He looked across the limo at Rose. “This is a good man,” he told her. “Chief Petty Officer Ken Karmody of SEAL Team Sixteen. He’s nicknamed WildCard partly because he’s something of a wildman—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in this situation—but mostly because he’s really good at thinking up unique solutions to problems.”
“He’s a computer specialist,” Alyssa volunteered. “Absolutely brilliant. A little unconventional—”
“Understatement of the year,” Jules muttered.
“But someone—a SEAL officer—once told me that having Karmody on your team is like playing poker with a wildcard in your hand,” Alyssa told Rose. “That’s why he got the nickname. When WildCard Karmody’s around, he’ll come up with more options for winning. If he’s with your granddaughter, Mrs. von Hopf, she’s as safe as she could possibly be.”
Rose nodded. “That’s good to hear.”
Jules leaned forward, addressing Max across Alyssa. “Excuse me, sir. But I’ll go to San Diego instead of Locke.”
Max just looked at him, eyebrow raised. It was a look meant to terrify, but Jules didn’t back down.
“It’s all right,” Alyssa murmured to her partner.
“No, it’s not all right,” he whispered back to her. “At least let me go, too,” he said to Max. “Sir. We’ll be back in time for the morning flight.”
Max still didn’t say a word.
“Please,” Jules said, his gaze still locked with Max’s death glare. “Believe it or not, sir, I’m friends with Sam Starrett. I can go talk to him while Locke meets with Lieutenant Commander Paoletti.”
The limo pulled up to the terminal and stopped.
“It’s all right,” Alyssa said through clenched teeth.
But Jules didn’t back down. “Sir. If I go, too, we can gather the information we need in half the time.”
Finally Max nodded. “All right.”
Jules nodded, too. “All right.” He smiled, obviously nearly faint with relief. “Thank you, sir.”
“If you’re going, get out of the limo,” Max ordered him.
The young man nearly tripped in his haste to do just that.
“No wonder you keep him around,” Max murmured to Alyssa as she slid across the seat, following Jules. “He’s ferocious.”
“He’s not going to be around much longer, because I’m going to kill him,” she said. “I could have done this alone.”
“Yeah, I know that, but why should you if you don’t have to,” Max said as he followed her out of the limo. He stuck his head back in. “Excuse me for a minute.”
“Of course.” Rose turned to George. “What was that about?”
He shook his head. “I don’t have a clue.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ten
“What’s your husband like?”
Husband? Molly turned to look at Jones. She was still shaken by the destruction they’d witnessed, and at first his words didn’t make sense.
Like her, he’d put his clothes back on as they drew closer to the village, but it didn’t matter. He looked as good dressed in shorts and a T-shirt as he did naked.
Well, maybe not. But it was certainly close.
“I don’t have a husband,” she told him.
“Your ex-husband, then.”
“I don’t have an ex-husband.” She understood what he was asking about. She’d told him she had a daughter and a granddaughter, and he’d made some assumptions. “I’ve never been married.” She had to work not to call him Grady. That wasn’t good. “Dave.” Dave, David, Davy. Anything but his real name, which she never should have used in the first place. Lord, she was a pushover.
“Oh. Sorry. I just thought . . . I mean, of course, that’s fine with me,” he backpedaled furiously. “I’m not . . . I don’t—”
“I know,” she said, amused at how flustered he’d become. “It doesn’t quite fit with the do-gooder stereotype, does it?” She purposely used the phrase he’d used to describe her.
“No, but not much of you does. I guess what I should ask is what your daughter’s father was like.”
Molly sat down across from him on the bench at the stern of the boat. “Well, that’s another one I can’t answer. I don’t know precisely who her father was.”
Again, she’d surprised the heck out of him.
Dear Lord, saying it aloud like that made it sound seedy and awful. This was not something she spoke of very often, and she looked away from Jones, suddenly afraid of the disapproval and censure she might see in his eyes.
But he surprised her by coming to sit next to her. By taking her hand in his. “Sounds like there’s a story there.”
She tried to laugh, but his sweetness flustered her. “Oh, there is.”
“Can you tell me? It’s okay, you know, if you can’t.”
He pushed her hair back from her face so gently, she was a little afraid if she opened her mouth, she’d blurt out how much she loved him. Wouldn’t that change the mood fast? He’d probably jump out of the boat.
She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes. “It’s pretty ugly.”
He just waited.
So she took a deep breath, sat up straight, looked him in the eye and told him. “When I was fifteen, I met Jamie. He was eighteen and already out of high school, and you know that expression ‘all that’? “
Jones nodded.
