Izzy arranged one of the guards on Tom’s bunk, positioning the man so that his back was to the door. He covered him with a blanket. “Sleep tight.”
The other guard had been safely stashed in the bathroom.
“I appreciate the effort, men,” Tom said, “but I’m not going anywhere.”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” apologized Ensign MacInnough—a monster of a young man who’d been appropriately nicknamed Big Mac. “But we’re under direct orders from Lieutenant Jacquette to test base security. Our assignment is to take you off the base and to deliver you to an as-yet-undisclosed location. Our orders, sir, are to do this with or without your cooperation.”
This was a hell of a time for Jazz Jacquette to be war-gaming. But the look in Big Mac’s eyes was unmistakable. Tom could say no. He could refuse to leave. And Mac would give Lopez a nod, Tom would get a needle of his own in his ass, and they’d end up carrying him out of here.
Tom sighed again as he looked around at his men. His former men. They were deadly serious, to the point of downright grim. No one so much as cracked a smile. Was this really what they were like these days on an op? “I’d like you all to know that I’m leaving under protest.”
“Duly noted, sir,” said Ens. Joel Collins—Tom still thought of him as “the new guy.” He’d joined the team just a few weeks before Tom had been relieved of his command.
Petty Officer First Class Mark Jenkins was standing watch at the top of the stairs. “Sir.” He nodded a greeting, then led the way down, leaving Big Mac and Collins in place.
If anyone came onto the floor, they’d never know that Tom wasn’t securely in his room.
“If your plan is to just walk me out the door—which, by the way is brilliant,” Tom pointed out as they moved in a group down the stairs, “you might want to consider the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever seen you guys walking around the base dead silent like this. Karmody, don’t you have any bad jokes to share?”
“Sorry, Tommy, I’m not quite in the mood today.”
“Have you guys had a chance to talk to Cosmo or Gilligan?” Tom asked.
“Yes, sir,” Duke said.
“So aren’t you going to congratulate me?” Tom asked. “Kelly finally married me. If I’d known it would do the trick, I’d’ve gotten myself locked up a long time ago.”
No one laughed, probably because it wasn’t very funny.
“Congratulations, Commander,” Silverman said. But he wouldn’t meet Tom’s eyes.
“Congratulations, sir,” the other men echoed. But Zanella and Duke, too, seemed fascinated by the tiles on the floor.
And Jenk and Lopez exchanged what was definitely a worried look.
Tom was pretty sure he knew why. “Hell of a time to get married, huh?”
“Come on, sir,” WildCard Karmody said, with something that looked a lot like sympathy in his eyes. “We really do need to hurry.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Something’s been bugging me,” Sam said as they bent over the street map of Sarasota that Alyssa had spread out on the hood of the car. They were attempting to locate the AA meetings in the area, to figure out which one Mary Lou might have attended on a Wednesday night.
Alyssa glanced up and into his eyes. “Oh, yeah?” she said. “That’s funny, because something’s been bugging me, too.” The look on his face became one of pure guilt—as if he already knew what she was going to say. “About my handcuffs?”
Back at that rest stop, he’d unlocked himself—somehow—from a pair of cuffs with a lock that was allegedly pick-proof. It was the exact same pair of cuffs that had kept them locked together—naked—that dreadful morning after, more than two years ago, when she’d woken up hungover and sick as a dog. She’d been unable to locate the handcuff key, and he hadn’t volunteered to pick the lock then.
“Oh,” Sam said now, “yeah. I was, uh, wondering when we’d get around to that.” He forced a weak smile. “Look, mind if I go first? Because it’s going to be difficult to discuss why this Ihbraham Rahman guy is bugging me after you get so mad you won’t ever talk to me again.”
She laughed her outrage. Holy God. He had been able to pick the lock. This wasn’t a skill he’d learned in the past few months. She knew it. She knew it. He’d purposely allowed her to be humiliated and mortified and . . . “You are such an unbelievable jerk.”
Sam looked at her with eyes that were the same color as the early evening sky.
