Thank you, Jesus and Tom Paoletti.
A redheaded woman appeared in the open doorway. “Excuse me, Max, Gina’s back on the radio.”
Bhagat flew out of the room. “Karen,” he said, his voice echoing in the hallway. “We have to call her Karen, all the time. No way are we going to foul this up by slipping and calling her Gina while the tangos are listening in.”
“Slept lately?” Tom Paoletti asked as they went more slowly out into the hall.
Stan just laughed. Dream on. “Need a lift back to the hotel?”
“Hi, Karen.” Bhagat was on the radio, his voice carrying into the hall. “It’s me, Max. Over.”
“Yeah, I think I do,” Tom said. “I’m going to take a short nap, then check out the 747 before the team gets back out there.”
“Max, I’ve been talking to Bob and Al over here.” The girl’s voice was husky and young and brimming with an undercurrent of intensity. Stan found himself stopping to listen. “They’ve agreed to let Gerhund and Ray and a girl named Casey off the plane. Both Gerhund and Ray have head injuries; Ray’s having trouble breathing. Casey’s diabetic and she’s gone into insulin shock. All three of these people are going to need immediate medical attention, do you hear me? I tried to talk ’em into letting the mothers with babies off, too. There are three babies on board—two have been crying nonstop—but they won’t let the babies leave. One of ’em hasn’t made a sound, Max, and I’m a little bit worried about that baby, but they won’t let any of them go.”
Stan followed Tom into the negotiators’room, where Max’s staff was scrambling around. Someone pushed past them, sent to give Helga Shuler the news that some of the passengers would be deplaning.
Bhagat was pacing, his team psychologist beside him, murmuring comments. “There’s quite a bit of stress in her voice.”
“I hear it, Doc.”
The girl continued. “Bob and Al have agreed to accept a shipment of water and food—”
The room erupted with a cheer. This was great news. Permission to deliver supplies meant that they wouldn’t have to wait until oh-dark-hundred to bring additional microphones and minicams out to Ensign MacInnough and his team, who’d overcome a jammed luggage compartment hatch only to experience equipment failure.
But now they could send an additional team in, beneath the chassis of the supply truck, without the tangos seeing them. They wouldn’t have to wait until dark to give the negotiating and take-down teams twenty-twenty vision and perfect hearing.
“Quiet!” Bhagat shouted.
“—including infant formula and food for the babies. They’re opening the doors right now—”
“We have activity on runway two,” someone reported in a low voice. “Doors opening!”
“Other passengers will be helping the injured off the plane,” Gina continued. “Do not, I repeat, do not approach the runway until they have gone back on board and locked the doors. At that point, you’ll have only twenty minutes to bring out water and food and to collect the injured. Twenty minutes. Do you copy, Max?”
Twenty minutes wasn’t a lot of time, but they could definitely get the job done.
Tom Paoletti turned to Stan. “Call Jazz.” Stan knew that the XO had an additional three-man team on standby. They were already here at the airport with the equipment in hand, ready to go.
Stan had already punched Jazz’s code into his cell phone.
“I copy all that, Karen,” Max said calmly as if the room weren’t erupting with activity around him. “Well done. Over.”
“There’s more,” she said. “You have to make the delivery by one of those . . . those luggage carts. You know, with the open sides? And you need to stay a hundred meters back from the plane. If you come any closer they’ll . . .” She took a deep breath. “They’ll kill me. Over.”
Silence.
All of the elation was instantly gone from the room.
Stan shut off his phone before Jazz picked up.
“Shit,” Max Bhagat said softly. “Options? Anyone.” No one spoke. He looked at Tom. “Lieutenant?”
Tom glanced at Stan, who shook his head. If the distance between the truck and the plane were a few meters, sure, they might want to risk it. Or if it were twilight. But for even one man to move the distance of a football field across a concrete runway in broad daylight . . . The urban camouflage gear they used was good, but it didn’t make a man invisible.
“I wouldn’t want to risk it,” Paoletti said. “Let’s focus on small victories—bringing those injured people to safety and getting those supplies to the plane within the time limit.”
“You heard the man,” Bhagat told his team. “Let’s move!”
Stan was already halfway down the hall.
Once again, lunch and a nap were going to have to wait.
By the time Sam Starrett made it into the hotel restaurant for lunch, by the time he’d filled his tray with pasta and a thick meat sauce, Alyssa Locke was already there.
Oh, man. She was sitting at his table. In his seat, no less.
Fucking A.
It had to be plain bad luck.
She couldn’t have sat there just to piss him off, could she have?
Surely she didn’t realize that he sat at that exact same table at every meal. Just because the other men in the team had left it empty for him because they knew he had a stupid superstition about this kind of thing during an op, well, that didn’t mean Alyssa knew.
After all, there was no sign on the table: reserved for the crazy seal team leader.
Alyssa had been avoiding him like the plague—why would she start seeking him out now?
Unless she was purposely trying to irritate him. That was always a possibility.
And Jesus, if that was her goal, it was working.
Sam knew that superstitions were just that—superstitions. It was ridiculous. What, was he really going to get the job done better, with fewer mishaps, by sitting in the same place in this room every time he ate here?
No.
Probably not.
But with 120 lives at stake, it sure as hell didn’t hurt to follow some crazy rituals that helped him feel more in control. What could it hurt?
Right now, it could hurt a lot, Sam realized as he carried his tray toward his table and Alyssa Locke. She was sitting there, right in the middle of her lunch break, with her fruit of a partner, reminding Sam of everything in life that he wanted but couldn’t have.
