Stan spotted her on the hotel stairs. “Lieutenant Howe,” he called. “Got a minute?”
“I’m wearing my jacket.” She gave him a smile as she turned to greet him. “See?”
The warmth of her smile made him hesitate. Christ, what was he doing? After going to all that trouble to make sure she’d have dinner tonight with Muldoon, he should be keeping his distance.
Still, seeing her with Rob Pierce, the Brit from the SIS, had made Stan realize that last night’s little game with Gilligan and Izzy had been off base. Teri wasn’t really threatened by guys like Iz and Gilligan. Or Jay Lopez. Guys like them would never be disrespectful to a woman like her. And she didn’t hang out in bars where nice guys got drunk and turned into assholes.
What Stan really needed to do was coach her through a confrontation with someone like Pierce. Someone older. Someone in authority. Someone with the power to take advantage of her. Someone she looked up to.
Someone like ... Stan.
Damn, what a thought that had been. But try as he might, he just couldn’t shake it.
“Impressive job out there today,” she said when he’d caught up to her. “You must be exhausted.”
“Exhausted’s not in the vocabulary, remember?”
She laughed. “Right. Although I hope sleep is on your list of things to do this afternoon.”
“Shower, food, sleep,” he told her, ticking them off on his fingers. “Definitely. Then at 0230 we go back and run the drill again until the sun comes up.”
“I know,” she said. “I volunteered to fly you out there.”
He stopped walking. “What, are you nuts? Here’s a hot tip, Teri. You’re supposed to volunteer for the glory assignments, not the grunt work. Who’s your favorite movie star?”
She blinked at his change of subject, but went along with the conversational shift willingly as Stan forced himself to keep moving. As nice as it was to stand in the stairwell with Teri Howe, it wasn’t very private. And for what he intended to say and do, he wanted privacy.
God help him.
“I don’t know.” She scrunched up her face as she considered his question. “I guess ... Russell Crowe. Yeah.”
It was his turn to be surprised. “Really?”
“Uh-huh. Or Tom Hanks.”
Wasn’t that interesting. She didn’t go for the pretty-boy actors like Tom Cruise or Mel Gibson or what’s-his-name—the guy who married that TV star.
“Here’s the deal,” he told Teri. “When Russell Crowe gets permission to sit in the observers’ tent, that’s when you should step forward. You volunteer to fly the visiting movie star wherever he wants to go. You don’t volunteer for the 0230 helo-load of grumpy, sleep-deprived SEALs.”
She glanced at him. “I’d rather fly you than Russell Crowe any day.”
Oh, baby. The double entendre in that one couldn’t have been intentional, could it? Surely that had been a plural you.
“Russell Crowe only pretends to rescue the hostages,” she continued. “You guys do it for real.”
Yes, she’d definitely meant that as a plural. The double entendre was just his dirty mind doing its nasty thang. And the bitch of it was, Stan didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved.
“Here’s my floor,” she said.
He opened the door for her. “I’ll walk you.”
She laughed as she went through to the hallway. “You’re stalling aren’t you?”
He didn’t follow. “Stalling?”
“So that the dining room will clear out before you get down there,” she said. He must’ve looked perplexed because she laughed again. “Does the word karaoke mean anything to you?”
“Oh, Jesus.” He cringed. He’d forgotten. “You heard about that, huh?”
“Yeah, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“Oh, please,” Stan said. “Please miss it.”
“Not a chance. What are you going to sing?”
“Not ‘New York, New York.’ That’s for damn sure.”
She tried not to laugh and failed. “Can you sing?”
“I can fake it.”
Her eyes were dancing. There was no other way to describe it. Her smile was so beautiful, she was so beautiful, she just sparkled with life and amusement. Her hair was a mess of wind-tousled curls, such a rich, dark shade of brown and so soft to the touch. He didn’t have to reach for her to know that—he remembered. She had a smudge of something on her cheek, probably grease from running the flight checklist. She was as dusty and hot as he was—hotter probably, since Kazbekistani customs prevented her from rolling up her sleeves even when the temperature broke one hundred.
She had delicate features, elegantly shaped eyes and mouth, eyebrows that were dark and graceful against her skin. But, really, it was her laughter that made her truly beautiful. When she laughed, it was with her whole heart, her whole self.
“So, are you going to shower before dinner?” she asked. “Because if you’re not, then I won’t either. I really don’t want to miss this.”
“Yes, I’m going to shower first. I stink. And that’s even before I start to sing.”
She laughed as he finally came through the stairwell door, and they started walking again. But slowly. As if she wasn’t in a particular hurry to get to her room either.
There was no one else in the hallway, so he cut to the chase. To the reason he wanted to talk to her privately, with no chance of someone stumbling over them.
