He tried to hand it to her, and they both fumbled. It dropped into his lap. He grabbed it quickly—God forbid she reach for it there—and held it out on his open palm for her to take.
Somehow she managed to touch nearly every inch of his palm as she took the elastic.
“You know what you’re asking, don’t you?” he said. “I’ll spend the evening fending off all kinds of personal questions. Is it true SEALs know how to rip out an opponent’s throat with their bare hands? How many men have you killed? Have you ever killed anyone in hand-to-hand combat? Did you like it? Is it true SEALs are rough in bed?” He let out a burst of exasperated air. “As soon as people find out I’m a SEAL, they change, Colleen. They look at me differently. The men size me up, and the women…” He shook his head.
She laughed as she sat back, finally done. “Yeah, right, Taylor. You tell me that you and my brother haven’t taken advantage of the way women react when they find out you’re a SEAL.”
“No,” he said. “You’re right. I have taken advantage—too many times. It’s just…these days I don’t get much enjoyment out of it. It’s not real. You know, I didn’t tell Kyra I was a SEAL until we were together for two months.”
“Did she treat you differently when she found out?” Colleen asked. Her eyes were more green than blue today, so luminous and beautiful.
“Yeah, she did,” he had to admit. “It was subtle, but it was there.” And she’d slept with him that very same night. Coincidence? Maybe. But unlikely.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Forget I asked. You don’t even have to come to this thing. It’s just…I have to go, and since you’re doing this twenty-four-hour bodyguard thing, I thought—”
“I’ll call Harvard, have him send my uniform.”
“No,” she said. “You can go incognito. With your hair down. Wearing leather pants. I’ll tell everyone you’re a supermodel from Paris. See what kind of questions you get asked then.”
Bobby laughed as Colleen climbed down from the cab of the truck. “Hey,” he said, sliding across the seat and keeping her from closing the door by sticking out his foot. “I’m glad we’re still friends.”
“You know, I’ve been thinking about this friend thing,” she said, standing there, hands on her hips, looking up at him. “I think we should be the kind of friends who have wild sex three or four times a day.”
She shot him a smile and turned toward the seniors center.
Bobby sat there, staring after her, watching the sunlight on her hair and the gentle swaying of her hips as she walked away.
She was kidding.
Wasn’t she?
God, maybe she wasn’t.
“Help,” he said to no one in particular as he followed her inside.
Chapter 6
Bobby caught Colleen by the arm and pulled her back, almost on top of him, almost down the stairs that led to her third-floor apartment.
At first she thought she’d won. At first she thought that all the little glances and smiles, and all the thinly veiled—and some not so thinly veiled at all—comments she’d made all afternoon were finally paying off, that she’d succeeded in driving him crazy. She thought he was pulling her toward him to kiss her, the way he’d kissed her in Harvard Square last night.
Yeah, right, Colleen. Dream on.
Kissing her was the last thing on his mind. “Stay behind me,” he ordered, pushing her so that her nose was practically pressed into the broad expanse of his back.
She realized then that her apartment door was ajar.
Someone was in her apartment.
Andrea Barker had come home, too, to find someone breaking into her house.
And had been beaten so badly she was still in a coma.
Colleen grabbed Bobby—it was about as effective as grabbing an aircraft carrier. “Don’t go in there!”
“I won’t,” he said. “At least not before I get you out of here.” He was holding on to her then, too, turning toward her and practically lifting her up, about to carry her down the stairs.
For the first time in her life Colleen actually felt fragile and petite and in need of rescue.
She wasn’t quite sure she liked it.
She was scared, yes. She didn’t want Bobby charging in, a one-man assault team, to find John Morrison and his gang in her living room. At the same time, if John Morrison and his gang were in her apartment, she didn’t want to run away and lose the opportunity to have them all arrested.
“Put me down,” she ordered him. They could go downstairs, call the police from Mr. Gheary’s apartment.
To her surprise he did put her down, none too gently pushing her away from him. As she struggled to regain her balance, she realized he was charging up the last few stairs toward her apartment door. Toward a man who was coming out.
