“In mine, too,” he told her quietly, a completely unexpected admission of deep love from this big, rough warrior.
“The first time I defied my father,” Helga told him, “the first time I stood up to him and told him he was wrong, I pretended I was Marte. She was so brave, so ferocious.”
He smiled. Damn, she’d lost his name again. The more she tried to force herself to remember, the more it eluded her.
“That’s a good word for her,” he said.
“She beat me up once,” Helga told him.
He laughed. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“She thought I’d told my parents . . . about something we’d been hiding from them. She was furious with me. Annebet had to pull her off. She felt just awful when she found out she was wrong. Marte,” she qualified. “It turned out another girl, Ebba Gersfelt, was the one who told.”
Ebba Gersfelt had been jealous. She’d seen Hershel and Annebet meeting in the park, and she’d told her parents, who had called the Rosens.
Marte’s son glanced across the room, trying not to be obvious about the fact that he was more interested in watching the pretty dark-haired helo pilot than in what Helga was saying. The pretty pilot was finishing up her dinner with an outrageously handsome young officer. What was that about? Why didn’t Marte’s son go and talk to her, join them?
Maybe it was because he was sitting here with her.
Helga might not be able to remember a name, but after being a diplomatic envoy for over forty years, she knew how to end a conversation.
“I’ve kept you here for long enough,” she told the man with a smile. “I know you have things to take care of. But perhaps we can find another time to talk.”
He was enough of a professional soldier to recognize a dismissal when he heard one. He stood up, pushed in his chair. “Your assistant mentioned something about sharing a flight back to London. I’d like that.”
She had no idea what he was talking about. Was she going to London? Still, she kept her smile intact. “Wonderful. It was nice talking to you.”
“Likewise, ma’am.”
As he walked away, Helga dug through her purse for her notepad. Stanley. His name was Stanley. And the helo pilot was Lt. Teri Howe.
But as she watched, Stanley gave Lieutenant Howe a wide berth, passing the young woman without even giving her a glance.
It didn’t make sense. But too often these days, nothing made sense.
Of course, that was really nothing new. Nothing had made sense back when she was ten years old, either.
“You’ve continued to see this girl, despite our objections,” her father had roared at Hershel on that awful day that had started with Marte’s fists and her angry accusations that Helga had betrayed them. The accusations had hurt far more than the fists.
Hershel had looked at their father, his anger evident only by the tightening of his jaw. “I’ve asked her to marry me.”
Poppi exploded. “Over my dead body! I forbid it! I forbid you to see her ever again!” He caught sight of Helga cowering in the doorway. “And you—I forbid you to play with the other Gunvald girl! From now on you will come straight home from school! You will not talk to either of them, am I understood? If you live in my house, under my roof—”
Forbid her to see Marte . . . ? Helga couldn’t breathe.
But Hershel just laughed. “I’ll pack my things.”
Mother was aghast. “And go where?”
“Anywhere but here,” Hershel told her. “If my friends in the resistance don’t have room for me, I’ll stay in the Gunvalds’barn. They’ve never been anything but welcoming to me.”
“Because they’re fortune hunters—all of them,” Poppi stormed. “If you walk out of this house, I’ll cut you from my will. Go and tell this Annebet that—that you have no more money. See if she’ll marry you then.”
“You’re wrong!” Helga stepped into the room, and her father turned to look at her, incredulousness and anger on his big face. She’d never dared to speak back to him before.
She nearly faltered, nearly backed away and scrambled up the stairs to the safety of her bedroom. But Marte wouldn’t have run, and she closed her eyes for a second, trying to imagine what Marte would say next.
She’d call him a fat pig and tell him to eat horse droppings.
Helga tempered Marte’s fight with her own gentle reasoning. “Poppi, you don’t really know the Gunvalds. You don’t know Annebet. If you took the time to meet her, you’d see that she doesn’t want Hershel’s money. She cares nothing for that, and everything for him. She loves him more than she loves herself, more than she loves her own comfort and happiness. The only reason she won’t marry him is because she can’t bear to be the cause of a rift between you.”
