Joint Engagement

by Karen Anders

  “What?” he said, his face full of confusion. “Cameron was in the navy. I don’t understand.”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out, Mr. Dixon. Cameron was in a Coast Guard uniform.”

  Mrs. Dixon turned her face toward them, leaning against her husband, wiping at her eyes with a tissue. She pulled herself together by sheer will and Beau got a glimpse into why Cameron had such a spotless record. She nodded at him and slipped her hand into her husband’s. “How can we help?”

  “When was the last time you talked to him?”

  “About a week ago. He was going on leave to the Bahamas with some of his friends.”

  Beau exchanged a look with Kinley. She said, “We often sell off decommissioned cutters. It’s possible this one was sold to the Bahamians. It’s a good place to start.”

  Dread coursed through him. He nodded. “These friends...would you have their names?”

  “Why?” When she saw the looks on their faces, she closed her eyes.

  “There’re six bodies in all,” Beau said. “The other five were not military personnel.” He couldn’t imagine what they must be going through now. His heart ached for them.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” she said, losing speech for a moment, her husband rubbing at her back. “Mike Levin, Pete Samson and Buck... I mean David Walters. His nickname is Buck...” She trailed off, sobbing a bit. “Those guys were inseparable when they were boys.” She broke down, clutching her midsection in even deeper grief. “Oh God. Mark’s parents still live across the street and Pete’s are a block over. Buck’s parents died last year in a car accident and he and his brother, Tommy, and Tommy’s wife, live next door. They inherited the house.”

  Beau had a sinking sensation that three of the bodies they’d found on that ship were possibly Cameron’s friends.

  She dabbed at her eyes and rested back against her husband. “Melissa, Tommy’s wife should be home.”

  “How did he sound?”

  “Happy,” she said, her voice thickening. “They were supposed to fly back today and Cameron was visiting us late this afternoon. It’s our fiftieth wedding anniversary today.” Tears welled and slipped down her cheeks. “We were going to celebrate before he had to go back to his ship tomorrow when his leave was up.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Kinley said, her heart in her eyes.

  “He said he had a great surprise for us.” Mrs. Dixon’s face contorted in pain. “We got his surprise yesterday,” she choked, then started crying again, burying her face into her husband’s neck.

  “What was it?” Beau asked.

  Mr. Dixon, his eyes glistening, said, “An all-expenses-paid trip to Paris for our anniversary. My wife has always wanted to go.” Then he broke down, clutching his grieving wife to him.

  Chapter 4

  After leaving the Dixons’, Kinley still felt the keenness of their pain. Neither of them spoke as they walked next door, an ache in her throat. Mr. and Mrs. Dixon had identified three of the five men found dead with Cameron from the pictures on Beau’s phone.

  The Dixons’ grief brought back the memory of her own and how horribly difficult it was to get over her father’s death. The ache intensified.

  The anniversary of his death had been one of the longest days of her life.

  It was enough for her to deal with without having to deal with Beau and the way he had looked at her when she’d been completely naked in her bedroom. It was totally unexpected. She hadn’t wanted that kind of connection to him. But there was something between them. A heavy attraction. How could she deny that? Her palms started sweating thinking about how he’d looked at her.

  Under normal circumstances she would think he was gorgeous. Drop-freaking-dead gorgeous. But these weren’t normal circumstances. That hair, that accent and those eyes. The kind of man who could have any woman he wanted, and she suspected he did. There was also something very subtle and completely seductive about the way he moved, the way he talked and the way he looked at not only her but at anyone. With deep interest, as if whatever was being said was completely important to him.

  This was work, and she’d already made a colossal mistake with Daniel and paid the price. The ending of their budding relationship, demerits for both him and her, and bitterness between the two of them.

  “Sometimes I hate this job.”

  Kinley barely heard him, her attention focusing almost completely inward, everything else becoming vague and peripheral. A shudder of tension rattled through her, stronger than ever. She tried to steel herself against it and failed.

  Failed.

  This is an irresponsible and detrimental breach. Distractions get people killed, Agent Cooper.

  She couldn’t make the same mistake twice. She’d let down her guard and look what had happened. Daniel had been angry when she wouldn’t make the concession and leave the CG so they could be together. He’d been a jerk. He’d betrayed her and her trust. He’d left her out to dry.

  She really didn’t want to feel a connection to Beau, but she couldn’t seem to help it. She might have been able to manage if he hadn’t seen her naked and done absolutely nothing about it, closing the door and keeping his distance and comments to himself. In fact, his restraint had only disarmed her more. He hadn’t made one crass joke or given her any indication that only two hours ago, she’d been bared to his eyes.

  God, she must be out of her mind with either her preoccupation with her father’s anniversary or the fact that Beau had quite literally stolen lead on this case from her. She should be completely angry at him, but she wasn’t. She was still frustrated and irritated, but could she blame Beau? Really, could she?

  They reached the front door and Beau knocked. After a couple of minutes, a petite blonde woman opened the door.

  “Can I help you?”

  Beau flashed his badge, and Kinley did as well as he introduced them.

