Secret Agent Sam

by Kathleen Creighton

  “But you wrote those stories.”

  “Yeah, mainly to get through it. Get past it. I wonder, sometimes, how it would’ve been if I hadn’t had that outlet. I know Tristan had a tough time of it-of course he’d been gone a lot longer than I was. They only had me a few months. Him they’d had for eight years.”

  “Hard to imagine. Impossible, maybe.”

  Cory nodded, the knots in his belly relaxing a little. He was always more comfortable concentrating on someone else’s story. “It was tough on his family. They’d assumed all along he was dead. Jessie-his wife-hadn’t remarried, though, which was one good thing. What a mess that would’ve been. Still, it was hard-they had a lot of readjusting to do. But it was hardest, I think, on Sammi-on Samantha. She was just a kid, a ten-year-old tomboy when she lost her dad. That’s how he remembered her-how he described her to me, when we were together in that Iraqi prison. He talked about her all the time. A tomboy with ponytails. With bandages on her knees from playing soccer.” A smile fluttered like a leaf on the gust of his exhalation. “Let me tell you, that’s not what he came back to.”

  Not even close.

  Oblivious to nuances, Tony whistled. “I guess not. She’d have been what, then-eighteen?”

  “Yeah. In college. A grown-up woman, the way she saw it.”

  “Still just a kid, though,” Tony said in a musing tone, then threw Cory a quick frown as it finally hit him. “What, you’re telling me you had something going with her? I never figured you for a cradle robber, man. You must have, what, ten or twelve years on her?”

  “It wasn’t my intention,” Cory said, putting his head back with a sigh. “Believe me. Well-” the smile this time was brief and wry “-not at first, anyway. Not that I didn’t fall for her. That happened probably the first minute I laid eyes on her.” He threw Tony a look and shifted uncomfortably. “Well, you’ve seen her.” He glanced toward the window and his heart gave a jolt as he saw the tall wavery figure in khakis and a baseball cap striding toward them across the scorched grass.

  Alerted by what he saw in Cory’s face, Tony, too, turned to look out the window. After a long moment he said in a reverent tone, “I can see how she’d get your attention, yeah. Even dressed like that I can see it.”

  “It wasn’t about her looks, though.” Cory waggled his shoulders, uncomfortable even with the thought. Blond hair, brown eyes, long legs…great legs…okay, sure, she’d had all that. So had any number of other women he’d met in his lifetime and over the course of his career, in one variation or another. But Sammi June-Samantha-there’d just been something about her. So much…more.

  “So, you had it bad for the college kid,” Tony said. “So, what happened?”

  “About what you’d expect, I guess. Didn’t work out.” Cory lifted one shoulder and closed his eyes, hoping maybe Tony would take the hint and let it drop.

  Naturally, he didn’t. “Didn’t work out? That’s all you have to say?” His voice rose in pitch as it lowered in volume. “Look, man, I know you. You’ll make a story out of a trip to the 7-Eleven.” With his eyes shut Cory felt the voice come nearer, and drop to a conspirator’s mutter. “Hey-I saw your face when you recognized that woman out there a while ago. Like you’d been whacked upside the head with a plank.” There was another pause while Tony settled back in his seat again.

  After a moment he exhaled in an exasperated way. “Look. Three years ago I stood by your side and handed you the ring while you got married to a woman who just happens to bear an uncanny resemblance to this pilot of ours-don’t think I didn’t notice that-and I gave up my couch when you divorced that same woman barely a year later-not that I minded. I never liked her that much, anyway. Now, I may be crazy, but I’m getting the idea there’s a connection there somewhere. So trust me, ‘didn’t work out’ ain’t gonna cut it.”

  “What do you want me to do? I can’t very well get into it now,” Cory threw back at him in an exasperated whisper. “She’s gonna be back in here in a minute.”

  “Yeah, well…don’t think I’m letting you off the hook on this one, pal. First thing when we get to Zamboanga-okay the second, but once we’ve got a couple of cold brewskies in front of us, I want the whole story. I’m not kiddin’, man.”