“I was watching you when you left with Rob Pierce earlier today,” he told her. “You know, the Brit.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
She was instantly tense, and he wanted to punch the wall. Or Pierce. “What’d he do?”
Teri shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Nothing,” he repeated, letting his exasperation ring in his voice as they stopped outside of her hotel room door. “You’re suddenly tense as hell simply because I mention this guy’s name, and you expect me to believe he did or said nothing?”
“You didn’t say ‘what’d he say,’ you said ‘what’d he do.’ ” Teri searched through her bag for her room key.
Christ. Fine. “What did he say to you?”
The door swung open. “Nothing.” She glanced at him. Probably because he was making a choking sound.
“Teri,” he managed to grind out.
“All right, all right. I mean, sure, he let me know he was interested in recreational sex, okay? Big deal. And I’m paraphrasing—he was far more smooth and sophisticated, so stop looking as if you want to wring his neck. He wasn’t offensive—it was kind of funny and flattering if you want to know the truth.”
He just looked at her.
“All right,” she admitted, “it wasn’t flattering at all because he probably hits on every female under forty that he ever meets, and you’re right, it made me angry because there are a lot of women who wouldn’t have understood his double-talk. They’re out there, and he’s going to seduce them because he’s handsome and charming, and they’re going to end up thinking he wants to start a relationship when all he really wants is a quick screw in the backseat of his car. And I’m sure he’s married to some poor woman who fools herself into believing that he’s faithful and I find that incredibly offensive. Along with the fact that he’s practically old enough to be my father—isn’t that old enough to know better?”
It was a rhetorical question. Since she was obviously not finished, Stan didn’t bother to answer it with the best wisdom he could offer, which was that some men just never stopped thinking with their head that didn’t have the brain in it. It was, no doubt, exactly what she didn’t want or need to hear right now. If ever.
“But what really pisses me off,” Teri continued, “is that I didn’t say a single thing. I didn’t tell him any of that. I wimped out. That’s what I do. You were so right about me, Stan. I suck. I just ... I run away unless I’m cornered. I run away, and then I hate myself for days—weeks—after.”
She was finally done.
“Can I come in for a minute?” Stan asked.
She stared at him, but then stepped back, giving him access to her room. “Sure.”
He took the door from her, closing it behind him with a very definite click.
Her room was cool and dim with the curtains still drawn. Well, it was cooler than it was outside, anyway. It was identical to his, only her room didn’t have his dirty laundry tossed into the corner—including a pair of socks he’d worn for two days straight that should have been bagged and labeled biohazard.
He’d surprised the hell out of her by asking to come in, that much was obvious.
His being there made her nervous. He could practically read her mind as she took off her jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. His asking to come into her room like this was the dead last thing she’d expected. Why was he here? What did he want?
He was already scaring her a little just by being here, and if he did this right, he’d kill two birds with one stone. The hero worship would vanish, and she’d maybe learn a thing or two about standing strong.
Only now that he was in here, he wasn’t sure what to do. He was frigging nervous, too.
This felt too real.
Bullshit. It wasn’t real. Stop thinking like that. Come on, just do it. He’d seen guys act like assholes plenty of times. He’d even been one himself a time or two.
Or ten.
But not like this. Never like this with a woman like Teri Howe who looked at him with such warmth and hope and trust in her eyes.
It wasn’t real. None of it was real. Stop thinking. Just do it.
She cleared her throat. “Was there something specific you wanted to—”
“Yes,” he said. Two steps toward her, and he caught her in his arms. He meant to say something rude, something suggestive, something along the lines of what Izzy had said to her yesterday in the stairwell, but she was staring up at him, her lips slightly parted and ...
And Stan kissed her instead. No, kiss was too nice a word for it. He crushed her mouth with his—that beautiful, delicate mouth—pushing his tongue past her teeth, kissing her as hard and as deeply as he’d ever kissed any woman, with no warm-up, no warning, no sweet words or courtship. Just, bang. His tongue in her mouth, his hands all over her, on her ass, yanking up her shirt, her full breast heavy in the palm of his unwashed hand.
He pushed her back toward the wall, pushed between her legs, trying to convince himself that it was more to protect himself from the knee in the balls that he deserved for doing this than because he desperately wanted to be there, right there, cradled by her soft heat.
Except she didn’t fight him at all. She didn’t try to push him away. She just kissed him back. Christ, she was kissing him back, pulling him even closer to her and ...
He was the one who leapt away from her, embarrassed as hell because he was completely aroused and there was no way she could’ve missed it.
This wasn’t real. This was just an exercise, so what the fuck was he doing getting a hard-on? And what the fuck was she doing kissing him back?
