She’d have invited Luke along, but she didn’t know which room was his. There was an idea in the back of her mind but she couldn’t seem to tease it out. If felt as if there was some way to recover the situation, but she couldn’t make it conscious. Maybe with Luke’s help… Except he was still asleep.
Usually a good workout helped her think, but her run had instead earned her nothing except jillions of marriage proposals.
Now she was trying to pump up the energy to do some serious stairs work. Trotting around Dakar, and dodging tall handsome natives with hopes of a rich foreign wife, hadn’t really lent itself to the kind of workout her elliptical delivered.
But then she’d spotted the stairs up the front of the African Renaissance Monument. One quick trot up and down had revealed two hundred and four steps, level and in good repair. Eleven flights unevenly broken up between landings, mostly in groups of seventeen or eighteen. Good. More of a challenge.
Back at the bottom, she closed her eyes for a moment and breathed deeply to make sure she was as well oxygenated as possible.
Then she spun for the stairs and slammed into someone.
“I’m. Not. Interested.” It took all her control to not shout it in the man’s face. “I don’t want to marry…” The “you” dribbled off as she looked up into Luke Altman’s face. He hadn’t even had the decency to waver when she’d slammed into him. He was just that substantial.
He crossed his arms and looked down at her, then raised his eyebrows at her in a question.
“I don’t want to marry you either,” she snarled at him.
“Good to know.” They were so close she could feel the soft morning breeze speeding up slightly to slip between them. Two bodies creating a Venturi Effect just like an RPA wing’s flat and curved surfaces creating lift. And with Luke’s impressive biceps and chest, it was sadly apparent which one of them was the flat one.
“Go away. I’m working out here.”
He waved a hand for her to proceed.
Screw him. She breathed deeply once more, then turned and began double-timing it up the stairs. Her legs were long enough—barely—that she could have done them two-by-two but that wasn’t the point of the workout. Hitting every step clean, she was soon racing upward.
Only when she turned at the top did she realize that Altman was right there with her.
“Enjoying watching my butt?”
“Did enough of that last night.”
At the airport was the only time he’d been behind her—for about twenty meters. Great. Like one look at her was all a man needed before he got bored.
She turned and ran back down.
“Go away,” she said at the bottom turn before heading back up the stairs to start her third lap.
Luke came up beside her and matched her step for step. He didn’t run up the stairs or climb them. He flowed. He had built-in laminar flow as if he was only touching the steps for guidance to steer his flight up the steps. He did the same on the descent. Ten stories twice, she was definitely beginning to feel the burn, but she wasn’t going to give in yet. Definitely not with SEAL Commander Altman beside her.
At least he kept away the Marry me jokers. They were there, also working the steps hard with their long legs and lean muscles. But now she was “with a man” so they treated her differently. She didn’t need a man’s protection. She didn’t want a man’s protection. They’d certainly done crap at protecting her when she could have really used it.
She turned to face him on the red-brick plaza at the base of the stairs.
“Okay. How do you do that?” She asked partly because she wanted to know, but also to buy a moment to catch her breath without letting Altman see how badly she needed to.
“Do what?” But his smile said he totally knew.
“Asshole.” She started up a fourth time.
As she hit the second landing and started on the next flight of twenty steps, she almost fell and ate the brick. Luke had placed a large hand at the small of her back.
“Try not to shift against my hand. Keep your body stable and let your legs do the work.”
She’d have asked why, but she was running way short on breath—far more than the climb should account for. Maybe the interval timing of landings and descents was chewing her up a lot faster than the predictable continuity of an elliptical exercise machine.
At first it felt as if he was rubbing his hand up and down her back. Not an unpleasurable sensation—even if he was married. Even if he’d grown bored of looking at her ass in the first thirty seconds. Her efforts to stop the motion only made it worse.
“Stay on your toes.”
“This isn’t. Ballet. Class,” she managed to huff out.
“Not ballet. A stable core from which to shoot accurately.”
And she watched Luke sideways as they hit the next flight. His motion was so smooth, even with her jostling against his hand, that he would indeed have a very stable motion from which to shoot accurately while on the run.
With the gentle pressure of his big hand, she had a reference of what her upper body was doing. It was going up with each step, but it was doing it in noncontinuous, bumpy fashion, shoving upward as she reached for the next stair, then easing down as her foot settled firmly on the step. It made her feel like she was a bobble-head doll version of herself.
By the sixth flight, she was getting a feel for it and by the top one, she felt a little as if she was floating upward on a strong thermal rather than driving upward under full thrust. Her legs burned even more, but the feeling of smooth flight was more than energizing enough to compensate for it.
Another lap down and back without a word.
Halfway up, he slid his hand away. And again she almost went down, losing every bit of the smooth rhythm she’d found. She held it together until the top step, then more collapsed than sat.
Her lungs were heaving. Five laps? Six? Ten stories each. After a 5K run. That definitely counted.
“You’ll get it.” Luke looked as if he was barely breathing.
If she had a cooler of ice water, she’d dump it over his head right about now. Or bury her face in it.
“You work out. It shows.” Wow! He was using whole sentences. Only two or three words, but grammatically intact.