“She told you that?” Hershel’s face was filled with emotion. For an instant, Helga wasn’t sure if he was going to laugh or cry. “Mouse, my God, she said that to you? That she loves me that much?”
Helga nodded.
Hershel laughed as he kissed her. “She loves me that much! Thank you, God! I’ve got to go find her.” He started for the front door.
Poppi was still furious. “If you leave this house, you’ll get no money from me!”
Mother was crying. “Hershel, don’t do this!”
Hershel stopped, looked back. “I don’t want your money—take it, please.”
“If you walk out that door, you will be my son no more!”
Helga gasped, but Hershel just shook his head. “How does that work, Poppi? You proclaim it and make it so? You can shut me out of your heart, but you can’t shut yourself out of mine. I may not be your son, but you’ll always be my father, in my eyes and in the eyes of God. Unless you think He listens to your pronouncements, too?”
For once her father was speechless.
“Won’t you wish me luck and long life?” Hershel asked quietly. “Because tonight will be my wedding night.”
Poppi pointedly turned away.
“Luck, Hershel,” Helga said. “Luck, and prosperity and—”
“To your room, miss,” her father raged, as Hershel quietly shut the door. “To bed without supper!”
And Helga escaped, only too glad to take the stairs to the second floor two at a time. She closed her bedroom door behind her. Locked it. And went out the window and into the softness of the late summer twilight, down the drainpipe, just the way Marte had shown her.
Hershel had seemed so convinced that Annebet would marry him—tonight.
And Helga wouldn’t have missed their wedding for the world.
“The best we could figure, it was some kind of equipment error,” Mike Muldoon told her as they sat over coffee in the hotel restaurant.
Teri was exhausted. She was having what had to be very close to what people described as an out-of-body experience. She was still partly numb from the afternoon’s emotional roller-coaster ride. She still couldn’t quite believe that, after over twenty years of silence, she’d finally told someone about those awful months when she was eight.
She’d told Stan.
And he hadn’t blamed her and he hadn’t hated her. And, probably most important, he hadn’t pitied her. He’d listened and held her. He’d cried, but it hadn’t been from pity. It had been because he cared.
Yeah, he cared—enough to bully her into coming downstairs for dinner and then virtually delivering her to Mike Muldoon.
Teri had been stunned. Again. Stan wasn’t going to join them. Again. She’d thought . . .
Obviously she’d thought wrong. Her whole world had gone through some major gyrations, yet nothing had changed for Stan. He was still working overtime to set her up with his friend.
And she’d sat down at Muldoon’s table, even more exhausted than ever, figuring, Why not? Why fight this? Stan wanted it so much—one of them deserved to get exactly what they wanted.
It had been awkward again at first, sitting there alone with Muldoon. The ensign was remarkably bad at small talk. Still, she�
��d managed to get him going by asking him questions about Stan.
Muldoon admired the senior chief possibly even more than she did. And he was full of some pretty wild stories—wild enough to keep her from begging exhaustion and crawling back to her room the minute she’d finished her dinner.
She glanced at her watch. It was only 1700. It felt closer to midnight.
“But there was no doubt about it,” Muldoon was telling her now. “We were dropped so far from the LZ—the landing zone—we were in a completely different country.”
“I know what an LZ is,” Teri told him.
“Right. Sorry.” He made a face. “I keep forgetting you’re a pilot. You’re . . .” He cleared his throat, fiddled with his glass of water. Glanced at her. “Too pretty to be a pilot.”
“You’re too pretty to be a SEAL,” she countered, and he laughed.
“I had a good time tonight,” he told her. “Stan was right. You’re great.”
It took every ounce of willpower she had not to pounce on that statement, to ask if Stan really said that about her in those exact words. But she knew she really didn’t need to ask. Of course Stan had said that. He said it while trying to talk Muldoon into going out with her. It meant nothing.