Worst case scenario, they wouldn’t scram, and Sam would be forced to eat lunch with a woman he’d dreamed about making love to just a few short hours ago when he’d grabbed a quick nap.
And wouldn’t that be fun?
Alyssa saw him coming and her eyes widened before she wiped her expression clean. He set his tray down on the table. May I join you? He knew he should probably smile—at least pretend to be friendly and polite. “You’re at my table,” he said instead.
Alyssa looked at her gay partner, Jules, and laughed. “Yeah, right. Nice try, Roger, but—”
Jules took one look at Sam and half stood up. “We can move.”
Alyssa grabbed his arm and pulled him back down. “No, we most certainly cannot—”
“Suit yourself.” Sam picked up her chair with her in it and moved her about two feet to her right.
“Hey!”
He pulled another chair over and sat, pushing her plate, all her utensils, and her bottle of water in front of her, pulling his own tray in front of him.
“What is wrong with you?” Alyssa asked between clenched teeth.
He ignored her, looking up at Jules instead. “Got a pen?”
“Excuse me, Lieutenant, I’m talking to you,” Alyssa said hotly as Jules searched his pockets.
“Never mind,” Sam said as he remembered the Paper Mate he’d stuck in the back pocket of his pants. “I’ve got one.”
He leaned back and took a napkin from another table and wrote right on the dingy gray of the linen, “Reserved for Lt. Sam Starrett.” His name was Sam, not Roger. His own mother didn’t call him Roger anymore. Alyssa was the only one who did.
“What gives you the right to come over here like that and—” Alyssa broke off as he set the napkin smack in the middle of the table.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “You’ve got a—” She shut her mouth abruptly and gave all of her attention back to her salad.
“A teeny little superstition,” Sam finished for her, feeling his ears heat with embarrassment. Thank God his hair was long and they were covered. “Big fucking deal, all right?”
“I didn’t say it was.” But she looked at him when she said it, instead of through him. For the first time all day, he didn’t feel like the invisible man. That would’ve been nice, except she was trying—and not very hard either—to hide a smile that was just a little too smug.
“And you don’t have a single superstition, right?” he countered. “Of course not, you’re Ms. Perfect. You never make any mistakes— oh, wait . . . I can think of four. Or was it five?”
Something flashed behind her eyes. It was very brief and then it was gone. His needling was getting to her—particularly this latest comment that referred to the record number of times they’d made love in that one short night and morning they’d shared.
But his surge of triumph was short-lived, leaving a bad taste in his mouth.
Jules, meanwhile, was focused completely on his sandwich, like a kid caught in the middle of warring parents.
It was time to shut the fuck up and carboload. He had a long afternoon ahead of him. Sam got down to eating, trying to shut out Alyssa Locke.
Trying not to smell her subtle perfume, trying not to stare at the smoothness of her cheek, at the delicate line of her jaw, her perfect ear, her eyes, her mouth, her breasts.
Great. Fantastic. Now she caught him staring at her breasts.
It was her fault entirely for wearing a shirt that . . . wasn’t low cut or too tight or even remotely transparent. It was a button-down shirt, white, cotton. It was like the one Jules was wearing beneath his purple tie, except it was tailored to fit Alyssa’s female curves.
Was it really her fault that it fit her so damn well?
Fuck, yes. She should be wearing something loose, something baggy, something completely unflattering in this shithole of a country, where women were second-class citizens, arrested for showing the least little bit of their ankles.
“You should have your jacket on,” Sam growled.
“It’s warm in here.”
“Tough shit. You’re in public.”
“The book says—”
“Screw the book!”
“—nothing about keeping my jacket on. As long as I’m wearing long sleeves—”
“What you’re wearing is inappropriate—”
“You don’t approve?” she asked. The look she was giving him was meant to skewer, but at least she was still looking at him instead of through him. “Tough shit back at you, Roger. I don’t answer to you.”
“Oh, yeah? Give me five minutes with Max Bhagat.”
Jules stood up, muttering something about coffee. Alyssa didn’t seem to notice he was gone.
“I spent the morning playing tango for your team in the one hundred degree heat with my required long sleeves and long pants, Lieutenant,” she spat back at Sam. “Unlike you and my other male counterparts, while I’m in Kazbekistan, I don’t have the option to strip down to my underwear when I start to sweat. I think Max would agree that it’s okay for me to have lunch without my jacket on.”
“It’s dangerous, god damn it,” he said through a mouthful of pasta. “You look too good.”
Oh, fuck. There it was. Out on the table for Alyssa to see. He’d just given himself away.
She was looking down at her salad, her eyelashes long and dark against her cheeks.
Oh, God. The wave of longing that hit him came in such a rush that he almost choked. Was he ever going to stop wanting her? It was all he could do not to bend his fork in half in frustration.
And then she surprised the hell out of him. “You look really good too, Sam,” she said quietly, giving him a glimpse of her ocean-colored eyes as she looked up and too briefly met his gaze. “Let’s try to get along. Try to be nice to each other. Okay?”
Yes. The correct response was yes, please, let’s. Instead Sam leaned toward her and said, “You want to be nice to me, sugar? Let’s go to my room and—”
She sat back in her chair. “You’re such an asshole.”
No doubt about it—he was an asshole. But what was he supposed to say now? Sorry? He couldn’t help himself? She brought out the worst in him? Of course, she brought out the best in him, too.
Maybe if he threw himself at her feet, grabbed her around the legs, and wept as he explained that she’d been driving him crazy for months, that he hadn’t forgotten her, that he needed her . . .
That he was doomed never to forget her.
“You want a war?” Alyssa said coldly as she pushed her chair away from the table. “Fine, Lieutenant. You got it. You’ve got yourself a war.”