Damn, he was a fool. He’d imagined she’d fight him, maybe crack him one across the face. He’d imagined them having a good laugh about it afterward.
But she wasn’t laughing. Not even close. She said nothing, did nothing. She just stared at him wide-eyed and breathing hard as she leaned against the wall. Her lips were swollen from the force of his mouth against hers, her shirt untucked from her pants and slightly askew. She looked like his own personal sex dream. Replace some of that confusion in her eyes with a touch more heat. Let her lips curl in the slightest of seductive smiles as she reached up and slowly started unbuttoning her shirt ...
He backed farther away. “Teri, Christ, at the very least you’ve got to learn to give out the kind of signals that tell a man you want him to stop!” It was the wrong thing to say, and he knew it the instant the words left his lips. “God damn it, I’m sorry. It was my fault that that went too far. I was trying to—”
“Get out,” she whispered, closing her eyes as if she didn’t even want to look at him anymore.
“Okay,” he said, trying desperately to turn this back into the exercise he’d imagined. “You need to be louder. More aggressive—”
“Get out!” She shouted it now. “Get the hell out of here!”
“That’s better, but—”
She opened her eyes. “That’s better? How dare you?”
“That’s good,” he said. “That’s right. Tell me off. Come on. Hit me if you want to.” God knows he deserved it. And he must’ve misread her when he was kissing her. Maybe she hadn’t really kissed him back. Maybe she’d been ... what? Trying to fight him off by jamming her tongue in his mouth, too?
Hell, no. She’d kissed him. He knew what a kiss was, and that had definitely been one. But it didn’t make any sense that she could’ve been so okay with it a minute ago, and so mad at him now.
“I want you to go!”
“Why? So you can feel bad later because you didn’t take the opportunity to tell me to go to hell? It’s okay to fight back, Teri, even if the guy is someone who intimidates you, someone you respect. You didn’t say anything to Rob Pierce—”
“Rob Pierce didn’t ... he didn’t ...”
“And you didn’t get angry enough to tell him off. Instead you internalized it, where it would fester and make you feel even worse. Who the hell needs that? You don’t! You could’ve said one thing to Pierce, just one thing —snowball’s chance in hell, pal—and he would’ve known you were on to him. So say it now, to me. Don’t kick me out. Confront me. Get angry. Tell me to keep my freaking hands to myself.”
But she just looked at him with those big wounded eyes.
God damn, this was a total goatfuck. He knew she wanted him to leave, but he couldn’t. Not now. Not like this. So he took a step toward her. And then another.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Don’t,” he repeated, hardening his heart. “That’s supposed to stop me? Tell me to go to hell.”
“Go to hell,” she whispered.
“Louder.”
“Go to hell.”
He made himself laugh at her, still moving closer. “That’s not loud. Christ, no wonder Hogan thinks you’re a pushover, because you goddamn are.”
“Go to hell! Stay away from me! Keep your fucking hands to yourself!”
Jackpot. She was livid, and she was far from done.
“How dare you come in here and play this stupid game? How dare you practice your stupid pop psychology on me! Have I entertained you, Senior Chief? Have I amused? Or maybe I’m just this month’s charity case—is that it? Well, screw you! Screw you! Why don’t you just leave me alone? Why doesn’t everyone just leave me the hell alone! Just stay out of my house! Stay out of my goddamn room! Stay out of my ...”
The look on her face broke his heart.
“Bedroom,” she whispered. She looked at him, her eyes huge in her face, and she knew that he knew. But she tried to hide it anyway. “Get out of my room, Stan. Please.”
It was the please that did it. Stan didn’t want to leave, but how could he stay when she begged him to go like that?
He went out the door, closing it gently behind him.
As she stepped into the courtyard that surrounded the hotel swimming pool, Alyssa nearly turned around and went back to her room.
Because Sam Starrett was there. In the pool.
If he hadn’t chosen that very moment to turn around, she might’ve run away. But once he saw her, she couldn’t retreat. No way. She walked out onto the cracked concrete and put her towel on a dilapidated lounge chair. Took off her sunglasses.
He was alone. Not even his obnoxious friend WildCard Karmody was with him. Of course not. Sam had finally seen the light and kicked Karmody off his team. And probably out of his life for good. He’d also taken him back with a stern warning, but the damage had already been done. And Ken Karmody seemed the kind of moronic idiot who would let hurt feelings ruin a friendship.
For a second, Alyssa actually felt sorry for Sam.
But then he swam to the edge of the pool. “Women’s swim’s not for another forty minutes,” he drawled lazily, his Texas redneck twang set on heavy stun.
She glanced at him as she pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “Do I really look like I care?”
