“Okay, so what do you do now, Teri?” Stan asked.
Get louder. Sound like she really meant it. Stand her ground, don’t back away, chin high, eyes hard.
Izzy reached for her, and she smacked his hand. “Back off!” she said again, and this time her voice rang out, echoing in the hotel stairwell.
And Izzy retreated. “Ouch.”
“Good,” Stan said, briefly touching her shoulder with approval.
“Yeah, like this has anything to do with real life,” she countered, her elation fading as quickly as the warmth from his hand. She sank down to sit on the stairs.
He turned to Izzy and Gilligan. “Thank you, gentlemen, for your help.”
“Any time, Senior Chief.”
“See you later, Teri.” Gilligan gave her a smile and Izzy winked as the two men headed down the stairs.
Teri sighed. Clearly she’d intimidated them. Not a bit.
Stan came over and sat beside her on the same step. He was careful to keep a lot of space between them, same as when he’d sat next to her on his bed. Sometimes it seemed as if every guy in the world crowded her—except the one she wanted to get close to.
“When it’s real, I freeze,” she told him.
“I thought I saw you do that a couple of times,” Stan said easily. “But then you snapped out of it. That was good. That’s what you have to practice doing.”
She had frozen at least once. When Stan had used his body to push her back against the wall. When he’d stood so close that she was pressed against the solid muscles of his chest. Her own body temperature had gone up several degrees simply from the proximity of his heat.
It wasn’t fear that had frozen her in place.
She’d been speechless as well as unable to move. Dry mouthed from desire.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate your help,” Teri told him now, “because I do. It’s just . . . different when it’s real.”
“So you’ll practice,” he said matter-of-factly. “Until it’s not different when it’s real. Until it’s no big deal—just another jerk to put in his place.”
He was tired. He tried to pretend he wasn’t, but he reached up with one hand to work out the stiffness in his neck and shoulders.
If she weren’t such a coward, she’d offer to give him a backrub. Instead she just sat there, watching him, admiring his eyes and his arms and the way his T-shirt clung to the muscles in his chest. Thinking that even though he wasn’t conventionally handsome, he was possibly the most attractive man she’d ever met. Thinking about his underwear. Wishing she had the nerve to touch him.
But he’d tried to set her up with his best friend. Surely that was a sign he wasn’t interested in her in a touching kind of way.
He met her gaze, looking at her as intently as she was looking at him. What did he see?
An exhausted coward with messy hair and tired eyes. And yet Teri didn’t want to stand up and call it a night. She wanted to stay right here, on this step, next to this man, for as long as she possibly could.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” Stan asked her.
Her heart tripped, yet she managed to sound normal as she answered. “Okay.”
If there were a God, Stan would ask her to go back to his room with him. But, really, she knew he wasn’t going to ask that. The way he was sitting—his body language—couldn’t scream friend any louder if he tried.
“What’s your goal in the Navy?” Stan asked. “What do you want from your career?”
That wasn’t personal. That was easy. “To fly. I just want to fly.”
He nodded, his eyes narrowing slightly. “Just to fly. Yeah, you told me that was a priority for you since you were a kid. You went after it, and you got it pretty quickly. No fear. But there’s really more to your goal than that, isn’t there? If you really just wanted to fly, you’d still be a pilot for Harmony Airlines.”
He was right.
“Okay, I guess I want to fly for missions like this one,” she said slowly, thinking aloud, “where I get to work with people I respect. With people who respect me.”
He nodded, seeming to think that was a good answer. “How about your personal life?” he asked. “What are your goals there?”
Teri didn’t know how to answer that.
“Do you want a family?” he went on. “And it’s okay if you don’t—not everyone does. I mean, I don’t. What would I do with a wife and kids? Christ. How do you sustain that kind of relationship if you’re gone all the time, you know?”
“But your house is perfect for . . .” Kids. She tried again. “You have such a great house.” God, that was a stupid thing to say.