“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe I am. I mean, you can definitely look at it from that perspective. And, yeah, I can see where you’d think I was being a jerk not to tell you I could open the lock without a key, but at the time you didn’t exactly ask me and . . .” He glanced away from her, down at the map, as he shook his head. He looked back up and this time held her gaze. “Maybe you could try to see this from my perspective. I was looking for a way to stay close to you. If I’d’ve unlocked those cuffs, I’d’ve had to leave. I guess I was hoping maybe you’d . . . I don’t know. Get used to me? I mean, there I was, right? Attached to your arm. Maybe if I stayed there long enough, I’d grow on you. Shit, I really don’t know what I was thinking, Alyssa. All I knew was I was crazy about you. That I’d just had the best night of my life, and you . . . you had nothing but regrets.”
Alyssa didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything at all. But she couldn’t hold his gaze, so she pretended to look down at the map. She’d been so sure on that awful morning that he was going to brag about what they’d done the night before to all his friends and teammates—people she worked closely with. She had been terrified. Of so many things. Of getting too close. Of appearing too vulnerable. Of being too vulnerable. She still was.
Sam cleared his throat, but his voice came out as barely more than a whisper. “I guess I was hoping that after you got all that out of your system, you know, after you calmed down a little, you’d realize that maybe I wasn’t so bad after all. I mean, you sure seemed to like me a hell of a lot the night before. I guess I didn’t want to believe it was only because of the alcohol. And you know, I still don’t believe that.”
She couldn’t look at him, and she forced herself to focus on the map. “It wasn’t,” she admitted. “I think I probably made that pretty clear in Kazbekistan.”
Six months later, on the other side of the world, she’d actually gone back to his room, and they’d had a replay of their one-night stand. He was silent then, and she could feel him watching her.
She was looking for Beneva Road. “Here’s the Lutheran church.”
He bent over the map, too, his head close to hers as she circled the intersection with her pen. “That’s a good one,” he said. “It’s right between both her old house and the newer one.”
“Yeah.” She risked a glance up at him. “So are you going to apologize?”
“Nah,” he said, without even the slightest hesitation.
She stared at him, and he shrugged, pure Sam Starrett. “Why should I apologize for doing what I thought was the best thing for both of us? You, however, should probably apologize to me.”
“What? Yeah, right.” She laughed. When hell froze.
“No, I’m serious,” he said. “You fuck me like there’s no tomorrow, make me start rhyming sappy verses that end with words like love and stars above, and then you wake up and treat me like shit on a stick. I’m still carrying the scars.” He put his finger on the map. “Here’s the Baptist church.”
Alyssa made another circle on the map. “Yeah, you really suffered that night. Poor baby.”
“No, but I suffered the next day, and a whole Christload of days after, when I realized that you didn’t love me even a little. You were just using me for sex. I was crushed.”
Alyssa put her pen down. “This is a perfect example of revisionist history,” she said hotly. “You were using me, too, Starrett, or have you forgotten that you got me drunk that night? You not only used me, you planned to use me—”
“No,” he said. “No way. I didn’
t get you drunk so I could sleep with you. I got you drunk because you were strung so tight, I thought you were going to shatter. I was trying to help.”
“You definitely took advantage of my inebriation,” she countered.
“Yes. Okay. I’ll cop to that. But you can’t deny that your ‘inebriation,’ ” he mimicked, “was pretty damn hard to resist. But I guess I should have said, ‘No, no, no, don’t do that,’ when you took off your clothes and sat on my face.”
Alyssa felt her cheeks heat. Was that really what she’d done? She remembered him . . . Oh, God. But she wasn’t sure how she’d gotten there. It was all such a blur.
“Alyssa, I’m only human,” Sam continued. “And congratulations. I found out that night that you are, too. It’s not such a bad thing to be, you know.”
“You’re not a woman—a black woman—trying to compete in a white man’s world,” she said quietly.
“I don’t understand what that has to do with any of this,” he said just as quietly. “If anything, I would think that would make you even more eager to have someone who loves you by your side.”