Wearing an unbelievably loud plaid shirt.
“Bobby, don’t!”
She wasn’t the only one shouting.
The owner of that shirt was shouting, too, shrieking, really, in pure terror.
It was Kenneth. Bobby had him against the entryway wall, his face pressed against the faded wallpaper, his armed twisted up behind his back.
“Bobby, stop! He’s a friend of mine,” Colleen shouted, taking the stairs two at a time, just as the door to her apartment opened wide, revealing the equally wide eyes of Ashley and her brother, Clark. She did a double take. Ashley’s blue-haired brother, Clark.
“What are you doing here?” she asked Ashley, who was supposed to be spending the entire summer working at her father’s law firm in New York.
“I escaped from Scarsdale,” Ashley said faintly, staring at Bobby, who still had Kenneth pinned, his feet completely off the ground. “Clark and Kenneth came and broke me out.”
That explained the blue hair. Nineteen-year-old Clark knew he’d be seeing his extremely conservative father. Say no more.
“Bobby, meet my roommate, Ashley DeWitt,” Colleen said. “Her brother, Clark, and his friend, Kenneth. Guys, this is my brother’s friend, Chief Bobby Taylor.”
“I’m your friend, too,” Bobby reminded her as he gently lowered the kid back to the floor. “Sorry.”
The kid was shaken, but he pulled himself together quickly. “That was…somewhat uncomfortable, but the adrenaline rush is quite nice, thanks.”
“Kenneth’s from England,” Colleen told him.
“Yeah,” Bobby said, following them all into her apartment. “I caught that from the accent.”
Man, Colleen hadn’t been kidding. It was worse in here than he’d imagined. The small living room was filled, in some cases from floor to ceiling, with boxes. Colleen was in the process of writing, in big, block letters, what seemed to be a Tulgerian address on each of them. As far as he could tell, she was only about a third of the way done.
“So you’re a chief, huh?” Clark said as Bobby closed the door behind him. “What tribe?”
“Oh, God! Clark, he’s not that kind of chief.” Ashley gave Bobby an apologetic smile. She was what he thought of as a New York blonde. Average height and slender, with a figure that was just barely curvy enough to be considered feminine, but certainly not curvy enough to be lush. Everything about her was neat and perfectly in place, nothing too extreme. She was cool and beautiful—kind of the way a stone statue was cool and beautiful. You didn’t mind looking, but you wouldn’t want to touch.
Compared to Ashley, Colleen was a mess. Her hair was everywhere. Her smile was crooked. Her breasts looked as if they were about to explode out from under her T-shirt every time she moved. She was too much of everything—too tall, too stacked, too blunt, too funny, too into having a good time wherever she went. Laughter spilled out of her constantly. Her eyes were never the same color from one minute to the next, but they were always, always welcoming and warm.
Desire knifed through him so sharply he had to clench his fists.
“Forgive my brother,” Ashley continued. “He’s terminally stupid.”
He yanked his gaze away
from Colleen, aware he’d been staring at her with his tongue nearly hanging out. God, he couldn’t let her catch him looking at her that way. If she knew the truth…
Who was he kidding? She’d probably already guessed the truth. And now she was trying to drive him slowly insane with all those deep looks and the seemingly innocently casual way she touched him damn near constantly in passing. A hand on his arm, on his knee. Fingers cool against his face as she fixed a stray lock of his hair. Brushing against him with her shoulder. Sitting so close that their thighs touched.
And the things she said to him! She thought they should be the kind of friends who had sex three or four times a day. She’d only been teasing. She liked being outrageous—saying things like that and trying to shake him up.
That one had worked.
“I’m a chief petty officer,” Bobby explained to the kid with blue hair, working to keep up with the conversation. That kid’s name was Clark. He was Ashley’s brother—no doubt about that. He had the same perfectly sculpted nose and chin, slightly differently shaped eyes that were a warmer shade of gray. “I’m in the Navy.”
“Whoa, dude,” Clark said. “With long hair like that?” He laughed. “Hey, maybe they’ll take me, huh?”
