Joint Engagement

by Karen Anders

  “The USS Daniel Robinson, Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, larger and more heavily armed than its predecessors,” Kinley said.

  “Yes, that’s right. You know your ships,” Mike said. “His family is actually in Norfolk.” He handed Beau a scrap of paper and he went to pull out his phone and enter the address into his GPS.

  “I know where that is,” Kinley said softly, looking at the paper. “Thank you for staying and lending a helping hand, again, Beau.”

  “Of course. I’m yours until you get some hands on deck.”

  “That’s good, because both SECNAV and the Commandant of the Coast Guard want you to lead this investigation. With your SEAL background and your exemplary record, we’re damn lucky to have you on this.”

  He heard the small gasp and saw her stiffen beside him, even as he was focusing on what Mike was saying. He glanced at Kinley, but she wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were suddenly carrying that bruised expression again, before it was suddenly replaced with anger.

  Right. She wanted lead on this and, well, he’d effectively stolen her thunder, though he definitely was qualified for this investigation after having come off that special op for NCIS in Afghanistan. He still didn’t like thinking about it.

  He heard Kinley’s boss ask to speak with her and they walked to the back of the room. He spoke to her quickly and at the end of it squeezed her shoulder. Her voice was quiet, but it was laced with anger. Stafford said something low and soothing sounding, but it didn’t appease her. She brushed past him and slammed out of the office. Mike watched her go with that same male look in his eyes. And it torqued Beau off all over again.

  Stafford grabbed his arm as he was heading out the door. “She expected to take lead. I tried to let her know about your qualifications, but there are extenuating circumstances I can’t go into, and suffice it to say she’s...uh...pissed.”

  “Yeah, with my great observational skills I got that.”

  “I could probably assign someone else—”

  “No. She discovered all this. She has a right to be included in this case. I wouldn’t want to take that away from her. I can handle it.”

  “I agree. She has earned her place here. It’ll just take her a few minutes to calm down.”

  Beau didn’t mind her anger. It showed that she cared enough to get mad. What he had to have was cooperation and that was more important than who led the damn team.

  Outside she was pacing, the strong muscles in her thighs and calves rippling as she moved. She looked mad enough to shoot him. A really good reason never to date a woman with a gun. Her red brows were drawn together in a furious scowl. For the first time, he noticed the dark stain on her bra and her shorts. It looked like...blood.

  She had been through quite a bit this morning. He approached her. She gave him a look that told him she hadn’t quite gotten to a calmed-down place yet.

  “Listen, Cooper...”

  “No. I don’t think so. Not right now. Just let me work it out.”

  She turned to leave and he followed close behind.

  “I’ll drive,” she said flatly, then turned to him and gave him a steely-eyed glare. Nope, he wasn’t going to get any kind of offer to call her Kinley and irrationally, he wanted her to ask him to. Most women it was easy to become familiar with. They never minded him calling them by their first names. Kinley wasn’t only his Kryptonite; she was as hard as the fabled rock. “That is, if I have your permission.”

  He shrugged and moved to her car. She tucked in behind the wheel. “If you don’t mind, I need to go home and change into more appropriate clothes.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said, keeping his voice neutral. She was pissed and he was in a position to step on her toes. It wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle. That thought brought with it a vision of his hands all over her. He brushed that aside. Professional situation. Professional behavior. There was something about her that made him wary. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

  She put the car in gear, but said nothing as she drove.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  She was about to see his persistent side.

  “Why not? It’s obvious that you’re upset about me taking lead. Don’t you think it would be best to clear the air?”

  “There is zero I can do about it except fume.”

  “I didn’t come here to step all over your case, if that helps.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “Cooper. I understand—”

  “What? No you don’t. Are you a woman trying to make it in a career that is predominantly male? You have to be smarter, faster and tougher than they are. And you can make zero mistakes. Unfortunately, I made a big blunder.” She winced and swore softly under her breath.

  “What kind of blunder?”

  “None of your business. It doesn’t affect my performance on this case.” She ignored him completely after that, focusing instead on maneuvering them across the highway over the expanse of the Chesapeake Bay.

  “Have you ever broken the news to a family?”

  Her hands tightened on the steering wheel, and she took a quick breath. “No. I haven’t. I can’t imagine it’s going to be the part of this job I like best.”

  When she pulled up to a small house across from the beach, she got out and he followed her silent, curvy figure into her house.

  “I would really like to take a quick shower. I’ve...got blood all over me.”

  “Of course. We’re about to destroy Dixon’s parents’ world. Let them have a little bit more time.”

  She bit her lip, nodded and disappeared into the bathroom. He heard the shower come on and steered himself and his thoughts away from the delectable Kinley, naked, getting wet. Damn. That made him hard.

  He sighed. Give him an uncomplicated woman like Daisy.

  Her house was decorated in an eclectic style that was neat and beachy. Outside the sliding-glass door in the back was a small backyard with a barbeque and a nice patio. All she was missing was the white picket fence out front.

  He went into her refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of water and unscrewed the top.