  Cory let out his breath in a gusty sigh.

  Of all things to happen, he thought. On this, of all assignments. It had to be the mother of all coincidences.

  Or maybe just fate, catching up with him.

  Outside on the steps, Sam paused with one hand braced on each side of the door as if she were preparing to withstand a gale-force wind. Which she supposed she was in a way, or at least the emotional equivalent. And so far she wasn’t pleased with the way she’d held up in the face of it. No excuses, she’d had plenty of time to prepare. She should have had her emotions battened down a whole lot better than this.

  One thing, one small triumph she could cling to: the look on Cory’s face when he’d realized who his pilot was. Hah-complete and total shock. His face had gone ash-white. You might be able to control your expressions and voice, Pearse, but there’s not much you can do about your blood vessels.

  He’d had absolutely no clue, she was sure of it. And his reaction to seeing her again told her one thing: The man still had some feelings for her.

  Okay, so she was probably never going to know exactly what those feelings were, but at least she knew he wasn’t indifferent.

  A little buzz of something-excitement? Triumph?-zinged through her and a smile curved her lips. Indifferent? Not by a long shot.

  The smile stayed put while she got the steps pulled up and stowed away and the door secured. The smile was still in place, feeling as if it had been molded out of clay and drying fast, as she started up the aisle, nodding at Tony Whitehall, who had turned to look at her with an expression of unabashed curiosity, and a glint in his exotic golden eyes.

  She wondered what Cory’d been telling him; she knew Tony had to have asked about her the minute she was out of earshot. And what an internal battle that must have been, she thought, between Cory’s two selves: On the one hand, the reporter, who’d made a life and a career out of finding out secrets, getting to the bottom of things, solving mysteries, telling the story. On the other, the intensely private man who’d mastered the art of protecting his own secrets.

  He, naturally, seemed completely unperturbed by her presence, or anything else, for that matter, sitting square in his seat, face forward, head back against the headrest. He looked as if he might even be enjoying a little nap.

  But she knew better.

  Or did she? Had she ever been sure what was going on behind those deep, all-seeing eyes?

  “Air controllers at Davao City airport have cleared us for takeoff. If you-all wanna fasten your seat belts, we’ll be getting underway in a few minutes,” she announced in her this-is-your-captain-speaking voice, pausing to check that the two men’s bags had been properly stowed in their compartments. “We should be in Zamboanga in about an hour and fifteen minutes.” She threw Tony Whitehall a smile and a wink.

  She didn’t look at Cory, but to her great annoyance, felt a distinct prickling sensation between her shoulder blades as she continued up the sloping aisle to the cockpit, an awareness of eyes watching her with unfathomable intensity…

  From his seat Cory could see clearly through the open cockpit door. He watched as she ran through her preflight checklist, and try as he would to deny it, felt a little burr of admiration, even pride, begin to hum beneath his breastbone. He’d never flown with Sam at the controls before.

  The baseball cap had been replaced by a bulky set of white headphones that left her sun-streaked hair in the kind of sweaty disarray he’d always found particularly sexy. Sexy even now, cut short like this, shorter than he’d ever seen her wear it. Her strong hands and long-boned fingers moved nimbly over the complicated array of dials and switches in a way that brought back vividly the no-nonsense, straight-ahead way she’d always had about her, even when they’d made
love. The way she’d had of touching him that was uniquely hers, without shyness or hesitation, with a certain bold edge and a hint…just a hint of wickedness.

  And it was that more than anything, he thought, that had ignited the fires in his blood back then. Maybe that part of her had connected with the secret danger-lover and thrill-seeker within him, like two live wires touching…

  Come off it, Pearse. It’s over. It was over long ago.

  One after the other, the twin engines fired with a deep-pitched growling sound that hummed in his bones and put him in mind of old black-and-white war movies, or something he’d watch on the History Channel. The plane sat vibrating in place while the engine rpm’s climbed and the growling changed in pitch and intensity. Then it slowly began to move forward.

