He smiled. “Don’t look so worried. As long as you’re not going to tell me that you had sex with the company president in the parking lot of the corporate headquarters, I’m not going to yell at you.”
She laughed shakily, still amazed that she could laugh at all. “No, I did that only once.”
“Yeah, I noted that you mentioned that. And I’m sorry, Lieutenant, I really shouldn’t tease you about any of this.”
“No,” she said. “I like that you did. I like . . .” You. Oh, God, if she said that, he might think she’d come here for more than his help. “I don’t know how to thank you. You’ve been so . . . sweet.”
“Sweet?” That got laughter with a snort. “You can thank me by not repeating that in public. Please. My reputation will be shot to hell.”
He was blushing. She’d embarrassed him, and he was trying to cover it up with a joke. As she watched, he gave up pretending and looked her in the eye.
“I like you, too,” he said bluntly. “I like you as a pilot, I like you as a human being. I’m happy to be able to help you.”
“Thank you,” she said. She was happy, too. She was having an almost ridiculously severe case of the warm fuzzies. He liked her! She hadn’t felt this affected by those words since middle school.
“So let’s get all the facts out on the table here,” Stan continued. “There’s something you think I need to know about this civilian job . . . ?”
She took a deep breath and told him. “I left Harmony Airlines because it was an unpleasant place for a woman to work.” Understatement of the century. “The female employees were treated with disrespect. There was lots of sex talk and innuendo and just general ugliness. And I’m not talking about a bunch of guys sitting around occasionally joking about the size of their . . . of their—”
“Yeah,” he said. “I get it.”
“It was continuous, and it was meant to intimidate. It was mostly two individuals, and during my three years with the company, I did everything I could to make sure I wasn’t scheduled with them. But it was a small airline and . . .”
It had been easier to leave, so she’d left.
“A few months after I handed in my resignation, I was approached by the lawyer of one of the other female pilots. She was suing them. For sexual harassment. I appeared as a witness. I testified in her behalf, she won, and the company offered me a settlement, too. I think they were afraid if they didn’t, I’d turn around and sue as well.” She took a deep breath. “If I make harassment charges against Joel Hogan, he’ll get a lawyer. And if that lawyer digs, he’ll find out about the settlement with Harmony. It was a completely different situation, but if it becomes public . . . Senior, I don’t want to be known as the woman who cries harassment every six months.”
He sat there nodding, his mouth slightly scrunched up in thought.
“But at the same time,” she added, “I cannot handle Joel Hogan touching me.” She needed Stan to understand how important it was to her that Joel be stopped. Somehow. “I don’t want his hands on me, I don’t want him . . .” Her voice shook.
Damn it, she’d been doing so well up to now.
“I’m scared I’m going to go home and he’s going to be inside my house, inside my bedroom,” she admitted, needing to say it but unable to speak louder than a whisper. “That bastard has made me scared to go home, scared to be home, and that’s going too damn far.”
The senior chief set his coffee mug down.
“Okay,” he said. Leaned forward slightly and looked her straight in the eye. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
“Don’t even think about it.”
The waiflike American girl in line at the World Airlines check-in counter was starting to cry, and Gina Vitagliano could feel Trent behind her, pushing her toward the gate.
“Come on, Gina, I’m serious,” he continued, looking at her over the tops of his sunglasses, his blue eyes bored.
How could Athens be boring? She wondered for the twentieth time that afternoon what she’d ever seen in him.
Yes, okay, all right. So he was gorgeous with blond curls that rivaled Ryan Phillippe’s. But it was only three days into this trip, and already, if she never saw him again—ever—it would be a hundred years too soon.
She’d tried to break up with him at lunch, but apparently he hadn’t realized she was dead serious.
Her fault—she was always joking and teasing. Why should anyone ever take her seriously?
“It’s just a con,” he said, Mr. Blasé Know-It-All. “She comes to the counter just as the flight starts to board and bursts into tears. Some American sucker—” He paused, and although he didn’t say like you, it was heavily implied. “—goes to help, and she tells them her credit card was stolen just this morning on the way to the airport. They buy her a ticket and she promises that her rich daddy will send them a check, paying them back, and of course he never does because he doesn’t exist. She’s probably flown all over Europe this way.”
“God, you are so jaded.” Gina looked back at the girl, who was still pleading with the World Airlines attendants, her mascara starting to run. “I bet you don’t believe in Santa Claus either, huh?”
But Casey was tugging on her sleeve now, too. With her face pinched and worried, she looked about twelve. “Please, Gina,” she said. “Let’s just get on the plane. I can’t wait to get out of here.”
Gina had to admit that this airport, with its history of violence and terrorist threats, wasn’t on her top ten list of favorite places to hang out.
Her father had been absolutely grim when she’d told him she was going to Europe with the university jazz band and that one of the tour cities was Athens. But she was twenty-one years old, and she’d earned the money for this trip herself. She’d weighed the potential risks in with the other pros and cons, and decided the opportunity was too good to pass up. There’d been no stopping her.
Ironically, one of the pros had been the chance of spending three weeks with dreamy Trent Engelman. Hah. Mr. Athens-is-so-dull, wake-me-when-the-bus-gets-to-the-airport Engelman.
What was wrong with him?
He was holding on to her by the waistband of her shorts, as if she were a dog on a leash, needing a firm hand to stay heeled. Maybe if he hadn’t held her like that she would have just gotten onto the plane.
Instead she pulled away from him and out of the line. “I’ll catch up.” She said it to Casey, not Trent.
Poor Casey looked as if she were going to have a stroke, and Gina gave her a reassuring smile, waving her boarding pass. “It’s not like I don’t have a seat.”
