Maddy’s heart began to palpitate. A pulse tapped at her eardrums. She tried sitting up, but the lieutenant laid a heavy hand on her shoulder, pushing her back down.
Another memory stirred. Something violent and frightening.
“You shouldn’t move,” he cautioned her.
“Take your hand off of me!” Her sudden panic startled them both. As she sorted through the rush of emotion, the lieutenant stepped back, his expression wary.
Under the SEALs’ watchful regard, Maggie sat up slowly. The room went into a slow spin and then subsided. “You said, ‘my father’s request,’” she recollected, trying to piece it all together. “Then he’s the reason I’m here.”
“Yes,” both men said simultaneously.
Damn it, Daddy. “And you—you what?—you slipped into the school while I slept and you grabbed me?” Of all the sneaky-underhanded maneuvers! They’d had no right to make that decision for her. No one did!
“Affirmative,” said the lieutenant, his expression so inscrutable that she felt like he was hiding something.
The blue-eyed chief shifted uncomfortably on his feet.
A chuckle floated through Maddy’s memory, like an untethered balloon.
The faces of her pupils rose up just as suddenly—Imelda, Graciela, Mercedes, and the other dozen girls at El Santuario. If they hadn’t realized she was gone yet, they soon would. Maddy’s heart clenched with alarm as she envisioned their confusion, followed by their fear when they realized what the loss of their teacher meant for them.
“What have you done?” she cried, directing her anger at her father first, and then at the two men hovering near the bed. “What have you done? They won’t survive without me!”
Lieutenant Sassville’s handsome face hardened. His companion clapped him on the shoulder. “She’s all yours, sir,” he stated with confidence. “Feel better soon, ma’am,” he added, backing swiftly out of the hatch behind him.
Maggie wished the lieutenant would leave with him. The realization that she had failed her students lodged in her throat like a bitter pill, too awful to swallow.
In a matter of days—weeks if they were lucky—every girl in the school would be preyed upon by a man, her innocence forcibly taken from her.
A sob of denial escaped Maddy’s strangled voice box. Dropping her face in her hands, she hid her crushing dismay from the commando studying her so apathetically. She had fooled herself into thinking she could make a critical difference in her students’ lives. But who was she to hold back the tide of degradation overtaking Mexico?
“Go away,” she choked, ashamed to be caught crying in front of a stranger. The pain in her chest made her double-over, but she was too unsettled by the lieutenant’s presence to grieve openly. “Why are you still here?” she raged a moment later, pulling her wet hands from her face.
His eyes narrowed as if deliberating how much to say. “You realize you would’ve ended up raped or murdered if you’d stayed any longer,” he bit out.
The harsh words sobered Maddy instantly. Dashing the moisture from her face, she sniffed and glared at him. “What’s it to you?” she demanded, appalled by her childishness, but there’d been no cause for his remark.
“What’s it to me? Nothing,” he retorted unkindly. “I don’t give a good damn what might have happened to you. Personally I think you deserved whatever you had coming.”
Stung by his antagonism, all Maddy could do was to gape at him.
“You know what else?” he added, planting a hand on either side of her knees. He bent over her, his face mere inches from her own. Maddy’s pulse leapt with alarm, only to subside as his scent stole into her nostrils. Baby wipes and dryer sheets. How dangerous could the man be?
“If not for you,” he continued when she kept quiet, “I would be halfway around the world right now, putting an end to an arms smuggler who’s been selling weapons to Al Qaeda.” He bit out every word succinctly, quietly, his dark green eyes sparkling with resentment. “Instead, I had to rescue you from your own idiocy.”
Memories bombarded Maddy, flickering through her mind so quickly she could scarcely get a read on them. She saw shadows in the darkness, heard a stifled chuckle. “You attacked me,” she accused, recollecting how he’d approached her bed.
He straightened like she’d slapped him in the face. “No way. I told you who we were, and you resisted us, remember?”
All she could remember was him groping through the mosquito netting, trying to grab her. No, wait, he’d been saying something at the time, only she hadn’t been able to hear him over her thundering heart.
“You dropped me on the floor and then you jumped on me,” she added, reliving the pain of her face striking the tiles. She lifted a hand to her cheek where the warm, puffy flesh provided evidence that she was right. She sent him an accusing glare.
“You were a crazed lunatic,” he corrected. “All we did was subdue you before you could hurt yourself worse.”
“Hurt myself?” She glanced pointedly at his bloody nose. “Admit it. You were worried I would hurt you.”
“Like I said. You were a lunatic.”
“You scared me half to death while I was sleeping!” The details had returned with perfect clarity. “I thought you were locals coming to drag me off to a brothel.”
“That’s exactly my point, woman,” he affirmed, his volume rising abruptly. “What the hell were you thinking staying in Matamoros after our government ordered you to leave?”
“Protecting the innocent!” Maddy shouted, undaunted by his thunder. “I was doing exactly what you do every day, you hypocrite!”
The epithet made him choke with laughter. He threw his head back and laughed out loud. After a moment’s astonishment, Maggie joined in, albeit a bit hysterically.
