An hour later, he heard Del return to her office. Moments after that, she came through the connecting door. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
“I got Karen settled, showed her around. She’s reading over the current workload for the rest of the day.” She perched on the corner of his desk and blew out a deep breath. “What a bombshell.”
He took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. “I sure wasn’t expecting that.”
She grimaced. “I had no idea they’d been married.”
“I looked at her file again. It’s not mentioned in there but there isn’t any reason it should have been.”
She picked up his glasses and fiddled with them idly. “What are we going to do?”
He shrugged. “Nothing. We hired her. Walker’s going to have to deal with it if he stays. I can’t just fire her because he doesn’t want to work with her.” He paused. “I told him we’d try to figure out something so he didn’t have to work with her much.”
A single elegant eyebrow rose. “You think we can manage that?”
“To some extent.”
“I guess you’re right.” Del started cleaning his glasses with the tail of her shirt. Then she held them up to the light. A moment later, she lowered them and looked at him with a strange expression. “Sam?”
“Yeah?” He was still thinking about Walker’s defeated expression. He’d felt like that for a while after Ilsa had dumped him. He never wanted to feel it again, either.
“Why do you wear glasses if you don’t need them? These aren’t prescription lenses, are they?”
Hell. He’d completely forgotten about that. “No,” he said slowly, “they aren’t.”
“So why do you wear them?” she asked again.
He searched for an explanation she would accept. Because I don’t want to be recognized was definitely not the right one. “I’ve found they make people take me more seriously.” That was lame.
But Del’s face lit up with amusement. “You mean women, don’t you? Poor baby. Were you getting hit on a lot?”
He narrowed his eyes. “You think that’s funny?”
“I think it’s true.” She was laughing. “Sam Deering. Hunk of the year.”
She had no idea how accurate that was and because she didn’t, he was able to laugh. He shot out a hand and grabbed her elbow, yanking her off her perch on the edge of the desk and into his arms. “So you wanna hit on me?”
She slipped her arms around his neck, running her fingers through the curling hair that lapped over the collar of his denim shirt in the back. “I might.”
He lowered his mouth to hers. “Notice me struggling.”
“Hey, boss, I’ve got—Whoops!” Peggy barged into the office and just as quickly retreated, shutting the door behind her. From the other side of the closed door, they could hear hoots of laughter.
“Damn,” he said, regretfully releasing Del. “There goes my office credibility.”
“What about mine?” Del straightened her shirt, blushing furiously.
“You don’t have to worry. I’m irresistible, remember?”
She groaned. “Not that again.” But she was laughing as she went to open the door for Peggy.
Other than that Monday-morning explosion with Walker and his ex-wife, it was the best week of his life. He and Del arose together, ate breakfast together, went to work together in the morning. At work, after the time Peggy had caught them on Monday, they were the model of propriety except for the occasional blood-pressure-raising exchange of glances.
Until they were alone together after everyone else had left the building.
Then he couldn’t seem to keep his hands off her. It didn’t prevent their work from getting done if he pulled her into his lap while they argued the cost estimates on a project. And it didn’t slow them down too drastically if, while she was showing him the layout for the new brochure, he slipped his hand up beneath her baggy shirt and cupped one rounded breast, teasing the nipple into stiff attention until her eyes clouded and she pulled away.
“Stop,” she said. “I can’t think straight when you do that.”
Good. He didn’t want her to think straight. He wanted her to think Sam. Only Sam.
After work they prepared meals together. Del was no better and no worse than he was in the kitchen. Between them they could put together a decent stuffed chicken, potatoes and a salad.
It amazed him, when he stopped to think about it, how easily they’d fit into each other’s lives. It was as if they’d been together for years. Which, he supposed, wasn’t far from the truth. While they hadn’t lived together, they’d worked so closely together that they knew each other’s quirks and moods without speaking.