“So you missed the LZ by a few dozen miles,” she said, wanting to hear the rest of Muldoon’s story before she went up to bed. She had fewer than nine hours before she had to report for duty, and she was determined to spend every one of them sleeping.
“Try a few hundred,” he told her. “Like, three hundred.”
What? “How could that have happened?”
“We didn’t spend a lot of time speculating,” he said with an adorable smile. There was no doubt about it, Muldoon was gorgeous with that chiseled face—a nose that was the closest thing to perfection she’d ever seen, those cheekbones, that sensitive mouth and strong jawline and chin. It was not a hardship to sit here and watch him tell his story, watch his eyes light with amusement, watch emotion and candlelight play across his face.
“We were in the middle of the jungle, near this mountain road. It was raining so hard visibility was down to eight inches, communications had crashed, our team leader was missing, and we had four hours to travel three hundred miles to meet L.T.—Lieutenant Paoletti—and his squad for an op that was . . . Well, let’s just say we needed to be there. But the senior chief is undaunted. He goes out to find us a truck. We need wheels because we’re running out of time—so he’s going to get us wheels. Our job is to find Lieutenant O’Brien, our missing CO.
“Stan set up a rendezvous point where we’re all supposed to meet—him with a vehicle and us with O’Brien. And then we start search patterns. It was a big jungle—I’m talking a needle in a haystack situation.
“But Izzy and I found him. He’d hit his head and was way out of it. I remember thinking, thank God—because the last thing I wanted to do was show up at that rendezvous point empty-handed.” He laughed softly. “I also remember think-ing, thank God he’s unconscious. Now the senior chief will remain in command, and he’ll get us out of here. I mean, I outrank the senior, sure, but I didn’t have the experience, so . . .”
“Let me guess,” Teri said, her chin in her hand as she watched him. “While you found O’Brien, Stan managed to find a truck.”
“He did.” Muldoon grinned. “It just so happened that it was filled with cocaine and being pursued rather relentlessly by the angry drug runners he’d stolen it from. So suddenly we’re in a firefight, and the senior chief’s like, ‘Well, I couldn’t just leave the drugs behind, could I?’ As calm and matter-of-fact as could be.”
Teri had to smile. She could just picture Stan. . . .
“Did I mention the volcano?” Mike said.
She laughed. “You’re making this up, aren’t you?”
“I swear to God, I’m not. This really happened on my first op with the team.”
“A volcano,” she said. “Where did you say you were?”
“I didn’t. But you can probably guess.”
“I’d bet it wasn’t Hawaii.”
He laughed—a flash of white teeth. “You’d win. Anyway, there we are. We’re being chased by forty angry men with automatic weapons, and Mount Kumquat or whatever the heck it was called chooses that moment to erupt. Now, it’s not quite in our neighborhood, but it’s close enough for some pretty intense earthquakes as we’re zooming down this mountain, heading for some little one-hut town in the valley. The road is crumbling beneath our wheels and Senior’s like, ‘Oh, good. This way security’ll be down on the airfield.’ Turns out there was a map in the truck—he’s pinpointed where we are and where we need to be, and there’s a nearby airport where we’re going to steal a plane so we can get there.”
“Of course,” Teri said with a laugh. “I should have guessed.”
“Yeah,” Muldoon said, grinning back at her. “It won’t be easy, but we’re SEALs. We can do it. At least that’s what the senior chief tells us. He has me and Jimmy rig enough C-4 to blow the truck and the drugs to Kingdom Come. Turns out—oops—the airport is a military air base, but Senior turns that snafu to our advantage, too. We drive that truck right through the locked gate and trigger the explosives—and we’ve got ourselves a nifty little diversion. We get off the ground in a military transport, complete with jump gear.
“By now O’Brien is awake and pretty embarrassed that he missed most of the action. He swears he’s feeling up to making another jump, so Senior tells Cosmo to set the plane on autopilot—it’s got just enough fuel so that it’ll go down over the ocean—and we get ready to make our second jump of the day.