“Bobby’s a—” Colleen cut herself off, and Bobby knew she was remembering all that he’d told her about the way most people’s attitudes changed when they found out he was a SEAL. She looked at him and as their eyes met he felt the small room shrink. It was as if he’d been caught in the beam of a searchlight—he and Colleen. Ashley, Clark and Kenneth vanished in the darkness outside his peripheral vision. All he could see was Colleen and her beautiful, laughing eyes.
They were very blue right now.
“Bobby’s a very good friend of mine,” she said softly, instead of telling them he was a SEAL.
“I should join the Navy,” Clark’s voice cut through. “Wouldn’t that tick the old man off?”
“I had big plans for tonight,” Colleen said, still looking into Bobby’s eyes. “I was going to cook dinner for Bobby and then seduce him by dancing naked in the kitchen.”
There she went again. More teasing. She was laughing at him—probably at the look of shock on his face. But as she turned away, as the world opened up again to include the other three people in the room, Bobby got the feeling that she wasn’t completely kidding. She’d had plans for tonight, and those plans had included him.
“I should go,” he said, wanting to stay at least as much as he wanted to keep breathing. But he couldn’t stay. No way.
“No,” Ashley said swiftly. “We were just going out.”
“No, we weren’t,” Clark said with disdain. “You are such a liar. You have a headache—so bad that Kenneth was going to the drugstore to get you some painkillers.” He turned to Colleen. “Unless you’ve got some hidden here. Ash wouldn’t let me search your bedroom.”
“Gee, I don’t know why,” Colleen said. “Could it maybe have something to do with the fact that the last time you searched my room I got home and called the police because I thought I’d been vandalized? Besides, you wouldn’t have found any. I don’t get headaches. Did you look in the bathroom?”
“I’m feeling much better,” Ashley interrupted. Bobby had just met her, but even he could tell that she was lying. “We’re going out.”
“But what about that letter you were going to write to Dad?”
“It can wait.” Ashley motioned toward the door with her head, making big eyes at her brother. “This is Bobby Taylor. Wes’s friend?” Clark stared at her blankly, as only a younger brother can stare at an older sister. “The Navy SEAL…?”
“Oh,” Clark said. “Oh. Right.” He looked at Bobby. “You’re a SEAL, huh? Cool.”
Colleen’s smile was rueful and apologetic. “Sorry,” she told Bobby. “I tried.”
Clark grinned at Kenneth. “Dude! You were almost killed by a Navy SEAL! You should definitely tell the girls at that party tonight. I bet one of ’em will go home with you.”
“Ashley, you really don’t have to go anywhere,” Colleen said to her friend. “You look wiped. What happened? What’d your father do now?”
Ashley just shook her head.
“What’s a Navy SEAL?” Kenneth asked. “And do you suppose if he actually had killed me then Jennifer Reilly might want to marry me? I mean, if you think she might go home with me if he almost killed me….”
“Oh, no way!” Clark countered. “I wasn’t thinking Jenn Reilly, dude! Set your sights lower, man. Think B or C tier. Think Stacy Thurmond or Candy Fremont.”
“You rank the women you know into tiers?” Colleen was outraged. “Get out of my house, scumball!”
“Whoa,” Clark said, backing up and tripping over one of the boxes. “We don’t tell ’em we rank ’em. We’d never say it to their faces. They don’t know. Honest.”
“Yes, they do,” Colleen countered. “Believe me, they know.”
“Who is this we to whom you keep referring, scumball?” Kenneth asked Clark.
“What tier am I in?” Colleen’s voice was dangerously quiet.
“A,” Clark told her quickly. “Absolutely. You are so completely, gorgeously, perfectly A.”
Colleen cut him down with a single word—a pungent profanity that Bobby realized he’d never heard her use before. Unlike Wes, she didn’t pepper her everyday speech with four-letter words. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard her say damn or even hell. It was pretty remarkable actually, considering how prone she was to blurting out whatever was on her mind.
I think we should be the kind of friends who have wild sex three or four times a day. Help.