Love. There he went, using that word again.
“You know what your problem is?” she asked him.
Sam exhaled a laugh. “No, but why do I have a feeling that you’re about to tell me?”
“You’re guilty of making the same mistake most people make. You say ‘I love you,’ but what you really mean is ‘I want you.’ You think it’s the same thing, but it’s not. You don’t fall in love with someone just because they fuck you like there’s no tomorrow.” Alyssa purposely used his words. “I don’t doubt that you wanted me, Sam. That you still do. Because on that really primitive, physical level, yeah, I still want you, too. But that’s not love. That’s about possessing, about being possessed. It’s not real—it can’t possibly last. Love is something you give. It’s not about taking, or possessing.”
Sam found the last location on the map, and he picked up the pen and marked the spot. And then he wrote a one, two, three, and four next to the locations. “And what you’ve found with Max? That’s real love?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Max and I . . .” She shook her head. “It’s way more complicated than you think.”
“Yeah, I bet. Mind if I drive?” Sam asked, folding the map so that their first destination was facing up.
“No.” But she made sure she got into the car before handing him the keys.
He smiled at that, scooping up the M&M’s wrappers he’d left on the floor of the passenger’s side and stuffing them into an empty McDonald’s bag. “Still think I’m going to drive off without you, huh?”
“I don’t just think it,” she told him. “I know it. If I’m not careful, sometime in the next—” She looked at her watch. “—approximately forty-one hours and seven minutes, if we don’t find Haley, I am definitely going to be eating your dust.”
He glanced at her as he started the car. “Who knows? One of these days, maybe I’ll surprise you.”
Whitney was acting weird. She’d been hanging around all day. Every time Mary Lou looked up, there she was. She even asked if she could help when Mary Lou got out the fingerpaints and spread newspaper on the playroom table.
It was a little nerve-wracking, to be honest. Especially when, as Mary Lou got ready to put Haley and Amanda down for their naps, Whitney picked up a magazine and settled into one of the easy chairs in Mary Lou’s little living room.
Mary Lou had been counting on having this time, while the girls were sleeping, to put those guns back in King Frank’s office. In the light of day, having unlocked weapons around two-year-olds seemed to be a greater danger than terrorist assassins.
But Whitney—who usually spent most of her time looking for ways to escape her father’s house—wasn’t going anywhere today.
As Mary Lou closed the door to the girls’ room, Whitney put down the magazine and said, “Don’t you think it was romantic in Castaway, when Tom Hanks came back from being shipwrecked and went to see Helen Hunt?”
“It was really sad,” Mary Lou said, “because she was married to someone else.”
“Yeah,” Whitney said. “I keep thinking there should be a sequel. You know, where her husband starts beating her up and she runs away because she knows he’s going to kill her, and then Tom Hanks comes to the rescue. Don’t you think that would be really romantic?”
“Don’t you want to go to the mall?” Mary Lou asked her. She’d put those weapons in her bedroom closet and locked the door, but that wasn’t safe, especially with Whitney’s habit of poking around where she didn’t belong. And what if King Frank changed his mind and came home early?
He’d fire her so fast . . .
If Mary Lou couldn’t put them back now, during the girls’ nap, she’d have to wait until after they were asleep tonight.
“I think it would be really romantic.” Whitney went back to reading her magazine, clearly not moving from her chair.
Mary Lou sighed and picked up her own book. Tonight couldn’t get here soon enough.
Once they left the confines of the naval base, and after receiving a call on his cell phone, WildCard Karmody drove like a man possessed.
Tom was wedged in the middle of the backseat, between Lopez and Jenk. It was not a backseat that was designed to hold three Navy SEALs, even when one of them was as vertically challenged as Mark Jenkins.
Izzy was riding shotgun, up with WildCard. Usually the pair of them could keep the mock insults and banter flowing in a steady stream, but today they were dead silent.
“So where are we going?” Tom asked the Card.
“We’ll be there soon, sir” was all he would say.
