Sam’s team.
That night of heaven and morning of hellfire had happened nearly six months ago. Six long months.
During which time Sam had dreamed about her constantly. Hardly a night went by without Alyssa Locke showing up in his dreams, usually naked, and so stupendously perfect it hurt.
She smiled at him now, sitting down on top of him, straddling him right there on the lounge chair. And God, then he was touching her again, running his hands across all that smooth, beautiful skin.
“I missed you,” she whispered, leaning down to kiss him, her eyes filled with warmth and sparkling with amusement and desire.
Why don’t you leave me alone?
When Sam was awake, he always vowed to ask her that, the next time he dreamed her into his life. But when he was asleep and dreaming about her, he didn’t want to say or do anything that might make her vanish.
“I missed you, too,” he whispered, heart in his throat. He missed seeing her, missed talking to her, missed making her laugh.
“Mmmm,” she said, as she settled herself more completely on top of him, pressing herself against the full length of his erection. She kissed him again and then smiled. “Is that for me?”
Stay asleep, he ordered himself. Whatever you do, stay asleep.
In a heartbeat, both the drinks she was holding and his bathing suit were gone. In a shift of the dream universe, he was inside of her, and they were making love, moving together in perfect unison, skin slick with sweat. He was laughing aloud, it was so damn good. She was laughing, too, her eyes alight with the same pure joy he was feeling.
“Lys,” he said. He needed to tell her . . . It was important that she know . . .
Another shift, and he could hear her ragged breathing, feel each exhale against his skin, and he knew she was close, so close.
Stay asleep! Stay asleep, god damn it!
“Lys,” he begged her. “Lys, please—”
“Who’s Liss?” WildCard’s voice cut through, and just like that, Alyssa Locke was gone and Sam was awake.
Shit.
Heart still pounding, drenched with sweat, Sam opened his eyes and stared up at the relentless blue of the sky.
WildCard handed him a bottle of beer, sat down on one of the built-in cushioned seats beside him.
Sam sat up, adjusting his shorts as he took a long, cooling slug of beer. It was probably a good thing WildCard had woken him up when he did. Another few minutes, and he would’ve had his first wet dream in years.
In public.
Jesus.
Johnny Nilsson sat down on the other side of him, sighing with contentment as he nursed his own beer.
“New girlfriend?” WildCard asked. “What, is Liss short for Alice or something? Do we know this girl?”
“No.” Sam answered his first two questions, hoping he would apply it to the third as well, even though it wasn’t true.
Yes, WildCard and Nils both knew Alyssa Locke. Sam hated the idea of lying to his friends, but he’d given Alyssa his word that he’d never tell a soul about the night they spent together.
He probably could’ve gotten away with confessing that he’d been dreaming about a woman he’d had a one nighter with and—didn’t it always work that way?—he’d wanted more but she hadn’t. But WildCard was one superintelligent son of a bitch, and it would be just Sam’s luck if he put zero and zero together and came up with Alyssa Locke.
Besides, talking about it made him feel pathetic. So he drank his beer and gazed out at the horizon.
“So you’re not seeing anyone these days?” WildCard persisted. “Because Janine gave me a call—I’m not with her anymore, but we’re still friends—and she wanted me to ask you how come you won’t return Mary Lou’s phone calls?”
Ah, shit.
Sam gave him the same answer he’d told Mary Lou months ago. “It wasn’t working out.”
Nils opened his eyes. “I thought you said you really liked this woman.”
“I did, but . . .”
“Man, you can’t just not call her back,” WildCard said. “I’ve been there, on the unanswered end of the telephone line, and it sucks.”
“She was fun at first, but then it got un-fun,” Sam admitted.
If he was going to withhold the truth about Alyssa from his best friends, he might as well come clean about Mary Lou. Well, as clean as he could without talking about the way he really felt.
“She’s a party girl, you know?” he told them. “Every night was a Saturday night. And that body—Jesus! It was like going home with the winner of the wet T-shirt contest all the time.”
Which was fun for about a week and a half.
Then reality cut through. He would lie in Mary Lou’s bed, mere seconds after strenuous, gymnastic, heart-pounding, gut-wrenching sex, and instead of settling into the relaxing calm of orgasm-induced peace, his entire body would hum with dissatisfaction.
This wasn’t enough.
He wanted—
No. There was no way he was going to let one night with Alyssa Locke ruin sex for him forever.
Maybe Mary Lou Morrison just wasn’t the right woman. Maybe his dissatisfaction was because he was getting older, growing up, and he just didn’t want every night to be a party anymore.
He didn’t want empty sex with some stranger with big tits who drank too much and had no real ambition besides hooking herself a SEAL for a husband.
“I thought she was into me for the fun,” Sam admitted now to Nils and WildCard. “But she wants to join the Wives of Navy SEALs Club, and soon as she started talking about moving in, I cut her loose.”
He’d actually started extracting himself from the relationship before that, pulling back instead of matching her beer for beer every night. Going home after she fell asleep.
He’d told himself it was because he couldn’t stop dreaming about Alyssa Locke. She came to him relentlessly—even the nights he spent in Mary Lou’s bed. He’d told himself that that wasn’t fair to Mary Lou.
Truth was, Mary Lou in the morning was not a pretty sight.
“She wasn’t in love with me,” Sam said. “And I sure as hell am not in love with her.” He looked at Nils sitting there, basking in the sunshine, all but dripping with contentment. “What we had going on was nothing like what you’ve got with Meg.”
