But he hadn’t been able to finish his sentence, because it wasn’t the truth. Not only could he imagine making love to Zoe, but he could see it in his mind’s eye in shockingly intimate detail.
“What made you decide to join the Navy?” she asked, pulling him back here, to the roof, where they both were fully dressed.
Her jacket was open and she was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt tucked neatly into equally snug-fitting blue jeans. She seemed comfortable in her clothes, though, comfortable in her body. And why shouldn’t she?
For most of his life, Jake had had the kind of good looks that most people made a big fuss over. But when he gazed into a mirror, he’d only seen himself. No big deal.
In the same way, Zoe had lived with herself all her life. She’d seen herself naked, washed that body every day in the shower, brushed her hair while looking into those liquid brown eyes in the mirror.
Like him, she was probably well aware that her package was wrapped in ultra-high quality paper, but—also like him—she had plenty of other, more important things to think about.
She was looking at him, waiting for him to answer her question about the Navy. Why had he joined the SEALs?
“My father was a UDT man in the Second World War,” he told her. “He was part of the underwater demolition teams, the precursors to the SEALs.”
“Was he career Navy, too?”
Jake had to laugh at that. “No. He was about as non-regular Navy as anyone I’ve ever met. He was a diver before the war, spent most of his time doing salvage ops in the Gulf of Mexico, living on a boat down in Key West, pretty much being a beach bum. He was tapped to join the teams after the disaster at Tarawa, when the Navy really started developing underwater navigation. He served in the Pacific until V-J day, and then he hunted down my mother in New York. He’d met her when she was a nurse in Hawaii. He went all the way to Peekskill and grabbed her out of the arms of her extremely boring fiancé, literally hours before the wedding, and pretty much immediately got her pregnant with me.” He laughed again. “Frank, my father, was something of an underachiever, but when he finally decided to take action, he was extremely thorough.”
“So you grew up in Peekskill, New York?”
Jake looked at her. “You planning to write up an article on me for Navy Life magazine?”
She laughed. Damn, she was pretty when she laughed. “Am I being too nosy?”
“Do I get to grill you after you’re done with me?”
She smiled into his eyes. “You’ve read my Agency profile—probably the Top Secret-eyes-only version. So you know pretty much all there is to know about me.”
“And you’re telling me you didn’t manage to get hold of my profile from the Agency?” he asked.
“Your Agency profile contains your full name, your date of birth and only a very brief sketch of your naval career, my mysterious friend. Most of what I know about you is from Scott Jennings’s book. And he doesn’t say anything at all about your childhood. I’m just…” She shrugged expansively. “Curious.”
She was curious. But was it a professional or personal curiosity? Jake wasn’t sure which alarmed him more.
He was silent so long, Zoe began to backpedal. “We don’t have to talk about this,” she said. “We don’t have to talk at all. I just…I wanted…”
“We lived in New York until I was about three,” Jake told her quietly. “I don’t really remember it, but apparently we were poor but happy.”
“Jake, you really don’t have to—”
“I had an extremely unconventional—but incredibly happy—childhood,” he said. “You want to hear about it or not?”
“Yes,” she said. “I want to hear about it. Please.”
“This is completely off the record,” he said. “We’re talking as Jake and Zoe. Not Admiral Robinson and Secret Agent Lange. Is that understood?”
“As Jake and Zoe,” she said. “As friends. That’s understood.”
Friends. They were friends. That was why he felt so warm inside whenever she smiled at him. That was why he felt good just sitting here, next to her. It was why he could hold her in his arms all night long and wake up having slept better than he had in months. Years, even.
“Good,” he said, letting himself get lost for a moment in her eyes. Friends. Yeah, they were friends.
“Are you waiting for a drumroll before you start?” she asked, eyebrows lifting slightly.
“Do you have a problem with me taking my time?” he countered.