He knew her favorite kind of pizza—pepperoni—and that when she was annoyed her eyes became as green as emeralds. She knew that ice cream gave him indigestion, and that he couldn’t knot his tie to save his life. Her habit of drumming her fingers on the table while she was thinking aggravated him endlessly, and when he chewed on the end of practically every pen he picked up, she fussed at him about spreading his germs to everyone in the company.
But in many ways, she was still an enigma. As far as he could tell, her life was as solitary as his. She didn’t appear to have any close girlfriends, and the calendar on the wall in her kitchen was conspicuously empty, except for a few notations about birthdays for co-workers. It appeared that her life revolved around PSI as much as his did.
That was weird. Most women were nesters in one way or another, drawing at least one or two people close even if they weren’t highly social. He’d never heard Del speak of a single person who wasn’t connected with the company other than her mother. And though she was close to several of the other PSI employees, particularly Peggy, he’d noticed the relationships seemed largely to end at the office door. Except for birthday parties, he thought, smiling to himself.
Friday evening, they took a prospective client to dinner, a West Coast actress who had been receiving death threats. Sam always invited Del along to meet prospective clients, and she usually attended. She was so much better than Sam at putting people at ease that he found her presence a welcome buffer.
As they were getting ready to go out, Del said, “Tell me again why Savannah Raines wants to hire us?”
Sam glanced across the bedroom. “Stalker,” he said briefly. Then he stopped in the act of donning his charcoal suit coat. “You’re wearing that?”
“That” was a shapeless black pantsuit. Now that he thought about it, he realized Del had worn the exact same outfit to every dinner meeting they’d had over the past seven years.
She glanced down at the boxy black jacket and equally loose black slacks. “Yes. Why?”
Sam walked across the room, thinking about the best way to word his objections. “You’ve worn it a lot before.”
“So?” She was looking at him in bewilderment. “It’s comfortable.”
“It helps you hide, is what you mean,” he said.
“Hide?” Her voice was chilly, but he didn’t care. Someone, somewhere, had given Del reason to believe she wasn’t attractive, and Del had been playing down her every asset ever since, he’d bet. “You hide behind glasses with useless lenses.”
“You’re a beautiful woman,” he said, ignoring her words as he crossed to her. “That dress your mother sent you looked terrific on you the other night. This—” he indicated her unflattering suit “—is like everything else you own—designed to make you invisible.”
“Maybe,” she said stiffly, “that’s what I’m aiming for. Maybe I like being invisible.”
“Do you?”
She hesitated, and he realized she hadn’t expected him to challenge her aggressive words. “Most of the time, yes,” she finally said. “I have good reasons for not wanting to attract attention.” Then she smiled, and he felt himself responding to the sensuality in her knowing gaze. “But I’m glad I wasn’t invisible last Friday night.”
“Me, too,” he said, meaning it. He was willing to let the subject drop for the time being, but he knew she thought she’d successfully sidetracked him. If she thought he was going to forget about it, she didn’t know him very well. She’d really piqued his interest with that simple statement: I have good reasons for not wanting to attract attention. What reasons could be good enough to make a woman work that hard to hide her natural beauty?
Savannah Raines’s husband came with her, and over dinner they discussed her best options for keeping herself and her family safe as well as for locating the individual making the threats.
The actress was surprisingly pleasant and down-to-earth and her husband, an architect, was nothing like some of the idiotic Hollywood types they occasionally dealt with. Sam would have enjoyed the meal except that Del was being almost monosyllabic. She wasn’t rude or unfriendly, in fact she was better than he at explaining what PSI could do for Savannah. But when they weren’t talking business, she sat back and seemed more than content to let him hold up the conversation, which was definitely not his strong suit. Usually, it was hers, and he wondered if she wasn’t feeling well or something.
He glanced at her, sitting quietly in the corner of the booth beside him just as Savannah said to Del, “You know, dear, you look so familiar to me. Have we met somewhere?”
Del raised one eyebrow, a unique trait that always intrigued him. “I doubt it, Ms. Raines. Have you been to Virginia before?”