Crinkled eyes and a flash of white teeth made him irresistible. His infectious laughter had her forgiving him begrudgingly.
“You couldn’t begin to do what I do, Miss Scott,” Sam Sasseville finally said, without conceit or rancor. His previous outrage seemed to have vanished. He now eyed her with something like compassion.
“I never said I do exactly what you do, lieutenant. You think I’d jump out of an airplane? No way. But am willing to put my life on line for a cause I believe in.”
Maybe if she took the time to explain herself, she could convince him that her work was worthwhile. “For the last year and a half my colleagues and I have kept the girls at the school from turning to prostitution because they had no other choice.” The recent events washed over her anew, and her heart sank. “Do you have any idea what’s going to happen to my students without my protection?” she lamented as her grief returned. “Do you know what kind of life you’ve condemned them to?”
“Oh, no.” He held both hands up as if warding her off. “You are not going to put that on me, lady.”
She desperately wanted to blame somebody—anybody. But the problem was bigger than he was. “Fine. You’re right,” she conceded. “What’s happening in Matamoros isn’t your fault.”
“Damn right it’s not.”
“I thought I could do more,” she said, swallowing the lump that swelled in her throat. “I suppose . . . I suppose I should thank you for getting me out before something happened to me,” she conceded. There, she’d extended him an olive branch. Surely he’d be gracious enough to take it.
He shifted on his feet, jammed his fingers into his pockets, and had the grace to look uncomfortable. “You can thank your father when you see him,” he retorted, glancing at his watch. “In about ten minutes.”
“Mmmm.” Maddy tugged at a loose thread unraveling from the blanket that covered her legs. She wasn’t looking forward to that reunion.
“What the hell is taking the commander so long?” The lieutenant swiveled abruptly, prowling toward the wall of cabinets. Opening a canister of gauze, he helped himself to several squares and wiped off the blood still oozing from his nose.
“Did I break it?” Maddy asked, with onl
y the slightest twinge of remorse.
“Probably,” he said, dropping the gauze into a receptacle marked HAZARDOUS WASTE.
“Sorry.” She actually felt somewhat mollified at having ruined his obscene good looks.
“Sure you are. You know what I think?” he said, turning to face her again.
“What?”
“I think you’re crazy,” he averred.
The man didn’t mince his words. “I’m crazy?” Maddy ran a dry gaze over his powerful physique, every inch of which suggested that he pushed himself to the limits of human endurance, daily. “I’m not the one who jumps out of airplanes into hostile territory,” she quipped.
“No. You drive in with your band of humanitarian aid workers, headed like pigs into a slaughterhouse.”
She blinked, her goodwill draining away with the blood that abruptly left her cheeks.
“I read your file, Miss Scott,” he continued, taking a brave step closer. “You’ve participated in every disaster relief effort since 9/11. You’ve been in Bosnia, Uganda, Haiti—” He ticked the locations off his fingers, “—and Mexico. Enough already,” he added on a note of exasperated concern. “Listen. I think you’re an intelligent and beautiful woman. I don’t want to hear one day that you got yourself killed in some shithole country where there’s been infighting for four hundred years and nothing you did changed anything.”
I think you’re an intelligent and beautiful woman. He’d tried tempering his view with a compliment, but it did nothing to ease the blow of his low opinion of her work. Tears she refused to shed stung the backs of Maddy’s eyes. Sam Sasseville had spouted off the same argument that her father always used. That she was too smart and beautiful to sacrifice herself for those less worthy.
Well, Maddy didn’t see the suffering as less worthy than she. And she wasn’t going to placate Sam Sasseville any more than she placated her father.
Lifting her chin into the air, she checked the emotion pressuring her chest and held his gaze unwaveringly. “Do you believe in what you do, lieutenant?” she inquired sharply.
He sent her a suspicious look and shrugged his massive shoulders. “Of course. I’m a SEAL.”
“You feel like you make a positive difference in the world,” she surmised.
“Yeah. When I’m not rescuing Americans from their own idiocy.”
Ignore that, she ordered herself. “Then I take it you like your work to be meaningful, like putting an end to arms smuggling.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, so do I. The work I do is meaningful to me. We’re exactly the same, Sam,” she insisted, addressing him intentionally by his first name. “Whether you want to admit it or not, we’re the same.”
Madison Scott’s assertion gave Sam pause. Hearing the slightest quaver in her voice, he realized that despite her willingness to engage him verbally, he’d dealt a little too harshly with her. She’d been through a lot in the past several hours—weeks, really, if he thought about it.
But she was every bit as crazy as he’d asserted earlier if she thought they were alike in any way. “No offense, Madison,” Sam replied, using her first name the way she’d used his, “but there’s a big difference between you and me.” He propped his hands on his hips. “I’ve been trained to fight aggression. I know how to resist torture, how to survive in the wilderness, how to operate thirty-one different weapons with lethal precision. You don’t know any of that.” He raised his eyebrows at her.
“True.” She conceded with surprising grace and a delicate shrug of her shoulders. “But I offer the world something other than physical protection.” Her liquid amber gaze seemed to see deep down inside him.
“What else is there?” He was afraid to ask.