“He was all that. And more. Handsome, athletic, intelligent, kind. Very sweet and sincere, too. Kind of like if Jesus had decided to become a rodeo rider. Of course there weren’t too many rodeos in our part of Iowa, so Jamie did a lot of traveling. But he came home an awful lot, and I knew that was because of me.
“At first he made all this noise about me being too young, and us having to wait to, you know, get physical, but I’d made up my mind, and, frankly, he didn’t have a prayer.”
Jones laughed. “I can imagine.”
“My mother disapproved, so she took me to see one of his shows. We actually flew down to Kansas City, without telling him we were coming. I think her plan was to make me see the kind of carrying on Jamie did while he was on the road. But we got there, and as we were asking around for where he might be, we found out that his nickname was the Priest—on account of him never, ever sleeping around. Word was he could come back to his trailer, find it filled with naked women, and he’d apologize, shut the door and go off to sleep in his truck. It seems all he ever talked about was me.
“I will never forget the look on his face when he saw me there in KC. If I doubted before that he loved me, I didn’t doubt it after that. And Mommy—she never again said another word against him, never tried to talk me into breaking things off.”
Molly took a deep breath. “Long story short, he was killed in a head-on with a drunk driver about a month later, coming home to see me.”
Jones swore. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I lost it when he died,” Molly admitted. “I seriously went mad with grief. I tried to kill myself—took a razor to my wrists. I say that now, and I’m ashamed, but at that time, I couldn’t see my way out of the darkness.” She turned her hands over, showed him the scars, long faded, almost invisible.
Almost.
Jones traced them with one finger. “Yeah, I noticed them yesterday. I wasn’t going to ask, because, well . . . But I definitely noticed.”
She knew he hadn’t asked because he didn’t want her asking about his scars in return.
“When that didn’t work,” she said, getting to the part of the story that was, oddly enough, easier to tell. “I tried to kill myself in other ways. By drinking. Drugs. I spent a whole month tripping. Anything to avoid the reality of life without Jamie, you know?”
She took a deep breath, and said it. “I used sex, too, to—I don’t know—maybe to try to regain at least some of what I’d had with Jamie. A ghost of the closeness and love we’d shared.
“Again, long story short, I pretty
much fucked my way through every boy in our school and plenty from the neighboring towns, too. I don’t remember much of it, but I do have this one hideous memory of me being stoned and naked in the back of some guy’s van and servicing the entire Howardville football team, one and, Lord help me, sometimes even two at a time. I was just so desperate, I—”
Jones was still holding onto her hand. “Molly, you don’t have to make yourself feel bad all over again by telling me this.”
“I do,” she said. “I think I do. Have to tell you it, I mean. I know there were things I did that were even worse, things I can’t remember now, things I’ve blocked. But the memories that weren’t blocked—I’m pretty sure they were left intact to keep me humble.” She took a deep breath, let it out in a rush. Then she looked him in the eye. “The woman I am today was born from that desperate girl, as surely as my daughter was. Obviously, because of my promiscuous behavior, it wasn’t too long before I got pregnant.”
“You must’ve been just a kid yourself when your daughter was born.”
“Sixteen and a half years old,” Molly told him. “When I found out I was pregnant, there wasn’t too much anyone could do. I mean, what? Hold a town meeting? I suppose we could have found the father through DNA testing, but wouldn’t that have been fun? Okay, everyone between the age of sixteen and twenty-five in this and the next three counties line up to give a DNA sample so we can find out the father of the town slut’s baby.
“No, instead, my mother did something that changed my life forever. She used the money she’d saved for my college education, and she put me in a drug rehab and counseling center specifically for troubled pregnant girls. It was an organization run by a couple of women who’d been in my shoes, and through their kindness and understanding, I finally began to come to terms with Jamie’s death. With their help, I focused on the baby that was growing inside of me, focused on life instead of death. I started a new relationship with my creator, and discovered that I truly wanted to go on living. I met a woman and a man who wanted to adopt my baby, and I knew they could give her things that I couldn’t give her. Even though I wasn’t running crazy anymore, I knew I still had a long hard journey ahead, so I signed the papers, and I gave her away.”
“That must’ve been hard for you to do,” Jones said quietly. “My mother didn’t have the strength to give me up. She got pushed into marriage with my father and we all suffered for it. She tried, but . . .” He shook his head. “Take it from me—you did the right thing for your kid.”
“Thank you for saying that.” He’d just told her more about himself than he ever had before. It wasn’t a lot, but it was certainly a start. And he’d shared that with her to try to give her comfort. She touched his cheek. “You’re a good person.”
