“I don’t want to take up too much of your time, Senior Chief,” she told him in an accent that reminded him sharply, sweetly of his mother’s laughter-filled voice. “I know you must be even more tired than I am. But I did want to meet you and introduce myself. When I was a little girl, back in Denmark, I was friends with your mother.”
Stan had to laugh. “No kidding?”
Mrs. Shuler nodded, warmth in her eyes. “Marte and her family—the Gunvalds—helped save my life when the Germans rounded up the Danish Jews in 1943.”
No shit? “She never talked about Denmark,” Stan admitted. “At least not to me, not in any depth. I mean, I knew her parents died there when she was pretty young, right after the war. And family legend has it that her older sister, Annebet, hocked an important piece of jewelry, some kind of heirloom, I think it was, to buy them passage on a ship to New York, but other than that . . .”
“My brother’s ring.” Mrs. Shuler suddenly had to reach for the wall to hold herself up.
Stan took her elbow, afraid she was going to do a half gainer right on her face, this woman who had known his mother, who had known the grandparents he himself had never met. “Are you all right, ma’am?”
She looked at him with eyes that were no longer filled with energy and light, but instead were confused and frightened.
“Ah, Helga, there you are.” Her assistant, the tall black former operator, breezed down the hall toward them. “I see you’ve met Senior Chief Wolchonok—Marte Gunvald’s son. I’m sure there’ll be a more opportune time to talk after this situation has been properly dealt with.”
“Marte’s son,” Mrs. Shuler repeated, looking at Stan, her face now showing every single day of her sixty-something years of life.
“Is that okay with you, Senior Chief?” the assistant said. “Maybe you can share a flight back to London with Mrs. Shuler.”
“I’d like that,” Stan said. “You know, my sister’s name is Helga.”
Mrs. Shuler’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t know,” she said.
And then she was gone. Whisked back into the negotiators’room.
Stan opened the door to his hotel room, peeling off his shirt and T-shirt and unfastening his pants as he went inside.
It was as freaking hot in there as it was out in the hallway. Hot and close. His vivid imagination conjured up the fragrant scent of the curried noodles and vegetables he’d ordered for dinner, back about a million years ago.
His stomach rumbled.
It was some realistic hallucination, because it overpowered the stench of his own clothes. He smelled like fatigue and nonstop stress, armpits and old feet. Tired, aching, stinky old feet.
He slapped on the light and sat down in one of the room’s tattered easy chairs to take his boots off. His left boot was off and in his hands before he saw it.
Dinner—main course covered with a metal plate warmer—had been laid out on the small table in the corner of the room.
And—holy shit!—Teri Howe was curled up in the middle of his bed, fast asleep.
He was wearing only his briefs. His pants were down around his knees, his T-shirt and shirt back by the door where he’d dropped them.
His fingers fumbled, and his boot hit the floor with a thump, and Teri sprang awake. It was remarkable to watch, at least for the part of him that wasn’t completely horrified by coming face-to-face with her in his current state of undress.
One instant she was sound asleep, and the next she was on her feet, back against the wall, staring at him, eyes wide, as if he were some flasher who’d dropped his pants in the park.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I didn’t realize I wasn’t alone.”
He stood to pull up and zip his pants—his turn to move fast. But then he was standing there, without a shirt on, his belt undone. As she edged even farther away from him, he quickly sat back down. Getting his shirt was a priority, but he’d have to walk past her to do it, and the last thing he wanted to appear was threatening to her in any way, especially when she was still off balance from sleep and on the verge of being extremely spooked.
As he watched, she looked around the room and got her bearings.
“Oh, my God,” she said as breathlessly as if she’d just run five miles. “I must’ve fallen asleep. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to invade your privacy. I just . . . I heard that you had to go to a meeting, that you didn’t get any dinner, so I ordered room service, only they wouldn’t bring it here if someone wasn’t in the room, so I found Duke—Chief Jefferson—who has a master key, and he let me in so I could wait for it, only after the food arrived I couldn’t leave because I couldn’t get the door to lock behind me and I didn’t want to leave the room unlocked with your seabag in here.”
She finally inhaled as she pointed to his duffel bag lying on the floor by the door, where he’d left it when he’d first been assigned this room.
“I’m so sorry, Senior Chief,” she said again, as if she’d committed some cardinal sin.
She’d ordered him dinner. Stan didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had ordered him dinner. He was always the man in charge of making sure everyone else had everything they needed, and his own needs often went ignored. He cleared his throat. “I’m, um, going to put my shirt back on, okay?”
“You don’t have to. It’s hot in here and you don’t . . . have to . . .” Teri watched as he crossed the room and picked up his T-shirt, as he turned it right-side out and pulled it over his head.
“Did I say thank you yet?” Stan asked.
She shook her head.
“Thank you.”
“I probably broke all kinds of rules, being in here like this.” She was embarrassed as hell and looked as if she were ready to bolt from the room. “It really wasn’t my intention to be in your room when you got back, like some kind of . . . of . . . weird stalker or something.”
“Actually, the situation did have a Goldilocks and the three bears feel to it.” He tried to make his voice light as he jammed his foot back into his boot. “Only you brought the porridge with you and your hair is dark brown. By the way, to get the door to lock, you need to pull up on the knob, let the latch click into place. So how was the karaoke? Did you get up and sing?”
She laughed—a short burst of surprised air. “Me?”
Stan felt far more in control with most of his clothes back on. “Not your style, huh?”
He crossed to the table and lifted the metal lid to find a fragrant mountain of vegetables, noodles, and chunks of tofu. Thank you, Jesus and Teri. He touched it with his finger and found that it was still faintly warm. Life was good.