  Cory felt his own pulse pick up speed as he watched the hands that had once stroked him to feverish arousal skillfully manipulate the throttles while she steered the plane in a tight right turn onto the runway, then tight left to straighten out. He saw her reach down with one hand to lock the tail wheel in place. The growling sound continued to grow in volume and intensity and he could feel the vibrating now in his belly as the plane began to accelerate down the runway.

  Tearing his eyes away from the open cockpit door, he glanced over at Tony, who looked back at him and hummed the first few bars of “Off We Go, into the Wild Blue Yonder,” grinning like a madman. He felt his stomach drop and his body press heavy into his seat, and he jerked his gaze to the window in time to watch the scorched grass and palm trees and tin-roofed buildings drop away under him.

  “Hot damn,” said Tony with a gleeful chortle.

  Cory didn’t reply. He leaned forward to stare through the window as Davao City came into view, slowly spreading out below him, with the glittering blue of the water beyond. His stomach dropped and the earth tilted as the plane banked sharply, and when it slowly rotated back into position, he could see Mount Apo draped in haze on the horizon.

  And still the plane climbed steadily, the deep growling of its powerful twin engines creeping into his bones and invading his brain until he almost felt as if he were a part of the plane himself, as if he were the one laboring skyward with the sun in his face and the wind solid beneath his wings. He felt a soaring, lifting inside himself, too, to think of the woman he’d held soft and naked and trembling in his arms, in control of such awesome power.

  He found the notion damned exciting…a pure turn-on, in fact. Which surprised and unnerved him more than a little.

  When he felt the plane level out and the engine growl ease off to a steady purr, Cory unbuckled his seat belt. He got a look from Tony when he got up and stepped into the aisle, but something Tony saw in Cory’s face must have warned him, because whatever it was he’d been about to say never got said.

  Sam glanced back at him as he stepped through the radio operator’s compartment, lips curving in a smug little Sammi June smile he remembered well. He couldn’t see her eyes because of her sunglasses. He wished he could have seen them, though he wasn’t sure why. Was he remembering the way they’d once lit up at the sight of him, wondering if the glasses were hiding that same glow now?

  Wishful thinking, he told himself.

  She tilted her head toward the right-hand seat. “Hey, Pearse-have a seat.”

  He eased past the controls and settled himself gingerly, his fascinated gaze sliding over the bewildering array of gauges and levers and dials to the view through the wide rectangular windshield. “Wow,” he said.

  Sam said lightly, “I guess this is a first.” She threw him a smile. “You’ve never flown with me before.”

  “With you at the controls, you mean. No,” he said, gazing once more at the hazy horizon, remembering other times when she’d seemed unknowingly to echo his thoughts. “I guess not.”

  There was a pause before she asked, with a slight edge of impatience, “Well, what do you think?”

  He hedged, naturally, since there wasn’t any way he could have told her the truth. Which was that he’d lost the ability to think the moment he’d set eyes on her, standing there beside the old World War Two airplane, wearing the arrogance that had always captivated him so, that was like her very own signature perfume.

  In that first moment, the years since he’d last seen her had evaporated and it was as if she’d never been gone from his life or his mind, not for an instant. It was all there, in total recall-her face, her body, her voice, her laugh…the way her skin felt, its texture and heat…its softness and its tiny imperfections…the freckles, the way she smelled, the way her hands felt touching him…the way she tasted.

  “Of the airplane,” he dryly asked, “or you?”

  She laughed, that husky chortle he’d always liked. “The plane, of course.” Once again her smile quirked sideways. “Me being a pilot isn’t exactly news.”

  “I never had a problem with you being a pilot. You know that.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  He shifted in his seat and changed the timbre of his voice, the way driving a car he might have shifted gears to gain traction through a muddy patch. “Somehow I never would have pictured you flying World War Two prop planes for a dumpy little back-water charter outfit in the Philippines, though. The last I heard, you were crewing on passenger jets to China. How in the hell did you wind up here?” He let go of an incredulous huff of laughter. “I’m still trying to get my mind around the coincidence of that.”

  She shrugged and said lightly, “Long story,” as she reached to tap some dials and gauges, an activity that, as far as Cory could tell, produced no changes whatsoever in the plane’s behavior.