Newly married, with an instant family that included a ten-year-old stepdaughter and a gorgeous wife who was already pregnant with his child, John Nilsson was the poster model for true love. He walked around with a spring in his step, smiling for no apparent reason, as if he and the sun and the moon shared a private joke. Running home to Meg as soon as the day was done. Calling her if he had a few minutes free. Happier than he’d ever been before.
It would’ve been annoying if Sam and Nils weren’t so tight. But since Sam couldn’t have loved Nils more if the man were his own blood brother, he focused on being glad for him instead of envious.
And maybe that, too, was what made him decide to break it off with Mary Lou before she even started talking about the future.
Seeing Nils and Meg together.
Wanting what they’d found.
It was stupid. Sam was stupid. He didn’t want what they’d found.
Couldn’t you just see him with a baby on the way? He wouldn’t be calmly sitting around like Nils. He’d be in a dead panic.
What the hell did you do with a baby?
“Still,” WildCard persisted. “You gotta call her back, man. Don’t ignore her—you don’t want to pull an Adele Zakashansky on her.”
“The bitch,” both Nils and Sam said in unison, and they all cracked up.
Except WildCard wasn’t really laughing. He was just pretending to laugh. Ten whole months after he split with Adele, and he was still hurt.
Jesus, love was a crapshoot. Nils had won himself a happy-ever-after. But WildCard had lost his shirt.
And here Sam sat, between the two of them, safely single again and determined to stay that way. Unless, of course, Alyssa Locke came walking up from below, naked.
And that wasn’t going to happen in this lifetime.
Sam closed his eyes and let himself drift as Nils started talking about the tracking system that WildCard, the boy genius, had developed, about patents and interest in the project from the FBI.
FBI. The name cut through his drowse.
His eyes still closed, Sam started paying attention, listening to see if, in their discussion of the FBI, either of them mentioned Alyssa Locke.
God, he was pathetic.
But he was saved from being too pathetic by the shrill sound of his cell phone.
WildCard’s started shrieking a half second later.
They both grabbed for them.
Sam pulled up the antennae. “Starrett.”
It was Jazz. “Get in. ASAP.”
“What’s up?” Sam asked, but the connection was already cut.
Sam looked at Nils, whose phone was silent. Nils shrugged as he stood up, moving back to get the motor going and head in to shore. “Nothing for me.”
“Lieutenant Paoletti always did love you best,” Sam told him. “You’re going to be home in your own bed, with Meg in your arms tonight—while me and Karmody are getting eaten alive by mosquitos, crawling through some swamp, pretending to be terrorists while a platoon of Marines try to learn to tell their asses from their elbows.”
WildCard snapped his own phone shut, “Alli, Alli, Ox in tree.”
“It’s a training op,” Sam guessed.
“Gotta be, if Johnny didn’t get called,” WildCard agreed.
“Son of a bitch,” Sam said. “On a Sunday.” He complained, but the truth was, he loved getting called. Even when it wasn’t real.
Sure, they were probably going to end up in some stinking, bug-infested swamp playing make-believe games with inexperienced troops, but maybe they’d get to do a HALO jump in. They’d exit the plane at a dangerously high altitude and would sky dive down, not opening their chutes until they’d almost reached the ground. That was a rush and a half—and worth all the aggravation that would come before and after.
On second thought, maybe Lieutenant Paoletti loved Sam best.
But then Nils’s cell phone shrilled, too.
“They want us in fast,” he reported. “Maybe this is real.”
“Hang on!” WildCard gave that boat all it had, and like a rocket, they hurtled back to shore.
The adrenaline surge made Sam laugh out loud.
He didn’t need Alyssa Locke, because times like this were better than sex.
Well . . . almost.
As Stan went into the hallway that led to Lt. Tom Paoletti’s office, Kelly, Tom’s fiancée, was coming out. Her face was pale, and her movements clipped.
“Hi, Stan.” She smiled at him, but it was forced.
Great. He was here to ask his CO for a major favor, and his warm-up act had been a lovers’quarrel. Yeah, he was going to go through that door to find Tom in one hell of a bad mood.
Perfect.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said shortly as she kept walking. But then she stopped and turned back. “How can you stand working with him? He’s so stubborn!”
He nodded. “Yes, ma’am, that’s usually a good quality for a commanding officer.”
“He won’t let me pay for anything,” she fumed. “Clothes. I can buy my own clothes. And I can buy him presents, but I can’t buy him anything too expensive. Do you know how much money I inherited when my father died?”
Stan cleared his throat. “No, ma’am.”
“Lots,” she told him. “Piles. Mountains. Tom and I are set. We could both retire tomorrow and never have to work another day in our lives. Except he won’t let me add his name to my bank accounts until after we’re officially married. And you know what? I bet he’s not even going to let me do it then.”
It was really pretty amazing. Stan knew, not through his own experience but through watching his men, that the biggest source of conflict for a couple was money. But they usually fought because they didn’t have enough of it.
Kelly and Tom, however, were arguing because they had too much.
“Do me a favor and just ignore me,” Kelly said, and this time when she smiled it was much more natural. She was one of those sweet-looking little blondes. A real Gidget, girl-next-door type—at least on the surface.
But appearances often deceived. And Stan had once seen Kelly pull Tom with her into the ladies’room of a posh Washington, DC, restaurant while a very formal party was in full swing.
And it had been a full twenty minutes before they’d reemerged.
“I didn’t mean to rant at you,” she told him now. “Or to hold you up.”
“Yeah,” he said with a smile. “As if I’m in any kind of hurry to see him now.”
She laughed as she walked away. “Just don’t talk about money, and he’ll be fine.”