The question implied that Del was a Virginia girl, and Sam knew for a fact that wasn’t true. She’d graduated with honors from Williams College, an exceptionally selective liberal-arts school in Massachusetts, shortly before he’d hired her. It suddenly dawned on him that he had no idea where she’d lived before that, and he cast her a sharp look. How was it they’d worked together so long and he knew so little about her formative years? He deliberately stayed quiet about his own past because he had something to hide. But it seemed that so did she: I have good reasons for not wanting to attract attention. The sentence kept replaying in his head.
What reason could Del possibly have for her reticence? What was she hiding? Somehow, he doubted it was anything as earthshaking as his desire not to have half the country recognize him when he walked out his front door.
At the end of the evening, they said goodbye to their guests and Sam helped Del into the front seat of his Jeep. He hadn’t forgotten his thoughts from earlier in the evening.
As they drove back toward her place, he said, “You lied by omission in there tonight.”
“What?” Del sounded understandably bewildered.
“You let Savannah believe you grew up in Virginia. Did you?”
“No.” Her bewilderment acquired a distinct edge of irritation. “I just didn’t see any point in going into my background.”
“Guess where I grew up.” He knew she’d get pricklier if he pressed her, and though he was determined to get some information out of her tonight, he was prepared to take his time and go about it leisurely.
She paused, apparently searching her memory banks. Finally, with an air of surprise, she said, “I don’t know. California?”
The guess was incorrect, but it shook him. He’d never told anyone at the company that he’d been based in San Diego during his years with the teams. In fact, he didn’t think anyone even knew he’d been a SEAL. They knew he was ex-military but he knew most of them assumed he’d come from the army and he’d never done anything to correct their impressions.
“No,” he said in answer to her guess. “I lived in California before I started the company. But I grew up in Nebraska.”
“Nebraska?”
He glanced across the car and was amused to see that single eyebrow raised again. “Yep. On a ranch a few miles from the South Dakota border.”
“You’re kidding. I never would have pegged you for a cowboy.”
He grinned. “I hide it well.”
“You can ride a horse?” She sounded highly skeptical.
“Of course I can ride a horse. On a ranch, everybody rides. I learned to drive when I was thirteen, though, because my dad got thrown and broke a leg that summer.”
“I didn’t learn to drive until I was in college,” she said.
“Why?” He was startled. That was far more unusual than learning to drive early.
She shrugged. “Never really needed to before that. Are your parents still in Nebraska?”
He nodded, aware that once again she’d neatly avoided talking about herself. “And my younger brother and sister. David and his wife have three sons and they live in the house where I grew up. My sister, Rachel, lives about twenty minutes away with her family. Mom and Dad moved into a smaller house on the property a few years ago.”
“So you’re the only one who moved away.”
“Yeah.” He took a deep breath. “I joined the navy.”
This time she turned fully in her seat to stare at him. “You’re full of surprises tonight. I thought you were army.”
“Nope.”
“Why the navy?”
“I wanted to be a SEAL.”
She was silent for a moment. Finally, she said, “That explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“The way you seem to know everything there is to know about the weird military stuff.”
He was amused again. “Weird military stuff. Such as?”
“Such as every kind of explosive on the market, weapons I’ve never even heard of, the best ways to get people in and out of places they shouldn’t be in the first place.” She took a breath. “You always consider the worst-case scenario and plan for it. That’s one of the reasons we’re so successful. When we take on a job, it gets done even when something unexpected forces us to alter the original plan.”
He didn’t quite know how to respond to that. He’d never really thought about it before. “Building this company has been exciting,” he said, “but we never would have become what we are today without you. I’d better remember to thank Robert someday for recommending you.”
“How did you meet Robert?” she asked.
Yikes. He wasn’t quite ready to go there yet, although he supposed that someday he would have to tell Del about his past.
“A year or so before I started PSI, I had an injury that ended my navy service,” he said. It was true enough; he just didn’t mention how he’d been hurt. “I was trying to decide what I was going to do with my life. So there I was, lying on a gurney in the hospital waiting for some X rays and this guy starts to talk to me. He was there for knee surgery and we both had to kill some time until they came for us. Turned out he once was married to an actress—he had all kinds of advice for me about how to avoid losing my privacy.”