  “I’m sure that you’ve been in a lot more muck and blood than I could have ever imagined.”

  He walked toward the sound of her voice. “That’s for sure. I’ve been through swamps and mud, monsoon rains, dust-dry deserts and...” His voice just stopped, the water bottle halfway to his lips. His body froze. Whatever thought he was going to make just ended abruptly as if he’d suddenly dropped into a coma. His mouth went as dry as the desert he had just mentioned.

  Her door was ajar just enough that he could see the full-length mirror on her closet door and it was... Damn...his brain just went to mush. There were no words to describe her naked body.

  He slid his gaze over her. Her hair was down out of the ponytail and hung around her in a tumble of red clumps of silk, her lips moist. Her face was flushed with heat.

  His throat tightened, his whole body tightened, as he watched a droplet of water trail down the dusky, soft-looking skin of her shoulder, over the enticing, plump, beautiful curve of her breast, down over her delicate rib cage, over her narrow hips and well-formed thigh.

  He’d literally never been blindsided by a woman before, but she was so utterly gorgeous from the top of her red head to her red-painted toenails and he couldn’t look away.

  He knew he should turn his back and walk away. Stop looking.

  But the message just got all jumbled up in his brain. That was something that also never happened to him.

  Then those green eyes rose. She stilled and met his eyes in the mirror. She was raw Kryptonite, giving off an interstellar force of exponential power and frying his brain. She gasped and that sound shot through him like wildfire. Damn. It was like bein
g caught in a tractor beam. He went weak. He swore his knees buckled. From the depths of those wide, dark-fringed eyes she returned his look, as if she couldn’t look away, either.

  He knew lust, and it was running hot through his veins, but there was something more. Something beyond the burning ache he felt for her. Something fiercer, with an edge of desperation he was trying to ignore and could barely comprehend.

  She looked at him like he set her on fire, made her gasp. It was crazy. Crazy and hot and utterly sexual in a way he’d thought he would never know. Every encounter he’d ever had paled in comparison to just looking at her. The reality of it was so much more intense. The pure physical energy of her was a force to be reckoned with.

  She was powerful, dangerous and unpredictably seductive.

  It was as if he was touching her, breathing her in instead of just staring at her.

  He’d felt it the moment he’d met her. Something...an elemental vibe that coursed through him. It was easy to think of her being beautiful because she was. Heartbreakingly.

  But that wasn’t it. There was something inherent in her. Something he wanted to...take...have.

  He couldn’t explain it. But he wanted it more than he wanted that delectable body. It scared the living hell right out of him.

  When he expected her to look away, a soft casting downward of her eyes, a lowering of her lashes, she didn’t. It made him want her more. She just stared at him, caught up in him.

  What did she see in him?

  It was like a missing piece in this whole puzzle. He was a lost cause. He’d slept around, didn’t always remember names. Usually one night was all there was even when he liked the girl. He’d been down that bumpy road and he wasn’t going down it again.

  But she... Damn... What a cluster. She heated him into more than lust. It was a yearning, a one-on-one he’d never experienced before.

  The sunlight cut into the room, just barely illuminated one of her legs. Standing there, shadows washed across her, highlighting curves, she made his heart beat hard.

  In an instant, at first sight, she was special, and what he wanted from her was a chance to see where it all went. The sheer potential of the two of them meeting somewhere he’d never been before.

  Just a chance to lay himself up against her, to connect with her, mouth to mouth, body to body, to see if she could save him from all that running. Maybe just a bit, just enough to take the sharp edges off his dreams, to break the barriers that were as strong as Fort Knox. She was some kinda siege breaker.

  He took two steps to the door and pulled it closed. Breathing hard, he wiped his hand across his mouth. What the hell was he thinking? This case had all the markings of something that could take a good bit of time to solve. He’d never felt this kind of attraction in his life.

  He was hard-pressed to keep his ethics intact. It didn’t matter if the girl had a cosmic hold on him. He wasn’t going to do it. The barriers were as strong as he could make them. Pain was something he was used to. He’d been in blowing snow that froze fingers and toes and ran through the body like a hard, subzero knife; in cold water that would give someone hypothermia in seconds. He’d been shot, mortared, had shrapnel flying around him, and been beaten, knifed and, once, hit with a lead pipe. He’d gotten through Hell Week. He knew pain, but none of that was like what Jennifer had done to him. She’d shredded his heart, shredded it on purpose.

  Instead of opening up about how she really felt, she’d sandbagged him for a long time, then literally packed up and took off without a word to him, leaving him emotionally stranded with an engagement ring in his pocket.

  But Special Agent Kinley Cooper was a much bigger threat. She possessed Jennifer’s go-for-the-jugular attitude. But she had a softer side to her that could undermine his ability to keep his distance, something he’d done ever since Jennifer had wrecked him.

  He walked away from the door and back to the living room, sitting down on the couch. She had exercise magazines on the coffee table. Yoga Art and Running. When he heard the door open, he picked up a magazine.