  “We’ve got time.”

  Sam felt herself tensing up; she couldn’t help it. It was the calm, almost gentle way he said it that got to her-hadn’t it always?

  As the old resentment flared, she fought the urge to glare at him, kept her eyes fixed on the horizon and said sweetly, “I don’t know, I guess it must have been my ‘childish lust for adventure.’ Isn’t that what you called it?”

  And she couldn’t help the little glow of satisfaction she got from the silence that followed, even though voices were hissing and moaning in dismay in the back of her mind. Ooh, what did you wanna go and say that for, Samantha June? You don’t wanna dredge up all that old stuff again. That’s water under the bridge, honey-child…you should just leave it be.

  She could feel his eyes on her again, that quiet, steady gaze that made her squirm because it seemed it must see right inside her.

  “You could have warned me,” he said mildly.

  Now she looked at him, her lips curving in an evil grin. “Deprive myself of the look on your face when you saw who your pilot was? No way.”

  He chuckled and shook his head, and his eyes found hers even through the shielding lenses of her sunglasses. “Same old Sammi June. Always got to be on top.”

  Something thumped hard in her belly. She kept the smile, but it no longer felt like part of her face. More like the clay mask again. “You used to like that about me.”

  He held her eyes for a long, intense, awful moment, then eased his shoulders back in the copilot’s seat and exhaled, sounding weary. “I used to like a lot of things about you, Sam.”

  Damn you, Pearse. Damn Will, too, for requesting me for this assignment. And damn me for being stupid-no, arrogant-enough to think I could handle it. What was I thinking?

  What were you thinking, Sam? How about that you’re a highly trained professional, with the skills and guts it takes to do this job?

  So, do it already. Focus, Sam. Do your job. So you had an affair with the man once upon a time. Forget it.

  An affair. She cringed at the word. It made the whole thing with Cory sound…frivolous. Fleeting. Bittersweet and nostalgic-rather old-fashioned, really. Like something you’d read about in an old diary.

  But it wasn’t just an “affair,” dammit. I loved you, Cory Pearson. You were the love of my life. And you broke my heart. No-you tore out my heart, tore it into i
tty-bitty pieces and stomped them in the dirt! God, how I hate you for that.

  She did-oh, she did. But most of all she hated that she’d never known if she’d succeeded in hurting him back. She’d tried-you’d better believe she’d tried-but if she had managed to hurt him, he’d never let her see it. Not once.

  And for that, more than anything, I swear I am never gonna forgive you.

  She cleared her throat, took a deep breath. “Look, Pearse…I know this is probably awkward for you-”

  “Awkward?” She heard the smile in his voice, and irony that was gentle, not bitter. “Like…hell is awkward, you mean?”

  So, he thinks seeing me again after two solid years is hell? Well, good. I’m glad.

  She was glad. So why did she feel a need to grit her teeth and swallow hard before she could answer him?

  “Yeah, well…I’m gonna need to know if you’re okay with it. If you’re not, just say the word. When we get to Zamboanga-”

  “Of course I can handle it,” he said softly.

  Of course he can handle it, she thought, sarcastically. He’d handle it the way he handled everything. Like a journalist, clear-eyed and objective, but careful to keep himself one step removed from the messy stuff. Stuff like…emotional turmoil. And pain. It was the way he’d handled Iraq and its aftermath, wasn’t it? And probably all sorts of stuff that had happened to him in his distant past he’d never been willing to talk about to anyone, not even her.

  Seconds ticked by in silence, while the farmlands and forests of Mindanao unfolded slowly below them.

  “So, tell me,” Sam said in a falsely bright, conversational voice, shaking off the strangling sense of futility that had coiled around her, “how’s Karen these days?”

  She heard his sharp hiss of exasperation and felt her cheeks heat with a weird mixture of triumph and shame. What was it that made her want to needle him? The forlorn hope he might lose his cool? That was never going to happen. And even if it did, what would that accomplish?

  At least I’d know he cared. That I’d hurt him, maybe a fraction as badly as he hurt me.