  “What’s this about?”

  “Your brother-in-law.”

  “Is David okay?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Oh, God.”

  She called her husband as soon as Beau broke the news, then invited them in. Once she was seated on the couch, Kinley said, “Can you give us any information about his stay in the Bahamas?”

  She wiped at her eyes. “He was having a great time. He and his friends had always been close. He was also ecstatic about something else, said he had landed this amazing job. I think he might have been a bit drunk when he called. He said it would be a piece of cake and a boat ride, and that he’d be home soon to help us out.”

  “So he was taking some kind of job? Did he mention what it was?”

  “He said it was like Halloween. Dress up. He got interrupted when he was on the phone. Some angry guy was yelling and he had to hang up. He was a good kid. He really was. How could this have happened?”

  “We think he got hooked up with some bad people. I’m not sure he was aware of who they really were if that is any consolation.”

  “Melissa?”

  She rose from the couch and ran to the foyer to wrap her arms around her husband. He buried his face in her neck with a devastated look on his face.

  “Looks like they played these guys with offers of money to pose as Coast Guard and it got them all killed,” Beau said.

  “Yes, so what was it they were smuggling into the country? We need to alert Homeland Security,” she said.

  Beau nodded. “And dig deeper.”

  They left a grieving Tommy and Melissa and interviewed the other victims’ next of kin and got similar stories. Mark’s mother indicated that it was some kind of Hollywood film and all they had to do was act as extras.

  It was really hard to break the news to two more sets of parents. Kinley struggled to stay neutral, but it was so difficult when she knew what it was to
lose a beloved family member. She had to get through this day as best she could. She was determined to find the scum who had murdered those kids, to make sure they paid. But the threat to the United States had to take precedence for now. They needed to identify the cutter and trace it to try to figure out what had happened. There was also the case of the last two unidentified men. That task they would have to leave up to the ME.

  After they finished the last interview, Beau stood outside the house, partly in shadow. She couldn’t help looking at him. She knew she should just stop. Stop analyzing him. Stop getting more involved with him. Never mind the looks and the magnetism. Just stop.

  She held her silence, sensing that he was quietly seething. He stared out onto the residential street. “I went into the navy to protect—” he lifted his hand to encompass the street of pretty houses, small children playing outside, their laughter contagious “—all this.”

  His eyes glittered in the sunlight that cut across his face, his dark hair absorbing the light, the sun bathing his features in a golden glow—a high, wide forehead, dark arched brows, an aquiline nose that looked as if it might have been broken once or twice in his thirty-some years.

  He looked like a battle-ready warrior, a man who pushed himself to his physical and mental limits. Free-fall parachuting at ten thousand feet, traveling by small rubber boat for a hundred miles, conducting a mission, then traveling thirty miles out to sea to rendezvous with a sub. The transformation from the teasing, affable, grinning devil he’d been earlier sent a shiver down her spine.

  He had the hard look of a navy SEAL about him now.

  “We’re going to get these guys,” he said in the kind of voice that indicated there would be no quarter. Full-out, hard-impact talk.

  When they pulled up to the NCIS office on Naval Station Norfolk, she gave him a glance out of the corner of her eye. He looked deep in thought. As she parked the car and they both exited, he said, “So, Cameron was in the Bahamas with friends. You said you thought the cutter was decommissioned and sold to the Bahamians?”

  “Yes, I can confirm it. It’s a good clue and will narrow down my search.”

  Inside, Mike was in his office, but the outer office was empty.

  “Here, take my desk,” Beau said. “Well, the temporary one I was assigned.” He sat down in the chair and booted it up, typing in his password.

  “I’ll talk to the ME over in Portsmouth. Be back shortly.” Then he stood and headed to the ME’s Office.

  “Sounds good,” she said, and before she realized what she was doing, she watched him walk out of the office. All the way out, until the door closed behind him. It wasn’t until she heard the snick that she realized she was staring at him. Well, to be precise, his ass, something deeply, intrinsically female in her admiring the way his slacks fit his backside.

  She shook herself as she accessed the database that housed the information regarding decommissioned vessels. She looked through the entries and her eyes snagged on the Point Rival, an eighty-two-foot Point-class cutter that had to be the ship that was lying at anchor on the docks. Another cutter, a High Endurance class named Revere. Both of the cutters had been recently sold to the Bahamians to make room for the new Legend-class National Security Cutter (NSC) Henry.

  As she did the calculations on how long the ships would take to get to the Bahamas to discover when it could have been hijacked and sailed to the US, she thought this wasn’t like her attraction to Daniel. Not even close. She’d been aware of him when he was in a room, but it was nothing like the presence of Beau. She swore she could feel the heat of him when he was next to her.

  This was a disaster. The case that could make her boss and even the commandant sit up and take notice, and she was thinking about Beau inappropriately. That compressed her lungs and suddenly made her breathless all over again.

  But it wouldn’t be good to give Beau an edge anywhere, not in this investigation and not with her. She had a job to do and she wasn’t going to screw it up again. Everything would be by the book on this and she would keep her hormones in line next time. So help her, God.