Zoe smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. It’s hard to break the habit of always being in a hurry. I’m not the most patient person in the world.” She took a deep breath, letting it slowly out. “Please,” she said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Jake laughed. “I love it when impatient people think they can fool everyone and pretend that they’re in control. Meanwhile, they’re wound tighter than a yo-yo and ready to go off in twenty different directions from tension.”
“I’m more than willing to discuss the causes of my tension—and potential ways to reduce a little of my stress. But something tells me you might want to stick to a safer topic right now.”
Jake cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Let’s see. Where was I? Peekskill. Right. I was about three, and Helen and Frank—my parents—both had jobs teaching at a private school, that is, until my great-uncle Arthur died.”
Jake could think of three or four really powerfully excellent ways to relieve a little of his own stress, and he desperately tried to push them far, far from his mind. Friends.
“Artie had just a little less money than God, and he left it all to Frank. Frank being Frank, both he and Helen handed in their resignations on the spot. Helen being Helen, they stayed until the end of the school year. But in May, we all packed our things, put our furniture in storage and spent the next fifteen years traveling. We went all over the world—London, Paris, Africa, Australia, Hong Kong, Peru. If we found a city we liked, we stayed for a few weeks. But if it had a beach, we stayed much longer. We spent about two years in the Greek Islands. Another two in Southeast Asia, not too far from Vietnam. It wasn’t always safe, the places we went, but it was always exciting. Frank taught me to dive and Helen homeschooled me. Instead of being poor and happy, we were rich and happy—not that you could tell we were loaded from looking at us.”
Frank had been easygoing, almost to a fault, and Helen had been intensely driven, determined to completely finish every last little project she started. Jake had inherited her drive but had learned to disguise it with his father’s laid-back attitude. He’d learned that in a command position, his men trusted him implicitly because of this—because of his relaxed air, his ability to exude the fact that everything was—or would be—okay.
“So you joined the SEAL units because you wanted to keep traveling?” Zoe asked.
“I joined for a lot of reasons. One of them was because I had friends in Vietnam. I spoke the language, I…felt like I could make a difference, maybe help end the conflict.” He smiled. “And of course, there’s that age old reason kids join the SEAL units—I had a fascination with explosives. I liked to blow stuff up. You know, SEALs can make a bomb from just about anything. Let me loose in a kitchen, and I can make a powerful explosive from the junk I can find under the sink.” He grinned. “And I can have fun while I’m doing it.”
Zoe laughed. “That’s interesting,” she said, “because in my line of work, I tend to try to keep things from blowing up.”
“Maybe that’s why we work well as a team,” Jake said. “It’s that yin and yang thing.”
Yin and yang. Female and male. He shouldn’t have said that, shouldn’t have made the comparison. He held his breath, hoping she wouldn’t go there again. Her last remark about stress had been about all he could take.
“I’m not used to working in a team,” Zoe told him, neatly ignoring his potentially sexually loaded comment. “I’m used to going in someplace, completely on my own, and getting the job done without having
to ask permission or wait for orders.”
“Well, for someone who’s not used to it, you’re doing a damn fine job working on my team.”
She chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip. “Does this mean you forgive me for trying to force your hand the other night?”
The night he’d gone to Mel’s and had been told she was out sick. The night he showed up at her trailer to find her bags already packed, Zoe ready to go to the CRO compound one way or another. With Jake. Or with Christopher Vincent. The thought still made his stomach hurt.
“Zoe, I—”
She held up one hand. “No, don’t answer that. I know I was way out of line, and that’s not something that can be fixed by only an apology.”
Jake had to smile. “It would help at least a little if you actually did apologize.”
“Oops.” Zoe’s answering smile faded as she gazed into his eyes. “I am sorry, Jake.”
“But not sorry enough not to do it again if you had to.”