His dark, shaggy hair was wet, slicked back from his face in a way that accentuated his cheekbones and blue eyes. If he ever cut his hair short, he’d be even more devastatingly handsome than he already was. “Nice attitude, Locke. Way to respect the customs and traditions of your host country.”
“I called the concierge desk and was told the pool was open all day, with American rules,” she reported. “I asked if there were restrictions as to swimming apparel and was told that tank suits were preferred.” She shrugged out of the sweatshirt and sweatpants she’d worn—as requested—through the hotel lobby. “Good thing I left my thong bikini at home.”
Truth was, she didn’t own a thong bikini, but Sam Starrett didn’t need to know that.
“You shouldn’t be wearing that while I’m out here,” he said with a frown, as if her faded red Speedo were something that might’ve been featured on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. He pointed up toward the windows of the buildings that surrounded them on all sides. “We’re not the only ones staying in this hotel. There are locals here, too. If they see us in the pool together—”
“I’ll be sentenced to death,” Alyssa said, slipping into the water. It felt sensuously cool against her hot skin. “That’s another delightful Kazbekistani custom—women being punished by death for being found in a compromising position with a man who’s not their husband. Do you think we should follow that one while we’re here, too, Roger? Out of respect for our host country? And oh, by the way, compromising positions that women should stay away from include rape, did you know that? Because of course it’s a woman’s fault if a man forces his way into her home and attacks her, right?”
Starrett pushed himself up and out of the pool, water sheeting off his body. His swim trunks were Navy issue—the same snugly fitting style that divers had worn since World War II.
Don’t look at his ass. Whatever she did, she could not look at his ass. If she did, he’d know that she still found him intensely attractive.
Along with infuriating, outrageously arrogant and ...
And she never would’ve guessed he’d be one of those guys who used some kind of voodoo to center himself during a high stress operation. Sitting at the same spot at the same table in the dining room at every meal?
Superstitions and rituals weren’t uncommon in their line of work. Alyssa just never suspected Sam Starrett would have one of his own.
It almost made him seem human.
“It sucks,” he said, following her along the edge of the pool as she did a leisurely breaststroke with her head above the water. “The way they treat women in this country. I’ll be the first to agree with you about that. But we’re not here to lead a revolution. We’re here to get those people out of that airplane—alive. To do that, we need the cooperation of the K-stani government. We—all of us, even the FBI observers—need to come across as respectful at all times, so that the next time some fuckhead hijacks a 747, they’ll let us come back to save the people on that plane, too.”
If he had left it at that, she might’ve gotten out of the pool and gone back to her room.
But he didn’t.
“What we don’t need is you walking around looking like sex for sale.”
Alyssa stopped swimming. “Excuse me?”
“Excuse me?” he mimicked her as he stood there nearly naked—more naked than she was—and dripping on the concrete. “You know damn well what I’m talking about. At lunch this afternoon I get on your case about being in the dining room with your jacket off, so this afternoon you wear something to the airfield that makes you look like a comic book superhero.”
She smiled at him sweetly. “You mean, in the dining room when you had to push me out of your way because of some asinine and completely childish superstition—”
“Sure,” he said. “Go ahead. Try to put the attention back on me. I guess you had enough of it today, prancing around, looking like—”
“You don’t need to worry about me sitting at your special little table tonight,” Alyssa spoke right over him. “I’m having dinner with Rob Pierce and the SAS team.”
“—some kind of fantasy fuck in that skintight Nazi-bitch jumpsuit.”
Nazi-bitch? “Fuck you!” The words escaped before she could bite them back. Why, why, why did arguing with Starrett always make her as disgustingly foulmouthed as he was? Why did he have the power to make her so completely lose control? She climbed up the ladder and out of the water, furious with him and unwilling to let him continue to loom over her that way.
“Figures you and Rob Pierce would find each other.” Starrett laughed in disgust. “Why am I not surprised about that?”
“I’m the furthest thing from a Nazi that you know, asshole,” she told him, jamming her finger in his chest. “And that jumpsuit is not skintight. At least get your facts straight before you insult me.”
He didn’t back down. “You purposely dressed provocatively—”
“There was nothing provocative—whatsoever—with what I was wearing out there in the field today, Roger,” she told him. “It wasn’t skintight—it wasn’t even close. It was made of lightweight, loose fabric designed for athletes to stay cool in severe heat. I bought it after ...”
After she’d nearly keeled over from the heat in Washington, DC, and Starrett had had to come to her rescue, dousing her with bottles of water from a nearby hotdog stand to cool her down. And mere hours later, she’d heated to a near boiling point all over again. In the man’s bed.
Because she’d been drunk, she reminded herself as she found herself inches from his well-muscled, half-naked, sinfully attractive body. Too drunk to know that inside that deliciously wrapped package lived a complete and total jerk.