He laughed. Apparently he thought it was pretty stupid, too, but his laughter was teasing and warm. Inclusive. “Yeah, but last time I checked, having a great house—and it’s a bungalow, by the way—wasn’t one of Navy Life magazine’s top ten reasons to get married.”
“It needs furniture,” she found herself saying. God, she was embarrassed she’d brought it up in the first place, but she was unable to stop sounding stupid. What was wrong with her?
She wanted him to kiss her. She always got stupid when she was with a man she liked enough to want to kiss.
This was too weird. She couldn’t get up the nerve to call this man by his first name, yet she wanted . . . Maybe it was hero worship, like the crushes she’d occasionally had on her teachers in school. Maybe it was all part of her ongoing quest to find approval. Maybe she was misinterpreting her emotional need to connect with a father figure for . . .
She snuck another glance at Stan’s near-perfect body. Long legs, lean hips, trim waist, big shoulders and arms.
No, what she was feeling was in no way daughterly.
Stan was still smiling, the lines around his eyes crinkling, making him more than merely attractive, making him decidedly handsome. Drop dead gorgeous with those warm, warm blue eyes and those straight white teeth and those lips . . .
“Yeah, you noticed the lack of furniture, huh?” he was saying. “I’m waiting to win the lottery so I can fill it with Stickley pieces.” At her blank look, he explained. “Oak furniture—antiques from the Arts and Crafts period. Same era as the bungalow—early 1900s. Currently it’s out of my price range and it just seems, I don’t know, wrong to fill a place I’ve worked so hard to restore with stuff from IKEA.”
Stan Wolchonok’s hobby was restoring old houses and collecting antiques. Teri couldn’t keep from smiling, and he was comfortable enough with himself to laugh, too.
“Yeah, don’t spread it around, all right?” he continued. “All I need is for my men to find out I’m into antiques. I’ll never hear the end of it—forget about the fact that Stickley used nice, clean, simple, masculine lines. It’s really gorgeous stuff and . . . I’m just digging myself in deeper here, aren’t I?”
She found herself leaning toward him. “How could they not know? Don’t they wonder why you don’t have furniture in your house?”
“Yeah, well . . .” He rubbed his face, cleared his throat. “They don’t come over,” he admitted. “My house is off-limits to U.S. Navy personnel, no exception. I decided early on in my career that I didn’t want to live in a halfway house for wayward SEALs. See, some of the other chiefs always find themselves followed home by whichever of their enlisted men has the problem of the week, and . . .” He shook his head. “The few hours that I’m off the base and home are my hours—and it’s usually only about six a day, sometimes fewer, so it’s not like I’m being overly selfish here. And they can reach me by phone, twenty-four/seven, I’ve made that clear. I’ll come rescue ’em if they need rescuing, but they can’t sleep on my couch. They can’t even come inside.”
“You don’t have a couch,” she pointed out. He’d let her into his house. What did that mean?
He gave her another of those amazing smiles. “Yeah, maybe that’s another reason why I’m not in such a hurry to get one. There’s never any temptation to let anyone come over and sleep on it.”
Why did you let me come inside? The question was burning the inside of her mouth, the inside of her very stomach.
He looked at his watch, and she knew it was just a matter of seconds, maybe less, before he stood up. Then this conversation would be over.
“Stan.” Oh, God. She’d done it. She’d actually used his name.
He didn’t seem aware of the momentousness of the occasion, though he stopped looking at his watch and waited for her to continue.
“I owe you an apology,” she said in a rush. “I didn’t know I was breaking the rules by coming over to your house.”
He was already shaking his head. “Please, don’t worry about it. You’re an exception—”
“You said no exceptions.”
“Yeah, well, I guess that makes me a liar. It’s really no big deal.”
But it was a big deal. He might’ve been unable to shut the door in her face because he was attracted to her. Or he might’ve let her in out of pity. Teri wanted to know which it had been.
“I’m glad I was home.” Stan stood up. “Come on. Tomorrow’ll be here far too soon. I’ll walk you to your room.”