“Robert.” Her voice was quiet. She’d become very still while he’d been speaking and he wondered what she was thinking.
“Yes,” he said. “So how did you know him? When he recommended you, I got the impression he’d known you for a long time.”
“He was a family friend.”
“A friend of your mother’s?”
“Um-hmm.”
“He’s a great guy.” And Sam couldn’t imagine the distinguished, elegant Robert hooking up with the woman Del had described. But who knew?
“Were you injured during a mission, or whatever you call it?”
The question caught him off guard, though he supposed he should have expected it. She’d seen the bullet wounds the first night they’d made love. The one that had ripped through his bicep didn’t look too bad.
But the other one told a different story. The slug had entered just above his left hipbone and torn its way through his body to exit through his back. It had nicked his spine and though he’d lost bits and pieces of several organs, that hadn’t been the damage that worried his doctors the most. He’d experienced temporary paralysis. Of course, no one had known it was temporary until it began to fade, and he’d spent weeks adjusting to the thought of life as a paraplegic.
And as a man who’d been dumped when he was no longer the able-bodied SEAL his fiancée had wanted.
He still could barely stand to think about those days. But she needed an answer.
“Sort of,” he said briefly, hoping she wouldn’t pursue the topic.
“Your injuries look as if they were serious.”
“They were.” He didn’t have to dissemble about that.
There was a moment of silence. He didn’t look at Del, but he could feel her gaze measuring him. Finally she said, “I’m glad you didn’t die.”
They had arrived, and he pulled into the parking lot and cut the engine before responding. Then he reached for her in the dark interior of the vehicle, hauling her into his arms. Just before he took her mouth, he said, “I’m glad I didn’t die, too. I’d never have met you.”
She kissed him back with all the fire and passion he’d come to expect, but when he lifted his head, she didn’t say anything more.
“Shall we go in?” he asked.
She nodded. “Let’s.”
As they started up the steps together, it occurred to him that they had never had any kind of conversation that hinted at future plans. She’d reluctantly agreed to let him bring over some of his things, and throughout the week he’d gradually brought more and more, until he had enough changes of clothes that he didn’t have to go home for a week if he didn’t want to. She had to have noticed, but she hadn’t protested, and he’d taken that as a good sign.
But sudden uncertainty pulled him to a halt in the hallway just outside her door. “Del?”
She glanced up at him, smiling as she extracted her key from the purse she’d carried this evening in a departure from her usual backpack. “Hmm?”
“Are you okay with this? With us?”
The door swung open, but she continued to look at him. “Yes. Are you?”
She’d answered him, so he didn’t know why he felt unsatisfied. Maybe he hadn’t asked the right question. “Yeah,” he said. “I am.”
But something within him wanted more. More what, he wasn’t sure. But he definitely wanted more from Del and he wasn’t at all sure she was prepared to give it.
That night, for the first time in more than six months, he had the dream.
He was walking down a street not far from the utilitarian apartment in San Diego where he lived when he wasn’t on an op. He was carrying a sack of groceries he’d picked up at the corner store.
It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in November and the temperature was shirtsleeves pleasant. There were tourists crowding the seafood market and checking out the little boutiques that had overtaken the rougher elements of the neighborhood a few years ago. It was a perfect day.
And then a madman opened fire.
He instantly recognized the rapid, distinctive sound of shots and reacted. But as he went rolling for the dubious cover of a nearby parked car, he felt a punch in his left shoulder, followed moments later by a searing pain.
He’d been shot!
And whoever had done it was still shooting.
Dammit. In his years with the navy, he’d never suffered more than cuts and bruises and once, a concussion from a blast that had gone off a little too close for comfort. And here he was, at home on leave with a bullet wound in his shoulder. God must enjoy a good joke.