  “You really into yoga or are you just acting nonchalant?” Kinley asked.

  Oh, she was going to hit it head-on. She could talk about this, but not about what was cheesing her off about him taking lead. “Do I look like the kind of guy that can bend himself into a pretzel? I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to—”

  “It wasn’t your fault. I was the one who didn’t close the door all the way.” She tilted her head. Her hair was pulled back again, and she was dressed in a pair of slim white pants that came to her ankles and a red shirt that did nothing to stem the memory of how her breasts had looked.

  “We have a professional relationship, so we’ll just forget this ever happened. Right?”

  Like hell. “Yes, absolutely.” How could she say this like the connection they’d made hadn’t been hot enough to melt metal?

  She gave him a tight smile. “That’s good, Agent Jerrott.”

  “Could you try to call me Beau?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Okay, it shouldn’t make him steam that she seemed totally unaffected. Had that all been one-sided in there? Hell, he needed to get a grip.

  He stood and turned. She was at the fridge getting a bottle of water, and that was when he saw her take a deep breath, shiver oh so slightly. She rubbed the bottle on the back of her neck.

  He grinned. It came from somewhere deep, deep inside him. A complete joy that he couldn’t contain, even as he knew it was wrong to even contemplate that she felt the same way. She had been affected by that look they’d exchanged.

  Then the smile faded from his face and that joy banked. His gut clenched in a way that brought that terror back. He read vulnerability there in the lines of her body, in the way she held herself. It tugged at his heart.

  Shaken once again by this woman, he was caught off guard as she touched something raw inside him. “So,” he said, turning his back to her, giving her a moment to compose herself. Or was he the one that needed the time? After a few seconds, he walked around the couch and approached her. She had straightened and put that neutral look back on her face, had the bottle unscrewed and was taking a sip. “You still mad at me?”

  “Let’s put it this way. I’m mad at the circumstances. I’m mad because I messed it up for myself. I want to clear this case. Discover exactly where that cutter came from, who murdered those men and what they were smuggling aboard that ship. That and that alone has to be our focus.”

  “Then we’re on the same page. We’re a team. You ready to go and get some answers?”

  She nodded and walked around the counter as he made space for her to move in front of him. The scent of her was intoxicating as he followed her out the door.

  Back in her car, she drove them over to the address they were given.

  Parking in front of a nice residential home with pretty flowers lining the walk, they found a middle-aged woman on her knees on the concrete, planting what looked like her last batch of flowers. Marigolds, he thought.

  Something about her reminded him of his own mère, who had been so grateful every time he came home from leave. His père was also a strong presence in his life, but his mère had taught him that while violence was maybe sometimes the answer, most of the time it wasn’t. She helped him to understand himself at a young age and learn his strengths. Most everything he’d ever tried came easily to him. Schoolwork, sports, friendships and girls. Especially girls. Even the navy had been something that really hadn’t challenged him.

  It wasn’t until he’d stepped onto that beach at Coronado that things got tough, then got tougher, then dropped them all into hell.

  But there wasn’t a day that didn’t go by on the teams that he wasn’t thankful for that training.

  He’d been humiliated, called pretty boy, candy boy, obscenities shout
ed in his face every day. Very little sleep, scarcely any rest. When they hadn’t been immersed in cold water, they’d been lugging gigantic logs. Tests that were designed to break a man down to the very fabric of his soul to see what he was really made of. It was then that he’d realized it wasn’t about the physical or the body at all. It was all about his mind and determination. It was all mental. Because really, that fueled everything.

  And he’d gotten basic, so damned basic.

  But they hadn’t broken him.

  There was no ringing out for him.

  The woman raised her head and stilled as soon as she saw them, her face wary and her eyes anxious.

  “Mrs. Dixon?”

  She nodded and came to her feet, pulling off the gardening gloves. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Special Agent Beau Jerrott, NCIS, and this is Special Agent Kinley Cooper, CGIS.”

  “NCIS...oh, God. Cameron? Has something happened?”

  “Could we go inside?”

  Full-blown worry on her face, she called out, “Matt!”

  A man came to the screen door and there was no doubt that this was Cameron’s father. The likeness was uncanny. When he saw his agitated wife coming up the stairs, he opened the door, alarm on his face when he turned to look at them.

  Beau indicated that Kinley should precede him. She climbed the stairs with him close behind. Once they were seated in the living room, Beau leaned forward. “I’m sorry to have to break this news to you, but we found your son’s body today.”

  Mrs. Dixon’s wail of pain was muffled as she buried her face into her husband’s throat. He just looked at Beau as if this wasn’t real.

  Beau didn’t speak for a few minutes. He gave Cameron’s parents a few minutes to absorb the shock of their son’s death. He ached for the Dixons and their loss.

  Finally, Matt Dixon said, “What happened?”

  “He was shot to death and was found aboard a Coast Guard cutter drifting on the tide.” Beau wished he didn’t have to deliver this news, but there wasn’t any way to soften the blow of hearing the details of their son’s death.