  Even as she finished that thought, the image of dark eyes and a devil’s smile filled her head. The memory of his eyes on her set off shivers that rippled from her neck downward, shocking her.

  There wouldn’t be a next time if she could help it. Could she even handle a man like Beau Jerrott, with all that raw sexuality? Could she be sure she could stay in control—of him or their relationship or herself?

  No. She’d screwed up with Daniel and whatever feelings she’d had for him had gotten smashed and battered in the fallout. She wasn’t sure what they’d been, even now. How much had been her overcompensating for her recent lack of a personal life, her loneliness?

  Regardless of any of that, she’d lost credibility. She intended to get it back now that she’d been given a second chance.

  When the door opened and closed, she didn’t have to turn around to know it was Beau. She had just finished compiling her own information.

  “How is it going?” he said in that husky, intimate way he had of talking. Trying to keep herself unaffected, she pushed a button and the Point Rival flashed up on the wide-screen monitor on the wall between the desk she was sitting at and the one Beau settled behind.

  “This is the Point Rival. We decommissioned it recently and it departed yesterday on its way to be delivered to the Bahamians.” She pulled up the second picture. “This is the Revere. It was also decommissioned and headed for the Bahamas. We sold both to make way for the new state-of-the-art Legend-class National Security Cutter Henry. The Point Rival never made port. I’ve already contacted the officials in the Bahamas. The Revere is already docked, but it’s a much faster vessel and outdistanced the slower Point Rival.”

  “That’s the ship we have docked here, the ones with the men’s bodies?”

  “Yes, you can’t completely sand off the call numbers. I have a crew working on it right now. I’m sure it’s the Point Rival.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t usually make assumptions.”

  “Guess. Project. You have to have some kind of theory.”

  “I don’t like guessing.”

  “You just made assumptions about the Point Rival.”

  “Ah, but they were researched and quantifiable facts about the ship. It was a calculated deduction. I don’t have any facts on what could have transpired between those men and what happened on that ship. That would be pure conjecture.”

  He gave her a hint of a charming smile. “Ah, chérie, you need to loosen up a bit.” His smile spread and her heart skipped a beat. “C’mon, give me your best hypothesis. I won’t tell anyone you made a guess,” he leaned forward and whispered.

  Her chest expanded at how completely attractive he was. The memory of his hot, burning eyes sent a heat flash over her skin. “I have a feeling that you know exactly how to cajole what you want out of women.”

  “I might know a thing or two,” he said with another one of those devastating grins. “But, I’m pretty interested in getting you to loosen up a bit.”

  “I’m probably not going to loosen up, but I can make a small concession here. I think they were attacked on the open sea.”

  His mouth tightened. “How many crew are we talking about?”

  “There were ten Bahamian crew members. An officer and two enlisted CG.” She tried to focus on what she was saying, to stay professional. “They had a small window. If it had been me, I would have done it at about the halfway point. It would get them back here in about fifteen hours. The fog was a plus for them. If my calculations are correct—”

  “I bet your calculations are always correct.”

  That comment made her feel better than it should. After what had happened with Daniel, she double-checked everything. “If they are, they either did
n’t have a very good navigator or ran into some rough seas. Instead of coming to shore in the dead of night, they came in after dawn. They lucked out with the fog.” He was doing it again. Looking at her like that. As if every word she said was gold he could deposit into the bank. “I have the coordinates of where it would have been in the time span it took for the Point Rival to come back to Norfolk.” She pulled up the map and Beau rose to get a closer look, standing way too close to her. He smelled spicy and delicious. As he studied the screen and the route that had been logged for the cutter, she couldn’t help but send her eyes over his face while he was distracted.

  He had the most tantalizingly kissable lips, so full and enticing. A frisson of heat rolled through her when he absently wet his bottom lip. Her eyes followed his tongue. His bangs were a heavy mess, curling across his forehead. The rest of his hair waved over his ears, coming to a point on the nape of his neck. It was definitely just shy of regulation. But it looked so soft, touchable and she wanted to run her fingers through his hair, feel his heat.

  Abruptly he turned to face her. “Most likely they killed...” He trailed off when he met her eyes and must have seen the desire there. She quickly looked away, but not fast enough. He’d caught her staring. Damn. He continued, “Killed the Defense Force members and your CG escorts, transported Dixon and his friends on board, rolled into Kroebuck Beach and ditched the boat.”

  She blinked. “I’m afraid they are most likely dead. There was another reason that I did the calculations to try to pinpoint where the Point Rival was when it might have been hijacked. It’s an excellent place to start looking for any survivors. I immediately contacted SAC Stafford the moment I discovered that the ship was most likely the Point Rival. Search and Rescue has already been dispatched based on my coordinates.”

  “Bodies were probably tossed overboard.”

  She nodded. To cover her embarrassment, she said, “They must have had a dinghy, and that’s what I heard as it pulled away. But I couldn’t see anything in the fog. I also alerted Homeland and they have been combing over the beach where the cutter almost ran aground.”