If they hadn’t been so damn grim, Tom would’ve guessed that his former team had broken him out of the BOQ to take him to the Ritz, or some other fancy hotel, so that he and Kelly could have a proper wedding night.
But the pucker factor in the car was way too high, and when WildCard’s there proved to be Sharp Memorial Hospital, the buzz of uncertainty he was feeling turned into a flicker of real fear.
“What the fuck is going on?” Tom asked as WildCard ignored the speed bumps and pulled up right at the front doors. “Someone goddamn better answer me. That’s a direct order. I still outrank you bastards.”
“Sir, we were ordered to deliver you here to Lieutenant Jacquette and the senior chief,” WildCard told him.
Sure enough, the XO and senior of Team Sixteen had come out of the hospital’s lobby and were approaching the car. Lopez slid out, and Tom followed.
Jazz Jacquette’s default expression was grim. It was the look on Senior Chief Stan Wolchonok’s face that turned that flicker Tom was feeling into an icy stab of fear. Sweet Jesus, Stan actually had tears in his eyes.
“No,” Tom said. No, not Kelly.
Stan took him by one arm, Jazz by the other, and together they hustled him into the hospital.
“Tommy, she’s alive,” Stan said, “but the doctors don’t think—” His voice broke. “But they’re wrong. Those fuckers are always wrong. She’s a fighter. She is going to make it.”
“She’s got a lot of internal damage, sir,” Jazz told him as they pulled him into an elevator. “They’ve been trying to get her stabilized before they take her into surgery, but she’s just not responding. The doctor thought it would be best for you to be here before—” He cleared his throat. “We didn’t have time to go through channels, so I ordered a training op to test base security.”
Kelly was dying. Neither of them said it directly, but that was what they’d just told him. This was unreal. This couldn’t be happening. This was just part of the god-awful nightmare he’d been trapped in for the past few days. It had, however, just been ramped up to a new, more terrifying level.
“What happened?” he asked as the doors opened onto a floor marked ICU. “How did she get hurt?”
“Car bomb,” Jazz reported.
“What?” Tom stopped walking, but they kept carryi
ng him forward.
“Cosmo was with her, Tommy,” Stan told him. “He’s injured, too, but not as bad as Kelly. It’s probably best if you get the whole story from him.”
Damn it, this was his own fault. Kelly had been digging around, looking for ways to help prove Tom’s innocence, and it never even occurred to him that she might actually stir up real trouble. A fucking car bomb.
“Was the bomb in her car?” he asked. Dear God, how badly had she been hurt?
“No,” Stan said, but then Tom stopped listening, because there she was.
Kelly. In the middle of a hospital bed, hooked up to all sorts of machines with wires and tubes and, oh, God . . . Her face was scraped and her hair was singed. She still had all her arms and legs. But internal injuries, Jazz had said.
Stan or maybe Jazz pushed a chair up behind him, and he sat, holding on to her hand. It was scraped. She had little nicks and cuts on her wrist and all the way up her arm. Flying glass could do that to you.
“Hey, Kel,” he said to her, even though she was unconscious. Maybe, just maybe, she could hear him. “It’s me. Tom.”
His voice shook, and he stopped, took a deep breath. He didn’t want her to hear his fear. No fear. No doubt. No letting her think there were any options besides getting through this.
“Here’s what we’re going to do, all right?” He leaned close. “I’m going to stay here with you. Every step of the way. You’re not alone. Whatever you do, don’t forget that. And what you’re going to do is stay alive. Keep fighting. Don’t quit on me, okay? Keep breathing. Inhale and then exhale. Remember when I told you about going through BUD/S training? Well, this is just like BUD/S, Kel. So stay in the moment, and stay in the game. One breath, one heartbeat at a time. Don’t think beyond that. Don’t think about how much it hurts or how tired you are. Don’t think. Just breathe. Just stay alive. I’m counting on you to do that.”
“Sir.”
He looked up to find a nurse standing beside him, a clipboard in her hands.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but the surgeon’s ready,” she told him, and hope was in her voice, her eyes, her body language. “If you’ll just sign these forms . . .”
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