Her eyes were completely subdued, level and sober as she looked at him. “Sitting out here like this, it’s easy to forget why we’re in the CRO fort. But if we don’t find that Trip X soon…”
“I have an appointment with Christopher Vincent on Tuesday morning,” Jake told her. “And if I can’t convince him to appoint me as one of his lieutenants and let me in on the birthday party plans, I’ll take a trip into town. On my way out of the gates, I’ll give the rest of the team a signal. Cowboy and Lucky will go into Mel’s while I’m there, and they’ll ‘recognize’ me as former Admiral Robinson—wanted by FInCOM. I’ll make it back to the compound, but within an hour, the place will be surrounded. We’ll be in siege mode, but I’ll be the catalyst, not the Trip X. The CRO still won’t know the Finks know about the nerve gas—they’ll think this is only about catching me. It’ll buy us more time, because no one—and nothing—will leave the fort until the situation’s resolved.”
Zoe nodded. “And you don’t think being surrounded by FInCOM agents might make Chris decide to try out the Trip X?”
“I’m willing to bet he won’t. Of course that’s something we’ll have to monitor carefully from inside. And as the FInCOM target, I’d hope I’d be privy to any plans Christopher has to resolve the issue.” Jake paused. “Again, this is the backup plan. First we wait and I go in and try to talk to Christopher.”
“But not until Tuesday.” Zoe sighed. “I feel as if this waiting is all my fault.”
“It could be worse,” Jake pointed out. “There could be a four-week honeymoon period instead of four days.”
“I’m not very good at waiting,” she admitted. “Sometimes even four minutes seems way too long.”
“Back in Nam,” he told her, “my team once got pinned down by these VC builders who came in and—It was the weirdest thing, Zoe. We were out in the middle of nowhere, and they started digging pits and building wooden flooring for tents literally feet from where we were hiding in the brush. We were pinned there until nightfall, and then, instead of getting the hell out of there and going back to civilization, we hung out for nearly four days. It drove the guys mad—we were just sitting there—but I had this hunch, and sure enough. The VC were building a POW camp. The tents were for their officers and guards. The pits were for the prisoners, mostly Americans. We just sat tight and watched as they brought in about seventy-five of our men.
“My SEALs started to hand-signal me.” Jake moved his hands, making the signals that enabled a SEAL team to communicate without speaking. “Now? Attack now? And I just kept signaling wait. Wait. We were way outnumbered. There were too many VC, and there was no way we could’ve taken them all out without killing some of the POWs in the crossfire. Besides, I had another hunch.”
Zoe nodded. “God bless those hunches, huh?”
It was the funniest thing. He was telling this story—one of his stories about a triumph in a war that had far too few triumphs, and he knew that Zoe understood everything he was saying. He knew she understood everything he’d felt. He’d helped to kill dozens of enemy soldiers that day, but in doing so, he’d saved over seventy Americans who otherwise would never have come out of that jungle alive.
It was crazy. In a way, this twenty-nine-year-old child understood him completely. He looked into her eyes, and he knew that she knew his anguish and his exhilaration. Even though she’d never been in quite that same situation, she knew. They were so alike in so many ways. And because of that, Jake had an intimacy with Zoe that he’d never had before, not with any other woman.
Not even Daisy.
Especially not Daisy.
Daisy had loved him, Jake knew that without a doubt. And he’d loved her, too, with all his heart. But despite that, there were parts of himself he’d purposely kept hidden from her. There were parts of his life that he’d simply never shared.
“So we sat there,” he told Zoe, “and we watched while they ordered the POWs into those pits and into the cages they’d made—these little, cramped god-awful…” He exhaled his revulsion. “One of the prisoners, a Brit, he spoke in Vietnamese about prisoners’ rights—and they hung him from his feet and tortured him to death.”
He closed his eyes, remembering, hating the powerless feeling of knowing there was nothing he could do. He knew now as well as he’d known then that if he’d let his men attack, dozens of the other prisoners would be mowed down by the VC’s automatic weapons. With those kinds of odds, in a direct firefight, the SEALs wouldn’t necessarily win. And if they didn’t win, they’d be dead—or worse. They’d be locked in those cages, too, thrown in those pits.
