What do you guys know about multiple orgasms?”
Both Johnny and Sam turned to look at him—Sam with the bleary eyes of the sleep deprived. He looked shell-shocked and confused—and as if he might’ve actually forgotten what an orgasm was.
“I’m wondering what it’s like for the woman.” Ken got more specific. “Is it like riding one big perfect twenty-minute wave? Or is it like catching an excellent string of three or four smaller but equally perfect waves?”
Johnny laughed. “Surfing as an analogy for orgasm. I like that. Kowabunga.”
“Three or four?” Sam repeated, interest returning to his bloodshot eyes, as if he were waking up. He laughed. “Ho, WildCard, you’re shagging a woman who comes three or four times inside of twenty minutes?”
Count on Starrett to bring it down to the crudest possible level.
“I didn’t say that,” Ken countered stiffly. He hadn’t brought this up to engage in a locker room discussion of last night’s exploits.
“You didn’t have to.” Sam laughed again. “Holy shit. Who is she?”
Yeah, like he would tell. “Look, asshole, I’m not shagging anyone.”
“Ah. Right. Forgive me. You’re making beautiful, respectful love to the Orgasm Queen of the World. Congratulations, man. Is this normal for her, or is there something important that you’ve discovered about women, that you need to teach the rest of us mere mortals?”
“I think you really need to ask her about it,” Johnny advised, pretty much ignoring Sam. “Women’s orgasms are different from men’s. With us, it’s over when it’s over, right? With a woman, if you do it right, you can keep it going for a nice long time.” He smiled the smile of a man who knew. “But I don’t think that necessarily qualifies as a multiple orgasm.”
John Nilsson had been married for nearly two years, and he and his wife, Meg, were so freaking happy, at times it seemed abnormal. Ken and Sam both tried their hardest to be sincerely glad for the guy, but it got a little hard to deal with at times—for Ken, because he was so relentlessly alone, and for Sam because he’d been roped into a loveless shotgun marriage when a former girlfriend, Mary Lou Morrison, showed up four months pregnant.
The situation was made worse by the fact that Sam was crazy in love with someone else at the time. And probably still was.
And Ken was one of the very few who knew Sam was hung up on FBI agent Alyssa Locke. Despite the fact that they claimed to despise each other, Ken had come across Sam and Locke in a serious liplock right before Mary Lou had dropped her little bomb and detonated Sam’s life.
“So who is she?” Sam asked again, persistent son of a bitch.
“I was speaking figuratively,” Ken lied.
“He’s such a fucking liar,” Sam said to Johnny. He turned to Ken. “Why the big secret? Jesus, you’re not seeing Adele again, are you?”
“God, no!”
“Well, that’s good. Even if she came every sixty seconds like a clock, you’d still be better off a hundred miles away from her.”
“I was just looking for information,” Ken said. “I was with Adele for so long and . . .” He wasn’t like Nilsson or Starrett. Before Johnny got married he’d been a real ladies’ man. And Sam had never suffered from lack of female company either. But in his entire life, Ken had been with a grand total of four different women—including Savannah—and the first one had been back in high school, before Adele even, and didn’t really count. “I was just wondering if there were any rules that I don’t know about.”
“Rules?” Johnny repeated. “Like . . . ?”
“Don’t do it in animal masks while swinging from a trapeze until the third week of the relationship,” Sam suggested. “That’s a rule I always followed religiously—along with the one about not having sex in her parents’ kitchen in the middle of a black-tie party. Broke that one once—got into real trouble.”
Ken ignored him. “Like, there’s a rule—it’s unspoken, but it’s definitely a rule—make sure the woman comes first, right?”
“Oh, shit,” Sam said. “Really? Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all these years.”
Ken continued to ignore him. “But what do you do if the woman comes right away? I’m talking right away. And then she comes again, and you know if you keep going she’ll come a third time, except by then you’re completely crazed because she is so freaking hot and . . .”
The expressions on both Johnny’s and Sam’s faces would have been funny as hell if this weren’t so important to him.
“And I think I just got the answer to one of my questions,” Ken had to laugh anyway. “I’m guessing that it’s not one in every four women who can—”
“No,” Sam said emphatically. “Try one in four hundred.”
“You’re in uncharted territory. You’re going to have to make up the rules as you go along, man,” Johnny told him.
“That is one very dangerous thing to tell an operator whose nickname is WildCard.” Senior Chief Wolchonok and Team Sixteen’s commanding officer, Tom Paoletti, came out of Paoletti’s office. “Do I need to know what this is about?”
“No, Senior,” Johnny said. “Karmody’s got it handled.”
“You got something for me to sign, Chief?” the CO asked Ken.
“Aye, sir.” Ken handed him the papers, and Paoletti took out his pen, motioning for Ken to turn around and give him his back to use as a table.
“What’s up?” Johnny asked.
“Two weeks leave, Lieutenant,” Ken said as Paoletti signed.
“Well, all right,” Sam said.
“He’s finally taking a vacation.” The senior chief turned to Ken. “Don’t just stay home and watch TV. Go someplace good. That’s an order, Chief.”
“No worries, Senior,” Sam drawled. He grinned at Ken. “I happen to know Chief Karmody’s going someplace really good.”
“How old are you?”
Molly smiled. Jones had been asking her questions like this ever since they’d sat down to dinner. Too blunt, too personal, too rude.
She’d answered them all.
She didn’t have a favorite position when making love—she liked them all.
She didn’t wear lipstick because she’d traded the last of her makeup—except for one bottle of nail polish that had fallen behind her bookshelf—to a neighboring village in return for beads to sew on a wedding dress for one of the young women who worked with her.
She was born in small-town Iowa and her mother lived there still.
She’d first had sex at age fifteen—much too young for most girls, but she’d never regretted it. The boy had been killed in a car accident several months later, and yes, she loved him still. A dead boyfriend was a hard act to follow, even now, all these years later.
“I’m forty-two,” she told him now. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-three.”
He was much younger than she’d thought. “Tough age.”
“No tougher than thirty-two was.”
“Really? You’re not having a Jesus complex?” she asked.
He laughed. Despite his scruffy growth of beard, the lank hair hanging in his face, despite the scowling badman attitude and the fact that he needed a shower, his laughter transformed him. He had no doubt been a remarkably beautiful child.
“Yeah, right,” he scoffed. “Me and Jesus—we’re so much alike, people often get us confused.”
“Sometimes people—men in particular, for some reason—experience a sense of impending doom in their thirty-third year because that was when Jesus died. The thinking is, ‘I’m not even half the man He was, so why should I be allowed to live longer than He did?’ “
“If that’s the case, I should’ve been hit by lightning when I was seven.” Jones laughed again. “No, I don’t spend much time thi
nking about Jesus. It’s not my thing.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Nope.”
Molly nodded, took a sip of her coffee. He’d answered that awfully quickly. “Why did you leave my tent without saying good-bye?” It was her turn to ask the blunt, personal questions.
He didn’t hesitate with this one, either. “Because I wanted to fuck you, and that didn’t seem like a good way to repay you for your help.”
“I see.” Molly set her coffee down, glad that she hadn’t been taking a sip when he’d said that. Years of working in unusual places and dealing with unexpected people and situations enabled her to sound as cool and matter of fact as he’d sounded, when in fact her heart was racing.
Troubleshooters 04 Out of Control Page 10