Stan, why did you let me come inside?
She could do it. All she had to do to start the question was to say his name again. How hard could that be? She took a deep breath.
“Hey,” he said, turning back to look at her as she followed him up the stairs. “I meant to ask—what’d you think of Mike Muldoon? Good guy, huh?”
Pity. It had no doubt been nothing more than pity.
Teri forced a smile. “Yeah,” she said. “He’s a really good guy.”
“Hello?” Gina said again into the microphone, aware that Handsome Bob and Snarly Al were watching her closely. Bob and Al, Backstreet Bob had said they were called, after Al had backhanded her hard enough to split her lip. They were clearly Americanizations of more complicated Kazbekistani names. “Are you still there? Daddy?”
Please, Daddy, don’t say something stupid and give her away. Please, Max of the relaxed, matter-of-fact, soothingly rich baritone voice, understand all that she had told him. Karen Crawford wasn’t on this plane. But God help Gina if Bob and Al found that out.
Would they shoot her or club her to death?
Please, someone answer or she was going to puke.
“Hey, Karen, this is Max again.” The voice came over the speaker, the answer to her prayers. “We can’t talk while you’ve got the thumb key pressed on the microphone. It would be a big help if you would say ‘over’ or ‘go ahead’ so we know when you’re finished speaking, and then lift your thumb, okay? And we’ll do the same. Here’s Senator Crawford again. Over.”
Senator Crawford, he’d said. Not your father. He knew. Now she nearly threw up from relief.
“Uh, Karen? I’m . . . I’m here, honey. Over.” Thank God, Crawford was playing along, too.
“They’ve told me they’ve already given you their list of demands,” she said. There was silence until she added, “Over.”
And then there was more silence. Too much silence.
Handsome Bob shifted in the pilot’s seat. Just the slightest show of impatience. Gina forced herself not to look at him.
She pressed the button on the side of the microphone. “Daddy?” she said, trying not to sound as desperate as she felt. “Please go ahead.”
“We’re . . . we’re working on that,” Crawford finally said. “On their demands. I’m going to Washington, uh, Karen, to, uh, speak to the president and, uh . . .”
God, this guy was a royal loser. To think she’d voted for him. But okay, to give him credit, he probably wasn’t thinking very clearly. He’d just found out that his daughter wasn’t being held at gunpoint by terrorists.
Lucky bastard. Much luckier than Gina’s father.
Well, if the senator didn’t have anything important to say, she sure as hell did.
Gina hit the button on her mike and the radio squealed. There was silence then. At least she’d managed to shut him up.
“Go ahead, Karen,” the other voice, Max’s voice—dear, wonderful Max’s voice—cut in.
“I love you, Daddy,” she said, knowing that somewhere over in the airport terminal building recorders were running, taping every word she uttered. Someday, her real father would hear this. She hoped.
Her throat ached from trying not to cry. “I’m so sorry—I know you didn’t want me to take this trip,” she continued. “You tried to talk me out of it, but there really was nothing you could have said. I wanted to go. And you can’t live your life expecting to be hijacked. I still believe that. Whatever happens here, it’s not my fault, okay? But it’s also not your fault.”
Silence. Crap, she forgot to say over. But it was just as well, she wasn’t done.
“Tell Mommy I love her, too,” Gina said. “Tell her I’m thinking about her. Tell her she was . . . God, she was right about Trent Engelman. Tell her I should have listened to her more. That she was probably right about a lot of things. Over.”
“Hey, Karen, it’s Max.” Just from his voice, she could picture him, sitting with his feet up on a table in front of him, lazing back in a chair propped back on two legs. He probably wore his shirtsleeves rolled up and his hair long and pulled back in a ponytail and was twenty pounds overweight. Mr. Don’t-Sweat-the-Small-Stuff. “Don’t give your farewell speech just yet, okay? We’ve got a lot to talk about—me and the men who have control of the plane. Are they in there with you right now? Over.”