“If I wanted to piss you off by purposely dressing provocatively,” she told him now, “I’d have to come here, to the swimming pool, and wear this. It’s the closest thing to provocative I have in my wardrobe right now. And this is the only place I could wear it without getting arrested.”
And it’s a Speedo, you fool. It was the kind of suit Olympic swimmers wore. As far as swimwear went, it couldn’t be more utilitarian.
But Starrett was looking at her as if she were wearing tassles and a G-string. As if, if they were alone, he’d peel both of their suits off so fast, she wouldn’t have time to kiss him more than once before he’d be inside of her.
Oh, God. She actually wanted him inside of her. But she wanted him the way he came to her in her dreams. Funny and sweet and gentle, with a softness in his eyes and a smile warming his face.
“And here you are, right on schedule. Pissing me off,” he drawled. “What do you know?”
She scoffed. “That’s assuming I care enough to want to piss you off. You know, it’s entirely possible, Roger, that I simply wanted to go for a swim, that the world doesn’t revolve around you.”
“Okay,” he said. “Great. You win this round, babycakes. You’ve managed to annoy the shit out of me. Now do me a favor. Be a good girl and come back later, so I can finish my swim.”
Her answer was a clean surface dive back into the pool.
Teri heard the knock on the door and knew it was Stan even before he spoke. He probably hadn’t even made it down a single flight of the stairs before he’d turned around and headed back here.
He’d surprised her completely this afternoon—mostly by leaving when she’d asked him to. She was so sure he’d stay until he somehow made everything all right.
Except he couldn’t this time. There was no way to make this right.
“Teri, I know you’re still there,” he said from the other side of the door. “Let me in, okay?”
She didn’t move, didn’t answer. God, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this embarrassed, this ...
Disappointed.
“Teri, come on.”
Devastated. That was a better word for what she was feeling.
“Please open the door.”
Stupid. Yes, she definitely felt stupid, too.
What was she thinking? The senior chief had been working overtime to set her up with Mike Muldoon. She should have realized right from the moment he’d asked to come into her room that this was another of his kindhearted lessons in confrontation. Instead, the moment he’d put his arms around her, she’d kissed him.
No, kiss was too nice a word for it. She’d inhaled him. Attacked him.
Thrown herself at him.
Oh, God.
The door opened with a click, and Stan came in. Figures he wouldn’t need a key.
Teri didn’t look up, but she knew he was repocketing whatever tool he’d used to pick the lock. And then he sat down beside her, his back against the wall. The miracle worker to the rescue.
She wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Not with him here.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said quietly. “And I can’t just walk away and assume you’re going to be all right now.”
“I am all right,” she lied. No, she wasn’t. She wanted to kiss him again. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and ...
“I honestly didn’t intend to kiss you like that,” he told her.
“I know.” Teri wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Believe me, I know.”
He sighed and turned slightly to look at her, but Teri kept her own eyes focused on her boots. Don’t cry.
“I was watching you today and thinking about what you said about being intimidated by men who were ... I don’t know, older. Authority figures. And I thought if I came in here and acted like some kind of asshole, like Joel Hogan, you could practice standing up to me, and Christ, I hear myself say this and it sounds like the most asinine idea in the world. I mean, it was an asinine idea before I lost my freaking mind and kissed you.”
He took a deep breath. “I don’t know why I did that. I have no real excuses—”
“It’s all right,” she said. God, he thought he’d kissed her. He didn’t realize she was the one who’d jumped him.
“I could give you some bullshit about stress and fatigue and the amount of adrenaline that goes through a man’s body during an op like this and what that does to the male anatomy. But that’s just crap. Or I could tell you that you’re the most attractive woman I’ve ever known but that’s not news to you either.” He sighed, rubbing his forehead. “And it doesn’t make it any better—as if your being beautiful means you deserve it when other people lose control. You know that’s not true and I know it, too. The best I can do, Teri, is apologize and assure you that it won’t ever happen again.”
Teri rested her head against her knees and tried not to laugh. Or cry. She wasn’t sure what would come out if she made so much as a sound.
“Your turn,” he said. “Talk to me. God damn, slap me across the face if you want to. Say something.”
She took a deep breath. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“The hell it wasn’t!”
I kissed you. But she couldn’t say it. She couldn’t bear the thought of sitting here while Stan gently explained that, yes, although he found her attractive, he wasn’t in the market for any kind of emotional attachment, especially not with a complete headcase like her.
She still didn’t know if he had a girlfriend back in San Diego. She hadn’t managed to ask him, and now wasn’t the time to do it.
“I forgive you,” she said instead. “I know what you were trying to do. Really. I understand. And it’s all right. It is.”