“There she goes again,” Trent said with a long-suffering sigh. “Off to save the world, one pathetic loser at a time. You know, Gina, I’m not waiting for you.”
He wasn’t waiting for her. Okay. And she, well, she was never having sex with him again.
Between the two of them—and as long as the topic of losers had come up—she suspected he was the one who was going to be the most disappointed.
She smiled at him, too, then. As sweetly as possible. Looked pointedly at the long line behind them. “It’s not like the plane’s going to leave before everyone gets on.”
Gina moved quickly away from them, before Casey could gulp at her again, before Trent could be any stupider.
Before she called him an asshole to his face.
Asshole.
“But my passport was stolen along with my boarding pass,” the girl at the counter was saying. She had a remarkably perfect nose. “If I don’t get on this plane—”
“I’m sorry, miss,” the woman behind the counter replied in her British-tinged English-as-a-second-language accent. “I’m not sure how you got to this gate without a boarding pass, but I can’t help. You have to go back to the ticket desk—”
“But I’ll miss this flight!” The girl started to tear up again.
Except she wasn’t a girl. Up close, Gina saw that she had to be a few years out of college. Older than Gina by at least two years. She merely looked seventeen, with long brown hair and delicate features that made her seem as if she came with a fragile—handle with care label sewn behind one of her perfect ears.
She looked a little bit like an anemic, thoroughbred version of Gina, with the same dark brown eyes and a faintly similar heart-shaped face.
They could’ve maybe been cousins.
It was possible this girl was what Gina would’ve looked like if she hadn’t been born in East Meadow, Long Island, with three older brothers who continuously pounded on her until she learned to pound back, a mother who force-fed five-course Italian meals to anyone within shouting distance, a father who was a die-hard Mets fan and permanently depressed because of it, and about forty-seven aunts, uncles, and close family friends who spent their free time mucking up the lives of those unlucky enough to have been born in Gina’s generation.
“I have no money at all,” the girl continued. “What am I going to do?”
The World Airlines clerk had already turned away.
Yeah, this girl really had an amazing nose. It was a living tribute to some high priced plastic surgeon. Man-oh-man.
“Hi,” Gina said. “I couldn’t help but overhear. . . . Got your purse snatched, huh?”
The girl wiped that perfect nose on her sleeve. “My pocket was picked,” she said tightly. “I wasn’t even carrying a purse because I’d heard . . .” She shook her head, miserable. “This sucks. My father is going to kill me. If I’m not on that plane . . .” Her voice wobbled even harder—very Mary Tyler Moore at her most stressed. “I’m supposed to meet my sister at some hotel in Vienna and I have no way of getting in touch with her. I can’t call the hotel collect and I’m not going to call my father!”
Gina could relate. Absolutely. “Write down your sister’s name and the hotel, too,” she suggested. “I’ll call and leave a message for her as soon as the plane gets in.”
Her long-lost half cousin’s eyes widened. “You’d do that?”
“Sure. We Americans have to stick together. Got a pen?” There was one on the counter. Gina reached over and took it, handing it to the girl, along with the paper that had her luggage tags attached. “Write it on this. Do me a favor and try not to get any snot on it, okay?”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry!”
“That was a joke. I was kidding.”
“It’s the Hotel Rathauspark—I have the phone number for her room,” the girl said. “If you could do this for me—”
“Consider it done,” Gina said, glancing at the paper. The sister’s name was Emily something and the hotel Ratsomething else but the number and extension were clear. “New York, right?”
The girl nodded.
“Me, too. I can always tell a fellow New Yorker. I’m Gina, by the way.”
“Karen.”
The line for boarding the plane was down to a businessman and a tired looking woman with a sleeping baby in a frontpack who’d come late to the gate.
Gina dug into her pocket. She had a single Greek bill there—10,000 drachmas. It was the equivalent of about twenty dollars, give or take a few.
She held it out to Karen. “Lookit, I’m not going to need this anymore. You might as well have it—buy yourself a hunk of whatever that crap is they try to pass off as hamburger. Save me the trouble of exchanging it.”
The girl started to cry again. “Oh, my God, thank you so much.”
“No problem. By the way, nice nose,” Gina said, and got onto the plane.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Three
Sam Starrett was fast asleep and dreaming that he was lying on the deck of John Nilsson’s boat. It was vivid, and for a moment he was uncertain. Was he awake or was he asleep?
It was afternoon, and Nils had cut the engine. The boat was drifting while he and WildCard Karmody fished and Sam lazed in the sun—a pleasant sensation.
But Sam knew he had to be dreaming when Alyssa Locke came out onto the deck carrying two piña coladas and wearing a smile.
And absolutely nothing else.
Jesus, she was beautiful. Part black, part white, part Hispanic, part God knows what, Alyssa had a face that combined the very best features from every single race of humans around the world. Her ocean green eyes had a slightly exotic slant, and her nose was exactly the right size and shape to complement those eyes. Her smile was wide, her lips lush and full, and she had the most gorgeous, smooth as silk, mocha-colored skin. Her hair was wavy, with reddish tints. Her arms and legs were long and gracefully shaped, her body slender and athletic, yet soft in all the right places. Her breasts weren’t large, but they were perfection. She was perfection.
He should know. He’d made love to her, thanks to the fact that she’d gotten completely shit-faced drunk and spent a night in his hotel room. One incredible, amazing night.
Of course the morning after hadn’t been very much fun.
Because Alyssa Locke hated him. She’d always hated him. It had been hate at first sight and apparently a night filled with the best sex of either of their lives wasn’t enough to change that.
A former U.S. Navy officer herself, Locke had resigned her commission when she was tapped to join the FBI’s most elite counterterrorist team. A team that, at times—unfortunately—worked closely with SEAL Team Sixteen’s Troubleshooters Squad.