He laughed. “Yeah, dream on. You’re the good person.”
“I like myself just fine these days,” she told him. “But I’m glad you think so, too. Some people might not after hearing my tales of my wicked past.”
“What’s that saying about ‘he who casts the first stone . . .’? Believe me, I’m in no position to look down on anyone, let alone you.”
Molly laughed. “David Jones, are you actually quoting the Bible?”
“I don’t know,” he countered. “Is that where that’s from?”
He was smiling at her again, with that look in his eyes that told her if they only had more time, he’d very soon be starting to undress her.
“I realized as I was telling you about the football team that maybe this was something I should have mentioned before you and I became intimate,” Molly told him. “I was so freaked out about the grandmother thing, it just never occurred to me that you might be put off by the crowds of men who had come—no pun intended—before you.”
“How many guys have you slept with since your daughter—what’s her name?”
“Chelsea. I let her adoptive parents name her. It seemed only fair.”
“Since Chelsea was born?”
Molly chewed on her lower lip as she thought. “Well, it’s been twenty-five years . . . I guess . . . three? Yes, three.”
He laughed. “Three men in twenty-five years?”
“What can I say? I happen to really enjoy sex.”
“Yeah, I noticed, but, Molly, three men in twenty-five years is not a lot. You don’t want to know how many women I’ve been with. Add a zero—or two.”
“But I didn’t even start having sexual relationships again until I was thirty—that was kind of a landmark year for me. It was the year I got the letter from the adoption agency, saying that Chelsea wanted to meet me. So it’s really only been twelve years.”
“So am I four?” he asked.
“No, you’re three.”
“Jesus, you are a nun.”
“I don’t think so.” She smiled, remembering what they’d just spent the afternoon doing, and he laughed.
“That smile of yours is going to kill me. If we run into each other and you smile at me like that, I’m not going to be responsible for my actions.” He kissed her, and she felt herself melt.
They just sat there, then, kissing like a pair of teenagers. It was unbelievably sweet.
“I hope we do run into each other more often,” Molly finally whispered. “I like talking to you. You’re a good listener.”
That embarrassed him and Molly had to smile. At times, he was such a man.
“I also really like it when you let me be on top and you push yourself way deep inside of me,” she added.
That, of course, did not embarrass him one bit. He actually laughed at that. “Yeah, okay, great. I spend the entire afternoon having the best sex of my life, and still you’re determined for me to walk off this boat with a hard-on, aren’t you?”
“I just want you to plan to stick around this part of the jungle for a while,” she admitted, praying that by saying this she wouldn’t make him run away. Best sex of his life . . . “And I wanted you to have something to think about tonight.”
“I would have done just fine on my own, thanks.”
She smiled at him. “But now you’ll know what I’ll be thinking about.”
“Jesus, Molly, you make me—” He cut himself off, shook his head. Pulled himself out of her arms, stood up and moved to the outboard motor. He shook his head again, as if to clear it, the way men sometimes did when they got punched in the face. “Look, we’re almost to the village dock. I better get off before we round the bend. Anyone who sees us together—sees this stupid grin I can’t keep off my face—is going to know what we’ve been up to.”
“Maybe they’ll think I converted you—that you’ve found God or been born again,” she teased.
He pulled the cord to start the outboard, then turned to look at her. She couldn’t hear him over the initial roar of the starting motor, but she could see his lips move and she would’ve sworn he’d said, “Maybe I have.”
He steered the boat to the side of the river, kissed her quick, grabbed his pack, and vanished into the underbrush.
Only to appear two seconds later.
“Can you come for dinner tonight?” he shouted.
Oh, my. She cut the engine so they wouldn’t have to shout. “I’m sorry—I’ve been gone all day. I can’t be away all evening, too.”
Jones nodded. “Yeah, I wasn’t thinking—that was stupid.”
“No, it was sweet. I’d love to, really, but . . .”
“Tomorrow, then,” he said as the boat started to drift downstream.
“Definitely,” Molly said. “Tomorrow.”
But he still didn’t leave. “You know, I really liked talking to you, too. And reading to you. I liked it all—except maybe the part where that chopper blew. That I could have done without. But the rest of it was . . .”
“I had a wonderful day, too,” she called back to him.
He was still standing there, looking after her, his hand lifted in a wave, as the boat drifted around the bend.
Ken hadn’t said he’d forgiven her.
The helicopter had come back. Twice more. Searching for them relentlessly.
Still, she couldn’t stop thinking about Kenny. I forgive you, she’d said to him. And all he’d said in return was thanks.
Troubleshooters 04 Out of Control Page 25