Cautiously, he peeked around the fender of the car. A lone man was strolling down the street at an almost leisurely pace, about twenty-five yards away. Three people lay sprawled on the pavement behind him, unmoving. At least one, a man, was clearly dead, Sam was sure, from the awkward angle at which the body had fallen. Another woman knelt on the pavement not far from where the guy was walking, a child cradled in her lap.
The shooter raised his pistol and shot her through the head.
Sam recoiled, his brain rejecting what he’d just seen. He heard another shot, a piercing scream and then another shot. The screaming stopped instantly.
God, this guy was executing people! Instantly, his mind went into what he privately thought of as protection mode, automatically seeking and assessing his chances of eliminating the enemy while saving his own hide and those of all the other people around him.
He glanced behind him, down the street in the other direction. Several people lay where they’d fallen when they’d been hit. Most of them were moving. And Sam would bet there were more people who’d taken cover just like him. This could be a massacre of devastating proportions.
In a doorway opposite him, a woman in a shopkeeper’s apron crouched, her eyes wide and terrified. A kid in the baggy pants and backward ball cap of a teenager lay a few feet from her, blood staining his pant leg and the pavement beneath him. He was trying to drag himself to the shelter of the shop’s doorway.
Sam could hear the gunman’s footsteps approaching.
“Hey, buddy,” the guy called to the bleeding kid. “What’samatter? You afraid?” He laughed, a chilling cackle that Sam would hear in his head for the rest of his life. “Lotsa people gonna die today,” he said in a singsong voice.
Sam gathered himself, every muscle in his body quivering, raring for action. The guy wasn’t close enough for a grab; he was going to have to sprint to get to him. And if he wasn’t careful and accurate—and fast—the woman and the injured boy would die next.
The gunman took a few more steps. This was as good as it was going to get.
Sam launched himself from behind the car, directly at the man with the gun.
The guy turned at the sound of Sam’s footsteps but by the time he’d swung his gun around, Sam was on him. Both men went tumbling to the pavement, elbows and heads striking the unforgiving surface as they fell. Another shot rang out and Sam felt a tremendous kick in the region of his left kidney. As he wrestled with the insane killer, a small part of him registered that he’d been shot again. But no pain. Not yet. He didn’t have time to worry about it as he struggled to immobilize the man before he could kill anyone else.
The guy still had a death grip on the gun and he was shooting wildly. There were so many people around he was almost guaranteed to kill someone else…. In a split-second decision, Sam did what he’d been trained to do. With one powerful arch of his body, he broke the gunman’s neck.
The silence was shocking after the noise of the weapon.
Sam lay where he was, the killer’s limp figure half atop him. As his concentration receded, he began to hear sounds. Sirens, people sobbing, several people moaning and screaming. The kid nearby was softly crying for his mother.
The woman who’d been crouching in the doorway ran to the boy’s side. “Lie still,” she said. “You’re going to be okay.”
“I’m a nurse,” shouted an unfamiliar voice as footsteps ran toward him. “We need to identify all the wounded and prioritize them by who’s most critical.”
The shopkeeper said, “I can put pressure on this boy’s leg. He didn’t hit a major blood vessel. But that guy over there—the one who stopped him—he might need help. He got shot when they were fighting.”
The footsteps came closer. He shoved at the gunman’s dead weight, rolling the body ignominiously to one side in a careless heap. The movement sent a nauseating wave of red-hot pain ripping through his abdomen, rippling out to every cell in him.
Gritting his teeth against the agony, he raised his head and looked down at himself. The second bullet had hit him in the lower left torso. Blood darkened his shirt and his jeans and was beginning to pool on the sidewalk around him.
He tried to gather himself, but his legs weren’t cooperating. The woman who’d said she was a nurse knelt at his side. “Hang in there,” she said. “Help’s on the way.”
And it was. Sam could hear the sirens drawing to a screaming halt, doors slamming and gurneys clattering as medics rushed toward the injured.
“This one first,” his comforter yelled.
Sam caught her eye. “That bad, huh?” It came out a hoarse whisper.
She shrugged, but she met his eyes and he saw the truth there. “Not so good,” she said, “but you can’t die on us, you’re a hero.”