She could feel him watching her for several long moments. “Has it occurred to you that you might be a little too understanding?”
She lifted her head at that. “You want me to stay mad at you? Fine. I’m mad at you.”
He laughed softly. “Yeah, I guess maybe I do want that. I’d feel a whole hell of a lot better if you called me a jerk.”
“You’re a jerk,” she told him obediently, her voice muffled. He was a jerk—for not realizing she’d wanted him to kiss her, to keep on kissing her. For not being on the verge of falling in love with her, too.
Stan was quiet then, for at least a minute. Maybe longer. But finally he cleared his throat. “At the risk of messing up our friendship even more than I’ve already messed it up today,” he said, “I’m going to ask you something I’ve been wondering abut for a while, about something that I think happened to you when you were a kid. Because you said something before that made me think—”
“Don’t,” she said.
He was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “You ever talk about it with anyone?”
“No.”
“Not ever?”
“No.”
“Not with anyone?”
She lifted her head as anger coursed through her. She didn’t want to talk about this. Not now. Not ever. “No.”
He scratched his ear. “That’s not good.”
“You ever talk about any of your bad shit, Senior Chief?” She purposely used his rank even though it suddenly felt strange for her to call him that instead of Stan. When had that changed for her?
But his eyes were gentle, and she couldn’t look at him for long.
“I don’t have any bad shit, Teri.” His use of her name was intentional. Obviously he’d noted her attempt to bring them back to a place where they were mere colleagues instead of friends, and was rejecting it. “Not like yours.”
“Then how come you’re not married?” she asked. “How come you’re alone?” There, she’d asked. Sort of. If he had a significant other, he’d tell her now.
“I’m alone because I choose to be alone.”
In other words, he’d rather be alone than be with her. That stung.
So Teri snorted. “Yeah, right. You’re really happy living in that empty house. What, are you afraid if you get married, she’ll die like your mother did?” She couldn’t believe the harshness of the words that were coming out of her mouth.
But to her surprise, Stan nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Fair enough. And yeah, maybe I am afraid of that. Or maybe I saw how hard it was for her every time my father left for another tour in ’Nam. I don’t go to war, but I go away, sometimes for months at a time. So it’s my choice to be alone. But you didn’t choose what happened to you.”
Oh, God, she didn’t want to talk about that. But he kept coming back to it, relentlessly.
“You didn’t choose your mother’s dying,” she countered.
“That’s true,” he agreed. “But I was eighteen when that happened.” He was silent for a moment. “How old were you?”
Teri shook her head. “No.”
“No, you don’t remember?” he asked.
She didn’t want to remember. Huddled in her bed, too scared to move ...
“Give it a guess,” he persisted. “You don’t need to be exact.”
Hoping, praying that tonight he wouldn’t come in. Stay out of my room! She’d never said those words to him. She’d been too afraid.
“Thirteen?” Stan asked.
Teri shook her head. No.
“Older or younger? And, please, I’m praying that you’re not going to say younger.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Oh, god damn it. Please tell me how old you were.”
She had no intention of telling him. She meant to stand up and walk out of her own hotel room, just to get away from his questions, if she had to. But the word came out of her, almost on its own accord. “Eight.”
He made the kind of sound a man might make if he were punched in the gut. His face twisted as if he were in terrible pain, and as she looked at him, she saw tears in his eyes.
There were tears in his eyes, but she was the one who suddenly started to cry.
She didn’t know where it came from, this sudden storm of emotion, but she couldn’t stop it. Maybe it was acknowledging it aloud for the first time. Maybe it was knowing that she was finally going to tell someone. Maybe it was because part of her desperately wanted to tell, while part of her desperately wanted to keep it buried, forever.
Teri reached for Stan. Or maybe he reached for her. Same as earlier, when she’d kissed him, she wasn’t quite sure who moved first. But then it didn’t matter, because she was in his arms, and he was holding her tightly while she cried.
“I’m so sorry,” he murmured, as if it were all somehow his fault.
“It’s not as bad as you think,” she told him when the tears finally eased. Her face was pressed against his shoulder, against the warmth of his neck. He smelled like heat and dust and hard work and coffee. “He never touched me. Not really.”
“Not really?” Stan asked. “What does that mean, not really?”
“He came into my room at night,” she whispered. “And he ...”
She couldn’t say it. At the time, she hadn’t even known what he was doing with that furtive movement of his arm, as he stared at her with his robe hanging open. It hadn’t been until years later that she’d truly understood how sick that bastard had been. The handkerchief he always took from his pocket after he came into the room and closed the door behind him. The full-body shudder that signaled the fact that it was almost over, that he would soon take his ugly face and his whispers of how much he loved her and leave.