“Hullo. In the Army.”
He shrugged. Because of course a Team 6 SEAL had no need to respect anything in the Army. Especially not an RPA pilot.
“I repeat: asshole. Bet you’ve been called that a few times.”
Again the maddening shrug as if to say, “Maybe.” Or perhaps as if he didn’t care.
“Bet your wife calls you that.” Except it didn’t come out funny the way she’d meant it.
Luke’s fulminating look might be the first true emotion she’d ever seen on his face.
“Sorry. That was—” unforgivable. “Sorry.”
But she was talking to herself. He was already halfway down the steps in that floating motion of his—at triple the speed she’d been moving. So smooth that he disappeared from view long before he was out of sight. He just blended in and she could no longer find him in the gathering crowd below.
“Smooth, Zoe. Real effing smooth.”
She stared out at the Mamelles Lighthouse and the broad sweep of the Atlantic. Beneath the morning sun, it was a dark blue with a hint of green. So different from the dark Pacific and the turquoise waters off the Florida beaches she went to on leave—because she sure as hell didn’t go home.
No question she was out of her depth here.
A tall Senegalese man, in green tennies and gym shorts that left little to the imagination, reached the top of the steps and sat down beside her. His smile revealed brilliant white teeth.
“You look so very sad,” he said in a deep, pleasantly French tone. “Maybe you should leave him and marry me. I make you very happy.”
It wouldn’t be the dumbest thing she’d done in the last thirty-six hours.
Or even the last thirty-six seconds.
&nb
sp; Crap!
There were some things Luke didn’t need to explain to anyone—least of all to someone like Zoe DeMille.
He stood in the cool shower and tried to soak the heat out of his body.
It wasn’t working.
Marva Hernandez had been everything he wanted. Exotically dark, fantastically built, and hungry for a SEAL. They’d met at McP’s Irish Pub and Grill in Coronado. They’d started at one of the outside tables, a cluster of tall tables under the cool trees perched on Orange Avenue. Their group had been thick with SEALs and bar babes.
Even in that crowd Marva had stood out. Maybe that’s why Sofia, DeMille’s commander, had been no turn on—too much like Marva. He hadn’t thought of that but it made sense. Except he hadn’t gone after many others lately either. The game had gotten old and maybe even gone stale.
But Marva had everything a twenty-eight-year-old, newly tagged SEAL lieutenant commander deserved: sun-kissed Central American skin, topped with just a hint of her country’s lush accent. Marva had done her best to make her speech pure Californian after coming to the US as a teen.
Long dark hair had rippled down to the middle of her back. Her short shorts and that clinging tube top had promised so much—and they’d delivered in McP’s bathroom stall when he took her up against the wall later that first night.
Luke turned the shower water colder, but it was already as low as it could go.
The heat wasn’t in his groin. He could feel it steaming off his head.
Two years married, his first mission with the Night Stalkers 5E had finished fast and efficiently—something he’d since learned wasn’t chance but rather a trademark of the 5E.
He’d meant to surprise Marva by coming home early.
He had.
The first thing he’d seen when he walked into their home was her magnificent breasts, clutched in another man’s hands as she rode him hard. A damned petty officer second class from Blue Squadron.
The petty officer went wide-eyed with shock. Screwing an officer’s wife wasn’t a court-martial offense, but it could easily be a death sentence.
If Marva noticed Luke’s arrival, she ignored it and finished what she was doing—crying out in that near-panicked release that she’d said only he could give her because he was just that big and good.
When she came down, that lovely toss of hair and arch of back so burned into his memory that he could still see it now, she’d finally turned to him and waited for his response.
“Back early,” were the only words he could think to say.
She’d rolled her eyes at him. “Asshole.” Moments later she’d tried to cover it with the typical, oh-honey-this-was-just-a-mistake bullshit, but he wasn’t buying it for a second. That one word had burned between them and he could still feel the searing brand of it.
SEAL officers didn’t beat the shit out of enlisted men—not if they wanted to stay in the military. No one would say shit if he flattened Marva, but Luke had seen too many beatings of women in his youth to ever do it himself.
Instead, he’d tossed them both out the door without clothes or car keys and called for the MPs to come haul their asses away when they made a fuss—it was base housing after all. Three hours later, he’d dumped every single thing that was hers or the asshole’s into his pickup, including their wallets. He’d towed her car—that he’d paid for—to the nearest used lot that offered him cash on the spot, transferred all except one dollar out of their joint account, and swung through the dump on his way out of town to empty the bed of his pickup.
Luke had wanted a photo of Marva’s glittering smile each time she greeted him home. It would keep him company on missions and he’d had his phone out. Instead, he’d instinctively snapped a photo that went in with the divorce papers that left her nothing. He’d forwarded a copy to the asshole’s wife, which had cost him everything too. And the asshole’s commander, which had made no difference at all. There were many reasons Luke only trusted his own team.
He lay his head on the ornate brown-and-gold tile wall of Christian’s shower. It still hadn’t chilled him down.
Asshole. Bet your wife calls you that.
“Go to hell, DeMille.” She couldn’t do it soon enough for him.