“To get up in front of a bunch of people I work with and make a total fool of myself?” She laughed again. “No, thanks.”
Stan glanced up at her. “Want some?”
She shook her head, her shoulders more relaxed now. “I had dinner.”
With Mike Muldoon. Yeah, he knew. And yet she was here in Stan’s room now.
If he hadn’t seen her holding Muldoon’s hand in the restaurant, he’d be wildly imagining a night filled with more than a good meal, a shower, and a few hours of deep, dreamless sleep. And okay, he had a very vivid imagination and it was going wild. But because he’d seen her with Muldoon, he knew reality was going to be very different from all he was imagining.
Still, he let himself enjoy the thought of Teri, stretched out naked on his bed, all long legs and full breasts and soft skin.
Oh, yeah.
As far as fantasies went, it was a good one.
She glanced toward the door. “I should go.”
Stan put the lid back on both his libido and his dinner. “I’ll walk you to your room.”
She laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t need to walk me—”
“There,” he interrupted her. “That’s the attitude you need. Instead of shrinking when someone bigger than you so much as looks at you—”
“I don’t shrink.”
She was only pretending to stand her ground. Stan gave her two seconds to fold. “You wanna bet?”
“I don’t.” Her gaze shifted and she was done. “I mean, I try not to—”
“I’ve been watching you for a while, Teri.” He moved so that she had to look at him. “Your body language is all about retreating when you should be holding your ground.”
She looked down at the floor. He would’ve had to lie down to put himself into her line of sight. Or touch her, tugging her chin up so that she was forced to look into his eyes.
He did neither.
“Out in the parking lot,” he said as gently as he could, “with Joel Hogan . . . You froze. I saw it. I kept waiting for you to whale him one, but you didn’t. And when Starrett told me about Admiral Tucker—”
“Oh, God.” She sank down onto his bed, eyes closed, defeated. “You must think I’m such a loser.”
Stan sat down next to her, making sure there was a good three feet between them. “I think you’re one of the best helo pilots I’ve ever worked with. I think you’re an extremely beautiful woman—for whom that’s probably been more of a curse than a blessing.” He also thought she’d probably been sexually abused as a child, but Christ, how the hell did you ask someone about that? “And I think all you need to do is to learn how to be a little less nonconfrontational when it comes to unwanted attention from men.”
She laughed then, but it was shaky. “You make it sound like I just have to enroll in a class,” she said. “Confrontational Behavior 101. God, I wish it were that easy. All I ever wanted to do was fly. Why can’t I just fly?” She finally looked over at him, something akin to misery in her eyes. “I hate it when they win. And they always win.” She shook her head. “I don’t belong here. That’s why I went into the Reserves, into the civilian sector, but I didn’t belong there either.”
Stan tried not to let her see how her quiet words had affected him. I hate it when they win. He blew out a burst of exasperated air. “Well, that’s bullshit I never expected to hear from you. You don’t belong? Who does? They always win? Fuck that. Learn how to beat ’em.”
The harshness of his language had done what he’d hoped it would. It had surprised her. Brought her a little bit out of her misery. “It’s not that easy.”
“Yeah? Tell me one thing that’s easy that’s worth having or doing.”
She wouldn’t look at him as she stood up. “Look, you don’t understand. And I just . . . I don’t want to argue with you.”
He got up, too, blocking her path to the door. “No,” he said. “No running away. You run away a lot, don’t you?”
She didn’t answer. She just stood there looking at him as if he’d stabbed her in the heart.
He steeled himself. “You do. You run from confrontation. Not when you’re flying though. But the rest of the time. You were running away from Hogan when he caught up to you in the parking lot. But right now, you have to stick,” he told her. “You wouldn’t run if you were in a helo.”
“I’m safe there,” she whispered.
“You’re safe here, too,” he said, and her eyes filled with new tears.
Please, God, don’t let her start to cry. If she started to cry, he’d have to put his arms around her, and that would probably kill him. Not him holding her—that wouldn’t hurt at all. What would kill him was having to let her go.
Besides, if he pulled her into his arms, and she didn’t want him to touch her, he probably wouldn’t know it.
She certainly wouldn’t tell him, that was for sure.
What the hell was he going to do with her?
And suddenly—just like that—he knew. He looked at his watch. Seventeen minutes to ten. There’d just been a surveillance shift change. Perfect.
“You ever have allergies?” he asked her.
She blinked at his apparent change of subject. “No.”
“Neither have I,” he said. “But my sister had hay fever really bad, and she took allergy shots. What they did was inject a little bit of the pollens she was allergic to into her system. It worked to desensitize her. That’s what we’ve got to do for you.”
She wasn’t following him.
“You tired?” he asked.
“No.”
Yeah, right. “Are you lying?”
She looked at him and laughed. It was a real life laugh, not one of those forced, fake ones that she sometimes made. “No. I’m not tired—I’m exhausted.”
Stan grabbed his key and opened the door. “Well, tough nuggies, Lieutenant. You’re with SEAL Team Sixteen’s Troubleshooters now, and exhausted is no longer part of your working vocabulary. On your feet, grab your flack jacket, and follow me.”
“Did you really just say tough nuggies?” she asked as she grabbed her jacket and followed him out the door.
“You want me to what?” The SEAL nicknamed Izzy was looking at the senior chief as if he’d asked him to set explosives and blow up the local orphanage.
Teri had to admit that everything about this was surreal.
Both Gilligan—Petty Officer Dan Gillman—and Izzy—she had no idea of his real name—had just come in from the swampy fields around runway two, where they’d laid low and watched the activity on the hijacked plane for the past two hours. Their faces were streaked with camouflage greasepaint and their uniforms were soaked with a malodorous mix of seawater and briny mud.