Zoe took his hand, linking their fingers together, squeezing gently. “How many did you save?” she asked. “Seventy-four?”
He nodded, loving the sensation of their clasped hands far, far too much, hoping she’d pull her hand away, praying that she wouldn’t.
“And still it’s the one you couldn’t save that you dream about, right?”
He forced a smile. “Funny you should know that.”
“Tell me about the seventy-four,” she said, still holding his hand.
Jake knew he should let go of her hand, maybe even move six inches or so away from her. Somehow they were now sitting close enough for their shoulders to touch, for their thighs to connect. How had that happened?
“How did you get them out?” she asked.
Jake drew in a deep breath. “Well, after they…did what they did to the Brit, they just left him hanging there. All the other prisoners went into the cages and pits without a fight, just completely beaten down both physically and psychologically.” His voice shook. He couldn’t help it, even now, all these years later. “God, Zoe, they were naked and starving—some of them skin and bones, some of them reduced to little more than animals and…”
He didn’t know how it happened, but Zoe wasn’t just holding his hand anymore. She was in his arms, holding him as tightly as he was holding her. Oh, dear God. He buried his face in her sweet-smelling hair, knowing for certain that if she kissed him, he’d be lost.
He had to keep talking, keep his mouth moving.
“After they were locked up, the camp commander sent a half a dozen men out to stand guard.” His voice was raspy, but he couldn’t stop to clear his throat. As it was, his lips were brushing the side of her face. “They’d built the camp in this sheltered area on the side of a mountain, and there was only one way in and out. So with the guards posted and the prisoners locked up tight—”
“Everyone else relaxed.” She lifted her head to look into his eyes.
Her mouth was inches from his. Soft. Sweet. Paradise.
“We struck covertly after dark,” he told her. “And we dispatched the VC soldiers silently, tent by tent.”
She knew what that meant. Dispatched silently. She knew the price he’d paid for those seventy-four lives—he could see her complete awareness in her eyes.
“The six men standing guard went down just as easily. They never expected to be attacked from within their camp.
We armed those POWs with the VC’s weapons and walked down that mountain and out of that jungle.”
Zoe pulled away from him slightly to narrow her eyes at him. “Why do I know it couldn’t have been that easy?”
“We had a few firefights on the way back to our side of the line. But compared to some ops, it was very easy.”
“I would’ve loved to see your captain’s face when you came walking in with seventy-four POWs and MIAs.”
He couldn’t make himself let go of her. It felt too good holding her this way. She was so warm and soft against him.
“I didn’t stick around to see anyone’s face,” Jake said. “We just dropped ’em and went back out there.”
“Because you couldn’t bear the fact that you’d only saved seventy-four instead of seventy-five?”
“We watched them cut him, Zoe. We watched the—” He shook his head, swearing softly. He pulled back and would have let her go, but she wouldn’t release him. And he was glad of that. “Look, it wasn’t something that I’m ever going to forget. But I swear, I played that scenario over and over and over in my mind—I still sometimes do. And there was no feasible way we could have saved him. I made a choice to save the seventy-four.” He laughed in disgust. “And in order to do that, I had to turn my back on that one very brave man.”
“But that’s the way life works,” Zoe told him. Her fingers combed through his hair at the nape of his neck, both soothing and nerve-jangling. “Every time you face someone, you turn your back on someone else. Your team saved my father’s life, Jake. His platoon was nearly wiped out, and he and about a dozen other Marines were left for dead. You and your SEALs were the only ones brave enough to try to bring them out. You used explosives and with only seven men, you made the Vietcong believe we’d launched a counteroffensive. It provided enough of a diversion to get a chopper in there and get those men out.”
“You know, I remember that,” Jake said. “That was one of the long shots that actually paid off. Your dad was one of those men, huh?”
Tall, Dark, and Dangerous Part 2 Page 61