“Spiritual protection,” she informed him solemnly. “Hope. Companionship. Compassion.”
Her words had a strange effect on him. He felt his chest tighten, his throat constrict. At the same time, he realized that arguing with her was clearly a lesson in frustration. “Now I see how you drive your father crazy.”
Her coral-colored lips quirked into a sad smile. She looked away from him, subdued but not defeated.
He stood there a moment longer, considering her fearlessness, her insanity. “Something tells me you’re not going to stay away out of hotspots from now on,” he guessed, his anger returning, simmering low deep down in his gut.
She looked up slowly. “Would you quit?” she asked him. “Just because someone worried about you?”
“It’s not the same.”
“Yes it is.”
Fueled by frustration, Sam stalked toward the bed. Madison stiffened but she didn’t shrink away from him when he caught her face lightly between his thumb and fingers. “You better hope I’m never taken off an assignment to rescue your sweet ass again,” he warned her, altogether distracted by the way her lips parted and the tongue darted out to wet them. “Stay the hell out of the hot spots from now on,” he added.
“Can’t,” she replied with an apologetic shrug.
That single syllable scarcely qualified as a smart-assed reply but, for some reason, it incensed Sam. Oh, what the hell. He’d been dying to kiss her since she’d lain across his lap like a damp angel. An angel with a temptress’s body.
In the next instant, he was crushing his mouth to hers, punishing her for her obstinacy.
The defiant glide of her tongue hit his central nervous system like a jolt of electricity. He was about to gentle the kiss into something neither one of them would forget when the tramp, tramp, tramp of Commander Brady’s boots intruded on the moment.
Sam straightened regretfully, his senses reeling; his faculties registering that he’d just given Miss Scott one more complaint to carry to her father: sexual harassment.
“Lieutenant, you’re needed in the Tactical Ops Center, stat,” the Navy doctor bit out, stepping through the hatch. “Here’s an icepack,” she added, slapping it into his hand as her sharp eyes slid suspiciously from his flushed face to the patient’s.
“Yes, ma’am.” Sam followed the commander’s gaze and intercepted Maddy’s dazed regard. She was looking at him with unguarded longing. The look made his gut clench in frustration. “Your, uh, your father should be here any minute,” he said, his voice thick. “You’re not gonna . . . ” He touched his cheek to signify the bruise on her own face. “You’re not going to blame us for that, are you?”
The look she sent him made him feel stupid for asking.
“Of course not,” she replied. “Take care, Sam.” She sent him a smile, her eyes so bright they looked like jewels.
“Stay out of the hot spots,” he reiterated, pointing a warning finger at him.
Her lips pulled into a familiar, sad smile. “I’ll see you around, Lieutenant,” she answered simply.
Damn it.
Ducking out of the hatch, Sam sent one last scowl over his shoulder and intercepted Maddy’s shining gaze a final time. As he hurried down the long corridor to the TOC, he suffered the gut-churning certainty that he would, indeed, see her around.
SIGNED, SEALed, DELIVERED . . . I’M YOURS
Christie Ridgway
Thanksgiving is turning into a real turkey, Mandy Warner thought, as another explosion in her uncle’s neighborhood rattled the tiny basement window and sent down a shower of plaster dust. She huddled deeper in her corner of the house’s foundation, tucking into a smaller ball as she considered her other options.
Oh, yeah, there weren’t any other options.
The door to the basement stairs was blocked by fallen debris. The sound of gunfire outside the walls told her that if she could have made it through, she would only face a dubious welcome from the trigger-happy rebels roaming the streets of the American district. Not for the first time in the last four hours did she curse her decision to spend Thanksgiving with her only living relative—her step-uncle, a top official in the U.S. foreign service, based in a stable region of Central America.
What had been a stable region.
She despised Brussels sprouts, not that as a would-be chef she supposed she should admit despising any food. But right now, self-delusion didn’t seem worth the effort.
Another barrage of gunfire began, more too-close-for-comfort pings. Drawing her knees nearer her chest, Mandy bit down on the denim of her jeans instead of screaming. Under the circumstances, her one idea for survival was not to give away that she was hidden here. Then, no rebels could capture her for ransom . . . or worse.
The basement of her uncle’s house offered decent concealment. It was nearing noon now, but the electricity had gone out long before, and there was only the one, postage-stamp window to alleviate the deep gloom. Earlier explosions had tossed around the contents, so the small space was a warren of tumbled boxes and fallen shelving. The floor was littered with canned goods, water bottles, cleaning supplies, and other household overflow. Mandy was nestled in the space created by a tall, freestanding bookcase that had tipped against the rear wall.
The first skitter of sound didn’t immediately register. There was so much going on outside the house: shouts, weapons discharging, loud explosive blasts. When she heard the quiet scratch and shuffle again, she tilted her head toward the noise. Then she thought—rats!
She moaned around the denim still clenched between her teeth. She didn’t like rats. Or mice. Or spiders. Hell, she didn’t even like pill bugs, when it came to that. It was just too bad she didn’t have a fear of flying. She’d have stayed in L.A. and wouldn’t be sitting here, waiting to be gnawed alive.
SEAL of My Dreams Page 32