“Visibility sucks because of the ash and dust from the volcano, but the senior chief says he knows where we are. He says jump, so we jump.”
“And . . . ?” Teri said. This entire story was pure Stan. Missed LZs. Rainstorms, volcanos, earthquakes, drug runners, trucks filled with cocaine. He would glower about the PITA factor, but then he’d go about taking it all in stride—and making things right.
“And he was right. He knew where we were,” Muldoon told her with another smile. “This time we hit the ground an eighth of a mile from the LZ. We made it to the rendezvous point with Lieutenant Paoletti with ten minutes to spare.
“And L.T. says, ‘We expected you here sooner. Did you have any problems, Senior?’ And the senior chief doesn’t bat an eye. He kind of shrugs and says, ‘Nothing the team couldn’t handle, sir.’ ”
Nothing he couldn’t handle was more like it. And it was true. There was nothing that Stan couldn’t deal with. Nothing he couldn’t fix.
Except maybe for the fact that Teri couldn’t stop thinking about him—couldn’t stop wanting him. Even when she was sitting here with Muldoon, who was undeniably gorgeous and incredibly sweet.
“You okay?” he asked.
She looked up to find concern in his pretty eyes. What was wrong with her? It was obvious that this man was interested in taking their budding friendship and tweaking it up a level. Or ten. But when she looked at him, she felt . . .
Exhausted.
And maybe a little flattered.
That was the best she could do. Maybe after a good night’s sleep . . .
“You look beat,” Muldoon said gently. “We should get out of here so you can get some rest.”
Teri didn’t argue. She let him lead her out of the restaurant, let him carry her heavy flack jacket. Together they went up the endless stairs and into the dimly lit hotel lobby.
“Which tower are you in?” he asked.
“West. You?”
He rolled his eyes. “South. But it’s not that far—I’ll walk you up anyway.”
“That’s okay,” Teri told him, shaking her head no. She didn’t want him to. She didn’t want to stand awkwardly with him outside of her room, praying that he wouldn’t try to kiss her good night.
She didn’t want to kiss him. Not after kissing Stan earlier this afternoon.
God, she’d never been kissed quite like t
hat before. With so much passion and power and ferociousness. She gazed up at Muldoon, watching his mouth as he said something to her, something she couldn’t hear over the memory-induced roaring in her ears.
No, although he had a very nice mouth, Teri didn’t want to . . .
He kissed her.
Muldoon kissed her. Right there in the lobby, where anyone could see them. Shock made her just stand there, so he kissed her again, settling his mouth against hers. As far as kisses went, it was nice—warm and soft and sweet.
And Teri realized that she’d asked for this. By looking at his mouth the way she had, he’d no doubt assumed that she wanted him to kiss her.
Oh, damn.
She stepped back, away from him, pulling out of his arms.
They were standing in the gloom of a lobby that was more shadows than light, thanks to the current brownout. And it was an empty lobby, too, thank goodness. No one had seen them.
Muldoon was looking at her as if he were thinking about kissing her again, so she quickly held out her hand to him. “Good night.”
He laughed as he shook her hand and opened his mouth to speak. “Teri, I—”
Teri didn’t want to hear it. So she did what she did best. She took her jacket from him and ran away.
Fifteen
Teri nearly sprinted to the stairs, leaving Mike Muldoon gazing after her.
Stan sat down in one of the hotel lobby’s battered easy chairs, suddenly exhausted.
He eased himself farther back into the gloom as Muldoon crossed to the south stairwell, praying that the ensign wouldn’t see him, wouldn’t stop to say hello.
Stan didn’t think he could stand exchanging pleasantries with anyone while he was so goddamn tired.
Yeah, right. That was it. His sudden aversion to Mike Muldoon had nothing to do with the fact that he’d just watched the guy kissing Teri Howe.
What the hell was wrong with Stan? He wanted Mike and Teri to hook up.
But he didn’t want to have to watch them kissing.
Over the Edge Page 25