Teri knew Stan was imagining that the bastard hadn’t stopped at the edge of her bed, and she knew with a revolting certainty that it had been leading to just that. If she hadn’t left for summer camp ...
Summer camp, the bane of her existence, had saved her from physical abuse. The emotional and psychological damage, however, had already been done.
Teri wiped her eyes, embarrassed that he’d seen her cry. She never let anyone see her cry.
But Stan was barely breathing, his arms still around her. He was as tense as she’d ever seen him, waiting for her to finish her sentence, to explain.
Maybe if she started from the beginning ...
“He was one of my mother’s boyfriends,” she whispered, not sure just how much of this she’d really be able to tell him, how much she’d be able to say aloud. “A live-in. They all were, really. She didn’t like to be alone. This one was younger than the others, younger than my mother. And he would’ve been good-looking, except his smile was so ... I don’t know ... fake, I guess. And his eyes ...”
She’d been afraid of him from the start, from the moment she’d come down to dinner and found him sitting at the table. He was always watching her with those pale eyes, always sneaking up behind her, always touching her hair, her face, her bottom. Always asking for a kiss good night.
“I came home from school one day, and he was in my mother’s bedroom, going through her purse.” She’d stopped in the doorway, frozen with shock, just as he was taking twenty dollars from her mother’s wallet. “He was stealing from her, and as I watched, he didn’t try to hide it. He smiled at me, and put the money in his pocket, and put her wallet back in her purse. And I knew I had him. I knew my mother would kick him out. She wouldn’t live with a thief no matter how handsome she thought he was.
“But then he told me I couldn’t tell. He told me if I told anyone, anyone at all, he’d kill my mother.”
“And you believed him,” Stan said. “Oh, Teri.”
“I was eight,” she said. “He told me ...”
“What?”
“That he’d make it look like an accident, and then he’d get custody of me. He said then it would be just him and me.”
She’d gone from the euphoria of knowing that he would soon be out of her house for good to the hot fear that came with the thought of losing her mother. Her mother was far from perfect, but Teri loved her. And the threat of spending the rest of her life with him ...
“So you didn’t tell.” Stan held her even more tightly. “And, Christ, he was testing you, wasn’t he? He probably figured if you wouldn’t tell about that, then you wouldn’t tell if he ...”
She nodded. “A few days later, he came into my room for the first time.”
“Jesus,” he said, his voice tight. “It happened more than once?”
“It happened nearly every night for I don’t know how long. Months.”
Stan made a strangled sound. “And your mother never thought that was strange? Him going into your room like that?”
“My mother passed out around eight-thirty every night.”
“God damn her!”
She pulled back so that she could look at him. “It wasn’t her fault—”
“God damn her!” He was crying. Senior Chief Wolchonok was crying. “She drinks so much that she can’t protect her own child from being abused, and it’s not her goddamn fault? Who’s fault was it, Teri? Yours?”
“I never told anyone,” she whispered. He was crying. “I should have told.”
“You were a baby!” He wiped his eyes with the heel of one hand, still holding her with the other. “Your mother should have protected you. This asshole—what was his name? Because I swear to God, I’m going to find him and I’m going to f— I’m going to kill him.”
He was dead serious. This man who was so careful not to use the f-word in front of her had killed before, in the line of duty. He knew what it meant to leave a body lying lifeless. This was no idle threat.
“Tell me his name,” he said again.
“I don’t know it,” Teri told him. “Honestly, I don’t think I ever knew. My mother called him darling. I thought of him as him or he. I don’t think I wanted to give him a real name.”
“He’s the one at fault,” Stan told her, pushing her hair back from her face. “He’s the one who was sick. Your mother should have protected you, and he ... He shouldn’t have let himself get near you.”
He was silent for a moment, and then he sighed. “Teri, you’ve got to have mercy on me and tell me what he did when he came into your room, because what I’m imagining is pretty hideous.”
She tucked her head back into his shoulder. Maybe she could say it if she didn’t look at him. Maybe she could say it without actually saying it. “He exposed himself and he touched himself and he ...”
“Jerked off?” Stan said it for her, and she nodded. “In front of an eight-year-old. My God, how sick is that?”
“I didn’t know what he was doing,” she told him. “I’d never even seen a naked man before, but I knew whatever it was that he was doing, him doing it there, in my room, was wrong. I tried closing my eyes, but he made me watch. He told me he’d kill my mother if I didn’t keep my eyes open and—”
Her voice was shaking so hard, she had to stop and take a breath. But once she’d started, it seemed to tumble out of her, this awful thing she’d never told anyone before.