7
Zoe stood in Christian’s garage and tried not to keep checking every dark corner. Her nerves were only slightly mollified when Christian rolled up the big outside door to let in the morning sun. There were still too many dark corners. Too many places where she could be dragged out of sight and—
Gathering every fiber of strength she possessed barely overpowered that horror of memories. She had made a whole woman out of that broken girl. It was so unfair that she wouldn’t stay lost in the past where she belonged. Everything about this mission was unearthing that young, naive, trusting version of herself from her restless grave and Zoe hated it. No shower, no amount of scrubbing, no amount of wishing to make that girl go away had sufficed.
Garage! She shouted it to herself in panic the moment Christian led her and Luke in here.
Don’t focus on the garage! There’d been a time she’d loved her father’s garage. As a little girl, she had known what tool her father wanted before he did. Could do the fussy work of rebuilding a carburetor by the age of ten better than Dad could.
Focus on that!
This wasn’t the garage where Dad’s best friend from childhood, “Uncle Bob,” was co-owner. Where—
She was half a world away from Pismo Beach.
Senegal. They were in Senegal.
Surely she was safe here.
In Christian’s garage the dark corners weren’t dangerous shadows, but rather pools of cool concrete-enclosed space inviolate to the soaring temperatures outside. The structure was as big as a whole wing of his house—which made sense as it was the fourth wall of his courtyard.
She also took comfort in Luke standing close beside her, even if he was still not saying a word. Her attempt to apologize once more didn’t even earn her the narrow-eyed inspection of when she’d hijacked a piece of his meatball last night. Someday he’d learn to use his words. And someday frogs could be princes. SEALs? Not so much. That thought almost made her smile.
The garage wasn’t quite the fantastic setup that Hathyaron had hidden away in Pakistan, but it was pretty amazing anyway. Over a dozen cars were parked here, and the Facel Vega II was not the only rare prize. A Plymouth Hemi Superbird and an even rarer 1981 Talbot Sunbeam rally racer also graced his collection. She wanted to go visit each one, but the vehicles in the service bay were why they were here, so she forced herself to focus on those. Which wasn’t hard; they looked amazing.
The working part of the garage had room for three cars, a lift, and an impressive array of tools. The parts rack alone was a thing of beauty—ultra heavy-duty shocks and other suspension parts, spare body panels, an extra engine… It screamed off-road rally racing even without the cars.
She wrapped her arms more tightly around herself, still feeling chilled by the space. But the cars helped pull her out of the darkness. All three in this area were Dakar Rally racers.
“They’re awfully pretty.”
One car was in pieces. A somber black man who was introduced as Ahmed the best mechanic in Dakar was rebuilding it.
But the Renault and Citroën looked ready to roll. They were only recognizable as such because of the prominent logos on their hoods. These bore no other relation to the manufacturers’ production cars—custom-built for world rally championship races. Like most WRC vehicles, they were designed to tackle cross-country racing where roads were just a distant memory.
There was a certain romance to them. Wide tires with deep tread to run on sand or rock. High body metal for ground clearance revealed massively oversized suspensions. The roll cage was clearly visible inside the body to protect the driver and navigator in the event of a roll or flip.
“You’ve upgraded them both to Brenthel Baja kit suspensions.” Even without the factory stickers, she’d have recogni
zed the configurations from the dune buggies her father had built for racing the Pismo Beach dunes.
Most of what raced there were just ATVs or the hopped-up buggies that were little more than an engine and a roll cage. But every now and then a serious racer would come into the shop and want their car or truck jacked especially for the sand. If they had the cash, they went for the Brenthel kit. Independent front suspension, solid axle rear—both rugged enough to take the pounding.
“Oh, Zoe. You make my heart go wild. That is how I first find you, is that picture of you at Huckfest.”
Huckfest was the annual truck-jumping competition that had run for years on the Pismo Beach dunes. Huckfesters had showed up by the hundreds, with fans in the thousands, to win bragging rights for the longest and highest jumps. The five years it had run had overlapped with her wild teenage years. She’d taken her revenge—mostly on herself, she’d finally understood—by sleeping her way through the camps.
She already knew the gear from her dad’s shop, so she could speak the lingo. The men had found the combination of that and the string bikini on her sylph-like body irresistible. She’d flown with more than a few of them. The summer after her senior year she’d gone for a record of her own—"I’ll sleep with you if I can jump with you.” She shuddered to remember how many jumps she’d made during the two-day event.
A few of the photos, thankfully not any of the bad ones—at least not the really bad ones, had been unearthed by her fans and posted to her feeds. There were some skills she wished she’d never learned.
Christian waved a hand at the Huckfest photo’s place of honor just above his own swimsuit girl calendar. It was her, the only woman and dressed in that trademark lemon-yellow bikini, at the center of a long line of male Huckfesters with their arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning like idiots for the camera. At least she’d finally developed some breasts by then.
She was a head shorter than any of the guys. Well, she wouldn’t be revealing the truth behind that photo, she’d screwed every one of them—some before the photo and some after. As if filling in the gaps had made that part of her more rather than less complete. Even did the twin brothers together to squeeze everyone in.
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