“Once when I was running down by the river,” Colleen told Clark tightly, “I went past these two guys who were grading all the women who ran by. The wind carried their voices to me right at the exact moment they were checking me out. They gave me a C minus—probably about the equivalent of your lower C tier.”
Bobby couldn’t stay silent another second. “They were fools.”
“They were…several words I will not lower myself to use,” she said, chin held high, pretending that a C-minus ranking by a pair of strangers didn’t bother her one bit. Pretending she was above that. Pretending that she hadn’t been hurt.
“You’re on my A list,” Bobby said. The moment the words left his lips, he realized he’d just made a fatal mistake. Although he’d meant it as the highest compliment, he’d just admitted that he had an A list. And that would make him little better than…what had she called Clark? A scumball.
“That came out really wrong,” he told her quickly as her eyes started to narrow.
Clark, the genius, stepped up to the plate. “See? All guys have lists. It’s a guy thing,” he protested, not old enough to know that all either of them could do now was grovel, apologize and pray for forgiveness. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Bobby, strangle him, strangle his strange, plaid-clothed little friend,” Colleen ordered him, “and then strangle yourself.”
“What I meant to say,” Bobby told her, moving close enough to catch her chin with his hand, so she now had to look up into his eyes, “was that I find you as beautiful on the outside as you are on the inside.”
The searchlight clicked back on, and the rest of the world faded. Colleen was looking at him, her eyes wide, her lips slightly parted. She was the only other person in the entire universe. No one and nothing else existed. He couldn’t even seem to move his hand away from the soft smoothness of her face.
“Strangle me?” Bobby heard Kenneth protest, his voice faint, as if coming from a great distance. “Why strangle me? I don’t put anyone into tiers, thank you very much.”
“Yeah, because you can’t see past Jenn Reilly,” Clark countered, also from somewhere way back there, beyond Colleen’s eyes and Colleen’s lips. “For you, Jenn’s got her own gigantic tier—and everyone else is invisible. You and Jenn are so not going to happen, man. Even if hell froz
e over, she would walk right past you and date Frosty the Snowman. And then she would call you later to tell you how it went because you guys are friends. Sheesh. Don’t you know friendship is the kiss of death between a man and a woman?”
“That was very sweet,” Colleen told Bobby softly. “I forgive you.”
She took his hand and kissed him, right on the palm, and Bobby felt something major snap in his chest.
Oh, God, he had to get out of here before it was too late. Before he reached for her and…
He turned away, forcing himself to focus on blue hair and a loud plaid. Anything but Colleen and her bone-melting smile.
“Yes, I’m thwarted by the curse of being the friend.” Kenneth sighed. “I’m double damned because Jennifer thinks I’m gay. I’m her gay friend. I’ve told her that I’m quite not, thanks, but…”
“Everyone thinks you’re gay,” Clark countered. “Tell me honestly, bro,” he asked Bobby. “When you first saw Kenneth—I mean, Kenneth, come on, man. Only a gay dude would call himself Kenneth instead of Ken or Kenny—when you first saw him, Bobby, didn’t you think—” he held out his hands to frame Kenneth, like a movie director “—gay?”
Bobby didn’t bother to answer. He’d spent far too much time around Wes, who was the same kind of hyped-up, whirlwind talker as this kid, to know that his answer wasn’t really needed. Which was just as well, because he wasn’t completely convinced that he’d be able to speak.
Every time he looked into Colleen’s eyes, his hands started to sweat, his chest felt squeezed and his throat tightened up. He was in desperate trouble.
“You know, my father thinks you’re gay, too,” Clark told Kenneth. “I enjoy that about you. You frighten him, dude.”
“Well, I’m not gay,” Kenneth said through clenched teeth.
Bobby cleared his throat experimentally. A few more times and he’d have his voice back. Provided he didn’t look at Colleen again.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay,” Kenneth added hastily, glancing at Bobby. “We should probably make sure we’re not offending a gay Navy SEAL here—an extremely big, extremely tall gay Navy SEAL. Although I still am not quite certain as to exactly what a Navy SEAL might be.”
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