“After dinner every night, when my mother was still awake, he started making me sit on his lap so he could read me a story. My mother thought it was cute, that he liked reading to me so much, but all the time he was ... God, he was rubbing himself against me with his ...” His thing. At the time, as an eight-year-old, she’d thought of it as a thing. A hideous thing.
Stan, too, had to work hard to keep his voice level. “And this went on for months?”
“I can’t remember exactly when it started. I remember he was around for the Easter party at Professor Bartley’s house, though. He hid jelly beans in his pants pockets and he got Connie and Mattie Bartley to reach in, looking for them, but I wouldn’t go near him.” She knew what he was really hiding in there. “It ended when I went away to summer camp in July. He and my mother broke up while I was away.” She laughed, but it came out very shaky. “I’d always hated camp, but that year I was packed and ready to go three weeks early.”
“How long were you gone?” Stan asked.
“Six glorious weeks.”
“Did you find out that this guy and your mom had split while you were there? I mean, did she call you and tell you so at least you knew you were finally safe?”
Teri shook her head no. “I found out when I got home.” Darling, come say hello. Teresa’s back, her mother had called out as they’d walked into the house, and Teri had braced herself, nearly sick with fear, ready to come face-to-face with him again.
“So you spent the whole six weeks thinking you were going to have to go home to this monster? Thinking he was waiting there for you.”
She nodded. Yes.
“So it wasn’t just three or four months,” Stan said. “It was more like six. Six months this fucker terrorized you. Excuse me.”
She laughed shakily. “It’s okay with me if you call him that. You know, the night I left for camp, he tried to ...” She still couldn’t say it. “He came into my room and told me that I had to ...” She had to clear her throat. “Kiss him good-bye.”
Stan knew what she meant and he was horrified. She could feel tension in his arms again. “But you said that he didn’t—”
“He didn’t,” she said quickly. “He didn’t get close enough because I, well, I threw up. On myself, on my bed. And he told me he’d see me when I got back from camp, and he left my room.”
She was talking now simply because she wanted to stay here like this for as long as possible, with his arms around her. She knew when she stopped talking, Stan would be that much closer to leaving her room. And despite what she’d said to him earlier, she didn’t want him to go.
“I made friends with Penny Stolz, one of the twelve-year-olds at camp, and I found out, well, if not all about sex, at least certainly more than the nothing I’d known. I didn’t tell her about him, but I think she knew. Because she set up a trade between me and Stacy Juliani—my radio for the switchblade Stacy stole from her brother.”
“You came home from camp with a switchblade knife?” Stan made a noise that sounded a lot like laughter. “Ah, Teri, I think I love you.”
He didn’t mean it. Not the way she wanted him to mean it.
“I don’t know if I would’ve had the guts to use it,” she told him, near tears all over again. Dammit, she wanted him to mean it. “I was lucky—I didn’t ever have to find out. Because when I went inside my house, he wasn’t there.” It was a new man, a giant stranger who’d walked out of the kitchen at her mother’s request. Darling, come say hello... . “He’d moved out and Lenny had moved in.”
Lenny, who had loved her the way an eight-year-old was supposed to be loved.
Lenny, who’d taken the time and made the effort to gain her trust. Lenny, without whose gentle help she might not have healed enough to have ever had a normal sexual relationship with any man. Lenny, who’d given her back her self-confidence—at least enough of it so that she wasn’t a total basket case.
Without Lenny, she wouldn’t be a helo pilot. She wouldn’t be in the Navy. She wouldn’t be even half as strong as she was.
She’d still be hiding somewhere, probably under her bedcovers, all the time. Still afraid to come out and face the world.
“I think you’re amazing,” Stan told her. “To have lived through all that.”
“I still sleep with the light on,” she told him.
“I sometimes sleep with the light on myself,” he admitted.
Teri lifted her head to look at him. “You do not.”
“You’d be surprised how often I do.” He touched her still wet cheek, brushing it dry with his thumb.
Now was the time to say it, while she was gazing at him, while he was looking back at her with such soft kindness in his beautiful eyes. I kissed you, Stan. I didn’t tell you to stop because I didn’t want you to stop.
But she couldn’t form the words. They were wedged too tightly in her throat. Part of her was still hiding in her bed, too scared to move.
And then the phone rang, breaking the spell.
“That’s probably Mike Muldoon,” Stan said, shifting away from her. “Wondering if you’re ready to go to dinner.”
Teri shivered, suddenly cold without his warmth.
“Come on,” he said, pushing himself to his feet, then reaching down and hauling her up beside him. “Take a quick shower. I’ll run to my room and do the same. Then I’ll come back here and walk you down to the restaurant.”
God, she was exhausted. “I don’t know... .”
“I’m not going to take no for an answer,” he told her. “I’ll be back in ten minutes. Be ready to go. And don’t forget your jacket.”